These are some of the thoughts I have had, and some of the connections I have made, regarding the attack in Woolwich on Wednesday, in which a man died after being attacked with a machete. Two suspects remain in hospital after a confrontation with the police. My considerations relate more to the reporting of the attack than to the nature of the attack itself; mine is really an attempt to analyse and philosophise the aims and the rhetoric of the reporting.
* * *
The more things change, the more they stay the same
This epigram – from the French ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, authored by the critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr – may encapsulate war and warmongering in general, which often seems the continual search for a common enemy, and which has only increased in scope and persistence in the age of the nation state. Yet its play upon the concept of time gives it particular pertinence for me here, and when it comes to terrorist attacks and the War on Terrorism.
The attack in Woolwich was quickly depicted as a terrorist attack; and quickly conceived as demonstrating a new type of terrorist activity in the United Kingdom, owing to its up-close nature and the bold and bloody use of a machete. Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, called the attack ‘totally unprecedented’; defence experts described it as a ‘departure’ from previous attacks, marking ‘a new round of terror threats in this country’. At the same time, in David Cameron’s press conference upon the attack – given in Paris, alongside François Hollande, whom the Prime Minister was visiting for a scheduled meeting – he stated ‘We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country’, before concluding, ‘and we never buckle in the face of them’.
Thus the Woolwich attack has been portrayed as both new and not-new, something appearing for the first time and something in a process of recurring. Involved here is a sort of emptying out of time which calls to mind Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity. For Giddens (the theoretical architect of the ‘Third Way’ in politics), a phenomenon of modern life is ‘time-space distanciation’, whereby time and subsequently space are made ’empty’ in that they are made distinct from any grounding contexts: with the mechanical clock and the standardised calendar, we can know the time without reference to nature and our specific locale; and with such developments as the telephone and improvements in travel (and now again with the internet), we can interact with people without being physically with them, and increasingly conceive the world in a way unlimited by what we see immediately around us.
Time-space distanciation ‘connects presence and absence’; it relates closely to ‘disembedding’, which Giddens defines as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space’. In short, disembedded social relations are those no longer embedded in local contexts. Giddens relates two types of disembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens – for instance, money – which are accepted as possessing value regardless of when they are used and by whom; and expert systems, where – lacking the requisite knowledge ourselves – we rely on the expertise of professionals. Giddens elaborates how the faith we place in expert systems relates to and becomes trust.
As disembedding allows us to operate without the restrictions that were once imposed by time and space, it offers us much in the way of opportunities. More, disembedding is crucial to our functioning in an increasingly complex world – our trust allows us to accept things and practices as real, even if we lack knowledge of their structure, development and coherence. Yet disembedding comes also with dangers, one of which is the acceptance of expert systems which are not expert, but contain flaws or deceits.
When it is stated that the Woolwich attack is both something new and emerging and at the same time something old and persisting, we lose our sense of the specific interaction and the contexts from which it actually emerged. The endeavour is to make us lose our grounding, and to increase our fear: an ambiguous and perverse fear that something will inevitably happen at any moment. This sort of rhetoric is typical in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and typical of the war on terrorism: there is frequent talk of phases and new stages, with speculation regarding repeat attacks, copycats, and the spiralling of incidents which may prove not to be one-offs. In the process we are encouraged to give ourselves over to expert systems, in this case to politicians and defence experts. One of these, Jonathan Shaw – former head of counter-terrorism and head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence until last year – has written a piece for the Evening Standard advocating that the intelligence services be allowed to monitor the public’s internet activities; promulgating the ‘snooper’s charter’ which Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly keen to revive.
* * *
Vague and unhelpful definitions and categorisations
With the vacuum which is a product of a lack of concrete information, distanciated from the individual occurrence by the leading rhetoric of the media and politicians, meta-narratives and broad categorisations move in. In the case of Woolwich, as in the case of many of the attacks which come to be considered terrorist, these categorisations are twofold. Firstly, the attack is categorised as a terrorist attack. This is understandable with regard to Woolwich, given the recorded public pronouncements made by the two suspects; that they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and making political statements (‘This British soldier is an eye for an eye…Remove your government’) led government sources to describe the attack as terrorist within ninety minutes of its first report.
