I’m not into having a War on “Terror”. I don’t object to war on a feeling per se, (well I do, but that’s not it), it’s just that I see it as a police matter, a global and serious police matter, but not like a “war”. I’m trying to get to a part of history where war plays less and less a role, not a world where it’s a metaphor for every project we tackle.
So I think we want this to be about “a global struggle against extremism” because it suits progressive goals in the matter. For one, it conveys the message right away, people know you are talking about this fight against terrorism, and yet the emphasis is on extremism. It’s a secret way to also say… “and we are not forgetting our own extremists”.
It emphasizes that we are not fighting a religious sect, we are fighting “extremists”, which are to be found in any religious sect in some number. It emphasizes what we really struggle with (or “fight against” if you like)… namely intolerance, namely the sort of dogmatic fantasies that lead to extremism. The lack of realism and a refusal to be reality based is behind extremism, and that is what we would be fighting, rather than dispossessed people, oppressed peoples. We would with rhetoric be bound to also fight the extremism of others (e.g. of the Saudi government, or the former Shah of Iran, etc) which provokes further extremism.
Fighting against “global extremism” reminds us that extremism like theirs is on the list of things to address, whereas a term like “terrorism” can just be applied to those that scare you, that terrorize us.
Who doesn’t know our government has become extremist..? on a lesser scale of extremes, but undeniably, on that scale, our government has become extreme, and if it’s a more mild extremism than al queda’s, fine and good, then our struggle against it is also more mild, but still extant. We still struggle against it, though we don’t even have to mention that, every time someone says “we must fight extremism” it’s implicit that this includes our extremism. A fight against terrorism allows the assumption that, of course, -our- violence isn’t terrorism, however extreme. (“Gee, Wolf, I expected more from ‘shock and awe'”… “Yeah, me too!”)
I think global extremism has run and ruined the world of man for centuries and millenia, so now so I am ready to see it finally end.