there's a brilliant, poetic essay by John Edgar Wideman in the March issue of Harper's magazine, which explores the use of the label terrorist which seems appropos here--
quote:From their initial appearance in English to describe the bloody dismantling of royal authority during the French Revolution (Burke's "thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists . . . are let loose on the people") the words terror and terrorist have signified godless savagry. Other definitions--government by a system of coercive intimidation--have almost entirely disappeared. Seldom if ever perceived neutrally as a tool, a set of practices and tactics for winning a conflict, terror instead is understood as pure evil. Terror and terrorists in this Manichaean scheme are excluded from the problematic dignity of conventional warfare.
One side's use of terrorist to describe the other is never the result of reasoned exchange between antagonsists. It's a refusal of dialogue, a negation of the other. The designation terrorist is produced by the one-way gaze of power. Only one point of view, one vision, one story is necessary and permissable, since what defines the gaze of power is its absolute, unquestionable authority.
To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist's gaze confers upon the native. Dismissing the possibility that the native can look back at you just as you are looking at him is a first step toward blinding him and ultimately rendering him or her invisible, the business of owning him, occupying and exploiting his land, becomes much more efficient, pleasant.
thoughts? |
