by Steven Poole
The objects of war
When contemporary American and British politicians talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, then, they have quite specific meanings in mind. Freedom is the freedom of capital, which if unhindered by the obstructions of justice may in turn grant ‘freedoms’ to individuals. Democracy, meanwhile, is represented by a brief moment at the ballot box, and otherwise denotes the minimal state of affairs that enables capital to go about its business. Probably we are unnecessarily bamboozled by what we might suppose are the more complex and valuable meanings of freedom and democracy. We should stop worrying and trust that the new versions of them, inexorably on the march as they are, will indeed lead to global calm and happiness.
That is, indeed, a modern article of faith, an assumption made even by such writers as LSE professor of international relations Fred Halliday. Rebutting the idea that the West ‘needs’ an enemy, Halliday writes: ‘The logic of capitalism is, rather, that a peaceful world in which countries trade and peacefully compete with each other is the most desirable.’90 It is perhaps more correct to say that capitalism doesn’t care where the profits come from, and to remember that, in certain countries, the military industry accounts for no insignificant proportion of capitalism. In 1970, the US Department of Defense owned ‘10 per cent of the assets of the entire American economy’.91 In the second financial quarter of 2003, military spending accounted for 60 per cent of the growth rate of US gross domestic product.92 It has long been observed that the running-up of deficits with enormous increases in military spending can fuel short-term growth, a phenomenon that economists have christened ‘military Keynesianism’: evidently, this worked for the Iraq invasion. By 2004, one out of every 27 working people in the US was employed either directly by the Pentagon or by the ‘defence industry’,93 much of whose profits depend on selling weapons overseas. As Ezra Pound remarked: ‘gun sales lead to more gun sales / they do not clutter the market for gunnery / there is no saturation.’94
It is also true, of course, that the ‘defense industry’ has contributed many useful things to the modern world, such as computers, the internet, and microwave ovens.95 But that is not its only function. And capitalism can be peaceful, as witness, for example, the number of countries invaded recently by Sweden; but it is not evident that it must be. Capitalism is not inherently evil; nor is it inherently good. It is agnostic on matters of good and evil. It is not immoral, it is amoral. (Which is why, despite the rhetoric of ‘free trade’, western capitalist democracies protect themselves with vast edifices of law and regulation.) And once you are agnostic about the rights or wrongs of war, you may be intensely relaxed about the fact that war can be very good for business.
We may contrast Halliday’s view of the ‘logic of capitalism’ as inherently pacific with the following bravura passage by American politician and financier Alexander Hamilton, author of most of what are known as the Federalist Papers. His political views would today be described as conservative rather than liberal, yet he did not view capital as a panacea for the world’s ills. In 1787, he wrote:
The genius of republics, say they, is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those inflammable humours which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord. We may ask these projectors in politics, whether it is not the true interest of all nations to cultivate the same benevolent and philosophic spirit? If this be their true interest, have they in fact pursued it? Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found, that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct, than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisition, that affect nations, as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known, that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and that they are of course liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives, since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.96
At the time of this writing, experience had still not given an answer compatible with the rhetoric of western leaders. Perhaps, then, it was time to change the labels once more.
9
Extremism
Extreme
Nearly four years after the ‘war on terror’ was first declared, the US administration appeared to decide that the slogan had been counterproductive in publicity terms. What America was engaged in now, it announced, was a ‘Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism’.1 The differences between this shiny new catchphrase and the old, much-maligned one were several. A ‘war on’ something sounds rather bellicose and unilateral, but a ‘struggle’ has a sense of built-in righteousness. It does not boast of physical superiority, but of moral superiority. One struggles against illness, or misfortune, or poverty. To struggle connotes a kind of heroism. The word also has a history in the language of communism, as in the ‘class struggle’: Lenin wrote of ‘the struggle of the proletariat’;2 ‘struggle meetings’ were held in revolutionary China for people to demand the removal of officials from office.3 The new US catchphrase might even have been designed with that sense also in mind, in a heartwarming attempt to reconcile socialists to the cause. A struggle, moreover, is not conducted only with bombs: General Richard Myers emphasised this implication of the change in language by saying that the new Global Struggle would be ‘more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military’.4 Better late than never, perhaps.
Thus the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism was one in which all right-thinking people would wish to share. For ‘Violent extremism’, furthermore, seemed to be a bad thing. But it was also rather a vague thing. To be sure that struggling against it was a good idea, we should know more about what it is. Yet ‘extremism’ itself is a rather slippery term of Unspeak. Let us trace its roots.
