So, now that we’ve got a war against terrorism, Bush, Blair and company are
tying it all together. It’s not a war against an ideology or tactic but a
war against those evil people who brought the twin towers down, so it’s all
OK. Saddam Hussein has ties to al Quaeda and is a terrorist, those in
Chechnya have ties to al Quaeda and are terrorists, those who bombed Bali,
Muslim professors, drug dealers—all of them are terrorists who hate America,
who are tied with radical Islam and need to be dealt with post haste.

There’s a problem here—well, several, but the most immediate is a really
lousy definition of terror. What qualifies? The West has tied ideas of
liberation to violence. The second amendment of the US constitution calls
for the right of a population to rise up with "well formed militias." France
celebrates Bastille Day as a national holiday—the storming of the Bastille
was the start of a revolution that contained something they called the
"Reign of Terror." We still talk of this kind of violence—in a speech given
this month to a military base in Virginia, Bush talked about liberating the
Iraqi people with bombs.

Terrorism is an ideological distinction: it means "those people who use the
tools of statecraft without owning a state," and they’re often in
desperation. People talk about the suicide bombers in Palestine as
terrorists, but they commit violence because their attempts to gain land
have been suppressed. The non-violent attempts at solving this problem—the
Camp David accords under Carter and the agreements between Rabin and Arafat
under Clinton—have not been effective, but that’s mostly because peaceful
solutions rarely work.

If a peaceful solution was successful in the twentieth century it was
because they were the safer of two options for a government nervous about
insurgency- Look at Gandhi or Martin Luther King Junior or Mandela. Who was the FBI more likely to give concessions to? Martin Luther King, with his utopian vision and non violence, or Malcolm X, who gave a speech called /The Ballot Box or The Bullet/ (to reduce things to their most simple, he favored the bullet) or divided people into "House Niggers" and "Field Niggers"—those who gave in to the dominant racism and those who fought against it? Or there was the South Western Township of Johannesburg, an all black forced ghetto where those who refused to revolt were disciplined with burning tires around their neck, and Winnie Mandela was one of the perpetuators. Even Gandhi was more peaceful at his time and place, the more dangerous option were Hindu nationalists who threatened to blow up trains and mentions. This is not to suggest that violence is a positive, just that it tends to be effective because the state understands it, and perhaps it is only because there were two options made these pacifist movements effective.

The little difference between the violence of the state and the violence of those who are stateless, and the proof that combat is effective as liberation is disheartening to those who work for a peaceful solution. The only way to prevent violence is to recognize that it exists for Bush and for Arafat, for J Edgar Hoover and for Malcolm X, but to make it and us versus them, a good use of violence against an evil use of violence is absurd. What we need to do, and the only way to progress is to deny all violence. This will force a third way, between those who have and those who have not and cause genuine change.