Functions of terrorism
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI, Brixton 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the early eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Thirty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept […]
Dissimulation has been at the heart of the terrorist tactic from the beginning. If you terrorise people, you will only solidify the political resistance against your aims — making it impossible for officials to entertain your demands. Terrorism, therefore, is not an effective tool, and terrorists rarely realise their stated aims. It is only when […]
THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD “The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Jesse Hughes: I knew right then and there it was gonna be bad, and I knew that these kids had no idea what […]
THE MURDEROUS CAPACITY OF IMAGES In 1981 Baudrillard was announcing, not predicting, the ‘death of the real’. In Simulacra and Simulation, he ironically reveres Disneyland, which he says ‘is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer […]