Recently after the bombings we had in London, something struck me. One of the people from the Olympic committee that had been celebrating winning the games for London was talking about how we couldn't possibly go on celebrating now this had happened, and I observed to myself the usual "you seemed quite happy celebrating on a day when 5000 people died because they didn't have access to fresh water. What's so special about these deaths", when I noticed just how important the notion that terrorist deaths are special is to the terrorist.
So consider.
The goal of terrorism isn't to kill people, it's to terrorise. That's why they're called terrorists, right?
But all terrorists can do is kill small numbers of people. In a world where hundreds of thousands of people die every day, what they do is nothing.
And most of the time, when small numbers of people die, people aren't terrorised. Imagine if someone was somehow able to induce 500 extra fatal road traffic accidents over the course of a year. (5000 if you're in America.) Would people be terrorised? Most people wouldn't even notice.
But when it's terrorists causing the deaths, people are terrorised. Why?
Surely, it's because we place undue significance on deaths due to terrorism. Terrorism becomes a greater factor in our thoughts than things which kill far more people, because we notice the deaths more. When terrorism occurs, we continue to ignore all the people dying from road traffic accidents, smoking, and so forth, but suddenly focus only on the deaths due to terrorism. If we treated deaths due to terrorism in the same way we treated most premature deaths, we wouldn't even be aware of it.
So terrorism is a two stage process. First, a few people are killed, and secondly, the people are convinced that these deaths are far more important than all the other deaths which are going on around them.
The terrorists can do the first stage, but only the media, the politicians, and ultimately the people themselves can do the second stage.
So when you have, for example, a stadium of people holding a two-minute silence for the victims of a terrorist attack, all the people there are actually inadvertently participating in that act of terrorism. They're mutually reinforcing in each other the notion that those deaths are far more important than the deaths which happen all around them every day, which is the central idea which the second stage of terrorism relies on. Whole countries full of people are tricked into helping terrorism, whilst thinking they're resisting it.
Is this correct? Is this fair? Well, is it?
