Premium terrorism FTW
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talkpoliticsNow. Where to begin. The good or the bad news?
Okay. First the good. The global War On Terror has ended with success. Mission Accomplished, folks! But this time for real! Terrorism has been defeated. There's no more terrorism. Hooray! Right?
The bad news is, there's a "but". There's always a "but" whenever there's some bombastic claim like the one I just made. Terrorism was really wiped out from the face of Earth, BUT this didn't happen thanks to the endless spec ops by the US military, Russian army, or the 24/7 efforts of the good guys from FBI, CIA, FSB, GRU, MI-6, etc. The victory wasn't achieved through multi-billion military budgets for various repressive agencies and organizations. Both the guys with earphones on their neck and those with pen in hand, or night-vision hi-tech gadgets all over, have turned out helpless against the global threat. The drone operators launching missiles from an office full of laptops have failed to do the job, too. Large-scale espionage and surveillance didn't achieve anything. They wiretapped everyone, from top politicians to mere citizens, the latter in turn footing the bill for all that - and yet it had no effect.
No. The victory was forged by the complete (theoretical) and diametrical difference between the secretive, shadowy security structures, and the bad brown guys with the turbans and big beards that they were fighting. In fact, the two were so diametrically opposite to each other that at some point they even managed to meet at the opposite side of the spectrum. I'll now tell you how that happened.
But first let me emphasize that the final nail in the coffin of terrorism was hit by the media. The media, driven by purely commercial motivations, were parroting the talking points uttered by both politicians and the military, crafting ever more frightening stories. And they succeeded where everything else had failed.
Sure, there's a "BUT" here, too. See, as is the case with everything else, words tend to get worn out from overuse, and they start to lose their weight and value over time. The terror acts, or in other words the acts of fear-inducing violence, were no longer perceived as so scary. The same way the advertisement guys have somehow managed to deprive the awesome "Premium" service of meaning and identity. At some point it turns out everything is Premium. And when everything is Premium, nothing's really Premium. The consumers/spectators/users, being so used to the everyday use of the term, gradually begin to let it pass by their ears without paying much attention any more. They've just grown accustomed to the sound of it, the same way the soldiers sitting in some military base on the front-line get used to the sound of machine gun and the missile warning siren, and the sound finally blends into the background.
You'll forgive me if I call this "Guerrilla PR". It's a very old concept really, coming from the world of adverts and public communications. The purpose of PR is to provide the user with certain information in an optimal manner, so that he or she could reach the desired conclusion or conviction on their own. Unlike the classic advertisement, where the user is being directly told what's good or bad for them, depending on the desired effect.
As for the Guerrilla PR, in a nutshell it could be described as an effort to achieve maximum media exposure with minimum investment, through staging or making use of spontaneously occurring events. The achieved volume of public exposure is vastly superior to the one achieved through classical advertising techniques, and it's much cheaper - so the method allows for hugely superior results, and the realization of projects that were never deemed possible with the old methods.
But what does this have to do with terrorism, you'll ask? Well, you'd be surprised. It's not just about the similarity of names. You know, Guerrilla means a group of armed warriors who participate in asymmetric military action against a regular army, or regular security forces. In other words, rebels. Partizan, as they were known in some parts of Europe in WW2.
In this sense, neither terrorism, nor the much cheaper support for local armed groups and presenting them as killers with a humane cause, is something new. And that's actual Guerrilla PR indeed, but with an important difference from the usual convincing of the public about the high social responsibility of Company X, or the value of the unorthodox way of advertising Product Y. The difference is that the price of the staged or spontaneous events generating the media exposure, is paid in blood.
That's a method lots of global and local power brokers have been using for ages. Without delving too deep into history, we could look at more recent events like Afghanistan, where the "heroic" Mujahideen were fighting the "Empire of Evil". That's a nice example, because less than a decade later 9-11 happened, and the US announced their global War on Terror, without giving much specifics on the reasons, methods, consequences, the cost, or, as transpired a bit later, accountability for that war. And they jumped in head-on, with all muscle flexed and a wallet wide open, into that shit-hole of a place. And not only there.
