Terrorism and liberalism Why presenting this report?

1. In the course on Security, Civil liberties and Terrorism, Dr. Donohue considers the counterterrorist spiral as the reaction of liberal-democratic state to the terrorism threat. • Terrorism may influence on the transformation of liberalism. • The headlines on the internet “Liberalism is terrorism”, “Liberalism breeds terrorism” etc. • Outline and explore other conceptions of the interplay between terrorism and liberalism. • Liberalism is political philosophy; terrorism is political action. • They both can be referred as ideology. Terrorism and liberalismWhy presenting this report?

2. What is terrorism? • There are different definitions, which contain key elements: violence, fear, broder audience, purposive, political power, noncombants as targets, instrumental. • Confusing definition of Islamic Association for Palestine: “Terrorism is any act of resistance by the Palestinians.” • In the report western definition (etymologicaly from terror) is accepted.

3. What is liberalism? • Liberalism is a philosophy or movement that has as its aim the development of individual freedom. “Freedom is the main need of human mind” –Ayn Rand. • Key-elements of liberalism are: the ultimate importance of the individual and his rights (for life, liberty, health, property), free-market system as guarantor of rights. • Freedom and rights must belong to all people, regardless of location, ethnicity – liberalism is universalistic.

4. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of leftist thinkers. • Interpretation by Noam Chomsky and his supporters (Susan Sontag, Alex George, Gerry O’ Sullivan). • Chomsky says that in modern western liberalism exist huge governments. • "Propaganda is to a government in democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state”.Propaganda becomes a mean of mass manipulation through fear. Using it makes liberalism close to terrorism.

5. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of leftist thinkers (cont.) • To keep citizens scared and thus under control, the Government is to find or construct a monster. • After the USSR was dismantled, the USA had to find the “new evil” – international terrorism. • “Liberals work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.”

6. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of leftist thinkers (cont.) • After the aggression in Nicaragua the World Court called the USA itself “the terrorist state”. • The fact of “real” terrorism Noam Chomsky and his associates tried to explain as a rational response to oppression and ideological expansion of the American liberalism. • People in some Eastern countries regard their religious identity as more important than the supposed benefits of freedom. Western liberalism doesn’t always work for the East. • The “blind” liberalism in a way breeds terrorism as a reaction to the expansion of alien values

7. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of the “right wing”. • Interpretation by Paul Berman and his supporters (Bernard Lewis, Walter Laquer, Paul Wilkinson). • Emergence of terrorism is not a result of the clash of civilisations. • “It is the clash of liberalism and its enemies—the battle between freedom and totalitarianism that arose in Europe many years ago and spread to the Muslim world.”

8. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of the “right wing” (cont). • Berman in his book “Terror and liberalism” categorizes terrorism in Islamism as a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism. • Terrorism in Islamism, Nazism, Communism, according to Berman, have common features - the irrational cult of death and the idea of Messianizm. • The people of good, messians were described as the Aryans, the proletarians, or the Arabs. The diabolical infestation was described as the Jews, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, etc.

9. How terrorism and liberalism correlates: position of the “right wing” (cont). • It the case of Islamic terrorist the Arabs identified themselves as “people of good”. Their aim is to establish blocklike unchanging purified society. • The Isalmism (as a form of totalitarism) declared war to the Western democracies by means of terrorism. The West make them furious as the illustration that liberal society can thrive and that antiliberal cannot. • The liberal order is attacked by terrorists – any defensive measures can be advocated in this hard-edged war. The war with terrorism will come to an end when the last Muslim and Arab is freed. The freedom in the East will mean the security in the West.

10. Terrorism and liberalism. • The report is to present the vision of interplay between concepts of terrorism and liberalism in two intellectual wings – “left” and “right”. • The more detailed survey can reveal new directions of reseach within the outlined concepts. • The author of the report doesn’t advocate any of the positions, but just tries to reproduce their inner logic.