Tuesday, April 26, 2005
WARNING OF TERRORISM = TERRORISM
Professor Bob Goodin, of the Australian National University’s Department of International Relations, will today argue that politicians pursuing the war against terror are themselves terrorists. From an internal email, forwarded by a reader, is this abstract:
Terrorists do all sorts of terrible things: they kill people; they destroy buildings and airplanes not belonging to them; they kidnap people and cut off their ears. But the offence of ‘killing people’ is already on the moral statute books; so is ‘kidnapping’, ‘maiming’ and ‘destroying property of others’. What, then, is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? I suggest that it is ‘frightening people for political advantage’; and that is something that can be done even by people who issue warnings without themselves committing any further terrorist acts. Politicians waging a War on Terror designed to frighten people into voting for them might thus be engaged in terrorism of a sort themselves.
They kidnap people and cut off their ears? They destroy buildings and airplanes not belonging to them? Why, these terrorists are wicked people indeed; soon they might be cutting off entire heads, and destroying more stuff they don’t own. Professor Goodin—author of Protecting the Vulnerable (U Chicago Press, 1985)—commences his talk at 12.30 pm in Seminar Room A, Coombs Building #9, Fellows Road, ANU. If you attend, ask him about the gross injustice of earless terror victims who are unable to hear politicians’ terrorism warnings.