Terrorists versus Pirates

Introducing a book published four years ago, I acknowledged the quandary of defining terrorists and terrorism. Not only is one man’s terrorist another’s freedom fighter; taking a longer view of which actions or groups should be understood under the label of terrorism and which not tends to cast as much light on those doing the labeling as those committing the acts. As an analyst, I was thus left to choose between two poor choices: plunging into a definition that would seem tendentious and emphasize certain aspects of action or ideology, or sidestepping such emphasis and thereby fail to provide a useful critical frame for the subsequent discussion.

There are patterns, though, that have emerged over time and multiple studies of different violent actions labeled as terrorism. For the sake of orienting my readers, I condensed these to five:
1. The deliberate deployment, or threat of deployment, of violent action against persons or property;
2. The production of anxiety and fear, and the disruption of social routine, by this action;
3. The pursuit of this action by individuals, sub-state groups, or states motivated by criminal, political, or religious reasons including the desire to demonstrate their power;
4. The intimidation of, or impact on, individuals who are neither directly involved in the violent action nor the primary targets of the actors’ motivation; and,
5. The often clandestine or semi-clandestine nature of the action and responsible actors.

While a useful starting point, what’s largely left out of this list is the importance of anti-Capitalist violence to understandings of terrorism, at least in Europe and the U.S. since the late 19th century. From the Haymarket bombings and Italian anarchism to Bolshevism to the Red Army Fraction and ultimately Al Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center, the violent actions mounted against property, especially private property, and the capitalist system it represents offer a continuing if quite varied thread linking so-called terrorists. Like any broad categorization of terrorist groups, of course there are exceptions; the point is that violence or its threat against property and the capitalist-system organized around and protected by nation-states has been a mainstay of the actions labeled as terrorism over the last century and a half.

The other aspect of terrorism worth highlighting is more familiar: the media. My contention has been that the production of anxiety or fear and intimidation of individuals distant from direct involvement in violent action requires mediated communication of information about that action to be effective. In other words, for a violent event to be terrorism, that is, qualitatively different from just another violent event (as traumatic as that may be), requires a certain framing, communication and interpretation of the event to those who did not experience it firsthand. Depending on one’s political leanings, then, parallels might be seen between a capitalist-media-system organized around and protected by nation-states and the resulting labeling of actions or events as terrorism. Put differently, as I did in Terrorism, Media, Liberation, media communication heightens the visibility of violent actions even as the violent groups themselves seek, at least most of the time, to remain invisible.

These two highlighted issues, anti-capitalism and mediated visibility, seem relevant not only for groups designated as terrorists. Both capitalism and media also raise questions about that other spectre of non-state group violence, pirates. Piracy, of course, is millennia old. Indeed, arguably a golden age, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when capitalism was emerging – along with nation-states and global trading systems.

Today, piracy has evolved along several tracks. The Somali pirates in recent headlines have primarily seized ships in the Indian Ocean and held them, and their kidnapped crews or passengers or cargo, for ransom. Elsewhere, in the waters around Southeast Asia, for example, the physical theft of cargo is more common. In both instances, the legal language around piracy entails violence and, tellingly, the use of “war-like acts” of violence or criminality – in other words, acts reserved in the inter-national system for nation-states. The status of “non-state actors” and their violation of the right to employ violence ordinarily the monopoly of states is as critical for the legal characterization of pirates as for terrorists.

(As a sidenote, the fuzzy status of airplane hijacking is intriguing here: there would seem to be a parallel with the seizure of ships at sea for which the term piracy is typically invoked, yet that same term is rarely if ever used for actions against airplanes. This might have to do with the apparent distinction between financial and political motivation for such action. The French use the term, pirate de l’air for the hijacker of a plane, and pirate de la route for the hijacker of a truck or bus.)

