When terror goes viral it’s up to us to prevent chaos

Brian McNair, Queensland University of Technology

The scent of chaos hangs heavy in the air. Donald Trump evokes it in Cleveland. Islamic State sows it in Nice, Brussels, Paris, Orlando. Britain is immersed in it after Brexit, while the EU struggles to prevent its onset amid mounting crises of migration and political legitimacy. Ukraine and Syria are being torn apart by it, and Turkey looks fragile after a failed coup.

To apply a metaphor from the science of chaos, we are, it seems, in a moment of phase transition. A state of relative global order – the Long Peace, as Steven Pinker describes it in The Better Angels Of Our Nature – has existed since 1945. We’re now moving into a new configuration of competing powers and ideologies, the structure of which we cannot predict, except to assume it will be very different from what we have known.

The intervening period of transition, which we may have entered, could be chaotic, destructive and violent to a degree that no one born after 1945 in the industrialised countries that constructed the post-war order can imagine.

The great battles of the era now underway or emerging are not those which dominated the late 20th century – left versus right, east versus west, communist versus capitalist. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, these binaries have had less and less relevance. It is the dark forces of nationalism and religious sectarianism that now drive global politics, fuelling the rise of a crude, xenophobic populism in the advanced capitalist world that we have not seen since the 1930s.

Trump is the most vivid manifestation of it, but we see it everywhere we look in formerly stable social democracies – Germany, Denmark, the UK, France, Greece, even Australia, where the demagogue Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party was returned to the Senate in the recent election. Appeals to nationalism and fear of the “other” are replacing notions of collective security, common interest and the moral duty to care for those in need such as asylum seekers.

Trump openly praises Putin and Saddam Hussein for their leadership and effectiveness (which in Saddam’s case, lest we forget, included the use of chemical weapons on his own people). NATO, he declares, is past its sell-by date, as are all international climate change and trade agreements which he judges to be against America’s interests.

The internet destabilises

In 2006, two years before the global financial crisis, and five years after al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, I wrote about the cultural chaos then emerging as an unforeseen, unintended consequence of the internet.

“Its roots,” I wrote then, “lie first in the destabilising impact of digital communication technologies … Not only is there more information out there, the speed of its flow has increased. The networked nature of the online media means that an item posted in one part of the world immediately becomes accessible to anyone with a PC and an internet connection, anywhere else – linked, signposted, rapidly becoming part of the common conversation for millions”.

As a consequence, I argued, established elite power was leaking away, becoming more porous. As 9/11 showed, we had entered a world where affluent, stable democracies were vulnerable as never before to disproportionate disruption by terrorism. A world where policy – as in the case of the EU and the current migrant crisis – was driven not by rational calculation so much as the power of testimonies, narratives and images captured and shared on digital media.

No one doubts the humanitarian impulse underpinning Angela Merkel’s decision to offer open house to millions of refuges from the Middle East. This policy was fuelled by distressing, globally networked accounts of desperate people drowning in Mediterranean waters, and pictures of children dead on the tourist beaches of southern Europe.

But if it contributes to the rising influence of anti-immigrant party AfD and the rise to power of its equivalents in France, Italy, the Netherlands, it will come to be seen as having hastened the fragmentation of the European Union; to have been an ill-considered response to a crisis amplified and intensified by 24-hour, always on, real time news and social media culture.

Notwithstanding the huge benefits brought to people and societies all over the world by the internet, then, it also presents challenges to the capacity for the good governance and rational decision making on which our collective well-being depends. In a world where information of all kinds – nasty as well as nice, false as easily as true – travels faster, further, and with fewer possibilities for censorship than ever before in human history, authority and the exercise of power are uniquely precarious.

Greater transparency and accountability of governing elites – what Sydney University professor John Keane calls monitory democracy – remains a positive benefit of digital technology. The internet made WikiLeaks, and the revelations of Edward Snowden and the Panama Papers possible. It gave every digitally networked individual on the planet all nine volumes of Sir John Chilcot’s report with its devastatingly forensic details of how and why Tony Blair took Britain to war with Iraq in 2003. You may choose not to read it, but it will be your choice, and no-one else’s.

