Western State Terrorism
and Its Apologetics

from the book

Triumph of the Market

by Edward S. Herman

published by South End Press, 1995

Despite the great media interest in terrorism in recent years, William Perdue's Terrorism and the State has not been reviewed in any mainstream journal or national newspaper. It was issued by a publisher that charges library-oriented high prices (here, $42.95) and provides modest follow-up support (including copy editing as well as advertising). But that is not the main reason this book has fallen still-born from the press. The problem with Perdue's book is that it frames the terrorism issue outside the mainstream paradigm, and will necessarily repel, and may even be incomprehensible to, mainstream editors and reviewers.

In the mainstream paradigm, the West is the victim of terrorism, because of its openness and the envy and hatred of the subversive forces of the world (Saddam Hussein and Iraq, Muammar Qadaffi and Libya, and, in the Evil Empire years and the vision of Ronald Reagan, Claire Sterling, and A. M. Rosenthal, the Soviet Union). The focus of Western officials, experts, and media is therefore on insurgent and Left terrorism, with selective admission of state terrorism by politically convenient villains.

Perdue not only fails to use this supremely biased Western model of terrorism, he analyses and rejects it as a blatant ideological apparatus designed to rationalize Western state terror. For Perdue, the main form of terrorism is 'regime terrorism," a "higher terrorism" managed by the leading Western states, to help them mobilize the world's resources and people to serve their own interests. They employ their superior power to advance and protect the transnational corporate system which they dominate and "to keep the world safe from change". These states use a wide array of means to dominate through fear. Thus Perdue includes under the rubric terrorism not only the state's employment of force to keep its own populace in line, but also the warfare state and its operations, racial terrorism, settler terrorism, surrogate terrorisms, and a vast array of other forms of state intervention.

Concept and Ideology

As Perdue notes, terrorism is "a label of defamation, a means of excluding those so branded from human standing", and it is a powerful one. He situates it not only in an ongoing structure of power relations, but in a history of domination and supremacist thought. In an earlier age of imperialism, slavery was legitimized by various racist ideologies, and terrorism is in the same tradition of ideologies in the service of domination. Essentially, terrorists are those who stand in the way of the West: it is "a form of international deviance," a resort to uncivilized forms of violence. These outsiders and deviants "are often portrayed as irrational or crazed, exercising a twisted thirst for blood....History is reduced to the behavior of notorious persons (whether good or evil) locked in an international morality play....Combined with appeals to nationalism, faith, and other traditional symbols, the war on terror unites the social audience against the forces of barbarism and heresy".

Perdue observes that each anti-colonial movement has been delegitimized as terrorist, and that each enemy resisting the United States, such as the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, is quickly given the terrorist label. He also points out that the "paranoid style of anti-communism projected on a world scale" has conveniently linked together domestic opposition to U.S. intervention and foreign communist terrorists. He stresses also the flexibility of usage of terrorism in a regime of modern propaganda servicing the state, illustrated by the emergence of "narco-terrorism," tying Reds and enemies of the state to drug suppliers, and merging together all the enemies into a compote of negative symbolism. Meanwhile, of course, in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, and in the case of the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, the establishment media ignored or downplayed the very real links between the CIA and other government agencies, the immediate Western tools of state terrorism, and the drug trade.

Perdue has a good account of the "academic" construct of terrorism, showing how nicely aligned it is with the demand of the Western establishment for an exclusive focus on threats and violence from below, simultaneously ignoring regime terrorism. He calls this the "order paradigm of terrorism" which "is clearly committed to a control perspective". Occasionally discussions of state terrorism by mainstream analysts mention notorious regimes (Hitler and Stalin, but never Pinochet or Botha) or take illustrations from African tribal communities. "Absent from this entire type of inquiry is an analysis of Western state violence, much less the global relations that give it form".

Regime Terrorism

Perdue provides a broad account of regime terrorism, describing its multi-leveled characteristics, but its invariable reliance on control through fear. He includes internal wars through death squads as well as pacifying armies, but he also embraces all of the external manifestations of the warfare state, which reflect "a real developmental stage in the productive forces". The resultant imperial terror, aided by a bellicose patriotism, is far and away the most important form of terrorism. It rests on and is at the same time a part of the ideology of a dominant global system, designed to open and serve transnational investment. It is a partner of a growth (as opposed to distributional) model of development. "Thus what is 'modernized' is a system of global inequality, and what is 'developed' are the dependency relations of peripheral underdevelopment. This, simply put, is real terrorism" .

