Other People's Wars: A Review of Overseas Terrorism in ... - Edocr

Other Peoples’ Wars – Chapter One
who want to see a different interpretation of the world from the mainstream will interpret
all events and developments differently from the rest of us. The conspiracy-myth addict
will cheerfully extrapolate all facts to support his construct of hidden meanings behind
events; the ideologue (and revisionist historians) will subordinate everything to his belief
system; and the terrorist will do both.
For the terrorist, the construction of a vile de-humanized enemy makes it easier both to
convince him or herself of the rightness of the cause, and to commit violence against the
demonized authority. Even then, it is perhaps significant to note that the terrorists of 30
years ago sometimes needed to work themselves up to the level where they could commit
lethal violence by staging a series of “learning” attacks with simple Molotov cocktails
and pipe-bombs hurled at empty offices, and then progressing to time bombs, and finally
to becoming psychologically ready to personally deal death to another human being.
Today’s terrorist, with his lethal suicide attack, is often the product of a much more
sophisticated conditioning system.
It must also be said that suicide bombers are not born; they are manufactured – usually
by isolating the impressionable from all outside influences and ceaselessly conditioning
them. The LTTE had been the world’s leading group for suicide attacks until recently,
but evidently the Palestinian Authority’s education system is equal to the challenge of
convincing large numbers of youngsters to immolate themselves.
The terrorist, even as he completes his internal conditioning, will also start working on
the second audience of potential supporters, and will try to persuade them to see the
world his way. Sometimes, this is fairly easy; but often, some very elaborate mental
constructions are required.
Jacques Ellul, in his masterwork on propaganda, essentially described it as a process
designed to get people to take a particular action (or inaction) and convince them to get to
a condition of self-reinforcement to sustain their new belief system. 24 Propaganda tends
to fall into three general categories based on the approach that is used: Freudian,
Pavlovian, or using a system based on Dewey’s educational theories. For the first two
approaches, it is necessary to have a degree of preconditioning to associate people with
the symbols and concepts that the propagandist intends to use and manipulate.
Sometimes, the preconditioning phase is very easy. For example, both the Irish
Republicans and the Protestant militants in Ulster needed to do very little to familiarize
their intended audiences with their symbols and concepts – both sides already had very
well developed mythologies and versions of Anglo-Irish history that most of their
audiences already knew very well. It is also significant that Sikh militants fell back on
the garb of 16-17 th Century warriors – who had to defend the emerging Sikh religion
against ferocious persecution by Muslim invaders. The inference was that the Punjabi
insurgents were again defending t he faith. Marxism is a well-defined political
philosophy (even if it has been discredited) that can be easily grabbed by any malcontent
and pressed into service with only some local refinements.
Other ideologies can be much stranger. Sometimes, as was the case with the Soviets,
the collision between reality and their ideological gestalt left people with bifurcated belief
24 E.llul, Jacques: Propaganda: Formation of Mens’ Attitudes, New York; 1965
20