Nicki Brøchner

Yeah what a great idea, lets further more combine the two institutions that really know how to fuck things up. Now that is real chance that we can believe in. it is not like it have been done before … oh wait

In my last post about Nelson Mandela I briefly touched the subject of terrorism and terrorist. This has made me start thinking about what terrorism is and what constitutes a terrorist? The subject of terrorism has in recent decades become once more something that fills the media landscape and the everyday lives of citizens all over the world, but what is it?

The subjectivity of terror
To answer the question we first need to establish what terror is, an in the true spirit of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz what it is made of, what the building blocks of terror is. Well the purpose of terror is to frighten or terrify someone. It is true fear that a terrorist is trying to reach his or her goal. What is terrifying and courses fear is a subjective matter. What I find terrifying is not necessarily the same as what you or anyone else for that matter fears. An example of this is Arachnophobia or Coulrophobia. This is the irrational, intense, persistent fear of either spiders or clowns. Now what is important here is that it is an irrational fear, which means that even if a person knows that there is no danger, or that the object form where the fear comes has no intensions of causing harm, the person suffering from the phobia is still terrified. As sad before; fear is a subjective matter, it is not every person that is afraid of spiders or clowns. So for those people spiders and clowns wouldn’t be considered terrifying. Furthermore we wouldn’t say that a spider is terrorising a person with Arachnophobia or that clowns is terrorising a spectator in a circus, which suffers form Coulrophobia. The reason for this is that it is considered an irrational fear and form that we can deduct that for something to be terror it needs to be a rational fear.

The rational fear
Then what is a rational fear? A rational fear is where there is a clear and eminent danger for something undesirable is happening. This fear has to orientate on a given situation. For example a person walking home, at night, in a “good neighbourhood” does properly not fear being assaulted. In contrast the same person walking home, still at night, in a “bad neighbourhood” would reasonably fear being assaulted. As with the irrational fear is would be a subjective matter, whether or not a person considers a given neighbourhood as being “good or bad” or how well that person knows the neighbourhood is all factors in if that person is afraid or not. Therefore just as irrational fear I subjective, rational fear also is. But what here is the reason for the subjectivity is not the object of the fear, the assailant, but the situation, the circumstances we have a different kind of subjectivity in play.

The object of fear
It is given, that when we are looking at fear that for a person to be afraid, that fear has to be of something. The person needs some object that can be the reason for the fear. Since fear is an internal reaction of an external threat. Being afraid by the unknown is inheriting a human feature, but it is also a feature that we over time have coped with and with reason overcome. Therefore for a given object to really be the source of a persons fear that person needs to have clearly identified that object as something to be afraid of. For example the fear of being left alone is only a real fear when that person realises what it means to be alone. It is also typical here that panics sets in. It makes no deferens if we are looking at the rational or irrational fear.

Now that brings us to a somewhat broad answer to what terror is:

Terror is a rational fear that exists in a given situation with a clear identified object.

Now what?
Now that we have this definition of what terror and terrorism is, then what? The next natural step would be to debate the historical and current use of the term terror and terrorism. So in my next post I will be looking into this. I am planning to post Part II in the begging of next week. In the mean time I would like to invite everyone reading this post to comment on this definition, help me correct any errors that you might find in my reasoning so that when I analyse historical and current international politics it would be with the best possible tools.

63 Days ago USAtoday could report to the world that the Nobel Peace Prize winner and international symbol of freedom Nelson Mandela where flagged on U.S. terrorist watch lists and therefore needed special permission to visit the USA. Now today the German newspaper Die Spiegel is reporting that finally both Nelson Mandela and the ANC (African National Congress) has been removed from the terrorist watch lists.

The funny part of this ridicules story is that the reason for having Mandela on the terror watch lists in the first place is because that in the 1970’s the ANC where classified as a terrorist organisation because they where spearheading the fight against apartheid. Because of the “good” relations between the former white government of South Africa and the United States, they just followed the apartheid regime, and classified the ANC as a terrorist organisation.

This for me is an elegant example on why governments should be extremely careful in there foreign policy. Because governments usual support whom ever is in power in a given nation, there are some exceptions of course but they are mostly rooted in ideology rather in reason. The former South African government had a clear incentive for calling the ANC a terrorist group because they where a treat against there control over the country. I am not going to speculate, on why the American government did as they did, but I suspect that one of the reasons where diamantes and natural resources.

This raises once more the question of what is a terrorist? Because it is commonly known that the American terrorist watch lists is unreliable. I wonder if it takes 63 days for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to get of the list, by law. How long, if possible, is it going to take for an ordinary citizen to get off?

I am going to the states in three weeks. Or I should rather say I hope…

In reason years a new term have been showing it face in the political debates and campaigns. We have seen it in the American presidential campaign where people are describing Barack Obama’s campaign as “open source democracy”, the term has also been used to describe the joint platform for the socialdemocrats European parliament election in 2009.  But what is open source democracy?

Dissecting the term
Lets first look at what democracy is:

Democracy is majority rule: the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group.

Who can join this organized group might vary from group to group, and over time. In the beginning when the Greeks invented this type of governmental system, it where only white, free men over a certain age. Today it is comment that the only criteria, when it comes to government, are age and that is typical around 18 years. In other forms of organization is typical accepted that all members can participate in the democracy process.

In regards to open source, well there are many different definitions of what is open source. Typical they apply to software, witch is understandable since it where in the realm of software the term where first used in March 1998. In regards of outside the realm of software I would define open source as following:

Is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice.

So if we combine those two terms into one – Open Source Democracy, what do we get? Well open source is based on the idea that anyone that would like to can take the concept, copy it, remake it and redistribute it for free to others has his or here own. But must important is that whom ever is interested in the open source concept, needs to be outside of the organization that is creating the open source concept. If our subject already is involved with the concept, it won’t matter if is open source or not. If we follow this reasoning then open source democracy would only, not be redundant, to people outside the democracy process.

Since the democracy process is only interesting for people that are inside the process, then what are open source democracy promoted as? Douglas Rushkoff introduced the term, I believe, in 2003 with his book “Open Source Democracy - How online communication is changing offline politics” in this book he is describing how basically web 2.0 is going to chance the way we perceives politicians and how we get engaged in politics. And he where right, we have seen in many elections all over Europe and in the united states who the internet, social networks, blogs and other web 2.0 tools has re-engaged the public in the political process and debates, but is that open source?

In my opinion is the term Open Source Democracy is merely a smart way to reposition the political process in a manner that sounds open, and accessible. Basically taking something that most people have lost interests and trust in and associating it with something that most people have a positive impression of. This is nothing new, it is something that private companies have been doing for ages, is called positive brand transfer.

In the end
So in the end I would say that open source democracy is a redundant concept that only services to make the public reengaged in politics so that the candidates increases there chances to get elected. There is no real empowerment of the public since the democratic structure hasn’t chanced nor has the election process. So it is just a matter of relabelling the same old story.