Modern Zealots of the Sacred Homeland

Abstract

The last four chapters have been devoted to establishing some basic heuristic tools for investigating themetapolitics of terrorism, the terrorist’s creed. These, it should be stressed once again, constitute only one generic, but neglected, level of causation alongside the highly specific, ‘concrete’ social, economic, political, military, cultural, historical, and economic factors that condition each individual episode of fanatical violence. It would be a perverse reading of this book, one certainly against the intentions of the author, to form the impression that the defence of an existing nomos or establishment of a new one is somehow the ‘real’, or ‘essential’ subliminal motivation of the terrorist, all other factors being merely incidental epiphenomena. Equally, it should be borne in mind that the existence of a ‘nomothetic’ (i.e. nomos-creating)1 level of terrorist motivation is relevant only to understanding the most ideologically motivated, genuine fanatics, who have made their religious or secular cause ‘holy’, not those who participate principally under duress, for reasons of personal vengeance, material gain, or criminal intent, or because of fear, emotional blackmail, a gang mentality, or the intrinsic, psychotic attraction of violence itself. ‘Real’ terrorists want their violence to communicate a symbolic message to a third party or target audience (which makes it in Žižek’s vocabulary an act of ‘phatic communication’),2 a message that cannot be ignored – like an ‘offer that cannot be refused’ – and hence to receivers who are not the immediate victims. The aim is to make the survivors, often placed at a safe distance from any personal threat, feel psychologically pressed into changing their behaviour or policies (or even their beliefs), or at least to feel deeply insecure in the world they call normality and which they hitherto took for granted as ‘real’.3