Extremism
Goodbye ‘war on terror’
July 28, 2005
Nearly four years after the “war on terror” was first declared, the US Administration has finally decided that perhaps the slogan was after all counterproductive in publicity terms. What America is engaged in now is a “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism“. The differences between this shiny new catchphrase and the old, much-maligned one are several. First, a “war on” something sounds rather bellicose and unilateral, but a “struggle” has a sense of built-in righteousness. It does not boast of physical superiority, but of moral superiority. One struggles against illness, or misfortune, or poverty. To struggle connotes a kind of heroism. The word also has a history in the language of communism, as in the “class struggle”: Lenin wrote of “the struggle of the proletariat”; “struggle meetings” were held in revolutionary China for people to demand the removal of officials from office. The new US catchphrase might even have been designed with that sense also in mind, in a heartwarming attempt to reconcile socialists to the cause. A struggle, moreover, is not conducted only with bombs: General Richard Myers emphasized this implication of the change in language by saying that the new Global Struggle would be “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military”. Better late than never, perhaps.
Thus the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism is one in which all right-thinking people will wish to share. For “violent extremism”, moreover, is surely a bad thing. But it is also rather a vague thing. To be sure that struggling against it is a good idea, we should know more about what it is. Yet “extremism” itself is a rather slippery term of Unspeak. Let us trace its roots . . .