The uttermost form of terrorism is that which disguises the very fact that it is terrorism.
That is the sort of terrorism, for example, that is practiced in the United States of America and across the globe it strives to dominate under the name of what President George W. Bush, in one of his common lapses of language and the thought that should accompany it, once called “the war on terror.”
Because it so successfully masks itself, we might well follow Günther Anders* and call the terror perpetrated in and by such ultimate, utter terrorism “gentle terror.”
Gentle terror: the very worst kind.
* * *
We stand endlessly in long lines at airport security whenever we have the misfortune to have to travel by air. We do not complain. We do not get “out of line” either literally or figuratively. Like lambs being led to the slaughter, we just wait our turn. Unlike the lambs, however, we don’t even bleat about it. We consider it a “necessary evil.”
While U.S. drones are dropping bombs on nation after nation, killing untold innocent people, we continue to obey the injunction to keep on being good little consumers, so the global market can keep humming along and marginalizing ever more millions. It’s our duty as God-loving, flag-waiving Americans after all! We should all do out duty!
Let our privacy be utterly destroyed. Let us be listened in on even when we are on the toilet in our bathrooms. Let our every move be tracked, encoded, and sent out to all the merchants in the area where we happen to be each minute of each day every day, so that we can be conned into buying yet more garbage to flush down those toilets or dispose of in similar receptacles. Let us do that while continuing to destroy the ecology of earth in the process, killing off countless species, and sealing our own eventual doom.
After all, the Kochs and Bezoses, and Gateses, and all the rest will be able to go with Elon Musk to Mars to save themselves. Or build fortresses in the high mountains of the world and hire bands of fascist thugs to defend their fortress walls from hoi polloi—which is to say the people. What is more, even if those exploiters themselves do not survive the growth of the noxious crops they have themselves sown, wasn’t it fun while they were doing all the sowing—or rather making the rest of us do it for them, and pay them for the privilege?
What do all the rest of us care? We are happy as mindless bugs rolled in the new rugs we just purchased from Home Depot, as we sit with self-satisfaction surrounded by tasteless and sterile wall-hangings we’ve bought from Hobby Lobby, eating our Chick-fil-a sandwiches.
Nero has nothing on us. We will fiddle while the whole world burns, not just Rome.
* * *
Man does not seek happiness, only the Englishman does.
—Nietzsche
We have all been made into Englishmen now. We all seek happiness, as happiness if defined for us by our consumer culture—namely, possessing enough of just the right gadgets and stuff of all sorts that has been palmed off on us as what we just absolutely must have, to be happy. However, if we somehow manage to get all that dross we have been convinced by advertising diversions and diverting advertisements we require in order to be happy, we find that we are still not happy at all. So, as our sorry excuse for a culture has dunned into us ceaselessly, we rush out and begin accumulating even more of the same sort of stuff that has left us empty so far, or at least different brands of the very same stuff.
We are all thus terrorized into a dazed state, one in which we don’t even realize how terrorized we have been.
That is the very gentlest—and most insidiously total—form of terrorism that has ever been perpetrated on anyone.
Welcome, indeed, to Happy Land!
* See Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2 (Munich: Bech, 1980), p. 131.