The subject of “terrorism” seized the world’s attention in late 2001 as a result of one fairly brief,
yet highly dramatic and destructive, attack on two of the core symbols of the world’s most
powerful political actor, the United States of America. The targeting of the World Trade Center
in New York City, the symbol of the United States’ enormous global economic power, and the
Pentagon Building in Washington, DC, the symbol of the United States’ overarching military
superiority, was well planned, coordinated, and executed. The attack itself attained symbolic
stature as an affront to the established global order, a challenge to the world’s dominant power,
and an announcement that the prevailing US-led global order was not viewed, or valued, equally
by all those whose daily lives are increasingly caught in the vortex of post-Cold War change.
Of course, the problem of terrorism was already well-known when the planes struck their targets
in full view of a vast, global, tele-connected audience and created their indelible psychic images
of sophisticated savagery. The politics of terror, and the overpowering fear that terror produces
in its wake, lay at the very foundation of the evolution of social order. And it is the ultimate
irony of societal development that modern acts of savagery have attained such high levels of
sophistication. In its most simple terms, terror has stood as the stark alternative to civility in
social relations from the time of humankind’s earliest recorded reflections. As Hobbes explained
in his 17th century treatise, “Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every
one…the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition
thereto…and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; the life of man
[sic], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”2
At their roots, terror, force, and violence are
integral and, as such, terrorism as a course of action is hardly distinguishable from coercion as a
strategy or violence as a tactic
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..