In reading Blackadder’s post on torture, I noticed that “The War on Terror is not only a battle of bombs and bullets, it is a battle of ideas”. It must be serious– it is capitalized! But the premise of this whole argument is fallacious– for phrase “war on terror” is utterly devoid of meaning. Indeed, it is one of the most cynical, most vacuous, most Orwellian phrases dreamed up by the Bush administration.
What does it mean? How can you declare war on a concept, on an activity, lacking all specificity? It would be the like saying we need a war on divorce, a war on illicit sex, a war on lying, a war on abortion, a war on unjust war itself! The point is pellucid: buying into this phrase means buying into a violent language, a notion that we need to use force, to glory in the use of force even, to combat a particular evil act. And that, of course, flies in the face of what the Church teaches in terms of dealing with the root causes of terrorism. Of course, it is perfectly compatible with a Calvinist foreign policy, which is why it has been embraced by so many Americans (and viewed with a mixture of bewilderment and horror by many in the rest of the world). Ironically, the phrase “war on terror” is akin to how some Muslims use the term “jihad”, in the sense that it hints at violence, and does not rule out violence, but also offers sufficient linguistic space for plausible deniability
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