When she
finally spoke, her words were lost in the scent. After five years,
the sickly-stale funk of male sweat, the fetid stench of male
breath, the oppressive, oily blandness of the prison food and the
acidic twinge of the urine which hung permanently in my cell had
beaten my sense of smell into a coma. Now, as her scent wafted
across them, my nostrils jolted back into furious life. I had to
dig my nails into my thigh to suppress the urge to jerk hungrily
forward once more.
‘I… I believe
-’ she began, in a fidgety voice. ‘Did you receive my letter?’
‘Yes,’ I
replied, still more interested in looking at her than in talking to
her. ‘But I’m afraid I haven’t got around to finishing it yet.’
‘Oh.’ There
was an awkward silence. ‘So are you willing to be interviewed as
part of my dissertation? I had to make a lot of inquiries in order
to…’
‘We’ll see how
things go from here,’ I said, with a dismissive wave of the hand.
‘Was that an essay you’d attached to it?’
‘Yes… I take
it that means you didn’t read it?’
‘Honestly? I
was making an attempt at sarcasm.’
She threw out
a chuckle.
‘I can have a
flick through it now, if you’ve got a copy with you,’ I told her,
in a conciliatory tone.
She gave
murmuring assent, and went rifling through her bag. The folded
pieces of paper she extracted came sliding across the table, and I
was suddenly reminded of the scene in
The Silence of the
Lambs
, where Jodie Foster delivers Hannibal Lecter a document
through the clanking feeding tray. I put the tip of one of my
fingers to my tongue and skimmed past the cover page, on which was
written the name Jennifer Green, followed by one of those unwieldy,
thirty-word titles that academics use through fear of their work
being mistaken as entertaining. Without looking up at her, I began
to read:
For two hours on
December 18
th
2012, a headline on the BBC News website
spoke of a suspected terror attack in Newcastle upon
Tyne
1
. As more facts relating to the incident which took
place in the Marks & Spencer mini-market on that Sunday morning
came to light, the phrase ‘terrorist attack’ was rescinded, and
replaced by the phrase ‘armed robbery’
2
. However, given
the subsequent testimony of the two convicted perpetrators, as well
as the available information concerning their characters and
socio-economic backgrounds, I would contend that the original term
was, in fact, the correct one. It is indisputable, given the facts
of the case and the relevant background information, that robbery
was not the primary motive for the perpetrators’ actions, and it is
only by viewing the incident through the framework of the
psychology of terrorism that these actions can be satisfactorily
understood. Moreover, an understanding of the Newcastle 2012
incident shows that the impulse which leads certain individuals –
usually young males – into fanaticism and terrorism does not
emanate from a strict adherence to a defective ideology, such as
radical Islam or Marxism, but instead emerges from social and
psychological pressures which can be found across all levels of
society. Though terrorism may appeal to those in a very specific
position within society, this appeal operates across a far wider
spectrum than is traditionally assumed. Ideology is not the
inciting influence for terrorist actions; it is the final step, the
moral justification for a course of action which the perpetrator
may well have committed without recourse to an ideological
framework. Indeed, the very label of ‘terrorism’ has been applied
inconsistently in order to differentiate near-identical behaviours,
most often to serve ends which are political or ideological in
themselves.
I looked up
from the table and caught her scruntising me.
‘You shouldn’t
use the first person in an academic essay,’ I told her. ‘You should
use “the evidence suggests that…” or “this would indicate that…”
instead of “I would contend…” Gives the impression of scholarly
detachment.’ She raised her eyebrows and smiled in a very
over-the-top fashion, as if to cover the involuntary furrow and
snarl which preceded it. Had I not been so suspicious of her
motives in coming here, I might have dismissed the darkening of her
features, which only lasted for a snatch of a second, as paranoia,
or even missed it entirely. Allowing my eyes to fall back
downwards, I thumbed through the pages on the table, reading only
the titles of each section:
Arriving at a
Definition of ‘Terrorism’
The appeal of
Terrorism to the Young
The Relationship
Between Terrorism and Minority-Group Allegiance
The Appeal of
Terrorism to the Middle-Class
The Appeal of
Terrorism to the Proto-Intelligentsia
Differentiating
Between ‘Terrorism’ and ‘Mass Killing’
Ideology as
Justification, Not Motivation
I skip
forward, to a point around halfway through the final section.
