WORDPLAY CAN DILUTE MEANING OF ‘TERRORISM’
Defining what or who is terrorist, who a mere nutter, is key to debate
“One man’s terrorist,” it used to be said, “is another man’s freedom fighter.” Well, it was said by idiots, who either would not or could not distinguish between those who, in pursuit of their aims, attack civilian as opposed to legitimate military targets. Which is to say, the same elementary moral error as the terrorist.
Nowadays the idiot’s line of choice has evolved: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s lone nutter with a gun.” This wilful refusal to engage the critical faculties has popped up with some regularity ever since the attacks in Ottawa and Quebec last fall. If the Islamist-inspired loons responsible for those attacks can be called terrorists, why not the Moncton cop-killer? Why not the allegedly Columbine-inspired suspects in the Halifax plot? Why not anyone who kills, or plots to kill, anyone?
The usual, and legitimate, concern when it comes to terrorism is that governments will define it too broadly. Civil libertarians are already raising the alarm over Bill C-51, the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act, for its vague allusion to activity that “undermines the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada,” and its inclusion, among the list of threats intelligence agents would be authorized to disrupt, of such relatively unapocalyptic scenarios as “interference with critical infrastructure” or “interference with the capability of the Government in relation to ... the economic or financial stability of Canada.”
And rightly so. You don’t have to subscribe to paranoid fears of a “secret police force” to see how casting such a wide net could lead to abuses. People who interfere with critical infrastructure are certainly deserving of being caught and punished. But the sorts of measures a free society might be prepared to accept to counter terrorism will be very different than those that might legitimately be deployed against the threat of, say, vandalism.
But the people insisting that nutters should also be called terrorists — or, in a variant, that the nutters the government calls terrorists shouldn’t be called terrorists, because they’re nutters — have the opposite concern: namely, that terrorism has not been defined broadly enough. After all, Anders Breivik, the deranged gunman who killed scores of people at a Norwegian summer camp in 2011, issued a manifesto, of sorts. Doesn’t that make him a terrorist?
Granted, terrorism may be hard to define around the edges. But the core of it, as spelled out in law — violence used “in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause” — is intelligible enough. It excludes other types of violence for precisely the reason that critics insist the anti-terrorism bill should: because the measures that might be appropriate for fighting the one are not appropriate to the other.
It’s not clear what the point of all this wordplay is, other than to rob “terrorism” of any meaning — or to suggest that it had none to start with: if not that there’s no such thing, that it’s not that big a threat, certainly none that warrants a specific response from the authorities, distinct from how we treat other sorts of violence. Murder is murder, after all. What difference does it make what the killer’s motive is? So far as we treat
The usual, and legitimate, concern when it comes to terrorism is that governments will define it too broadly. Civil libertarians are already raising the alarm over Bill C-51.
one sort of murderer more severely on account of his motive, are we not to that extent prosecuting him for his beliefs, rather than his acts?
Actually, motive comes up at many points in the criminal law — if the motive is self-defence, for example. And motive, in the case of terrorism, is inseparable from the act. The terrorist does not seek only to kill for killing’s sake, or for reasons internal to him, but to intimidate others — to send a message, to alter behaviour — not only on the part of governments, but of citizens. More to the point, he might just succeed.
It is that possibility that truly separates terrorism from other crimes of violence. There is no way to lessen your chances of being killed by a random lunatic. As such, there is no reason to alter your behaviour. But there is, or at least so you might reason, so long as you, or we, do as the terrorist demands, and the more any of us do, the more likely it is that such demands will be issued. We do not want our society to be run by violence and threats. Hence the need, at the least, for a separate category of crime.
And a separate category of response? Here the scale of the threat enters into it. An organized movement, with a coherent ideology, capable of raising funds, recruiting others, planning, training and so on, is capable of much greater mayhem than a stray lunatic — especially now that the technology of mass death has escaped the control of state actors. Never has it been more easily available, and never have there been so many willing to use it. (The crossover case is the so-called “lone wolf,” acting alone but guided or inspired by an organized terrorist group. It is not the voices in his head we need to worry about so much as the voices in his ear.)
Terrorism is not a one-off, a blip of murderous frenzy that appears out of nowhere and as suddenly disappears. It is ongoing, organized, often meticulously planned, a systematic challenge to democratic society.
That doesn’t justify any and all measures aimed at preventing it. It does justify some.