In a short but compelling piece at TCS, Professor Turner offers the idea that terrorism is a last gasp counter-revolutionary technique against the democratic revolutions that have spread across the globe in the last several generations. In his view, the Islamist nature of much of the terrorism today is a little misleading — what is more important than the religious impulse is the totalitarian impulse, and totalitarianism has been losing big for years now:

Thirty years ago it looked as if the totalitarian state was solidly established, successful and immortal. Democratic capitalism had been stopped in its tracks. The nuclear-armed socialist dictatorship could not be attacked or defeated; it could at best be contained, and none of its incremental marginal conquests could be rolled back. Marvelously, however, a new strategy emerged, invented by the world’s middle-class populations, that could bring down the totalitarian state: the velvet revolution. Totalitarian governments rely on elites to govern and control the people and defend themselves against outside ideas. Those elites must reproduce themselves, creating a property-owning educated class with great power but without the revolutionary ideology of their parents; and to remain economically viable the state must produce a skilled artisan class, like the shipbuilders of Gdansk, with the capacity to unionize. Out of these materials, generated by totalitarianism itself, comes the velvet revolution…..

The suicide bomb, with the mass terrorism it epitomizes, is the weapon of choice against the velvet revolution. The target is not, as well-meaning critics of terrorism say, indiscriminate: it is exact and precise. The target is any population that might organize a velvet revolution, the potential sovereigns of a democratic state. It is people who are not ideological, who are willing to let others believe what they want, who want to make a living and be independent, and who want a say in their government.

There is much in Professor Turner’s thinking to merit serious reflection. One thinks, for example, of the Tamil Tigers, early and notorious adopters of suicide-bombing. They are mostly Hindu, and their leader is said to have been a communist. Turner’s thoughts suggest a common thread between the Tamil Tigers and the Islamist terrorists in their desires to create oppressive, totalitarian states.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 7:17 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, art, culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.