The "blowback" theory

Submitted by Matthew on 28 May, 2013 - 8:19

In the aftermath of the Woolwich killing on 22 May all of the press, to one degree or another, and within the constraints of their own individual styles and prejudices tried to make sense of the horror.

Events like Woolwich are straightforward for the right-wing press to deal with. Crazed Muslims attack an off-duty soldier in the most brutal way imaginable in broad day light on the streets of the capital. The killers obligingly hang around to deliver on camera a religiously-inspired rant against “the west” warning that “you people will never be safe”. Cue recycled reports of hate speeches from imam X and radical preacher Y. The story fell so easily into the agenda of the Sun, Mail and Express that you could almost feel them pull back from the most extreme reaction.

Much worse things about immigrants, Muslims and multiculturalism have been written throughout the year than in the immediate aftermath of this event. Maybe it was the rapid attempt by the thugs of the EDL to exploit the story by stirring up local tensions that held the tabloid-land back from full-throated hate.

In many ways the most self-revealing analyses could be found in the more left-leaning press. You expect Guardian and Independent writers to avoid and warn against the demonisation of a particular community and to protest against greater restrictions on liberty as the way to keep people safe from future attacks. These papers occasionally give space to people of a more radical or socialist stripe and it might be hoped that they would have something more insightful to say on why these things happen, the type of people who perpetrate them and how we might best combat their ideas. But just as after 9/11 or the July 2005 London bombings, it turns out that they have only one thing to say — repeatedly and at length, presented as a great and controversial insight ignored by “the establishment commentators”.

They say that the Woolwich killing is down to “western foreign policy”. It is blowback. People like the killers in Woolwich do these things because they are angered by the invasion of Iraq, the oppression of the Palestinians and the propping up, by western governments, of a series of repressive Arab regimes.

They say so in the macabre amateur videos they leave behind after suicide missions. One of the Woolwich killers spelled it out to nearby mobile phone-users.

The evidence is so unmissable that nobody really misses it! The Sun published the “eye for an eye, none of you people will be safe” rant as a banner on its front page. So prominent was it that they reported a couple of days later that the paper was removed from a shop after a customer thought it was a poster supporting the act. Every other paper also reported the rant.

Two comment articles in the Guardian typify the paucity of this repetitive single-focus attempt to explain events like Woolwich.

On Monday 27 May Terry Eagleton played the role of brave free-thinking historian against all those who refuse to face the evidence.

His article, “To explain is not to excuse” was an exercise in the Jesuitical logic for which he has become famous. In several hundred carefully chosen words he managed to say four things: that anyone who links this killing to western foreign policy is being “speedily shut up”; that the alternative to that link is to see it as mindless and without cause (which is what “they” want you to think); that people like him who try to explain it are acting as historians just like those who seek to explain Hitler or Stalin; that none of that is an attempt to justify or mitigate.

The day after the killing Glenn Greenwald, in the same paper, decided to challenge the idea that the attack could be accurately and usefully described as “terrorism”. He used the space as a platform for the common-enough argument that the actions of the US and other western governments could fairly be described as terrorism, therefore actions like Woolwich were hardly any different. But this is a confused and contradictory argument. He defines terrorism as violence which “deliberately targets” non-combatants. Because a soldier was killed in Woolwich this is an act of war committed in response to the “war on terror”.

Throughout, however, he makes reference to other attacks which did “deliberately target” civilians such as the Boston marathon and London 2005 bombings without seeming to note the contradiction. The essential point being made has little to do with this distinction, as can be seen from this stark and stupid paragraph:
“Basic human nature simply does not allow you to cheer on your government as it carries out massive violence in multiple countries around the world and then have you be completely immune from having that violence returned.”

Taken seriously the claim seems to be that the “returned violence” (Boston, Woolwich, London) is no more than human nature. There is really nothing these young men could have been expected to do given the “massive violence in multiple countries around the world” they had witnessed (or rather seen on TV and read about in newspapers).

How millions of other humans who had seen the same events (and very many witnessed in “real life”) had not turned into crazed killers will have to remain a mystery. There are other mysteries left unexplained by this call to human nature.