Many contemporary pirates are adept at the use of modern technology. But the more compelling connection between technology and piracy involves the illegal infringement of copyright or theft of copyrighted material. Digitalization has enabled the ready manipulation and circulation of such materials, with the internet, in particular, allowing unauthorized sharing. Probably the most famous example of this process was the appearance in the late 1990s of Napster and the illegal downloading and proliferation of audio files in mp3 format. Despite the successful shutdown of Napster by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001, the episode altered the basic business model – and dominance by a handful of longtime corporate players – in the music industry. In the roughly decade since, the film industry has feared similar downloads of its productions, causing, as some see it, a delay in the implementation of widespread internet- or broadband-delivered digital film.

Like piracy on the seas, the piracy of copyrighted material has a longer history. The latter phenomenon dates at least to the early 17th century – again, the time when capitalism and the private property underlying it were assuming what are for us recognizably modern forms. The linkages between these notions of private property and intellectual property remain underdeveloped, however. Moreover, as my friend Martin Roberts has put it to me, both kinds of property speak to the emergence of commodities created and regulated not only by capitalism but the legal orders of nation-states.

Piracy of both kinds also relies on minimizing the visibility of its perpetrators. Terrorism, recall, depends for its success on the ever-increasing visibility of events to influence those not having immediate proximity to events. Pirates, on the other hand, not only employ stealth and invisibility in order to carry out their actions but generally seek advantage by denying visibility or awareness to those beyond immediate events. Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom and others have referred to the enormity of the “hidden economy” existing outside or on the margins of the official capitalist economy, and many groups identified as pirates are directly involved in its operation. The role of media in increasing or denying visibility thus becomes crucial for the continuing success of pirates.

The juxtaposition of terrorism and piracy turns on this different relation to visibility. Even more important, though, is their shared if still different relationship to capitalism and the nation-state system underlying it. Terrorism, at least of the Al Qaeda strain, is in its attack on and critique of capitalism, in ways a double for that ideology. Piracy is different. As an extreme, violent version of the ever-growing pursuit of self-interest and private control of capital, piracy is finally guided by the same logics of political economy, however exaggerated. It is a shadow of capitalism. In this age of increasing circulation of global capital – not to mention of global media – the renewed prominence of that shadow should be unsurprising.

A Noble Terrorist?: Thoughts inspired by _Seven Days to Noon_

If Alfred Hitchcock had made The Naked City in London, and substituted Cold War atomic politics for domestic criminality, the film would have been something like this....

Directed in Britain in 1950 by John and Roy Boulting, Seven Days to Noon tells the story of the pursuit of a scientist who has threatened to explode an atomic bomb unless his government agrees to renounce atomic weaponry. Led by a Superintendent Folland of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the investigation follows the scientist, Professor Willingdon, from his rural research center to London. Over the seven days stipulated by Willingdon in his ultimatum letter, the film traverses London as his pursuers slowly track him down. The city, eventually evacuated as a precaution, ends up appearing surreally empty. On the seventh day, the police find the scientist, kill him in a moment of confusion, and disarm the bomb.

Like many thrillers, the narrative both follows the Scotland Yard investigation of the plot and functions as an investigation itself. Of what? Visually, of postwar London. Shot on location, at times in overtly documentary style, and occasionally incorporating stock footage of city life and police activity, the film dwells on the diversity of the city’s places and inhabitants. This is conspicuously highlighted in the unorthodox opening credits, the words of which move swiftly across the screen from right to left over a virtual travelogue of the city. If the film’s first third is taken up with the presentation of plot and the initiation of the police investigator’s search for the would-be bomber, the second third is given over to the city as a lead character – both the space controlled by the police who search it thoroughly and an unending array of places in which the would-be bomber can hide. We consequently see hotels, barbershops, bars, gambling halls, and rooming houses; that is, the heart of the people’s city.