If power is built on knowledge, and effective democracy requires that citizens be informed about their environment, the age of digitalisation has also been one of global democratisation. It has made popular challenge to authoritarian rule easier to organise (if not necessarily to succeed). Cultural chaos, like chaos in nature, can be a constructive as well as destructive force.

Fear is contagious

This media environment sees isolated events which would once have been of mainly local importance, such as the Lindt Café siege in Sydney (a “lone wolf” terrorist attack in which two people were killed), become global in their impacts through the immediacy and visceral nature of their media coverage. But it is also an efficient way to disseminate anxiety, panic and fear.

Donald Trump understands this, and uses Twitter like no other presidential candidate before him. He is able to further stir up his already enraged constituency with simplistic, authoritarian solutions to complex social problems like illegal migration and global terrorism.

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IS, like al-Qaeda before it, understands it. Jihadi John cuts off the head of an American or Japanese journalist, and the uploaded, socially networked video becomes a weapon of mass psychic torture, spreading virally.

Some Britons voted for Brexit because they had seen those videos, or heard about them. They believe they can be quarantined from radical Islamism by rejecting Merkel’s humanitarianism and closing the doors on the continent.

9/11 cost al-Qaeda $500,000. It cost the world trillions in military expeditions, heightened airport security and other responses, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of deaths inflicted in the “war against terror” since 2001. IS atrocity videos are well produced, but cheap to make, and the communicative power of digital networks does the rest. They are at the heart of a new kind of asymmetrical warfare.

The chaos Edward Lorenz described in nature applies also to our globalised, digitised societies. From small bifurcations in the social fabric emerge catastrophic, potentially system-destroying consequences.

One crisis feeds into another. Trump’s success fuels French National Front leader Marine Le Pen. The UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage encourages Putin in his dream of winning back Ukraine and the Baltic states. And as the mass murderer of Nice follows the attack at Ataturk airport, both outdone by the atrocity of Bataclan, we enter a period of cascading, interconnected crises, where “black swan” moments become part of everyday life, and the unthinkable becomes mainstream.

Is it too late?

Have we reached the tipping point between order and chaos at the global level? Is it too late to stop this slide backwards into the vortex of violent nationalism, sectarian hatred and authoritarianism that caused World War II? After a century of unparalleled progress in democratisation and the extension of human rights to women, ethnic and sexual minorities, are we now at the top of the ladder, the peak of a cycle, with nowhere to go but down?

No one knows, because by definition the onset of chaos is non-linear and unpredictable. Its precise causes are impossible to identify, and its consequences unknowable.

Personally, I think not. I believe not, because I am an optimist and I have confidence in the essential goodness of most people.

We – that is, those of us who don’t wish to build walls, or erect borders where there were none, or to prevent others from harbouring beliefs, religions or values different to our own – are still the majority, as far as I can see. Our law governed liberal states still define the rules and set the tone for global culture and politics. Barack Obama won two elections with convincing majorities.

If we can engage in this global struggle with the same confidence and commitment as the other side engage in their jihads and nationalist hate-mongering and fascistic public gatherings, not with military hardware but with ideas and words, it is not too late.

The journalists of Charlie Hebdo did that, and paid the price. Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali called for reformation of islam, and has been condemned not only by the mullahs who regard her an apostate but by some western non-muslims for doing so. We must support voices like Ali’s, and add to them, at the same time as we challenge the racists and xenophobes who are feeding off fundamentalist islam’s excesses.

That the global system is under unprecedented stress is by now undeniable. The role of the digital media in increasing that stress is also clear, as is its potential to be utilised for progressive reform and democratic accountability. We have to be wise in responding to the first, and smart about fulfilling the second. As to their impact on political outcomes, that remains stubbornly unpredictable. The Arab Spring failed to become a summer.

