Our Own Form of Violence

By Crispin Sartwell

Each era of history is characterized by certain sorts of political arrangements, economic relations, and epistemic structures (religions, sciences, philosophies). But each era, too, is marked by a pervasive structure of violence.

Alexander the Great, for instance, inaugurated an era of empire in which the characteristic forms of violence were conquest and resistance to conquest. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the era of the white man''s burden, of the colonial correlation of violence and condescension in administrative units scattered across the globe. The twentieth century was the era of genocide, or the systematic extermination of populations by the nation state.

And now we inhabit the age of terrorism.

Forms of violence and forms of power, of course, accumulate; they do not suddenly begin or end. And terrorism is not new. Through history, such religious groups as the (Jewish) Zealots, the (Moslem) Assassins, and the (Hindu) Thugees practiced public acts of murder for religious purposes, to destroy heretics, or to make sacrifice to the gods.

The term "terrorism" was coined to describe Robespierre''s cycles of paranoid murder in service to the French revolution. Anarchists, nihilists and revolutionaries of various other stripes carried out a wave of assassinations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But I propose to you that there is also something fundamentally new in the current wave of terror, or at least that certain tendencies have been intensified exponentially.

The other day in Iraq, someone drove a car bomb into a crowd of children and blew it and them and himself to smithereens. In Beslan, too, children were the intended victims. Here, we might denote something of the same impulse with the name "Columbine."

Killing children is an attempt to destroy the future; it''s a negation of life, thought, hope. These acts are emblematic because of their almost metaphysical nihilism, their ferocious mixture of rage and despair, and their dedication to destruction of the terrorists themselves. They seem to be carried out by a death cult, people who believe that it would be better if the human race or perhaps the universe were entirely extinguished.

It seems to me that this can no longer be a matter of religious commitment or the desire for political resistance: it''s a pure negation of all life and all values. The anarchist assassins targeted political leaders. The Zealots attacked Jews who collaborated with the Romans. Today''s suicide bomber attacks randomly selected children and in the process annihilates himself.

Contemporary terrorism is jagged to any purpose or project: it usually harms rather than helps the cause that the terrorist supposedly champions.

The age of genocide arises with the growth and consolidation of state and economic power. And now that growth and consolidation has developed into a world information oligarchy, or what is sometimes called "globalization."

As power under the regime of globalization becomes unimaginably pervasive and vast, individual people tucked away in corners of the world become infinitesimally small. They have already been annihilated, as it were: they have no voice and no presence.

We are reaching the point not only at which no individual person counts, but in which whole peoples do not count, in which the actual operations of power consist of electronic transactions, backed by armies of incredible technological sophistication: irresistible killing machines and smart missiles against which any particular group is powerless. Mission accomplished.

In its erasure of the person and its dedication to the destruction of all local cultures and idiosyncratic or extra-economic belief systems, globalization finds its corollary in people who erase themselves and everyone else, people who would rather see the world end than continue.

They are fighting the huge bland implacable bureaucracies (call them "cheneys") - from high schools to prisons to ministries to multinationals - that are trying to standardize and hence erase the human.

The cheneys too are nihilistic. And in the contest of cheney and terrorist that is coming to mark our era, the spiral of annihilations can only intensify.