For instance, why the Woolwich, Boston and 9/11 attackers remained so unmoved by so much other “massive violence in multiple countries” like Zimbabwe or Iran or by the murder of trade unionists in Colombia or the mass death of garment workers in Bangladesh.

Or why they remain unmoved by forms of extreme repression, often violent, which deny the most basic rights to millions of people in “multiple countries around the world” — women most especially but also trade unionists, gay people and democrats. Is it not human nature to be angered by this? Or is it only certain types of violence and injustice, committed by specific agents and not others, that moves human beings to violence? And if this is the way humans “naturally” respond to violence done to us or people we sympathise with, then couldn’t that explain the US invasion of Afghanistan, home of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11?

This ”basic human nature” is a lot more indiscriminate than Greenwald will allow. You do not have to be someone who “cheers on” your government as it carries out violence to lose your immunity to having that violence returned. You only had to live, work or be in New York, Boston or London at the wrong time and place to risk the violent wrath of these poor victims of their own human nature. Jihadists have no interest in whether you opposed or supported or weren’t sure about the Iraq war or any other aspect of western foreign policy.

These are not cheap rhetorical points. A socialist intellectual, the beneficiary of the kind of education which allowed time to develop critical ideas and perspectives, the holder of a world-view which professes to a deeper fuller understanding of the underlying forces that drive human actions, given space in national media to explain such events, ought to have important things to say.

They ought to know that it matters that the vast majority of Muslims have no time whatsoever for those who bomb and kill in their name. That alone is evidence that this is not about human nature.

Intellectuals should be the first to point out that the primary and most numerous victims of people who share the ideology of the Woolwich killers are Muslim or of Muslim heritage — women, socialists, apostates and indeed intellectuals. Among other things, such arguments will help combat the ideas that this is a matter of “Muslims versus the rest”. They ought to be explaining, describing and clarifying that this is about a reactionary political ideology which uses Islam, not Islam in general.

That kind of discourse helps us understand the reasons why the vast majority of Muslims, and the millions who oppose western foreign policy (war, invasion, the propping up of unsavoury regimes) do not as a result support bombing or otherwise killing civilians or off-duty soldiers.

There are also explanations for the lack of anger generated among jihadists against the repression in Iran, Zimbabwe and any number of other countries. These are not people who just can’t help getting angry about injustice. Their anger is particular, singular, ideologically driven. There is plenty of injustice and violence they are not only not angry about but would like to see an awful lot more of.

Terry Eagleton and Glenn Greenwald ought to be able to explain that the difference between most opponents (or even sceptics) of western foreign policy and the jihadists is that we oppose it in favour of something better, more democratic and progressive whereas they (the jihadists) oppose it in favour of something much worse.

The problem with the self-proclaimed left wing commentators is not that they want to have another pop at the west or that they want to force people to think about what “terrorism” really is. And a generous assessment of Eagleton and Greenwald would acquit them of justifying attacks like Woolwich (their assurances are no doubt sincere).

The problem here is the lack of intellectual rigour. The way they present a conflict between the “west” and Islamic fundamentalism or jihadism. This is an abject failure to explain. They may not want to justify but they don’t want to blame too much lest that reduces the responsibility which should be laid at the door of the West. In that reluctance to draw attention to anyone else’s responsibility they lose any ability to explain events like this.

Because words and arguments matter it is hard to see how they don’t in fact mitigate and excuse. Greenwald’s appeal to “basic human nature” to explain why we cannot be immune from the “violence returning” logically implies acts like the Greenwich killing are inevitable and that the two men were doing no more than acting out a natural human drive. Apart from being transparent nonsense, this absolves him from considering the actual motives behind such actions, the causal factors that separate these two men and other perpetrators from the rest of us.

An examination of those factors would make it a lot harder to hold on to the childish “good vs evil” worldview that saturates everything Eagleton and Greenwald write.

If you want to be an advocate and fighter for a more thoroughly democratic, equal and free society, then the social forces that rule the most powerful states in the world are your enemy. But so too, and no less so, are the religious fascists who have inspired and carried out two decades of violent assaults on a whole range of targets in the name of holy war.

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