With that knowledge, all we can do is what we must do. Resist the censors, the haters, the authoritarians, religious and secular, the builders of walls, and declare them the enemy of us all, this human race, which will not be dragged against its will into a new dark age.

Brian McNair is the author of Cultural Chaos (Routledge, 2006). His new book is Communication and Political Crisis (Peter Lang, 2016).

Brian McNair, Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

http://theaimn.com/bread-caucuses-us-primaries-brazilian-coups-depressing-irrelevance-western-democracy/

A 2013 Princeton University study by Martin Gilens entitled Affluence & Influence suggests that the US is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy, in which power rests with a small number of wealthy elites. Hillary’s decision to back the 2010 Citizens United bill which protects multi-million dollar political donations as the exercise of “free speech” confirms this. It doesn’t take an IQ of 180 to realise that under a capitalist system the political class exist to serve the interests of capitalists.

In scenes reminiscent of the 1930s the euro is rapidly dissolving and we are seeing the rise of fascism across Europe. While NATO surrounds Russia’s borders, the US continues to run destabilising coups in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Currently there are some 250,000 US military personnel deployed to over 725 military bases throughout the world. As the popular meme goes, that’s not self-defence; that’s an empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fromelles
Western Front
The Battle of Fromelles (French pronunciation: [fʁɔmɛl]; 19–20 July 1916) was a British military operation on the Western Front during World War I, subsidiary to the Battle of the Somme.[a] General Headquarters (GHQ) of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had ordered the First and Second armies to prepare attacks to support the Fourth Army on the Somme 80 kilometres (50 mi) to the south, to exploit any weakening of the German defences opposite. The attack took place 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Lille, between the Fauquissart–Trivelet road and Cordonnerie Farm, an area overlooked from Aubers Ridge to the south. The ground was low-lying and much of the defensive fortification of both sides consisted of breastworks, rather than trenches.
The operation was conducted by XI Corps of the First Army with the 61st Division and the 5th Australian Division, Australian Imperial Force (1st AIF) against the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, supported by two flanking divisions of the German 6th Army. Preparations for the attack were rushed, the troops involved lacked experience in trench warfare and the power of the German defence was significantly underestimated, the attackers being outnumbered 2:1. The advance took place in daylight, against defences overlooked by Aubers Ridge, on a narrow front which left German artillery on either side free to fire into the flanks of the attack. A renewal of the attack by the 61st Division early on 20 July was cancelled, after it was realised that German counter-attacks had already forced a retirement by the Australian troops to the original front line.
On 19 July, General von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of the General Staff, had judged the British attack to be a long-anticipated offensive against the 6th Army. On the next day when the effect of the attack was known and a captured operation order from XI Corps revealed the limited intent of the operation, Falkenhayn ordered the Guard Reserve Corps to be withdrawn to reinforce the Somme front. The Battle of Fromelles had inflicted some losses on the German defenders but gained no ground nor deflected many German troops bound for the Somme. The attack was the début of the AIF on the Western Front and the Australian War Memorial described the battle as “the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history”.[2] Of 7,080 BEF casualties, 5,533 losses were incurred by the 5th Australian Division; German losses were 1,600–2,000, with 150 taken prisoner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romesh_Chandra

From Wikipedia:

” . . . . Chandra became the General Secretary of the All-India Peace Council in 1952 and continued that position till 1963.[4] In 1953 he joined the World Peace Council, becoming its General Secretary in 1953 and its president in 1977.[1] He addressed the United Nations many times, the most times of any Indian.[5] The World Peace Council gave Chandra its F. Joliot-Curie Gold Peace Medal in 1964. The Soviet Union in 1968 presented him with the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Nations and again honoured him by conferring the Order of Friendship of Peoples in 1975.[1] In 1971, he criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a “great threat to world peace”.[6] During the Assembly of the World Peace Council held at Athens in 2000, Chandra was elected as its “President of Honour”.

. . . . Around 3 p.m. IST on 4 July 2016, Chandra died in Mumbai of old age at the age of 97.”