Hurried Thoughts on Terrorism

We keep hearing that these terrorists hate modernity and want to destroy it in favor of an outdated medieval model. 

But what if we are the ones who are having trouble accepting modernity and the terrorists are winning because they are far ahead of us? Today’s terrorists don’t give a hoot for passports and borders. The fuddy-duddy insistence of reporters and politicians on discussing the terrorists’ citizenship looks weak and pathetic in the  face of the terrorists’ floating allegiances that aren’t based on passports and citizenships. 

Terrorists are also enormously better at using modern mass media. The documentary on ISIS that I talked about recently showed that even government workers are laughing at the pathetic counter-propaganda efforts by the US government that are supposed to counteract the brilliant ISIS propaganda. The question is: can a government, an entity that is constrained in everything it does by a bizillion and one regulations, counteract the artistic freedom of ISIS propagandists who have no such constraints?

What would work is for the state to relinquish the power over propaganda to regular folks. Facebookers, Twitterers, bloggers, Instagrammers. They are the ones who won the propaganda war in Ukraine while the official ministry of propaganda fumbled and bumbled. 

The downfall of these terrorists will be their nation-state nostalgia. They become sad and pathetic when they try to mimic “a country”. Their desire to be an actual state is what should be exploited. It’s their weak spot.

And one last thought because I have to run: the best things about the nation-state can only be preserved if a lot of the less wonderful and crucial nation-state baggage is dumped as soon as possible. There are things about the nation-state model that we all love. Let’s keep them and ditch the rest. Right now, however, we are doing the opposite. We are ditching stuff like welfare and public education and keeping or even reinforcing things like governmental control over speech codes (which is one of the reasons for why the government can’t relinquish its control over propaganda, for instance).