Most of Perdue's later chapters are case studies of various forms of regime terrorism. He is unusual in treating the testing of and threat to use nuclear weapons as a form of state terrorism. For the Western establishment, the threat of nuclear terrorism is confined to the possible acquisition and use of such weapons by Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein, and other enemies of the West. Perdue argues, however, that "the real nuclear terrorism is already here," manifested by actual possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons by Western governments pursuing their alleged national security interests. For the West, only its members have legitimate security interests, and the imperial demands of the elites of the dominant states are readily made into "security" questions. But this is the self-serving perspective of the powerful; in fact, the nuclear powers have transformed "the whole of humanity into nuclear hostages," always in the name of keeping the peace, but as part of a system of domination by fear.

Racial terrorism is analyzed in a chapter focusing on the apartheid system of South Africa. Perdue puts that system into a historic and global context: a racialist tradition; the long record of South African oppression and aggression; the tie-in of South Africa's needs and the Red menace; and the various modalities of U.S. and other Western support for racial terrorism. Perdue's other chapters on forms of state terrorism cover the British in Ireland, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iranian state terror under the Shah and pre- and post-Shah developments, and the U.S. attack on Nicaragua as a case study in surrogate terrorism. These chapters are rich in historic and global context, unusual in the terrorism literature.

His most original work in this series is that on Libya and terrorism, entitled " 'Terrornoia' and Zonal Revolution." Terrornoia is of course Western frenzy over terrorism, which reached its zenith in the Reagan-orchestrated anti-Qadaffi campaign of 1981-87. Perdue reframes the issue, making Libya the victim of western terrorism, for two main reasons: its (and particularly Qadaffi's) serviceability as a target of opportunity and, most important, Libya's own independent development and support for programs, movements and regimes not fitting the global requirements and development model being enforced worldwide by the United States and its allies.

The Selling of International Terrorism

Perdue also has a very good account of "the selling of terrorism". He describes how the media readily adopt the official identification of terrorists, confine the discussion to ways of meeting a self-evident terrorist threat, and ignore Western terror or make it into "counter-terror." He shows how really gullible the Western media are, swallowing lies, small and large, sometimes belatedly and unapologetically corrected in the back pages.

He stresses that terror stories concerning the proper terrorists are highly salable and "commodified" in the Western media, not only meeting the standard of high marketability in a commercial media setting, but serving well the ideological interests of the transnational corporate economy. Commodified terror stories build audiences and sell commercial messages, and also serve to mobilize people and justify attacks against threats to global corporate interests.

As Perdue points out, the commodification of terrorism-confined to cases fitting systemic needs-also comes very easily to the mass media by virtue of their ownership, frequent conglomerate linkage, and literal membership in a mutually supportive global corporate system.

Perdue effectively ties the Western media's selling of terrorism into the long debate over a New World Information Order (NWIO). He notes how the extremely self-serving Western media perspective on terrorism is transmitted through powerful Western-dominated agencies to the entire world as the view on terrorism. This is a compelling proof that a NWIO that would not frame important issues solely in accord with the demands of dominant Western power is desperately needed. A section on the stereotyping of Arabs in the media reinforces this point.

Perdue also provides an extended case study of the Reagan era demonization of and attacks on Qadaffi and Libya, showing in detail the media's extreme bias and service as a propaganda agency of the state. He examines the 1981 "hit squad" episode, as well as various others designed to make Libya the model of a modern terrorist state, in an interesting and persuasive account of real terrorism portrayed in the U.S. media as a response to terrorism.

Conclusion

William Perdue provides a critique that deserves close reading and wide distribution and debate. It reverses the dominant Western frame of discussion, locating the most intimidating and destructive forms of terrorism in the Western states and their clients and in the needs of the global political economy dominated by the West. Perdue shows convincingly how the West and its intellectual and media agents have transformed the victims of terrorism into the terrorists, in a great feat of system-supportive word management and intellectual legerdemain. His work has the additional meats of providing historic and institutional context, describing the semantic and ideological background of Western practice, and tying the whole picture together as part of a global system of control.

This is an important and useful work that raises questions that would be openly debated in a truly free society. The book has a contribution to make to an understanding of the Bush policies of selective opposition to "naked aggression" and the differential labeling of the insurgencies in Angola, Israel, Lebanon, Central America, the Gulf, and elsewhere. In fact, it provides an excellent background for understanding the Persian Gulf War, which fits the notion of a higher terrorism employed once again by the West to smash a threatening independent locus of power in the Third World.

Monthly Review, April 1991

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