In a way, this evokes a grand tradition of using the film camera to penetrate and illuminate the ordinarily unseen, marginal spaces of the modern city. Think of German films of the Weimar period, as Tom Gunning has noted so incisively in writing about Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler, in which the contest between good and evil, or at least official order and criminality, is fought in part over the control of vision of the urban world. Which parts of the city are illuminated and made visible and which are left in darkness and invisible to official eyes and the film camera? To be sure, Seven Days to Noon is not a film on par with Dr. Mabuse. Yet part of what’s fascinating in the Boultings’ production is how exactly it reorients some of the central ideas represented so profoundly by Lang and others in the long cinematic tradition of representing the modern city.

Instead of critiquing the often arbitrary distinction between official and under-worlds by showing their similar motivations and values, Seven Days to Noon dwells on the urban spaces of ordinary people, including, yes, less flattering sites like dance halls and bars. That these spaces enjoy a pride of place and warrant neither parallel nor justification with the physical monuments of official London suggest that what is ultimately at stake in the atomic age is not states or government buildings so much as people and everyday spaces and lives. While hardly audacious, such humanism is refreshing for a genre, the thriller, more often characterized by superficial action, tinny political motivations or fashionable pessimism.

The final third of the film dramatizes the evacuation of the city ordered by the Prime Minister. It is here that the film’s historical moment of production warrants comment. Made in 1950, Seven Days to Noon seeks to evoke the spirit of solidarity and grand purpose of the recent wartime past as still relevant to the new threats of the atomic age. This is most clearly evinced in the willing transport of the citizenry out of town, which almost surely would have appeared as a reassuring reminder to Londoners that they remained capable of responding successfully to the new atomic threat just as they had the earlier one of Nazi attacks. The more visible outcome in the film is a stunningly empty city (imagine a precursor, made a half-century earlier, to the arresting opening visuals of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later).

Again mindful of how the city had so recently been a battleground, the images of uninhabited but mostly rebuilt and intact buildings also serve as a kind of postwar tribute to the resolute British spirit. Ultimately, though, the resulting vision of empty streets suggests a kind of stand-off in the struggle for visual control of the city between the police and the bomb-wielding professor: while the emptiness literally results from a state-administered evacuation, the necessity for that action has been driven by Willingdon. Even more, the scenes are strangely haunting in their suggestion of the potential consequences of the scientist’s threat fulfilled.

It is here that we come to the question of terrorism. In the era of mass media, terrorism can be understood as an attempt, for political ends, to control information, narratives, images, knowledge and feeling through the intimidation and fear of individuals remote from the physical acts being threatened. As I’ve argued elsewhere, such a formulation recognizes the importance and complicated operation of media for communicating distant experience. More interestingly, this model suggests that, if judged by the same standards, mainstream media makers might fall into the same category of provocateurs and intimidators. Consider Hitchcock bringing a ticking bomb onto a loaded city bus: the act drives the narrative of a film about the evil done by those disrupting public order on-screen (the film is Sabotage, from 1936) in order to manipulate the emotions of audience members safely on the other side of that screen but whose viewing of the commercial film tends to set them in a particular political position. So is Hitchcock a terrorist? Or is the Eastern European villain, Verloc (played by Oscar Homolka)?

One answer is, of course not: neither threatens real people with actual violence. Yet recalling the importance to our conception of terrorism of the intimidation of people at a distance from the threat of violence depicted through media, the answer grows murkier. To label an individual a terrorist, or an act terrorism, indeed requires acknowledgment of the role and reach of media. It also demands a sensitivity to the political character of words and behaviors. We tend not to think of mainstream films or other commercial media as political in the same way as the overt propaganda of some zealots or groups. For some, though, commercializing or commodifying media and entertainment is entirely political – socializing and pacifying viewers, feeding the maw of consumers, serving as an opiate for the masses.

Where this potentially leads is to a questioning of one’s perspective and, especially, the consistent privileging of some perspectives over others. How do we approach commercial films, for instance, or even news? As somehow politically neutral or as manifestations of a specific political and economic structure? As means, moreover, for a particular shaping and packaging of information and emphasis on some images and narratives over others? These questions should not be understood as leading to the conclusion that all perspectives are somehow equivalent, morally or otherwise. We need to be able differentiate perspectives and politics and the media practices communicating them without that kind of reductionism.