The base word, ‘extreme’, comes from the Latin extremus, the superlative form of exterus, outward (hence the English ‘exterior’). So ‘extreme’ began its life meaning ‘outermost’: at the limit of something. It is in this sense that the Catholic Church uses ‘extreme unction’: it is the last sacrament given to a dying person. But the strictly superlative usage, to mean right at the outer limit, was not honoured for long. Shakespeare, for one, thought that something could be more or less extreme (he uses the constructions ‘not so extreme’ and ‘extremest’), a usage that Samuel Johnson later mocked for its illogicality in his Dictionary. In its new comparative use, the word was able to pass from a purely descriptive term to one expressing a form of moral disapproval. There was a spectrum of possible behaviour in any context, and acts near one end or the other would be denounced as ‘extreme’. Too much physical exercise was ‘extreme’, argued Bishop Joseph Hall in 1614, while William Cowper by 1734 was denouncing the ‘extreme’ dress of your average avaricious parson.5
The words ‘extremism’ and ‘extremist’ were invented only in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they carried a similar freight of rhetorical disapprobation. It works like this: first we imagine a
spectrum of all possible ideas, then we say that anything near one end or the other constitutes ‘extremism’. But those ‘extreme’ ideas are only near the end of the spectrum because of the way we have drawn it in the first place. Those accused of extremism may wish to draw very different spectra, with their own views in the middle. For instance, one person may consider ‘extremism’ the views of an animal-rights activist who breaks into laboratories to free monkeys or cats and insists that everyone has a moral duty to become a vegan. The activist, for her part, would consider acceptance of the mass cruelty of animal experimentation and factory farming to be the ‘extreme’ position: she would say that her own view was the only reasonable one to take after due moral consideration. Indeed, as George Lakoff noted, members of animal-rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had already been denoted ‘terrorists’ for releasing minks; it would do just as well henceforth to call them ‘extremists’, a term that had already been applied to environmental activists.6 In 2005, even people peacefully signing petitions to ban the shooting of doves in the US were labelled ‘anti-hunting extremists’ by the National Rifle Association.7 An alternative view might consider the desire to fire bullets at birds to be the extreme position.
To call someone an ‘extremist’ is to denounce him merely for his position on our imaginary spectrum of ideas, rather than to engage with what he is actually saying. An extremist is someone whose opinions differ markedly from ours. He will not listen to argument, and so we should not listen to him. It is perhaps for this reason that, by 2005, ‘extremist’ seemed to have replaced the old standby ‘fundamentalist’, particularly for referring to violent Islamism. Not only is ‘extremist’ much more flexible in its application, it also gets around the possible problem that to call someone a ‘fundamentalist’ is to acknowledge that he has some kind of foundation, which is to say that his actions do not just derive from some arbitrary evil. Especially if he goes on to claim that his foundation is a holy book, it becomes difficult to denounce him other than by saying that your holy book is better than his. ‘Extremism’ replaces incommensurable factions of different religions with simple geometry: it is thus much more obvious that what it denotes must be bad.
One of the earliest systematic campaigns that employed the new concept of ‘extremism’ was the British war of words against Indian nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century. One faction in the Indian National Congress, represented by Aurobindo Ghose, wanted the British colonial rulers to leave immediately and let India rule itself: the ideal as he expressed it was ‘a free national government unhampered even in the least by foreign control’.8 Aghast at such boldness, the British press and politicians immediately dubbed his group the Extremists, an appellation that has passed into normal historical parlance, where they are contrasted with the so-called Moderates, who wished only that their British rulers might allow them a little more freedom to self-govern.
There were links between the so-called ‘Extremists’ and the perpetrators of acts of terrorism in Bengal from 1908 onwards, but the former had already been labelled as beneath serious debate because of their views. They were ‘extremists’ in mind, not merely in deed. For Ghose and his fellows, any desire to be free of imperial rule was automatically categorised as extremism, and therefore dismissed politically. The British could not conceive that there might be a sincere fight for national liberation going on – and so they termed the Bengali bombings ‘anarchism’, quite missing the point.9
To label the Indian revolutionaries ‘Extremists’, then, was simply to say that they had no right to ask for what they wanted. The label has a further useful function: to imply that such a person cannot possibly be thought reasonable on any matter at all. An ‘extremist’, it is easy to suppose, does not hold just one opinion with which we disagree, but is habitually, essentially extreme: impossible to talk to, impossible to welcome into civilisation. In that respect the appellation ‘extremist’ works much like ‘terrorist’, conflating many kinds of motivation and action under one all-purpose bogey-word. Vladimir Putin’s violent suppression of Chechen rebellion became ‘partnership’ in the ‘war on terror’; it would equally easily become part of the struggle against violent extremism. Just like the ‘war on terror’, the new struggle was defined so as to outflank and outlive any mere fight with A1 Qaeda.
