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Terror, power and the new culture of death: in the wake of the Beslan school massacre it is clear that the new rationale for global war is being assembled.

Article Excerpt
One of the most comprehensive building projects of the Second World War was the creation of a replica Germancity in the Nevada desert. The aim was to perfect the fire-bombing capacity of the Allied raids on German cities and so German architects and builders were called in as consultants to design exact copies of the Berlin tenements. Mike Davis has called the bombing campaign "the last program of the New Deal', the mobilisation of mass production and organisation for the purpose of total destruction. That the aim of the bombing war was total destruction is undoubted. Churchill and Arthur 'Bomber' Harris had said as much. That part of its purpose was to terrorise the German population went without saying. Sudden death reigned over the innocent--the collective punishment of a people. Faced with the initial threat of annihilation, there was some justification for the British bombing campaign, later none. Terror and war, inextricably intertwined--in the 1930s, the existence of bombers and the prospect of widespread urban bombing had been taken by some as a necessary argument for pacifism, for the impossibility of war. After the war, the ultimate barbarity became the standard mode of staging conflict. In Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that which is regarded as terror occurs against a background of mass bombing whose character is taken to be effectively neutral. The annihilating act--the bombing--becomes nihilated, reduced to nothing, an act without dimension.

In the wake of the Beslan school atrocity, the pure character of terror has come to the forefront of public attention. It would be idle to point out that the event was no more lethal than a surgically precisioned raid, or stray missile gone wrong; the cruelty of it cut to the marrow. We know that this is the point, and that terror of this type works most effectively when it summons up a commensurate--and more--response from its opponents. In this the Beslan terrorists succeeded utterly. The official response of the American power elite--as faithfully relayed in the opinion pages of the Australian, the well-known import agent --was that the Beslan massacre represented a new and uniquely evil manifestation of a particular political-historical form, that of radical 'Islamism' (or 'militant Islamic fundamentalism'). Commentators outdid themselves in splenetic rage against the Beslan perpetrators, as if a sort...

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