Sun, Oct 5th 2008, 12:28

Amarjyoti Acharya, author/commentator, Silver Contributor (60)

Things are moving and perhaps had begun moving even before, ever since Walter Lacquer began in his classificatory schemes of terrorism and its various mutations that go in conjunction with globalization, as a process. Peter Chalk has written rather beautifully about terrorism and its objectives. Many have worked upon the issue areas and attempts at grappling at the newer disguises continue. One does not know if terrorism has decreased, for sure. What may have happened, in recording fewer bomb blasts and civilian deaths, would be the movement away from direct violence to indirect violence. Something that makes it less offensive to many college and university campuses - where cyber-crime and terrorism; social degenration under the aegesis of negative freedom (described and experienced by and under largely idiots) - may serve as the inroads to drug and delinquent behaviour. These are the new anti-war Flower-generation in the absence of wars like Vietnam, gripping US imagination.
US diplomatic success has also meant the adoption of the flower-generation peace activism elsewhere where there is no war nor the context nor the socio-economic reality of the US during such times. Adopted as the less-offensive campus recruitments as noted above - terrorism is going underground. It is not fading away but rather it is merely re-grouping itself in an attempted silence before the storms.
What is happening is the crime-delinquency route that has been adopted for a far more damaging long-term consequences. Today's terrorism comes across as much more street-smart and less ideologically charged, as the Baader-Meinhof marked urban terrorism in the sixties. The modus-operandi adopted now seems to be geared at a strategic as well as tactical victories - via the destabilization of societies and the wealth of a state - its future generations. In the attempted destruction of the minds of a state's future, lies hidden the strategic aims and objectives of many terrorist groups. The situation is worsening in third world states whose younger generations attempts at their self-definitions of identity may be failing to make the distinction between delinquency and modernity, while their religious/moral police - more often than not comprising of the pre-modern primordial soup of anti-west/anti-modern vintages - assume their finding more ammunition at the attempted come-back of religious nationalism, in its distinct challenge and threat to the liberal democratic world order that it seeks to overthrow and replace.
The synergies between such flower-generation mimics (largely the "left-intelligentsia" of third-world universities and colleges) and their infiltration by crime-delinquency serve further the agendas of the religous nationalists, as is often visible in many parts of the world. The reports are less of dramatic terrorist violence, but should they be able to succeed - it promises an overthrow as dramatic as the US 9/11 - but more devastatingly in socio-economic terms. There are differences between change (such as globalization as a process) and the challenges of adaptation it brings with itself, and the deliberate and educated infiltration of societies and states, in their destabilization that comes more forcefully as the crime-delinquent network - the new arm of terrorism since it does serve the purpose rather well. As noted earler and elsewhere, "It is an interesting phenomenon that contemporary international terrorism, rise of religious fanaticisms, and criticisms of modernity qua the ‘West’ appear as synchronous activities in historical time." Needless to say, the elites of many third-world states are as usual more guilty than charged - not only in the war against their own states, but also in the war against the developed world. The latter is often served as an ideological war - by the very same third-world flower-generations attempting mimicking their US-European counterparts, minus the context. They are thus able to help legitimize the rhetorics of the religious fanatics, in their own contexts, alongwith the anti-west qua anti-modern forces. It is interesting indeed to look at the particular trajectories and their impacts that may come less as spectacular direct violence and more as cyber- and ethno-political terrorism, practiced via the crime-delinquent networks as the new recruits of terrorism turning street-smart.