What the pupils say

John Berger

You can't win without knowing your enemy. So what makes a terrorist?
I would like, as a storyteller, to add a few remarks to the current debate. Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy's place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.

A crucial question today is: what makes a terrorist, and in extremity, what makes a suicide martyr? (I speak here of the volunteers: terrorist leaders are another story.) What makes a terrorist is, first, a form of despair. Or, to put it more accurately, it is a way of making sense of and thus of transcending despair.

This is why the term suicide is somewhat inappropriate, for the transcendence gives to the martyr a sense of triumph. The triumph is not over those he is supposed to hate, but over the passivity, the bitterness, the sense of absurdity that emanate from a certain depth of despair.

It is hard for the first world to imagine such despair. Not so much because of its relative wealth (wealth produces its own despairs), but because the first world is being continually distracted. The despair to which I refer comes to those in conditions that oblige them to be single-minded. Decades lived in a refugee camp, for example. This despair consists of the sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing. And this is felt on several different levels so that it becomes total, without appeal.

The search each morning

To find the scraps

With which to survive another day

The knowledge on waking

That in this legal wilderness

No rights exist

The experience over the years

Of nothing getting better

Only worse

The humiliation of being able

To change almost nothing

And of seizing upon the almost

Which then leads to another impasse

The listening to a thousand promises

Which pass inexorably

Besides you and yours

The example of those who resist

Being bombarded to dust

The weight of your own killed

A weight which closes

Innocence for ever

Because they are so many

These are seven levels of despair - one for each day of the week - which lead, for some of the more courageous, to this revelation: that to offer one's own life in contesting the forces that have pushed the world to where it is, is the only way of invoking an all which is larger than that of despair. Any strategy planned by man to whom such despair is unimaginable will fail and will recruit more and more enemies.

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