The same logic of privileging, of making visible versus keeping invisible, pervades individual narratives and the actions and motivations of individuals occupying them. How do we compare the actions of Superintendent Folland and Professor Willingdon? More fundamentally, how do make sense of the contrasting assumptions about atomic weapons held by the British government in Seven Days to Noon (in the characters of Folland and especially the fictional Prime Minister) and by scientist? That the film doesn’t delve into these different understandings and motivations is partly a function of it being a thriller more interested in the chase itself than the background rationale. Yet the very absence of sustained elaboration of the reasons for Willingdon’s actions, of his presumably humanist convictions and beliefs, is illustrative of how media communications rely on partial or fragmentary or even negligible accounts of why individuals behave politically in the way they do.

A frequent critique of commercial media treatments of so-called terrorism is that the details of the perpetrator’s motivations or politics are left undeveloped or written off in broad strokes as irrational, villainous, savage, or simply evil. That approach may heighten dramatic conflict, especially if the conflict is cast as good versus evil, but it ignores the reality that even perpetrators of ghastly violence are people with pasts and thoughts and feelings that presumably have contributed to their complex decision to take extreme actions. Sadly, the neglect of this sociological and psychological complexity is often colored by racism or xenophobia or other biases based in cultural difference.

In the Boulting brothers’ film, Professor Willingdon is a fascinating test case because he embodies the very values that the state itself seems also most to represent or care to defend: he is a loving father and husband, a devoted civil servant, a well-educated producer of knowledge for the greater good. If he is a genius, he’s hardly an evil one. In fact, his motivation in issuing his ultimatum might appear as an expression of the most basic of liberal humanist values, the preservation of self and society. Though he finally comes off as absent-minded and, as a research scientist, naïve about the geopolitical realities of the world, his might be seen as a virtuous, even noble reaction to an increasingly uncertain world.

To speak in such terms of Willingdon’s nobility requires a certain perspective on individual virtue, political action and humanist values. One might imagine, for example, a more militant position in which the professor’s thinking fails utterly to account for the Cold War threats to the survival of Britain and its inhabitants. The humanist values he seems to promote are secondary, even inconsequential, if the society does not adopt a policy of realpolitik and arm itself to counter the enemy’s atomic build-up. Naivete trumps nobility in that view.

The larger point is that characterizing intentions as noble, virtuous, or otherwise marked by good principles is largely left to the eye of the beholder. Like the idea of terrorism itself, which has been elastically deployed by many governments over more than two centuries to describe all manner of enemies and villains (recall how Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was once on the U.S. terrorist list), nobility means different things from different perspectives. At least most, if not all individuals labeled by others as terrorists themselves have motivations that they consider good or noble. They want to remake society according to their own vision, do god’s work as they see it, destroy the world in order to save it. From outside that perspective, such intentions may seem irrational or non-sensical but internally they cohere and accord meaning to destructive behavior.

Again, this is not to defend violent action or justify any random vision for employing violence or its threat to change the world. Bloodshed needs to be condemned roundly. However, as the issues surrounding Professor Willingdon’s ultimatum make plain, dismissive labeling of destructive behavior or its threat as simplistically irrational or hateful or evil is neither accurate nor useful. More helpful is a cultivated sensitivity to the complexity of motivations driving these actions and the play of perspectives shaping mediated communications about them. While not a great film, Seven Days to Noon presses us to acknowledge that multiple perspectives in media productions necessarily shape the way we approach both good or noble intentions and the political use or threatened use of violence. Oftentimes, as the film demonstrates in its memorable depictions of postwar London, those perspectives turn on which spaces or persons or experiences are made visible and which are kept invisible -- that is, how some perspectives are privileged over and at the expense of others.