Still, what defines a terrorist attack seems somewhat open to interpretation. A simple definition would suggest that it is any attack which is meant to provoke terror, and which carries a political motive. Yet there is no internationally accepted legal definition of what constitutes terrorism: attempts to arrive at a consensus have faltered upon differences of opinion regarding which political motives should be included in a criminal law definition, and which political motives – for instance, motives of self-determination – should not.
The second problem of categorisation is an extension of the first, and it is that where acts are categorised as terrorist, they tend also to be categorised as belonging to a particular terrorist group or organisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack, by late Wednesday evening, even supposedly liberal news sources were proclaiming the perpetrators’ association with al-Qaeda. The Guardian based their connecting of the organisation tenuously on one suspect’s reference to ‘our land’, calling the attack ‘the first al-Qaida inspired attack to claim a life on British soil’ since 7 July, 2005, and terming the suspect’s claims ‘jihadist’. The BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent wrote a piece balanced in so far as it distinguished between jihadists, political Islamists, and Muslims, and sought to interpret the typical justification for jihadist attacks; yet the concept of the piece was similarly based on an unestablished connection with al-Qaeda, the piece stating that the ‘long-feared attack’ may be rooted to ‘the heart of al-Qaeda’s violent ideology’.
It has since emerged that one of the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo, attended meetings of the Al-Muhajiroun organisation from around 2003, though the extent of his involvement with the group remains uncertain. Al-Muhajiroun claims to be a purely political organisation, focused on promoting Islam and declaiming the state of Israel; but it has links to several people convicted of terrorist activities. The organisation was banned by the National Union of Students in 2001, for disseminating hate literature; and was banned by the government from the UK in 2005. Hours ago, a friend of Adebolajo’s, Abu Nusaybah, alleged during an interview for Newsnight that Adebolajo was approached six months ago to work for MI5, but declined; Nusaybah was arrested on BBC premises shortly after making the allegations.
* * *
Other problematic terms, and parallels in Boston
There are other problematic terms. Referring to suspects as having been ‘radicalised’ takes away their agency and dehumanises them: the phrase evokes Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of ‘machine men with machine minds’, which is evocative and interesting psychologically, but which is neither clear nor balanced news reporting. It is not a rhetoric otherwise used by media outlets; ‘radicalised’ would not be used even for those political leaders who some outlets accuse of leading their countries into illegal Middle Eastern wars. The UK terrorism threat levels are also vague, with the raising of threat levels inciting fear and substituting for substantive information.
There are clear parallels and extensions to be found in the recent Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. The decision to charge the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with use of a weapon of mass destruction is far from straightforward. A weapon of mass destruction originally referred to a chemical weapon, but now the term has no internationally authoritative definition; to be charged with the use of such can subsume an indiscriminate mixture of more specific offences. Theoretically, the phrase arguably implies a level of indiscriminate destruction greater than that carried out in Boston. Again, the term appears more politically than technically descriptive.
Where broad categorisations are so readily made, so condemnation tends to be broad and absolute. That such an attack is inexcusable and ultimately cannot be justified may be so, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be better understood; it may surpass the sense many have of what is moral, but there remains a logic which impels such attacks and which cannot be dismissed in the face of the actions of Western states, who have engaged for much of the period since the Second World War in global programmes of regime change, arms dealings, and military action.
* * *
Finally Social Media to the Fore!
The Woolwich attack is remarkable in that the two suspects remained on the scene of the crime; with Adebolajo readily, and even casually, with a London accent, being recorded on phone camera by a witness as he made his politicised remarks. Another video has surfaced showing the two men charging towards police officers when these arrived, which resulted in the suspects being shot and detained. That the suspects remained in place and spoke so freely to witnesses meant that information about the attack, and its declared motives, rapidly spread across social media.
Both the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, initially responded to the attack via Twitter: Cameron tweeting ‘The killing in #Woolwich is truly shocking – I have asked the Home Secretary to chair a COBRA meeting’; Miliband tweeting ‘Shocked by appalling events in Woolwich. Whole country will be horrified by what has happened’. Later into the evening, the English Defence League gained a significant number of Twitter followers as they attempted to utilise social media to arrange a series of protests.
Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 2010)