The interdependency of terms in this phrase ‘violent extremism’ is quite complex. It would seem that violent extremism is considered the natural kind of extremism. To speak of ‘peaceful extremism’ would sound plain weird. The metaphorical violence done to respectable thinking implied by the holding of an ‘extreme’ view always has the potential, in the view of those denouncing the extremists, to transmute into physical violence: it is only a matter of time before an extremist bombs or kills. In this way, the appellation ‘extremist’ works deliberately to blur the distinction between opinion and behaviour. And the potential violence, concomitantly, is rendered all the more horrible because it is extremist – there is an associative sense of ‘extreme violence’ as compared to other kinds. After all, it would not do to argue that perhaps all violence constitutes an ‘extreme’ approach to a situation, even if one supposes that, in extremis, it may be justified.
Yet another sense of ‘struggle’, by the way, is that it better conveys the sense of indefinite, even permanent conflict that Donald Rumsfeld had to twist himself into crazy jazz locutions to justify in the previous linguistic context of a ‘war’. Struggle does not imply certain victory. The sense of a never-ending crusade was reassuringly intact. A Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism was, then, a righteous, permanent, planetary fight against, in principle, anyone whose views differed greatly from ours. And there was one more thing: the new catchphrase had an attractive acronym. Could it have been coincidence that Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism telescoped into the snappy G-SAVE? G for God, or GI, or G-Man, the implacable FBI agent of national-security lore. And SAVE for, well, save. Save the world. Save civilisation. Who could not feel inspired to sign up to that?
Not two weeks later, however, G-SAVE turned out to be a botched product launch. Former CIA officer Larry Johnson reported that George W. Bush had complained ‘No one checked with me’, and insisted it was still a war.10 Bush rammed the new old message home in a speech where the repeated syllables of ‘war on terror’ rang out like anvil-blows:
Make no mistake about it, we are at war. We’re at war with an enemy that attacked us on September 11th, 2001. We’re at war against an enemy that, since that day, has continued to kill. […] To win this war on terror, we will use all elements of national power. […] Part of winning this war on terror is to remind others of what’s at stake, and to work diplomatically to get people to keep pressure on the enemy. […] Iraq is the latest battlefield in the war on terror […] Our men and women who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in this war on terror have died in a noble cause, in a selfless cause. […] We got a big task in Washington, D.C., and that’s to remember the stakes of the war on terror, and to do our duty, and to be true to the principles of the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.11
Perhaps Bush worried that the change to ‘struggle’ implied potential failure; and so the return to ‘war’ worked to erase that admission. Even the improvising soloist Rumsfeld fell into line after this, going back to ‘war on terror’; yet he could not help but spice it up with the blue note of ‘extremism’ while he was at it: ‘This war of ideas is at the heart of the war on terror; a conflict between a totalitarian ideology of the extremists, and the now-tested vision of free societies.’12
And so a kind of compromise seemed to have been reached. It was still a ‘war on terror’, but the enemy was now comprised of ‘extremists’ of all possible types. The effect was that the war’s scope was wider than ever. And happily, unlike the dismayingly long and unwieldy GLOBAL STRUGGLE AGAINST VIOLENT EXTREMISM, the phrase WAR ON TERROR would still fit perfectly on a television news graphic.
&
nbsp; Moderation
The inherent evil of ‘extremism’ is commonly contrasted with the supposed opposites of ‘moderation’ or ‘balance’. To call oneself a ‘moderate’ is to appeal to virtues of sobriety and impartiality, but it is just as much a trick of drawing the appropriate spectrum as the denunciation of extremism is. Someone might call himself a ‘moderate’ on judicial punishment, for example, if he thinks people should be executed by the state, but only for heinous premeditated murders. He may describe this as a ‘moderate’ position by appealing to one extreme of people who call for the execution of petty thieves, on the one hand, and an opposing extreme of people who want to offer killers nothing but warm baths and PlayStations. Note that it doesn’t matter if no such people of either kind exist: the very naming of a possible strand of opinion, regardless of whether anyone holds it, is sufficient to draw the spectrum of ideas that places one’s own view in an admirable position. Of course for some people, all life is sacred and killing is never justified, so for them a ‘moderate’ approach to punishment would necessarily be drawn between different points. Thus ‘moderate’ means nothing until you define the context. This was well illustrated by a group of Iranian students, who in summer 2005 wrote an open letter to the G8 summit:
During the past two weeks, the theocratic regime in Iran held its elections for the successor to Mohammad Khatami, which according to the mafia theocratic Regime resulted in a run-off between Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a ‘moderate’ and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ‘hardliner.’ In reality, these terms of ‘moderate’ and ‘hardliner’ mean little. Both of these men, as well as all those who ran for any office in Iran, did so only upon the approval of the Guardian Council. While the Islamic Republic Regime decides who is allowed to run for office, we Iranians are only allowed to pick our political leaders and representatives from a field of supporters of the oligarchic Regime.13