Terrorism and the State: A Critique of Domination Through Fear.

• Date: 22 March 1992
• Author: Herman, Edward S.
• Published date: 22 March 1992
• Author: Herman, Edward S.

Despite the great media interest in terrorism in recent years, William Perdue's Terrorism and the State has not been reviewed in any mainstream journal or national newspaper. It was issued by a publisher that charges library-oriented high prices (here, $42.95) and provides modest follow-up support (including copy editing and advertising). Yet that is not the main reason this book has fallen still-born from the press. The problem with Perdue's book is that it frames the terrorism issue outside the mainstream paradigm and will necessarily repel or even be incomprehensible to, mainstream editors and reviewers.

In the mainstream paradigm, the West is the victim of terrorism both because of its openness and because of the envy and hatred of the subversive forces of the world (Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Libya, and, in the Evil Empire years in the vision of Ronald Reagan, Claire Sterling, and A.M. Rosenthal, the Soviet Union). The focus of Western officials, experts, and media is therefore on insurgent and left terrorism, with selective admission of state terrorism by politically convenient villains.(1)

Instead of adopting this supremely biased Western model of terrorism, Perdue analyses and rejects it as a blatant ideological apparatus designed to rationalize Western state terror. For Perdue, the main form of terrorism is "regime terrorism," a "higher terrorism" managed by the leading Western states to help them mobilize the world's resources and people to serve their own interests. They employ their superior power to advance and protect the transnational system that they dominate and "to keep the world safe from change" (pp. 16, 18). These states use a wide array of means to dominate through fear. Thus, Perdue includes under the rubric terrorism not only straightforward regime terrorism, but also the warfare state and its operations, racial terrorism, settler terrorism, surrogate terrorisms, and a vast array of other forms of state intervention (listed on pp. 42-43).

Concept and Ideology

As Perdue notes, terrorism is "a label of defamation, a means of excluding those so branded from human standing" (p. 4), and it is a powerful one. He situates it not only in an ongoing structure of power relations, but also in a history of domination and supremacist thought. In an earlier age of imperialism, slavery was legitimized by various racist ideologies, and terrorism is in the same tradition of serviceable dominant ideologies. Essentially, terrorists are those who stand in the way of the West: it is "a form of international deviance," a resort to uncivilized forms of violence. These outsiders and deviants:

are often portrayed as irrational or crazed...