Now that terrorism has been bashed and destroyed everywhere and in all its forms for way more than two decades now, one can't help but recall the old saying that when you've got a hammer in hand, everything starts looking to you like a nail. And somewhere along the way, you're risking turning into what you were supposed to be fighting in the first place.
So who's defining the meaning of these definitions? Who's placing the quotation marks around the forged terms? Well, that depends on who you ask. But things are starting to get really annoying when there are armed groups on BOTH sides, who are "in no way being supported by [insert government name]", and you simultaneously end up with everyone suddenly being a "terrorist" (note the quotation marks). Yep, it's not just the media logistics that's so cheap in Guerrilla PR - it's also the actual logistic support that's cheap, too. It's much cheaper to send 20K guns than 20K soldiers with guns. And Agency X could always lean on the story that the PR campaign has now become "viral", ergo none of these events have been staged and everything that's happening is spontaneous. Or, as a very good tradesman used to say, "The offer has been unleashed", hinting that it could now take off and run away; become uncontrollable. Which, let's admit it, is what often happens in reality. There's just too much risk involved when your product carries the "Terrorism" label - and I've already told you how the price is being paid.
See, up to a (un)certain (and vaguely defined) point, everything with the War on Terror was going all right. There was the established image of the bad terrorist as an evil bearded man with AK47, often with a turban, chased all around the world by the good US, UK, French, Russian or other special forces, or more ordinary forces. The public had arrived at that publicly accepted image "on their own" (see?), based on all the information it had been provided (but sure!). An image that dominated the discourse, even though some bad bearded guys also tried their luck with various forms of PR activity. Which is not to say that none of all that pointless massacre didn't happen, and the predominantly bearded, brown evil men with AK47s don't exist. Or that they aren't being systematically sent to meet the 72 virgins that they so much blabber about. But, like I already mentioned, the quotation marks can be placed in various places depending on who's placing them, which may or may not warrant the use of the information flow with the occasional accompaniment of Benny Hill's Chase Musical Theme. Constantly being chased by everyone, and yet somehow managing to arm themselves and remain a huge constant threat for everybody. Hmmm.
We've come to a point where absolutely everyone's a terrorist. From religious extremists with a VIP pass to Heaven, driving vans full of TNT into crowds, to crazy lone-wolves with a kitchen knife in hand who manage to stab a few random folks here and there, or pick the pockets and grope strangers on the crotch while doing manic dance moves. Or the "white hackers" who regularly breach into government personal databases just because they can - they're terrorists too, now (well, some folks have proposed giving them a Nobel, but still). The list of absurd terrorist examples can go on all day. In this whole picture, the problem is no longer just who's placing the quotation marks, but in the totally inconsistent degree of public danger of the above-listed forms of terrorism, and their real potential to cause terror, respectively.
Turns out, some of them are more "Premium" than others, in other words the message is far from consistent, and the term is already worn-out, its meaning diluted. On top of that, the various special forces around the world, particularly the military ones, now all look identical with the guys they're fighting: bearded guys with guns, and with the most expensive trousers and gadgets imaginable. Hey, they're humans too, who doesn't want to be Premium?
Despite all these problems, the global bashing of bearded armed men by other bearded armed men could've happily proceeded in the established manner for, like, forever.
Except, several truly scary things have happened. Some bearded armed men got hold of, beside the usual AK47s, also some neatly translated literature on marketing and advertisement. And they recognized the value of re-branding, i.e. the change of corporate image and identity. Like corporate mergers, hostile takeovers and other fancy business terms. And then Syria happened. And guys who used to be terrorists (note the absence of quotation marks) until yesterday, were no longer called that. And everyone realized that the War on Terror had always been a PR trick. And that there are Our Terrorists and Their Terrorists. And some folks with beards and guns might've (once) been bad terrorists, but now they're good terrorists. And some are even medics. They must be that, otherwise how else could they be chopping heads and eating hearts with such surgical precision? What, you thought they've quit their old habits? Nah. They still do all those things. Just not as much as they used to.
