Professor Gives Varied Meanings to Terrorism

Terrorism will continue throughout the world until people realize that the violent actions of strong countries, such as the United States, are perceived as terrorist ventures, too, a Princeton professor of international law said Thursday.

“We talk about state-sponsored violence” by Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, “but we don’t appreciate that our own sponsorship of the contras (rebels in Nicaragua) is seen as just as much a terrorist action,” said Richard Falk after a talk to about 60 political science enthusiasts as part of UC Irvine’s “Global Peace and Conflict Studies” lecture series.

The United States was right in not retaliating with military force after the recent terrorist attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna, Falk said.

“Every time one bombs refugees and civilian targets, one creates many more terrorists than one kills,” he said. “Terrorism feeds on violence.”

America has been the target of so much violence in the Middle East, he said, because “we’ve been associated with the dispossession of the Palestinians. . . . That’s as deeply felt as an issue (in the Middle East) as apartheid is for the black South Africans.”

In addition, he added, “The media here has rewarded terrorism with extraordinary publicity.”

It is wrong to think of terrorism as only a “barbarous expression” of frustration, Falk suggested. “It’s a warning. And Lebanon is a warning of what the world system could be.”

In his lecture, Falk painted a dim picture of the state of world peace.

The nuclear arms race, environmental decay, the denial of human rights, and the upsurge of warfare and random violence throughout the world reveal “a political order in deep trouble,” he said.

One of the ways political leaders of the world have tried to cope with the tensions of the nuclear age has been “to avoid the worst by threatening the worst,” he said. Yet avoiding the “big catastrophe has the effect of making war a permanent dimension of our existence. We’re never at peace. We’re always preparing and prepared for the greatest war in human history.”

This penetrates the outlook of society in a fundamental way, creating “a state so oriented toward military solutions and a military world view as to be resistant to all other forms of political imagination,” he observed.

It makes society willing to accept “dark utopian solutions” and even take seriously President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” he said. “The fantasy of abolishing nuclear weapons and creating perfect defense structures is enormously attractive.” It feeds on the notion that science and technology “are our real god,” he said.

Falk said he is optimistic that world peace and the “unity of the planet” can be achieved. Women can help bring that about because as they ascend into power, they will bring a different perception of authority and question the hierarchy and violence that is so closely connected with current patriarchal systems, he concluded.