…
Soldiers are far
easier to recruit than suicide bombers. In the insurrectionary
stage of a revolutionary movement, when adherents to an ideology
have yet to overthrow an existing regime, the vast majority of its
sympathisers cannot be swayed into violent ‘extremism’, even if
this is preached by the leaders of the movement. In terms of the
use of revolutionary violence, the delineation between the
Bolsheviki and the less militant socialist groups within Russia,
for example, was not especially pronounced until the breakdown of
the provincial government
17
. Furthermore, once a
successful insurrection has consolidated itself into a bonified
regime, the ideological impulse ceases to be a necessary means of
coercing individuals into acts of violence against those whom they
have no personal motive. This fact was best demonstrated during the
Milgram experiments of the 1960s
18
.
An ‘underdog’
ideology, therefore, is insufficient to produce acts of terrorism,
and within a ruling ideology, simple self-interest and even
self-preservation are more important than adherence. However,
though I hope I have shown that the precedence of ideology as a
motivating factor for acts commonly labelled as terrorism is a
political narrative unsubstantiated by the available evidence, we
have not yet seen whether it is a
necessary
factor; that is, can an act of terrorism
be committed in the absence of an ideology?
Though one could argue
that the ‘terror-ish’ actions described in section VI above could
be categorised as such, my examination of the perpetrators’
testimonies heavily implies that their motives were primarily
personal ones, which contradicts the definition of ‘terrorism’ we
arrived at earlier. The testimony of Peter Thompson following the
Newcastle 2012 incident provides a far more clear-cut example of
terrorism in an ideological vacuum. Indeed, his defence, in which
he argued that a strictly materialist conception of reality proved
that he had no control over – and therefore no responsibility for –
his actions, a viewpoint which ironically allowed him complete
liberty to do as he pleased, seemed to some to be a deliberate
satire of the notion of an ideological justification for impersonal
violence
19
. We saw in section III that numerous
proponents of revolutionary violence have told themselves, ‘I have
the authority to change the world’; Thompson distilled this down to
its essential meaning: ‘I have the authority to break the rules’.
Likewise, in place of the grand ideological narrative that most
individuals guilty of similar acts have constructed, placing
themselves and their victims in a comrade-enemy dynamic and thereby
justifying their violence against them, Thompson, in effect,
reduced all of these arguments down to their logical derivation:
‘They don’t care if I live or die, and the feeling is mutual.’
I slowly
lifted my eyes up from the table again. At the same time, a
malevolent smirk crept up my cheek. Very deliberately, I turned
over the pages I skipped past and placed them back on top of the
pages I no longer needed to read.
‘So who
exactly is it you’re psychoanalysing here?’ I asked. ‘Because as
far as I can recall, it was you who – what was it?’ I lifted up the
corner of the stack of pages and peeked at her words, for effect,
‘“killed without any personal motivation”, not me.’
I could tell
she was tensing-up in preparation for this, but the preparation
could not protect her from the involuntary, almost Pavlovian spasm
that my remark provoked. She gripped the side of her chair, perhaps
to suppress the urge to turn tail and run. Her pupils bounced
around in their sockets for a few seconds, checking to see if the
guard was approaching, before she finally got them under
control.
‘For a minute
there I thought you were going to miss the reference,’ she
muttered. ‘No such luck, I guess.’
‘If you didn’t
want me to get it, you wouldn’t have come here in the first place,’
I countered.
‘True, but we
both know that, sometimes, you can only spot a bad idea after
you’ve drop-kicked it into reality.’ She tried to force a laugh,
but couldn’t quite get it past her gullet.
