Meta-terrorism

The images that came out within hours of the terror attack at the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou were repeated over and over, the same ones on every channel.

The near-identical assault from November, at the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital, was portrayed with essentially the same sequence: a shot of a stairwell, a few scenes from around the hotel and embarrassingly little else of the city or the country. Then come the commentators — the usual faces who talk about everything — flanked by images of jihadist propaganda, interspersed with improvised maps.

In this age of global information, we now routinely face a disturbing phenomenon: a nail being pounded indefinitely, a mixture of captured images on international networks and social media. Violent flashes, events rarely united by minimally convincing analysis: Talking about terrorism, they say whatever comes to mind, and it’s up to you to fact check.

A week ago, Cheikh Ould Salek escaped from Nouakchott prison, in the Mauritania’s capital, where a death sentence was hanging over his head for an attempt on the life of the president. The evening before his escape, he called upon his cellmates and distributed lavish sums of money; the next morning, they found a flag of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) on his cot and a dedication to the elusive leader of the Al Mourabitoun brigade, Mokhtar Belmokhtar — known as “The One-Eyed.” Repeatedly reported dead (most recently after a rare U.S. air strike over Libya), Belmokhtar has recently realigned with the commands of AQIM, engaging in the formation of a wide-ranging, broad Qaeda front, Al-Qaeda of West Africa.

Under President Blaise Compaore, ousted by a popular uprising a year ago, Ouagadougou played an important mediation role on several fronts, from the conflict in Ivory Coast to the north of Mali, engaging in negotiations that led to the release of Western hostages held by jihadists.

Shaken by the convulsive events of the transition, Burkina Faso is a country with a strong Christian presence, but weak in facing the pressure of groups pushing for the introduction of Sharia, and where armed Qaeda propaganda has little sense, after all. Yesterday’s attacks are therefore read in the light of an emerging serial effect on a regional scale.

In order to make this reading possible, it is necessary to illuminate the dark areas of the official story — perhaps even starting with the inconsistencies that marked the attack on the Radisson at Bamako, where the bombers had time even to start cooking.

None of this is included in the media reports that we usually get, which merely alternate images of besieged buildings and clips of jihadist propaganda. When it comes to Europe, the pattern is well established and is quickly becoming a genre in itself: It starts with the news of “terrorism alert in (city X),” accompanied by photos of heavily armed police and deserted streets, followed by clarifications from strictly anonymous sources, and comments of “experts” who more and more often speculate on scenarios so implausible as to be terrifying. For example, weapons whose very existence is an essentially speculative act, such as the devices for radiological dispersal.

This emerging genre can be traced to a specific phenomenon, which should be named: meta-terrorism. Adam H. Johnson on the U.S. magazine AlterNet (Independent Media Institute) defines it as the terror propagated by the nonstop replication of past terrorist attacks and the ongoing speculation about future attacks.

Meta-terrorism feeds on the amplification of the communication codes that ISIS has borrowed from Hollywood, investing heavily in post-production and marketing strategies and primetime launches. Instead of questioning experts on visual sociology who may know how to decode messages based on four technical coordinates and insert images into an interpretative context, our media pepper it with comments that exalt unfailingly its communicative power.

Surely, news pieces are being prepared on safe holiday destinations for Italians, away from the risk of terrorism. A communication system in crisis finds in the meta-terrorism an opportunity to catch its breath.

–> Originally published in Italian at il manifesto on Jan. 17, 2016