BANGKOK POST, Opinion
BOSTON BOMBERS
An overzealous response to terror
can be terrifying
To follow the drama of the manhunt for the Boston
Marathon bomber online through Twitter, Reddit, television, police scanners and
news updates was to be inundated with an abundance of almost real-time
information.
Anyone with internet access could get a virtual view of
events, blow by blow, and connect the dots, rightly or wrongly, along the way.
To follow the tweets of Watertown eyewitnesses in
particular was to be thrust into a front-row seat of a real-life horror movie
of guns popping in the dark and bodies falling, police cars racing and
bystanders mistakenly apprehended.
Bearing witness to breaking news informed by a rash of
sightings, bedroom-window reporting and stunning digital photos and telephone
videos of shootouts and shutdowns as police and hundreds of helpers from
assorted government agencies locked down a small community in search of a
dangerous man was a full-spectrum, surround-sound cinematic experience.
As the manhunt dragged on and anger and angst mounted,
there were inevitable media gaffes, verbal lynchings and anti-immigration
narratives being inappropriately raised and, worst of all, rash judgements
assigning guilt to innocents, whether it be police takedowns and strip-searches
or internet hatemongers baying for the blood of alleged culprits.
Twitter was fast, and fairly accurate when sourced to
people on the scene, but careless headlines in the New York Post and
crowd-sourced speculation about guilt, especially on Reddit, could have led to
real-life harm as complete innocents were painted as guilty based on incomplete
information and knee-jerk speculation.
Television news ranged from agenda-driven drivel on Fox
to attention-seeking, celebrity-hosted bloviating by CNN _ and yet television
news, CNN included, also rose to the occasion, carrying riveting interviews
with relatives of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, of which paternal uncle
Ruslan's interrogation was the most searing and memorable.
Watching TV with a computer in lap and police scanner
reports blaring in a set of headphones, I found myself thinking of an epic
horror film about the nature of evil and the potential evils of society's
sometimes vile response to evil.
The movie M, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter
Lorre, was first released in Germany in 1931. It is a riveting crime drama
about a heinous criminal and the overwrought manhunt that brings him down.
It examines both the natural desire for vigilante
justice and some of the unnatural and inadvertent consequences of a bumbling
official response as public anger is unleashed. It shows solid upright citizens
doing their part to make the streets safer, and illustrates the ability of a
despicable, but wily and all-too-human criminal to escape detection longer than
expected.
It shows a man who commits beastly crimes get his just
deserts as he is hunted down like a beast.
It is a haunting film, set in the Weimar Republic's roaring
'20s and it speaks to contemporary America in several important ways.
M entertains and discomforts in equal measure, raising
the hairs on the back of one's neck while also raising critical social issues.
The Nazis, on the rise but not yet in power, thought it
was about them and tried to ban it, but it was sufficiently abstract, and the
Weimar Republic sufficiently free, for it to hit the movie theatres and create
a sensational storm of debate.
Part of the film's resonance with recent events is the central
focus on a manhunt for a despicable criminal, who has no redeeming features
other than having been born human, and yet by the end of the film the viewer
has at least a flicker of feeling for the perpetrator while being filled with
dread and foreboding about society's lockstep direction.
Perusing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter account is to be
uncomfortably reminded that the "monster" who placed a bomb next to a
child and other innocents, was in many other respects a normal American
teenager who liked to Tweet about girls, cars, TV shows, video games, burgers
and his reluctance to get a haircut.
Assuming the Twitter account Jahar@J_tsar, which opens
with the Arabic greeting "Salam alaikum" (peace be upon you), proves
genuine, it shows a teenager grappling with self-presentation, identity, desire
and familiar social issues before and after committing an unspeakable crime.
One needn't like him, but one cannot deny the recognisably banal human
attributes.
Another way M resonates with current events is that it
portrays a troubled society in transition, rocked by political bickering,
ponderous bureaucracy and radical technological change.
In 1920s Germany, sound was being introduced to cinema,
photography was reaching technological heights, the printing press more
efficient, the radio was finding its way into every living room and traditional
media and culture were under siege, much as is the case today with the promise,
disconcerting tendencies and disruptions, of the digital revolution.
The lavish use of storefront windows in the film,
representing the unprecedented transparency of the Weimar period and the rise
of advertising, anticipates contemporary disquiet about issues of transparency
and privacy.
Finally, the closure of a city and the sight of so many
jack-booted men on the ground in search of a single criminal raises
uncomfortable questions about over-zealous manhunts, disproportionate
application of force, and the high-strung emotional excesses of the security
state.
What this means for US society is unclear, but the
twisted militarism, pathological patriotism and groupthink of Germany in the
1930s was all too horrific to bear repeating in any shape or form. Terrorism is
never good, but a trumped up response to terror can be terrifying, too.
