Perceptions of Fear in a Climate of Expected Terrorism

Terrorism plays into the fear of change inherent in the routinized lifestyles of many people in Western cultures such as west Europe, the United Kingdom, America and Canada. Much of the looming effects of the terrorist attack in 2001 in New York and again in Spain and England several years later are present in day-to-day “inconveniences,” such as increased airport security and a decreased sense of overall stability, rather than an immediate, tight expectation of violence. I want to argue the point expressed by Alex Schmid that the main purpose of terrorism is not to kill but to engender a fear of further attack through propaganda and the media. He says it effectively: “Violence aims at behavior modification by coercion. Propaganda aims at the same by persuasion. Terrorism can be seen as a combination of the two.” (Schmid 206) Lemyre, too, emphasizes this point when she notes that a year after 9/11 one fifth of Americans still feared that they would personally be hurt by an upcoming terrorist attack. (756) It did not matter that the United States government attempted to preemptively prevent another attack by going into Afghanistan to hunt down Al-Qaeda agents; the damage, psychologically more than physically, was done.

Another interesting fact of Lemyre’s study noted that Londoners felt more insecure themselves after 9/11 than they did after the attacks nearly four years later in their own city. (756) Possibly the scope of the destruction, the potency and immediacy of the images of the burning and falling towers, lodged into the collective unconscious in a more lasting way than those London attacks, a mere fraction of the overall chaos.

The media, too, plays an enormous part in propagating the lasting effects of terrorism, by reinforcing the immediate dangers of another attack, and, in order to keep viewers not only entertained, but watching, reading or listening to the source of news itself. Osama bin Laden could not have been unaware that his perception throughout the democratic world as Enemy Number One granted him an omniscience and terribleness that could not have been achieved had his face not been plastered all over the Western media in the weeks and months following the initial attacks. His name, and that of Al Qaeda, has become synonymous with terrorism; in fact, any terrorist attack in a Western democracy, for the foreseeable future, will automatically be credited to them until disproven. Such was the effectiveness of the 9/11 attacks that the death of 3500 people seems almost an afterthought now in the greater consciousness of the world. An act of terrorism is a challenge to the government of the attacked state to retaliate, to reduce itself to the anarchic, disparate form of guerilla warfare encouraged by the attack itself. When the rules of war are disregarded, as they regularly are in a terrorist attack, the governing power of the attacked state must choose how to engage the invisible enemy, as one would almost provoke a ghost. The surreptitious methods of vengeance, due to their intimacy and secrecy so as to keep the public fears quelled, in fact do more to facilitate a general uneasiness. When we get word that the government has quelled another potential attack by burying itself deep into undercover operations and risky reconnaissance missions, the already-harassed citizen of the Western democracy, used to living with a taken-for-granted freedom in his actions and associations, becomes agitated, nervous and irrational. A neighbour is suddenly an enemy because we are taught and conditioned to be skeptical of everyone of Middle-Eastern descent. As a result, insurrection is borne in those people through resentment, and the cycle continues and violence proliferates from the inside out. The perpetrators of the London attacks were English citizens, some of whom were born in the country.

Fear is a very easy emotion to allow free reign over and terrorists take advantage of that fact. As Schmid quotes Walter Laqueur, ‘the success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives.’ (Schmid 208) A terrorist attack, more common in Pakistan or Indonesia, is not given the same freedom to disseminate into the collective fear or the citizenry because the media in those countries is heavily controlled and the spread of unbiased information is more difficult. Schmid again asserts that ‘the purposeful creation of bad events by means of terroristic violence can assure them free access to the news system.’ (208) It may not be the direct moral intention of the news media to give increased power to terrorists, but they are knowing and willing participants in the insecurity felt by the naïve public. Indeed, the relationship is often symbiotic. There is a so-called entertainment value to a terrorist attack in the sense that it is meant to terrify; it is there to be observed. Much like the religious zealot whose message would not be disdained if it were not known, terrorism as a religion, as a cult, is a form of proselytization, whereby the martyrdom of the assailants and the death of the innocent, are consequences of a religious battle between freedom and sacrifice. Those who sacrifice themselves do so in the same of God, but also to escape the moral poverty they would otherwise encounter killing for a king or for a cause. Religion lifts a terrorist to heaven, whereupon he can claim unity with the other saints of death who believed killing in the name of God makes what they did, or will do, morally justifiable. It is a twisted logic, definitely, but may aid the fear of death and the trepidation involved in arbitrary mass-killing.

As well, fear amongst those affected by a terrorist attack is more acute when it is known the act was done for religious reasons. There is an inherent strangeness about other religions, as it brings with it disparate approaches to violence and friendship, death rites and association with neighbours. As I have been arguing, this fear of the ‘other,’ combined with the media’s willingness to exasperate the actual danger of another terrorist attack, is what keeps people in Western democracies complacent, and why governments, following the attacks in 2001, were easily able to pass sweeping anti-terrorism bills with the public’s majority support. It took a few years, as we get further and further away from another imminent attack, for people to realize that the fear they experience is being marketed to them not only by lingering terrorist propaganda, but by the lack of education by the mass media, the hesitance in admitting that a terrorist attack is much an ‘act’ as most great public spectacles, and the greatest prize of any attack is not death itself but the lingering fear of death. As long as the greater population deems their security in jeopardy, they will support sweeping government legislation limiting their rights as citizens and supporting anti-terrorist activities, and terrorists expect that as those governments concentrate harder and harder on preventing another attack, mistakes will be made. The conceit, ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall,’ comes to mind when I think of how America would deal with another terrorist threat on its soil; as long as we live in perpetual fear of another attack, our loyalty to our government will waver, and death will be expected.

Works Cited:

Lemyre, Louise, et al. "Public Perception of Terrorism Threats and Related Information Sources in Canada: Implications for the Management of Terrorism Risks." Journal of Risk Research 9.7 (2006): 755-74.

Schmid, Alex P. “Frameworks for Conceptualizing Terrorism.” Terrorism and Political Violence 16:2 (2004) 197-221