Big Brother Isn’t Suitable as a Policeman

If a test of a nation’s political maturity lies in its leaders’ reaction to adversity, Washington is setting the rest of the country a poor example. At the grass-roots level, the crowds returned to Atlanta’s Olympics Centennial Park in a spirit of dignified resilience; in New York, the families of the victims of TWA Flight 800 earned our respect for their restraint.

The contrast with Washington is striking. A giant bandwagon called “terrorism” is rolling through the city, collecting straphangers of every stripe, all united in one aim: to act tough. Somehow, anyhow. Yesterday, the idea du jour involved a huge expansion of telephone surveillance. Today, hotheads want to bomb Iran.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich made a sound point early on when he cautioned against “coming up with answers when we don’t even know the questions.” This is sound advice for those conservatives who have joined the Clinton administration’s stampede toward federal encroachment on individual liberty. No one seems to have noticed the poignant irony of the situation. At a time when the Poles, Czechs and Russians are dismantling their organs of internal control and wiretapping surveillance, Americans are blithely rushing to extend theirs by geometric proportions.

That conservatives should be participating in this dangerous expansion of state power is lamentable. But, they will retort, we cannot stand idly by. After all, is not Salus populi suprema lex--the people’s safety is the supreme law--the cornerstone of conservative philosophy?

Yes, it is. But conservatives should also bring a sense of historical perspective to bear. The very use of the word “terrorism” in connection with the Atlanta incident should be suspect.

Over history, terrorism has meant something very different from criminal violence. True terrorism has as its central purpose to change government policy. Its essence is that it is a challenge to a state. It is an act closely associated with war.

Take some of the memorable terrorist acts of our time. They have a common pattern. When Menachem Begin’s Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, this was not a random act. It was designed to accelerate the British withdrawal from Palestine. The bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 was calculated to drive U.S. forces out of Lebanon. The killing of American personnel in Saudi Arabia is aimed at loosening American ties with the Saudis.

And so it is with the countless shabby murders perpetrated over various continents by the likes of the Irish Republican Army, Palestine Liberation Organization, Red Brigade, Shining Path and Tamil Tigers. This is not random, aimless violence. This is targeted action with a larger purpose of achieving a political objective. As such, it is rightly regarded as a direct challenge to governments, which react with the full panoply of their powers, often stimulating the terrorists to an even more vicious response. On it goes until some event, whether external good offices or internal weariness, provides the catalyst for ending the cycle.

One curious aspect of modern terrorism is that its perpetrators have a knack for becoming respectable. Begin ended his career as Israel’s prime minister and peacemaker. The PLO’s Yasser Arafat and the IRA’s Gerry Adams have been welcomed at the White House. Nelson Mandela, whose African National Congress was once featured on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, is now the world’s most respected statesman.

It may be seen, therefore, that to describe a violent act as one of terrorism is to elevate it in the hierarchy of crime. It lends the act a wider significance, even a sense of glamour, going beyond mere homicide.

It seems likely that the destruction of TWA 800 may turn out to fit this category. If so, the meeting of terrorist experts in Paris attended by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno will be justified and useful.

By contrast, the Atlanta outrage, murky thought its origins still may be, appears to meet none of the criteria of terrorism.

This is where the conservatives’ sense of proportion should come in. Atlanta, the Unabomber, even the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City are of a piece. These are squalid crimes, the perpetrators of which deserve ample punishment. But we do ourselves a disservice if, by calling such people terrorists, we allow them to panic us into ill-considered tampering with legal norms. This bathes them in a limelight they do not deserve, setting the stage for copycats to step up for their moment of glory. Terrorism is a dreadful thing, but we cannot let mere criminals identify themselves as terrorists. Otherwise, Big Brother will soon be perched on every shoulder.