Terror that doesn't cause a panic: anxietism

We don’t respond to right-wing terrorism in the same way that we do to Islamic terrorism. That was the point of an article I read with the headline ‘The terrorism that doesn’t spark a panic’. We treat right-wingers who cross the nutty threshold into crime as mere criminals, but treat Muslims as inherently representative of anyone who also happens to use the same name for the religion. It’s a fair point, but there’s more to consider.

What do we define as terrorism? It’s violence intended to cause wider fear. Or, if I take the Crown Prosecution Service’s definition, ‘the use or threat of action, both in and outside of the UK, designed to influence any international government organisation or to intimidate the public’.

Now that’s a definition we can work with! Think of the possibilities. When Vladimir Putin says that Russia will defend the territory it stole from Ukraine, he is threatening action with the intent of influencing a government. He’s a terrorist.

Clearly the CPS has cast its net wide in defining terrorism. But it has done that for a reason. We can’t say terrorism is done outside of national governments, because North Korea is a terrorist state, and other states have threatened terrorist acts. If a North Korean or Russian agent tries to do something in the UK we want to be able to prosecute them despite their government affiliation.

Perhaps we can clarify the CPS’ definition by cutting out ‘influence any government’. After all, terrorism is designed to influence governments only by creating fear within, or for, the public that those governments claim to protect. So terrorism is really about intimidating the public, and in a democracy that directly influences government. That’s why authoritarian states are less worried about terrorism, and even employ it.

Why do we use the word ‘intimidate’? Well, we can’t use ‘terror’, despite it being implied. Most people aren’t actually terrified of terrorism, even if they are changing their behaviour because of it. It’s an ongoing concern, and that matters even though we feel safe enough not to feel such an extreme and immediate emotion as terror.

So it’s about actions or threats of actions that manipulate the emotions of the public. That’s what really matters about terrorism: without this, it’d be bog-standard crime. And it’s right that we care about this: attempts to distort others’ lives beyond the immediate victims, and attempts to distort our national life, are acts of aggression against us.

That’s exactly how to describe fake news and political lies. When Vote Leave displayed a picture of a queue of brown people (a queue! So they must have been natural Britons) with a caption about Turkey joining the EU, it was emotional manipulation of the public; it aimed to create fear of being overwhelmed using lies. Turkey is not anywhere near to joining the EU, and most of its citizens would stay where they are if it did. Every attempt at emotional manipulation is an assault on the public.

Politicians must campaign, and broadcasters must be free to discuss political issues. The difference is that facts can persuade someone through their rational, conscious decision-making. Lies distort that decision-making. It is the attempt to distort our national life that is the crime. That’s why Barack Obama, when he gave a speech during the EU referendum campaign about the USA’s thoughts on the matter, was not a terrorist: he was voicing genuine American policy. Yes, Cameron hoped it would influence voters, but not just through emotion.

The CPS, with its broad definition, has highlighted the similarities between terrorism as we usually imagine it and most modern campaigning. The only real difference is that terrorism is based on the credible threat of a crime, whereas political lies are not currently a crime. But since the whole point of labelling something as terrorism is to imply that there is something wrong beyond the basic crime, this difference isn’t important.

When commentators call social media a threat to modern society, is it hyperbole? Well, definitely no more so than when people call old-style terrorism a threat. But how often does it happen? We know that traditional terrorist attacks are very rare. Manipulation through lies and emotional gaming, on the other hand, is common. The threat is real. It is our actions to control it that are not.

But if we look even further afield, there’s more that ought to induce panic: the ongoing suffering of the public due to what we regard as natural causes. If it is the fear of terrorism that is the problem with terrorism - the negative emotion that worsens public life and lives - then we should care about all the other fears that drive people from day to day. This isn’t entirely a new point to make. For example, people who live in crime-ridden areas speak of the ongoing terror and anxiety, for both personal safety and property.

Outside of violent crime, in the modern economy most people are scared of losing their job; of falling behind in the rat race and falling under; falling further into debt, getting swamped with interest, bills and demands that all chase inflation in a way that needs constant promotion to accommodate. More and more people are surviving moment to moment, with poverty a constant threat. That doesn’t necessarily show up in statistics; people can still be in work and yet feel more threatened by being without it. They might work longer hours and more jobs, which would even make the economy look like it’s booming.

And then there’s social pressure: the stream of adverts reminding you that you ought to be unhappy unless you have their product, selling you a dream of a perfect life that is impossible, and the stream of social media feeds that do exactly the same, only it’s your friends portraying the dream of a perfect life, and the advertisers only come along for the ride.

There’s the way that society has told us for 30 years that we can all be special; that we should be passionate about our work; that we can make a difference if only we try: messages that stop dead against the reality that we are tiny pieces in a bubbling pot of millions, and random chance does more work for and against us than we or our rivals ever could. The dreams we have bought into are a lie; our hopes are impossible.

And finally, of all these existential questions, there’s ill health. We have a skeleton health system; the structure is there but not even our health minister dares call it healthy. People fall through the cracks all the time: we have poor mental health services in general, insufficient beds, people kicked out of stroke wards just because newer strokes have happened, doctors working 24-hr shifts with no sleep, GPs rushing complex problems through 5-minute appointments (remember the last business meeting in which everything was resolved in the first 5 minutes?), 100,000 vacancies… No wonder everyone’s scared of ill health. And, of course, death. Death is the end, and we currently reconcile ourselves to it by claiming that we can finally be at peace: that our sufferings and anxieties are over. Doesn’t that strike anyone else as perverse? We have created a system that makes us suffer, and then claim that death is good because it’s our escape from that system!

Ongoing fears and worries are all about us. Terrorism, as you might have imagined it, is just a tiny part of them. We, as a nation and a species, have the ability to alleviate most of them, and the potential to eliminate all of them. We don’t; we don’t because too many people benefit from others’ suffering, directly and indirectly; because we are lazy; because we are jealous of others’ happiness; because the only joy we get in life is looking down on those beneath us and we fear to lose that last pleasure.We might sometimes wonder if our politicians do it deliberately, as advertisers do.

This is the real terrorism. Millions of times bigger than the effects of a blown-up bus, and bigger even than the lies on a Brexit bus, we are haunted by fears that could be addressed, if only we recognised them as more than ‘natural’. Or perhaps less: they are not part of how the universe works but part of society only. We made them, and we can unmake them.