Has Terrorism Won?
The word terrorism provokes sentiments of fear and anxiety to most of us. For some, it can bring back horrifying memories. I cannot imagine the pain or the anger of survivors and victims’ families of a terrorist attack. In one moment, your whole life changes, just because you were unlucky. But the effects of terrorism do not last only for a moment and do not affect only the ones who had the bad luck to be present. The consequences of terrorism are broader and have an impact on the entire society. After every terrorist attack, the public discourse is more or less the same. We will not tolerate terrorism, we will intensify the fight against it, temporary measures will be taken and most importantly we will not allow terrorism to win by imposing the fear on us. Well, nothing is more permanent than the temporary. As my experience has proven, this old proverb is very much true, and measures against terrorism are a textbook example of it.
If you have travelled with an airplane once in your life after 9/11 you know what I am talking about. Security controls at the airports are only one of the many temporary measures that came to stay. I recently moved to Paris, a city that counts a number of deadly terrorist attacks, that shocked the whole world. A few years after these attacks, there is still in force a measure which affects the lives of hundreds of people almost daily. If someone forgets a bag in any kind of public transportation (metros, trains, trams etc) the traffic of the particular line stops. People get stuck in stations, some are late for work, some may lose another train they need to catch, best-case scenario you just lose your time waiting. Every time I am stuck in a situation like this, I am quite often, I can’t help it but think that terrorism is winning by disrupting our everyday life after all. Museums are another example. Big queues to pass from the metal detector and then an announcement warning that in case of an unattended bag, we will have to evacuate the building immediately.
You will hear many times the phrase 9/11 changed everything. I was six years old when it happened, so I don’t remember the first reactions when the news came. I don’t recall the numbness of the grown-ups all over the world, when they saw the first images. I didn’t feel the fear and the anxiety of what’s next. Twenty years after, I must say that 9/11 did change everything. A new type of terrorism was born. One that doesn’t target a specific person, an important personality of the time or a representative of some institution. It targets the heart of the organism it wants to kill, it targets us, the people. This shift of the way terrorist organizations operate prove to be much more effective for them. The reason is not the increase in the number of casualties. The reason is the change of our mindset. We took them seriously, we felt the pain, we felt the fear, we started thinking twice before going to a concert, we started looking for any “suspicious behavior” at public spaces. And unfortunately, we started considering suspicious behavior any behavior different from ours. Democracies struggled, populism and racism rose, and we weren’t feeling safe in our house. This is not memories from a far away past. This was the reality before Covid-19 crisis. And certainly the effects of the terrorist attacks are still present, a quick look at election results from 2015 until today in Western democracies can verify that.