Backrub is now Google. Brad's Drink is now Pepsi. Blue Ribbon Sports is now Nike. Stag Party is now Playboy. Pete's Super Submarines is now Subway. Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web is now Yahoo. PKK is now YPG, because PKK doesn't sound good. Al Qaeda is now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, because... well, Al Qaeda, Osama, 9-11! Not nice. And now it's nicer. Especially after having passed through a series of intermediary re-brandings, from Al Nusra Front through Jabhat al Nusra, etc. As have dozens of other groups of extremely democratic folks with beards, turbans and AK47s, and with names that are as hard to pronounce as they're frequently replaced. The names of the groups, not the folks in them, that is. Groups that merge and flow into each other like corporations. ISIS/Islamic State is now IDIL, or any from a long list of other names, again depending on who you ask. And then the ISIS corporation was declared insolvent by the US, and then the CEO to whose name the company registration was supposed to be transferred, going by the name of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, brutally killed himself a little bit. Must've been because he realized how much he owed to his creditors - or something. Hey, terrorism is an expensive business! Gotta be careful with those bills. There are lots of AK47s to buy, and tons of explosives and vans to maintain, and Toyota pickups to fuel! Not to mention all that black cloth for flags that you must wash from the sand every day. Duh.
Finally, the last anchor in the stocks prices of the overused, worn-out, magic lamp that is the word "terrorism" was dropped by some obscure gang of junior assistant script-writers for this movie, who somehow found themselves unsupervised for a minute. So they used the commercial break to fill some pages with a script of their own. They sure unleashed their imagination! And somehow it ended up on president Trump's desk, the unabridged, unedited version. And of course he read it on air. And of course the media parroted it on and on, until it became the Truth. As per the US script, one Kassim Soleimani, a top general and official of a sovereign country, is now terrorist. Now - I mean now that he's been killed. Then the accusations of "state terrorism" began hurling from Washington DC to Tehran and from Tehran to Washington DC. Now everyone's a terrorist. But, since all those terrorists are now at a state level, we, the regular spectator, can't help but start wondering if those aren't some sort of Premium Terrorists.
Yeah. The word "terrorism" has been used 34 times up to this point in the post (including the title). You must've grown fed up with it already. Or freaked out, I dunno. But more likely, the former. You're pissed off. And so am I. Because everything can't just be Premium. It's a law of nature. You need those 99 percent if you're to have your top 1 percent.
So why not start calling things with their real names?
Okay. First the good. The global War On Terror has ended with success. Mission Accomplished, folks! But this time for real! Terrorism has been defeated. There's no more terrorism. Hooray! Right?
The bad news is, there's a "but". There's always a "but" whenever there's some bombastic claim like the one I just made. Terrorism was really wiped out from the face of Earth, BUT this didn't happen thanks to the endless spec ops by the US military, Russian army, or the 24/7 efforts of the good guys from FBI, CIA, FSB, GRU, MI-6, etc. The victory wasn't achieved through multi-billion military budgets for various repressive agencies and organizations. Both the guys with earphones on their neck and those with pen in hand, or night-vision hi-tech gadgets all over, have turned out helpless against the global threat. The drone operators launching missiles from an office full of laptops have failed to do the job, too. Large-scale espionage and surveillance didn't achieve anything. They wiretapped everyone, from top politicians to mere citizens, the latter in turn footing the bill for all that - and yet it had no effect.
No. The victory was forged by the complete (theoretical) and diametrical difference between the secretive, shadowy security structures, and the bad brown guys with the turbans and big beards that they were fighting. In fact, the two were so diametrically opposite to each other that at some point they even managed to meet at the opposite side of the spectrum. I'll now tell you how that happened.
But first let me emphasize that the final nail in the coffin of terrorism was hit by the media. The media, driven by purely commercial motivations, were parroting the talking points uttered by both politicians and the military, crafting ever more frightening stories. And they succeeded where everything else had failed.
Sure, there's a "BUT" here, too. See, as is the case with everything else, words tend to get worn out from overuse, and they start to lose their weight and value over time. The terror acts, or in other words the acts of fear-inducing violence, were no longer perceived as so scary. The same way the advertisement guys have somehow managed to deprive the awesome "Premium" service of meaning and identity. At some point it turns out everything is Premium. And when everything is Premium, nothing's really Premium. The consumers/spectators/users, being so used to the everyday use of the term, gradually begin to let it pass by their ears without paying much attention any more. They've just grown accustomed to the sound of it, the same way the soldiers sitting in some military base on the front-line get used to the sound of machine gun and the missile warning siren, and the sound finally blends into the background.
