written by: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sedat LACINER
I. Terrorism as an Indication of Social Problems
What is Terrorism?
Recently, with the additional effect of popularization, there has been almost countless number of terrorism definitions. The common point of all definitions was their description of terror as “illegal”, “evil” and “an unwanted phenomenon”. Its lawlessness and its merciless attacks without differentiating between innocent-criminal, civil-armed are listed as other characteristics of terrorism. Violence and blood-shedding… Lurid acts… The list of terror’s characteristics may further be extended.
Almost all evils and troubles are attributed to terror and terrorists.
From this point of view, the terror seems as if it is not belonging to our world. As if it has come from far away, from a kind of “world of darkness”… Hence, dark and ugly faces are preferred when portraying terrorists. Most of the time, the terrorist’s face or eyes are not even shown. Terror is described by extremely abstract and contentious concepts like “dark”, “monster”, “devil”, “the origins of all evils”, as if the people prefer to overlook the fact that a terrorist is a human being as well and the terror is an act which belongs to the human beings, if not humane.
To exemplify, the “terror monster” speeches, which depicts terror as a kind of “monster”, are frequently used. In Turkey, where there is the “monster” of everything, the Turks are used to such situations, but reflecting terror as a kind of monster is also common among the peoples of the world.[i] But presentation of a problem as a “monster” is not peculiar to terrorism. Today, as it had been in the ancient times, people tend to generate “monsters” in case they face unclarified, unsolved problems and it can be said that there are monsters in modern times as much as it had been in the ancient times: For instance, it is a common practice in Turkey to characterize inflation, traffic accidents and drugs as “monsters”. However, “monster” is a creature that doesn’t exist and in this regard, the human mind tends to explain the problems that are unresolved and beyond the defined boundaries in this way. Describing the problems like terror and drug as “monster” or “devil” distances, or even alienates us from the problem at first. It makes us think that we are facing a problem that we cannot solve or cope with. We are no more the roots of the problem. Now, there is a “monster” or “devil” in the root of the problem. In other words, there is an unknown, that is, “something that doesn’t belong to us”. By classifying the concepts that we don’t want to include into our world as “monster”, we alienate ourselves from the problem, we, as individuals or the society, oversee – or wish to oversee- the problem. In the case of traffic monster, we construct a “traffic monster” and blame the full responsibility on it as if it was not us who make accidents, who fail to build a good infrastructure, who make mistakes when driving etc. By this way, we acquit our friends, our families, ourselves etc.
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Terrorism as a Social Symptom
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Terrorism is beyond the perceptions which we tried to summarize earlier. It is not a monster, not a devil. It is not an enemy that you can destroy or overthrow. Terrorism in fact is an indication, a symptom. It is a clue that something is going wrong. Just like the disorders of the body are revealed by “pain”, one of the “pains” of the social problems is terrorism. Especially a terrorist movement which attains a massive scale demonstrates that there are significant problems in the society. There is no one kind of pain in social problems just like the pains in the body. Hence, terrorist activities can not be grasped by a single formula. There are no fixed, unchanged causes for terrorism. As the head ache, stomach ache or tooth ache indicate different problems, kinds of terror similarly point to different problems in the society. In this regard, struggle with the terror itself is meaningless.
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Struggle Against Terror – Struggle Against the Terrorist
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II. The Global Terror and Terror in the Middle East
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III. Leading Reason of Global Terror: Gap In Representation of Greater Middle East
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