A terrorist is like a mouse confronting an elephant. His only hope is to frighten or enrage the great beast so badly that it ends up injuring itself.
Political killers, whether they are white supremacists, jihadists, animal rights extremists, or Marxist revolutionaries, cannot hope to take on the full force of a modern state. What chance do they have against the police, the armed forces, the intelligence agencies, and the panoply of powers enjoyed by even a small country? They can do just one thing: They can cause such outrage or fear that the authorities overreact, thereby doing lasting damage to their own cause.
The terroristic murderer in Christchurch, New Zealand, was unusual only in that he declared openly and specifically that this was his aim. In the manifesto he wrote while preparing for his monstrous crime, he frankly announced that his purpose was to prompt a blowback that would inflame passions further and so bring on the confrontation that would, as he hoped, end the presence of nonwhite communities in the West.
He wanted to catalyze tighter restrictions on guns, and thus exacerbate the culture war. Sure enough, the New Zealand government reacted by banning semi-automatic weapons. He hoped to provoke more Islamist attacks and, alas, he may well have succeeded. We don’t yet know whether the murders by a Turkish gunman in the Dutch city of Utrecht were linked to the Christchurch murders. Be honest, though: Would you be surprised if they were? Turkey’s firebrand president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been playing clips of the footage to whip up crowds, exactly as the Christchurch shooter had hoped.
Terrorism is the ultimate attempt at asymmetric war, as its rare successes demonstrate. Gavrilo Princip’s assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 led, via the bloodiest conflagration the world had known, to the independent Yugoslav state he had wanted. Why? Because Austria-Hungary felt compelled to overreact. The 9/11 abominations ushered in nearly 20 years of heightened terrorist activity worldwide. Why? Because, again, the United States believed it had to respond in a way that reflected the degree of public outrage, a belief that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Democracies have their own imperatives. When voters are angry and frightened, their representatives act in a way that is proportionate to their constituents’ anger and fear, not to the need to prevent further attacks. Legislation becomes a kind of public tribute, a way to honor the victims and assuage the survivors, rather than to deter the next bomber.
Alongside the counterattacks and gun bans specifically anticipated by the murderer, there is a third potential overreaction. Politicians around the world are angrily demanding tighter regulation of the Internet, partly on grounds of deterring copycat crimes, and partly on grounds of decency. Who, after all, would want to stumble across footage of the shooting?
As always in these situations, politicians should look at existing laws before grabbing at new ones. Incitement is an old common law offense. Publication of material that encourages others to commit crimes, whether on paper or online, is already against the law. Newspapers and Internet companies also have guidelines that go beyond the law — protecting the identities, for example, of legal minors who happen to have famous parents. The laws on slander, incitement, public decency, and the like that applied to analogue-era publishers have not been repealed.
There is a difference, obviously, between a platform and a content provider. Google and Facebook are frames into which almost anyone can push a canvas. They are understandably reluctant to accept liability for material made by their users. They can and do set their algorithms to deal with, for example, indecent images of children, or pirated material. Perhaps they could do more. But we should be wary of politicians who make angry and unspecific demands for crackdowns simply to show that they reflect the sense of grief and rage that follows an attack. Few phrases are more dangerous in politics than the emotional and panicked “something must be done!”
How, then, should states contain terror? Instead of banning material, they should monitor it, using human and artificial intelligence to identify potential threats. When their agents foil plots, they should do so as briskly and unfussily as possible, denying malefactors the publicity they crave.
The trouble is that such an approach is, by its nature, barely visible. In a democracy, politicians like to show they are on top of events. They would rather act in the way terrorists want, even if it means making future attacks likelier, than stand accused of not having done enough. And so the cycle continues.
