Terrorism and moral urgency

A recap of the current position

I’ll start by recapping in basic terms the moral position, not to be preachy, but because it’s important here to be clear about where I’m coming from. Terrorism, as I understand it, is deliberately killing or harming innocents, or those who are innocents, as far as you know, in order to achieve political ends. I say “innocents”, but this isn’t quite the right phrase, nor is the more usual “non-combatants” wholly accurate- targeting politicians of an enemy nation is not terrorism. Innocents here is something of a term of art.

Outside of fanciful hypotheticals that probably never happen in real life, terrorism is always wrong. Terrorism is sometimes said to include a carve-out that it only counts if it is done by non-state actors. This is risible. One can define words however one likes, but the distinctive moral wrong of terrorism is present whether or not the actors are state or non-state.

Now, who is innocent is, can be a fine matter. But typically not that fine. Anscombe writes about the deliberate killing of innocents in war:

This fineness around what counts as terrorism can matter in practice. I do not mean this as a moral judgement, but simply as a reflection of fact: The public has reacted very differently to Luigi Mangione and Elias Rodriguez in part because of the difference between killing a CEO intimately involved in objectionable political and economic practices, and random embassy workers. Certainly, low-ranking embassy workers are not a legitimate target, and even less so, children like those recently set on fire by a protester throwing Molotov cocktails.

By far the most significant act of unequivocal terrorism in the Gaza war is the prevention of aid from entering the city. I, and most of the people reading this, are doing what we can to oppose such genocidal terrorism. A small number of people in the West have turned to terrorism to oppose terrorism. It is unlikely we can prevent this, but we need to be absolutely clear we do not support it.

A theory of why this is happening

Having laid out the facts and values as I see them, I wanted to put forward a theory as to 1. Why some western leftists have supported terrorists like Elias Rodriguez and 2. What we should learn from it. There are a lot of reasons this is happening- e.g., social media algorithmic incentives- but I want to focus on a few interrelated factors that haven’t been talked about enough. Obviously, supporting killing civilians is immoral, but this alone doesn’t answer the question of why people are doing it, and it must be understood to be stopped.

It is an awful truth that the only means of effective resistance we have in the West at the moment- limited as it is- is to try to persuade as many people as possible of the rightness of our cause. There are limited opportunities for direct action- obstructing arms shipments- but even in these cases, the main value is persuasive and symbolic.

But understandably, people do not think they should have to make a case that genocide is occurring and is morally wrong. To even try to persuade others of these things who are not convinced already seems like a kind of complicity- a concession to a blind way of seeing things, or worse, to deliberately abstruse bad faith. They feel a sense of the moral urgency of the situation precludes cajoling, begging, or meeting people where they are at, and so the only alternative is to try to force the issue.

But people have always had to work to persuade others of things they shouldn’t need to be persuaded of. Relatedly, thinking in tactical or strategic terms right now feels like a betrayal of the elemental rightness of the cause. But it is not, thinking with a cool head becomes more urgent the more urgent the cause. Something as sacred as life deserves defenders who are not just brave and charitable, but wise and cunning.

Because the left in the west is fragmentary and not unified in organisations, and because of the unique culture of social media, many think of politics as a form of moral expression. But when politics is done well, it is not primarily a form of moral expression, it is a form of moral action- a thoughtful attempt to change things for the better. Even urgent, radical, moral politics is still politics, and politics requires -indeed is often synonymous with- calculation. Even radical politics still involves constituency management, coalition building, message discipline, message design, and all the rest. Although it may seem absurd, even pretentious, to think about these things as a lone individual, you have to try. We urgently must organise for many reasons, but in part so we can start thinking about politics properly again.

To calculate isn’t to betray, rather to act without calculation is betrayal; it is to prioritize anger at injustice over love for the victims of injustice. When we love people, we do what we can to help them thoughtfully, even when doing so feels maddening, and we want to lose our patience.

Below is Hyde Park Fountain, Sydney. Activists put red dye in the water, colouring it blood red in protest against genocide. By my estimate, there’s about 100,000 litres in the fountain- the shed blood of dead children alone from this war is more than that.