You'll forgive me if I call this "Guerrilla PR". It's a very old concept really, coming from the world of adverts and public communications. The purpose of PR is to provide the user with certain information in an optimal manner, so that he or she could reach the desired conclusion or conviction on their own. Unlike the classic advertisement, where the user is being directly told what's good or bad for them, depending on the desired effect.
As for the Guerrilla PR, in a nutshell it could be described as an effort to achieve maximum media exposure with minimum investment, through staging or making use of spontaneously occurring events. The achieved volume of public exposure is vastly superior to the one achieved through classical advertising techniques, and it's much cheaper - so the method allows for hugely superior results, and the realization of projects that were never deemed possible with the old methods.
But what does this have to do with terrorism, you'll ask? Well, you'd be surprised. It's not just about the similarity of names. You know, Guerrilla means a group of armed warriors who participate in asymmetric military action against a regular army, or regular security forces. In other words, rebels. Partizan, as they were known in some parts of Europe in WW2.
In this sense, neither terrorism, nor the much cheaper support for local armed groups and presenting them as killers with a humane cause, is something new. And that's actual Guerrilla PR indeed, but with an important difference from the usual convincing of the public about the high social responsibility of Company X, or the value of the unorthodox way of advertising Product Y. The difference is that the price of the staged or spontaneous events generating the media exposure, is paid in blood.
That's a method lots of global and local power brokers have been using for ages. Without delving too deep into history, we could look at more recent events like Afghanistan, where the "heroic" Mujahideen were fighting the "Empire of Evil". That's a nice example, because less than a decade later 9-11 happened, and the US announced their global War on Terror, without giving much specifics on the reasons, methods, consequences, the cost, or, as transpired a bit later, accountability for that war. And they jumped in head-on, with all muscle flexed and a wallet wide open, into that shit-hole of a place. And not only there.
Now that terrorism has been bashed and destroyed everywhere and in all its forms for way more than two decades now, one can't help but recall the old saying that when you've got a hammer in hand, everything starts looking to you like a nail. And somewhere along the way, you're risking turning into what you were supposed to be fighting in the first place.
So who's defining the meaning of these definitions? Who's placing the quotation marks around the forged terms? Well, that depends on who you ask. But things are starting to get really annoying when there are armed groups on BOTH sides, who are "in no way being supported by [insert government name]", and you simultaneously end up with everyone suddenly being a "terrorist" (note the quotation marks). Yep, it's not just the media logistics that's so cheap in Guerrilla PR - it's also the actual logistic support that's cheap, too. It's much cheaper to send 20K guns than 20K soldiers with guns. And Agency X could always lean on the story that the PR campaign has now become "viral", ergo none of these events have been staged and everything that's happening is spontaneous. Or, as a very good tradesman used to say, "The offer has been unleashed", hinting that it could now take off and run away; become uncontrollable. Which, let's admit it, is what often happens in reality. There's just too much risk involved when your product carries the "Terrorism" label - and I've already told you how the price is being paid.
See, up to a (un)certain (and vaguely defined) point, everything with the War on Terror was going all right. There was the established image of the bad terrorist as an evil bearded man with AK47, often with a turban, chased all around the world by the good US, UK, French, Russian or other special forces, or more ordinary forces. The public had arrived at that publicly accepted image "on their own" (see?), based on all the information it had been provided (but sure!). An image that dominated the discourse, even though some bad bearded guys also tried their luck with various forms of PR activity. Which is not to say that none of all that pointless massacre didn't happen, and the predominantly bearded, brown evil men with AK47s don't exist. Or that they aren't being systematically sent to meet the 72 virgins that they so much blabber about. But, like I already mentioned, the quotation marks can be placed in various places depending on who's placing them, which may or may not warrant the use of the information flow with the occasional accompaniment of Benny Hill's Chase Musical Theme. Constantly being chased by everyone, and yet somehow managing to arm themselves and remain a huge constant threat for everybody. Hmmm.
