Another paired set: eco-terrorism near Seattle and potential anti-military terrorism in Times Square. Both happened in the past few days. In the Seattle suburbs, five new houses were burnt down and the Earth Liberation Front left a banner. In New York, someone tossed a pretty little bomb (that police have apparently called an IED) into the military recruiting station that sits in the middle of Times Square.
Both of these may be cases of “domestic terrorism,” something difficult for some to conceive:
The small bomb that went off in Times Square early this morning “doesn’t appear to be” a terrorist act, said White House press secretary Dana Perino…When asked whether a bomb is, by definition, an act of terror, Mrs. Perino paused. “It’s a little bit to early to determine what happened,” Mrs. Perino said. “I’m going to let the authorities do their investigation and then we’ll get back to you.
It’s not unreasonable to think that “not terrorism” was intended as “not The Terrorists.” It wasn’t Al-Qaeda or whatever, just some dude on a bike. The point is that red-blooded Americans might be destroying stuff to make political statements. It’s not radically new or anything, but it could have some significance, as demonstrated by this slip where an official seemed unable to apply the term terrorist to an American. For all the talk of it being all non-nation state-y and deterritorialized, the war on terror still has been maintained with a healthy concept of inside/outside. Even when suspected terrorist are hunted down in the U.S., they’re invading foreign agents (or, in the case of John Walker Linde, one of us who went over there–and, if you didn’t know, it seems that was a transgression deserving of pretty special reprimand).
How often would minor acts of political inflected destruction like this have to happen for them not to be immediately forgotten? Not the militia movements or the Branch Davidians, not the fabled one person army, just some property-damaging protest against objectionable aspects of the present.
These recent events aren’t a reason for optimism in this area. The two targets are a little, well, obvious. Suburban sprawl and military recruitment? Really? The choices feel somewhat adolescent: the big new houses and Uncle Sam are mostly symbolic here. The Seattle arson might inflict some financial cost, but they’ll rebuild the houses. The minor explosion in New York did little more than break some glass and get attention–basically little more than a prank.
It might come down to a suspicion that the people responsible for these acts were acting out of psychological rather than material interests (more on this later). By way of counter-example, here’s a pretty good little story from the Global Guerilla’s blog (which it seems this blog is basically a rip off of now).
I’m not advocating violence here, but we all know where history is headed.
Tags: bush administration, guerillas, hippies, the terrorists
