“The Ends Justify The Means”: A Mixture Of Politics And Terrorism

If you are a Machiavelli reader, that phrase might have been familiar with you. The author of ‘The Prince’ suggests that to get into political power, one should ignore etika considerations. That is the first thing to do to become ‘a Prince’. In order to be obeyed by people, it is better for a leader to be feared than loved. Politics is all about power and the first task is how to get and maintain political power. As Machiavelli suggests, if you have set up the ends, the means just follow. Sounds terrifying?

Now I would like to talk about terrorism. To me, terrorism has something to do with fear, power, and politics. I refer to Machiavelli idea of politics because I assume that he was one who successfully imposed the idea of terrorism into politics. Therefore, common arguments regarding with Machiavelli in politics are always immoral, sadism, and full of sense of terror. Why did he put a terror into politics? Machiavelli’s notion seems come to be true if we follow what is happening today in the Middle East.

Before going further, let us come to the definition first. The best way to understand terrorism is by defining the root of the word itself, ‘terror’. Terror, in any forms, makes us fear, loss of freedom, and die. Everybody is, by nature, enemy of terror. Instead of living in the world of terror, we want our world to be in peace. The question is how it could be possible living in this world without terror? Meanwhile terror itself is part of our life, terrorists are there in the crowd, terrorism is real, and threatening our everyday life.

What do we mean by terrorism now, to me, has been politically instrumentalized. Remember what Bush’s declaration on ’war of terror’. That was only a mask to attack Iraq and Afghanistan. As a political instrument, terrorism can impossibly be understood clearly. The definition is getting absurd. American understanding of terrorism might be different with people in the Middle East. It is because they have political interests concealed behind their speech of terrorism.

Western media often vulgarly uses the word ‘terrorism’ to refer to Islamic movements. Look at what is happening in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, when Islamic movement activists attack, they call it “terrorist attack”. Otherwise, the opponents call USA, Israel, UN, and all the media supporting them are the real terrorists. Those who stay in between may well understand that terrorism is politically instrumentalized. So, some say both are terrorists.

My position in this is, there is a lack of understanding with the very meaning of terrorism among those who go to war in the name of anti-terrorism. This seems confirm the view of politics from Machiavelli, that ‘the ends justify the means’. If you want power, it doesn’t matter at all if you promote war in the name of fighting against terrorism. Finally, to me, those who instrumentalize terrorism are much more dangerous than terrorists!

Yogyakarta, 4^th Sept 2014

Sumber aciknadzirah.blogspot.com

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