We've come to a point where absolutely everyone's a terrorist. From religious extremists with a VIP pass to Heaven, driving vans full of TNT into crowds, to crazy lone-wolves with a kitchen knife in hand who manage to stab a few random folks here and there, or pick the pockets and grope strangers on the crotch while doing manic dance moves. Or the "white hackers" who regularly breach into government personal databases just because they can - they're terrorists too, now (well, some folks have proposed giving them a Nobel, but still). The list of absurd terrorist examples can go on all day. In this whole picture, the problem is no longer just who's placing the quotation marks, but in the totally inconsistent degree of public danger of the above-listed forms of terrorism, and their real potential to cause terror, respectively.
Turns out, some of them are more "Premium" than others, in other words the message is far from consistent, and the term is already worn-out, its meaning diluted. On top of that, the various special forces around the world, particularly the military ones, now all look identical with the guys they're fighting: bearded guys with guns, and with the most expensive trousers and gadgets imaginable. Hey, they're humans too, who doesn't want to be Premium?
Despite all these problems, the global bashing of bearded armed men by other bearded armed men could've happily proceeded in the established manner for, like, forever.
Except, several truly scary things have happened. Some bearded armed men got hold of, beside the usual AK47s, also some neatly translated literature on marketing and advertisement. And they recognized the value of re-branding, i.e. the change of corporate image and identity. Like corporate mergers, hostile takeovers and other fancy business terms. And then Syria happened. And guys who used to be terrorists (note the absence of quotation marks) until yesterday, were no longer called that. And everyone realized that the War on Terror had always been a PR trick. And that there are Our Terrorists and Their Terrorists. And some folks with beards and guns might've (once) been bad terrorists, but now they're good terrorists. And some are even medics. They must be that, otherwise how else could they be chopping heads and eating hearts with such surgical precision? What, you thought they've quit their old habits? Nah. They still do all those things. Just not as much as they used to.
Backrub is now Google. Brad's Drink is now Pepsi. Blue Ribbon Sports is now Nike. Stag Party is now Playboy. Pete's Super Submarines is now Subway. Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web is now Yahoo. PKK is now YPG, because PKK doesn't sound good. Al Qaeda is now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, because... well, Al Qaeda, Osama, 9-11! Not nice. And now it's nicer. Especially after having passed through a series of intermediary re-brandings, from Al Nusra Front through Jabhat al Nusra, etc. As have dozens of other groups of extremely democratic folks with beards, turbans and AK47s, and with names that are as hard to pronounce as they're frequently replaced. The names of the groups, not the folks in them, that is. Groups that merge and flow into each other like corporations. ISIS/Islamic State is now IDIL, or any from a long list of other names, again depending on who you ask. And then the ISIS corporation was declared insolvent by the US, and then the CEO to whose name the company registration was supposed to be transferred, going by the name of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, brutally killed himself a little bit. Must've been because he realized how much he owed to his creditors - or something. Hey, terrorism is an expensive business! Gotta be careful with those bills. There are lots of AK47s to buy, and tons of explosives and vans to maintain, and Toyota pickups to fuel! Not to mention all that black cloth for flags that you must wash from the sand every day. Duh.
Finally, the last anchor in the stocks prices of the overused, worn-out, magic lamp that is the word "terrorism" was dropped by some obscure gang of junior assistant script-writers for this movie, who somehow found themselves unsupervised for a minute. So they used the commercial break to fill some pages with a script of their own. They sure unleashed their imagination! And somehow it ended up on president Trump's desk, the unabridged, unedited version. And of course he read it on air. And of course the media parroted it on and on, until it became the Truth. As per the US script, one Kassim Soleimani, a top general and official of a sovereign country, is now terrorist. Now - I mean now that he's been killed. Then the accusations of "state terrorism" began hurling from Washington DC to Tehran and from Tehran to Washington DC. Now everyone's a terrorist. But, since all those terrorists are now at a state level, we, the regular spectator, can't help but start wondering if those aren't some sort of Premium Terrorists.
Yeah. The word "terrorism" has been used 34 times up to this point in the post (including the title). You must've grown fed up with it already. Or freaked out, I dunno. But more likely, the former. You're pissed off. And so am I. Because everything can't just be Premium. It's a law of nature. You need those 99 percent if you're to have your top 1 percent.
So why not start calling things with their real names?
