Vance Peavy's Website Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 22, 2001
Latest Update: September 22, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

On Thursday, September 20, 2001, Vance Peavy wrote:

Reply to Emily Klug,

Emily, on a personal level the disaster in New York is nearly impossible to comprehend. It seems so terrible, so profoundly shocking, so bewildering. Yet we can slowly find our center of being again and take stock for ourselves on what we can, and should, to continue our lives.

You wrote of hearing someone speak of losing a son in the tragedy. (Why did they do this to us? by Emily Klug, UWP.) Losing a loved one is probably the deepest loss a human can feel, especially one's own son or daughter. My son died when he was 16. I was gripped by a numbness like I could never have imagined when I received a telephone call with the news of his death. After a few minutes, I picked up the phone to call my daughter, his older sister. She was thousands of miles away, but I felt that she should know as soon as possible. She answered the phone and said, "Dad, what is wrong, your voice...". I said, "E., I must tell you that R. died last night." I will never forget her reply which was: "Dad he is all right, he has gone to a safe place, it is ourselves that we must take care of". This profound, wise reply was something that I only dimly perceived, but which I came to see in time. Learning to live with such a loss does take time. Yet it is up to the living to take up life and make it worth while. Even the death of a loved one can add, in due time, to your knowledge of what it means to be a human being, to care, and take up living again with more wisdom than before.

Why did they do it? What a huge and multi-headed question!!! Now I will move off the personal level and think out loud with you on a more abstract level. First I don't think anyone has any complete or coherent reply to that. However, each of us can do some thinking about it. My thinking goes something like this:

1. Those who commit to terrorism no longer abide by what might be called the common laws of civility. They do not make distinctions between the innocent and the guilty in the same way as most other people do.

2. They often, but not always, are adherents to a belief system(often religious, but not always) that they believe is holy or in some other way absolutely supreme or best and is under attack by others.

3. They combine ways of instilling fear and violent attack against "the others" with secrecy, strict discipline, and relentlessness.

4. They have a consuming, relentless drive to wound, demolish, or destroy those against whom they are struggling. Having no nation state, they work from a base of cunning intelligence, secrecy, non-visibility, and surprise. They are often distributed in small groups spread across many countries or areas.

5. We might say "Why do they operate in this way and why do they not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent?" They do not have the power of a state, so they use another kind of power: invisibility, catastrophic events, and extreme ideas.

6. Terrorists often see themselves as the advocates or saviors of desperate people. In one sense they are that. And in another sense they are plainly criminals.

7. Because their acts are so incomprehensible and in some cases so hugely catastrophic and bring on great loss of life, their acts trigger extreme reactions in other people: fear, anxiety, anger, revengeful feelings, murderousness, and so on.

8. Those of us who try to be members of civil and democratic societies are caught between wanting to understand and wanting to avenge. We may have leaders who are wise enough and strong enough to help lead us citizens through such a time in a measured and responsible way. Sometimes we don't. A great problem is that the evil done by others to us can, if we are not watchful, take up residence in our own souls. This we must resist. If we allow our own reasoning and action to take on monstrous and evil proportions, then the terrorists or whoever it is that is harming us, have basically won their campaign regardless of whether or not they get away with their deeds.

   Emily, I believe that it is possible, though not easy, to proceed in a lawful way against terrorists. They have abandoned law, but we should not.

   In a way, I have not answered you at all. We must remember that when people of any culture or group, are deprived and oppressed enough they will resort to whatever means they can find, violent or otherwise, in order to survive. We have a need in our world for a much more equitable distribution of money, goods, and basic infrastructures to support decent life. This awful event and numerous others in recent decades are a kind of wake-up call for the have nations. It is not a matter of the wealthy nations ""rescuing" the poor nations; it is a matter of creating ways whereby people in poor nations can participate more in the world of "markets", and "finance". Behnd terrorist movements, there can always be discerned conditions of inequity, marginalization, and unfair or downright oppressive treatment by the more powerful.

   Emily, when we want to understand terrorism, we must see that there are concentric contexts:

   1. There are the individuals (whom we can analyze and demonize and try to eliminate or not),
   2. Then there are the terrorist group(s) and those who support them {which we can also analyze and demonize and try to eliminate or not).
   3. Then there are the conditions in which people live as a result of the structures created by the power-wielders of the states, economies and transnational organizations,
   4. Then there is the history of civilization, and the many evolving nations, internationalisms, cultural evolution, and all the events and processes of history which will be sprinkled with accounts or terrorism, from the beginning to the present.

   Each of these contexts (a,b,c,d) will give us certain understandings and knowledge if we think at the level of the context. No one of them will give us certainty. But they are what we have to work with.