{"id":1304,"date":"2013-05-25T11:54:08","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T11:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedallroundman.com\/?p=1304"},"modified":"2015-08-04T00:49:25","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T03:49:25","slug":"woolwich-and-the-philosophy-of-reporting-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/woolwich-and-the-philosophy-of-reporting-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Woolwich and the Philosophy of Reporting Terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The more things change, the more they stay the same<\/strong><\/p>\n

This epigram \u2013 from the French \u2018plus \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose\u2019, authored by the critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, called the attack \u2018totally unprecedented\u2019;\u00a0defence experts described it<\/a> as a \u2018departure\u2019 from previous attacks, marking \u2018a new round of terror threats in this country\u2019. At the same time, in David Cameron\u2019s press conference upon the attack \u2013 given in Paris, alongside Fran\u00e7ois\u00a0Hollande, whom the Prime Minister was visiting for a scheduled meeting \u2013 he stated \u2018We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country\u2019, before concluding, \u2018and we never buckle in the face of them\u2019.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 The Consequences of Modernity<\/em>.\u00a0For Giddens (the theoretical architect of the \u2018Third Way\u2019 in politics), a phenomenon of modern life is \u2018time-space distanciation\u2019, whereby time and subsequently space are made \u2019empty\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Time-space distanciation \u2018connects presence and absence\u2019; it relates closely to\u00a0\u2018disembedding\u2019, which Giddens defines as \u2018the \u201clifting out\u201d of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space\u2019. In short, disembedded social relations are those no longer embedded in local contexts. Giddens relates two types of disembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens \u2013 for instance, money \u2013 which are accepted as possessing value regardless of when they are used and by whom; and expert systems, where \u2013 lacking the requisite knowledge ourselves \u2013 we rely on the expertise of professionals. Giddens elaborates how the faith we place in expert systems relates to and becomes trust.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 former head of counter-terrorism and head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence until last year \u2013 has written a piece for the Evening Standard<\/a> advocating that the intelligence services be allowed to monitor the public\u2019s internet activities; promulgating the \u2018snooper\u2019s charter\u2019 which Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly keen to revive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Vague and unhelpful definitions and categorisations<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2018Allahu Akbar\u2019 and making political statements (\u2018This British soldier is an eye for an eye\u2026Remove your government\u2019) led government sources to describe the attack as terrorist within ninety minutes of its first report.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 for instance, motives of self-determination \u2013 should not.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 association with al-Qaeda.\u00a0The Guardian<\/em> based their connecting of the organisation<\/a> tenuously on one suspect\u2019s reference to \u2018our land\u2019, calling the attack \u2018the first al-Qaida inspired attack to claim a life on British soil\u2019 since 7 July, 2005, and terming the suspect\u2019s claims \u2018jihadist\u2019. The BBC\u2019s Home Affairs Correspondent wrote a piece<\/a> 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 \u2018long-feared attack\u2019 may be rooted to \u2018the heart of al-Qaeda\u2019s violent ideology\u2019.<\/p>\n

It has since emerged that one of the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo, attended meetings of the\u00a0Al-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\u2019s, Abu Nusaybah, alleged during an interview for\u00a0Newsnight<\/em> that Adebolajo was approached six months ago to work for MI5, but declined; Nusaybah was arrested on BBC premises shortly after making the allegations.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Other problematic terms, and parallels in Boston<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are other problematic terms. Referring to suspects as having been \u2018radicalised\u2019 takes away their agency and dehumanises them: the phrase evokes Charlie Chaplin\u2019s depiction of \u2018machine men with machine minds\u2019, 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;\u00a0\u2018radicalised\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

There are clear parallels and extensions to be found in the recent Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath.\u00a0The 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,\u00a0the phrase arguably implies a level of indiscriminate destruction greater than that carried out in Boston. Again, the term appears more politically than technically descriptive.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t mean that it can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Finally Social Media to the Fore!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Both the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, initially responded to the attack via Twitter: Cameron tweeting \u2018The killing in #Woolwich is truly shocking \u2013 I have asked the Home Secretary to chair a COBRA meeting\u2019; Miliband tweeting \u2018Shocked by appalling events in Woolwich. Whole country will be horrified by what has happened\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity<\/em> (Polity Press, 2010)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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the Woolwich attack which criticises the media reaction, and draws upon Anthony Giddens' concepts of disembedding and distanciation.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/woolwich-and-the-philosophy-of-reporting-terror\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/woolwich-and-the-philosophy-of-reporting-terror\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/woolwich-and-the-philosophy-of-reporting-terror\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/wp-content\/uploads\/London-Terror-1.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","contentUrl":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/wp-content\/uploads\/London-Terror-1.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","width":1200,"height":800,"caption":"A tent is erected near the scene of an attack in Woolwich southeast London Wednesday, May, 22, 2013. 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