Terrorism

What is terrorist killing and terrorist death? Not killings of terrorists not even killings by terrorists, but killings that arouse terror – a terror-death, a death that terrorizes, a terror that produces death, a death that will not be considered normal, banal, but exceptional and so different from the living as to produce terror. Therefore, part of the population in various parts of the world unable to fathom the deaths in the sky will not be terrorized at the deaths up there in the buildings touching the sky, but terrorized at the prospects of deaths that those deaths in the sky will have brought upon them. Terrors of different kinds, and this difference that the baroque cannot erase – in fact the more universal the death the more are the differences. Americans were not terrorized at the deaths in Rwanda, Tamils were not terrorized at the killings in Punjab and Bengal; death is therefore universal while terror is differential. We know that for the last half-century killings have gone on with indifference of many not affected immediately, but we also know that deaths have become now matter of concern, they produce terror, death has become a being, an act that leaps into universality. Torture of the dissenting sects in medieval times, regular throttling of infants and children to death by the Ottoman emperors, stoning of liberals to death in the rugged squares of a city, or shooting of communists by firing squads in soccer stadium – in all these death is protocol. The protocol is of establishing what should be alive, compared to the great anonymous slaughters in wars. The latter scarcely rank as events, though acknowledged as facts. They are slave massacres, unknown, collective, plebian. But paradoxically in making death a baroque act, the singularity is destroyed. Massive deaths become banal, in time what the anonymous deaths have been.

Death is an occasion always for states to come to sense. Revolution needs deaths, much more than that a statist counter-revolution needs death as the necessary protocol. The State, in order to make a come back, requires a murderous rite. The victim holds office, he is innocent, he is clean, he had no complicity with murders, he typifies the daily life of rule - he was not exceptional. His death is therefore dying at the hands of a murderer, the duration of an act, the slaughter of innocence, the catastrophe of silence, a death that requires baroque funeral – in form of wholesale incarceration of family and clan members to death, of the wife led to the pyre, of rounding up members of a locality to the execution ground, a memorial, or forming a State or States. The effects outshine the occasion, or the effects outshining the cause are the occasion, the monumental Taj Mahalin building and destroying in honour of death. We must not eat for some days, observe certain purifying rites, force others into penance, silence, and agony, kill a few or thousands to avenge, build a mausoleum - a kind of denial of death by absorbing immediately this death into monuments of other acts that include the dying of others, an avenging angel that will make killing (of others) look like a suicide (of selves). In this way, the State returns with all controls. It returned repeatedly in Mughal India, in Ottoman Turkey, in Agrippina's Rome, in Socrates' Athens, in Sheikh Mujibur Rehman's Bangladesh, or after the killings of Prince Ferdinand and then thousands and thousands who followed the Prince into dying in the second decade of the last century. In revolution, more in restoration, power needs the protocol of dying. Death by terrorist or a terrorist death is like life, for it brings so many back to life. Consider for example the following: the State that comes alive after some deaths (in Indira Gandhi's case in India or Premadasa's case in Sri Lanka, after one single death), victim who becomes the decor of life (Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.), unconcerned who become the anxious victims-to-be (Central Asia in 1990s), and the counselors who find their vocation earlier snatched away from them by the banality of life and death restored back to them now (US government to the Afghans, Europeans to the Balkans). The change in the form of murderous tool does not matter. Hand (throttling), rope (tying), knife (assassinating), rifle (shooting), bombing (en masse destroying), ramming aircraft (piercing), atom bomb dropping (finishing everything in fire and smoke), chemical weapon (poisoning), death by injection (pleasant death), and guided missiles (revolutionary killing, the RMA) – all these are incidental. Essential is death achievable through killing and achievable of terror. The fundamental principle is that, this death was not certain, terror did it, it may visit me. Even after the most furious act of omission or commission, the most severe ruler like Emperor Aurangjeb would have pardoned me, but this death may visit me any time. Therefore the ghost must be laid to rest, rubble must be turned into ashes, the corpse must be taken out of grave and given new burial – again the mode is purely instrumental, the murderous function of a killing is the protocol of the power that is living.

To die is then to perceive life, whence the question - how did the death come, how did the death become so liquid, how did terror become real leaping to life from fantasy, what were the gods and bystanders doing when the killer was taking position – in other words does death have a structure, death that is supposed to do away with all structures? In other words, what do we mean when the philosopher says that terror-death is not "bookkeeping, but vegetation", reproduced but not repeated, death in My Lai is and is not death in the Manhattan, death on the ground is and is not the death in the sky?