Zygmunt Bauman sobre a Europa e o terrorismo

Zygmunt Bauman sobre a Europa e o terrorismo . A Few Comments On The Mis-Imagined War On Terrorism.

(...) In direct opposition to Victor Orban’s infamous oracle, “All terrorists are immigrants”, almost all terrorists operating on the European stage are home grown. The most crafty, shrewd and malevolent schemers, who concoct and command or solicit the successive terrorist acts from the safety of their far-away homes, may live in foreign countries – but their foot soldiers are recruited from among the deprived, discriminated against, humiliated, embittered and vengeful local youth facing – again with our direct or indirect, deliberate or flowing from neglect help – their prospectless future. Keeping them in that state of deprivation is how social problems yearning for social action are transmogrified into security problems calling for military responses; this is perhaps the principal way in which our authorities cooperate with terrorists: by following the eye-for-eye rule instead of taking a higher moral ground combined with a radical as much as a long-term perspective, we continue to widen the recruiting area which the terrorist commanders are all too eager to deploy in full.

(...)All too often we find in the newspaper headlines, in the comments of experts invited to the TV news studios, and in the speeches of the top-rank politicians, that we are in the state of war with terrorism. But “war with terrorism” is (for many reasons we have no room and no time to discuss here at length) nothing but an oxymoron. If applied to the current string of terrorist attacks and our responses to them, most – perhaps even all – metaphors referring to the experience of warfare engagement are misleading and guide thought in a wrong direction; they hide the truth of the present condition instead of enabling its comprehension. All in all, deployment of the warlike metaphoric in our attempts to sever the roots of global terrorism is highly ill-advised.

Most wars segregate combatants into winners and losers, triumphant and defeated. For that one reason our battle with terrorism cannot be classified into the category of wars. From this battle none of the sides (except perhaps the producers, sellers and smugglers of murderous weapons) may emerge victorious. The global arms trade – given in practice, if not in theory, a free ride, and guided by the lucre-greed of weapons merchants in cahoots with governments greedy for rising rates of GDP – has by now transformed the planet into a minefield, of which we know that explosions must happen there in a first awkward move but we can’t predict where and when an explosion will happen. Weapons ready for criminal uses are abundantly available (and as Anton Chekhov instructed budding realist play writers – “if there is a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act of a play, it must be discharged in the third”). Selection of targets is, after all, determined by the firing appliance at hand.

(...)On the scale of our globalized planet, de-mining the minefields (or, for that matter, the other idea of castle-on-water category – erecting walls meant and hoped to stop migrants short of “our own backyards”) is hardly a proposition likely to become realistically effective in a foreseeable future. By comparison, the intention of cutting at the roots of the problem – that is, depriving the terror-lovers and promoters of the luxury of ample and still swelling recruiting ground of people forced or prompted to handle those weapons for iniquitous purposes – however fanciful it may seem by itself, sounds much more realistic.

The sole (but grave) reason to be afraid is the (hopefully small) possibility of Europe abandoning the values for which it stands and stooping to the terrorists’ mindset and code of behaviour – thereby committing, for all intents and purposes, a suicide as the home of truth, morality and beauty – as well as the birthplace of the ideas of liberty, equality, and brotherhood.