‘Also true,’ I
replied. I leaned back on my chair and examined her features,
trying to compare them with the old, faded memories of the girl I
met at university, and the girl I met in the store room at Marks
and Spencer on December the Eighteenth, Two-Thousand and Twelve. I
squinted, searching for some kind of distinguishing feature that
would bind the three guises together, but couldn’t find one. The
three instances of her looked
alike
, of course, in a
generically attractive kind of a way, but there was nothing to hang
a tag on except maybe the smell.
‘So, I guess
I’ll have to rephrase my first question: What can I do for you,
Phoebe?’
Her hand again
clutched the chair and her eyes again went shooting off in every
direction. I was tempted to say it again, just a bit louder, but I
put the impulse to one side. The conversation – at that point at
least – seemed more intriguing than the opportunity to exert some
power over her. Phoebe, likewise, put away the expression her face
had tried to spring into, which was that of a leashed pit-bull
terrier being teased. She shrugged as best she could, but her
whitening knuckles were still clamped around the underside of her
seat.
‘I don’t know
exactly,’ she admitted. ‘I just knew I had to talk to you before
all this drives me insane.’
‘So you not
only posed as a university student, but you also wrote a fake
ten-thousand-word essay so that you had a plausible excuse to come
and see me? I’m touched that you went to so much effort, Phoebes,
but there are easier ways.’
‘No, I
am
a sociology student,’ she replied. ‘That’s my actual
dissertation. I hope you don’t mind, but I made up your quotes in
advance, so we’d have more time to talk properly.’
‘You?’ I
asked, my head askance. ‘Sociology?’
She indulged
herself in a very long and unnecessary pause. Then she shrugged
again.
‘I find it
interesting.’ There was a hint of grumble in her voice as she said
it.
‘I suppose I’m
hardly one to talk,’ I conceded. ‘I used to find data management
interesting.’
A very slight
ripple in the air behind me told me that the guard had just walked
past, at the one moment where we were discussing something
innocuous. Though the mischievous impulse rose back to the surface,
I held it in check and gestured towards her notepad.
‘Next
question, if you don’t mind.’ Without so much as a crack appearing
in her performance, she asked:
‘How affluent
do you remember being, growing up? Would you say you ever wanted
for anything? Erm, and – err - if so, were those things
necessities, like, such as food, or luxuries, such as – I don’t
know – a videogame console?’
I watched the
guard getting smaller in my peripheral vision. When I was sure that
he was out of the range of my whispers, I replied:
‘I was
affluent for a couple of days, back when I was at university, but
then someone robbed it all from me.’ The smile crept up my cheek
once again. ‘Is that what brought you here, Phoebe? Did come to pay
me back my share?’
‘I’ve been
staying in one place lately. The longer I stay put, the more I get
scared of the past catching up with me. That’s what brought me
here.’
‘It has a
habit of doing that,’ I agreed, with grim humour. ‘Out of
curiosity, did the decision to stay put come before or after that?’
I gestured towards her gleaming, diamond-ringed finger. She cocked
her head sideways, in the way a cat does when it walks in on you
masturbating and you can tell that it’s thinking,
what is that
stupid human doing now?
‘He wouldn’t
have decided to marry me if I hadn’t been around for a while, would
he?’
‘That doesn’t
mean you’d decided to stay there, long-term,’ I returned. ‘You
might’ve just been waiting to pawn off the engagement ring.’
Her neck
snapped back into the upright position.
‘Fuck you,’
she spat at me. I clapped my hands together and grinned
broadly.
‘That’s the
spirit! For a minute there, I thought you’d gone fucking soft on
me.’ She didn’t grin back. ‘So who’s the lucky fellow? Charlie?’
She shook her head, and I sighed theatrically. ‘Poor guy; he
deserved a chance of domestic bliss.’
‘And what
about me?’ she asked, colour suddenly leaking into her pale cheeks.
‘Do I deserve it?’ I reapplied the mocking grin, but this time
there was no streak of humour behind it.
‘No. No you
fucking don’t. But that never seemed to bother you before.’