I have been in a coup d’état in Caracas, a block away from a crowded bus that burst into flames after a bomb exploded in Spain’s Basque region, quarantined for almost a week in a bunker near the Lebanon border, and in a Tel-Aviv restaurant hours before a Palestinian shooter sprayed bullets there indiscriminately. I’m by no means a survivor of terror, at least not in the traditional sense; I was just a peripheral bystander in all these events.
But maybe all of us, no matter how close we might have been to the epicenter of terror, should be described as survivors. That’s because terror has become commonplace. It happens randomly: it affects anyone anywhere, even indirectly, because its concentric circles envelop us all.
Merriam-Webster defines “terror” as a state of intense fear. On the surface, the definition seems appropriate. Terror really isn’t about the dead — or better, it isn’t only about the dead — but about the living. It’s a state of mind: it could have been me, we tell ourselves after we are exposed to a round of atrocities in the media; my luck hasn’t quite run out, or not today, at least. That attitude may make us vulnerable; or it may encourage us to live life a day at a time.
Pundits enjoy telling us that compared to other causes, deaths by terror are statistically small. They emphasize that metropolitan centers are more prone to terrorist attacks, as are the young rather than old because terrorists like to hit right where it hurts the most. Occasionally, we are told that God may be used by terrorists as an excuse for terror — but God isn’t the one pulling the trigger. It’s the same preposterous argument used by the NRA in regards to guns: weapons don’t kill people, people kill people. God is a human concoction, albeit a needed one. We make with him what we please.
Honestly, I don’t like the dictionary definition of “terror.” It’s too ethereal; it doesn’t say anything concrete. Think of war. Doesn’t war cause fear as well? So do addiction, domestic abuse, and other calamities. And horror films. By saying that terror generates severe fear, we are just obfuscating semantics.
Logo-centric as I am, I also looked up “horror” in Merriam-Webster. The lexicon describes it as “a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay.” So are “terror” and “horror” synonyms? Not quite. The Reagan Administration went after cocaine, heroin, and other drugs because of their “terrifying effects,” although it stopped short of categorizing either the opioids themselves or those who distribute them as actual terrorists. It did call them “horrendous.” Likewise, after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush engaged in what he foolishly referred to as “a war on terror,” his cabinet seeking to combat Muslim fundamentalist organizations that it said were behind the anti-American aggression. It was a fruitless effort: Al-Qaeda might be diminished, but other organizations have sprung up since then. Terror remains a source of unremitting discomfort.
It is all a charade. Wasn’t the American bombing of Iraq a terrorist attack in equal measure, seeking to create an atmosphere of fear among Iraqis? In that sense, Henry Kissinger is as much a terrorist as Osama bin Laden, and perhaps worse, since the victims of Kissinger’s foreign policy decisions in Vietnam, Chile, and elsewhere far outnumbered those of bin Laden.
My point is that the word “terror” has become so overused these days that it has almost totally lost any meaning. Fear is everywhere. It might not be more intense than in previous times — think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hiroshima, Hitler’s bombing of London, the Napoleonic Wars, and so on — but it is surely widespread.
School shootings are also acts of terror. The 26 children and adults killed by Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 — do we resist calling this terrorism because Lanza didn’t have an ideology to support his action? Does the same logic apply to the 58 people Stephen Paddock killed at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas last fall? Sure, categorizing some incidents as terrorism activates special federal funds, so semantics matter. But is that the right way to portray some events but not others?
If terror needs to be ascribed to an ideology, what kind of ideology should it be? I recently reread Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” about a terrorist attack targeting the Royal Observatory in London’s Greenwich Park. Conrad’s novel came out in 1907. The ideology supported by the disjointed terrorist group in the plot is anarchism, which seeks to bring down any type of authority. In a bizarre twist, Donald Trump, in my view, is a proto-anarchist in that he tries to undermine any authority that isn’t his own. He isn’t so much a tyrant as a terrorizing disrupter.
In this age of twitchy relativism, one culture’s terrorist is another culture’s martyr. Perhaps it was that way all along. When Susan Sontag, in her brief response in The New Yorker shortly after 9/11, said that Mohamed Atta and the other attackers “in the matter of courage (a morally neutral value) … were not cowards,” she got a lot of heat. Yet a bombing attack in Syria ordered by Trump is cowardly. It surely won’t stop the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the Russian-backed Assad government. What it does do is intensify anti-American hatred. Trump, like Assad and Putin, should be on trial in international tribunals.
We imprudently think that a fitting response to terror is going through metal detectors. Come on! Manuals on how to deal with an active shooter are as easily available online as bomb-making ingredients. Let’s face it, the intense fear that comes from terrorism is as inevitable as taxes. To address it, we first need to redefine terror as “any violent attack against collective targets by someone who perceives a different kind of order as a threat.”
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of “In Contrast” on NEPR.