A Tactic of Warfare

by Jay Taber

Contrary to propaganda proffered by the State Department, terrorism is not a belief system; it is, rather,
a tactic of warfare. Sometimes used offensively by states in suppressing dissent or in subduing
populations, sometimes used defensively by those being suppressed or subdued, terrorism is an
effective means of making one's determination known. As a systematic tactic that employs collective
fear as a lever in political conflict, terrorism can be deployed in both spectacular and spectral ways, and
is usually used in conjunction with other means of psychological warfare.

Genocide and other extreme extensions of conflict between societies rely on the justifications
developed to carry out this warfare, and indeed are natural extensions of commercial philosophy. I
thought about the connections between commercialization, terrorism, and psychological warfare
recently when listening to a talk by the director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism,
who was addressing the formidable task of fighting the commercialization of life and the attendant
threat to indigenous cultures worldwide from the corporate states that control the media and
international institutions guiding such protocols as the Convention on Biological Diversity.

By chance, I happened to notice a news item the same day about the United States government
deploying financial warfare against the whistleblower organization Wikileaks for exposing US war
crimes in Central Asia, and recalled how financial warfare was likewise used in the mid 1980s to
undermine the former Republic of Yugoslavia. While these hostile acts do not constitute terrorism, they
nevertheless are terrifying, and contribute to the destabilizing effect of globalization—the ongoing
commercialization project of states and corporations benefiting from the theft of what the rest of us
need to live. In that context, it is not surprising that some of the victims resort to terror as a defense.

*More of Jay's writing is available at http://www.jaytaber.com/