Yuval Noah Harari: the theatre of terror
As the literal meaning of the word indicates, terror is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties, who are unable to inflict much material damage on their enemies. Of course, every military action spreads fear. But in conventional warfare, fear is a byproduct of material losses, and is usually proportional to the force inflicting the losses. In terrorism, fear is the whole story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.
.. However, the terrorists hope that even though they can barely dent the enemy’s material, power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse its strength. Terrorists fight like tai-chi masters: they aim to beat the rival with the rival’s own power.
.. Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses its massive power against them, it will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create.
.. People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.
.. Terrorists undertake an impossible mission: to change the political balance of power when they have almost no military abilities. To achieve their aim, they present the state with an impossible challenge of its own: to prove that it can protect all its citizens from political violence, anywhere, anytime. The terrorists hope that when the state tries to fulfil this impossible mission, it will reshuffle the political cards, and hand them some unforeseen ace.
.. In France, for example, more than 1,000 rape cases are reported to the authorities each year, with thousands more unreported cases. Rapists and abusive husbands, however, are not perceived as an existential threat to the state, because, historically, the state did not build itself on the promise to eliminate sexual violence. In contrast, the much rarer cases of terrorism are viewed as a deadly threat, because over the last few centuries modern western states have gradually built their legitimacy on the explicit promise to maintain zero political violence within their borders.
.. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.