Reality, Fiction, and Terrorism

Well, it's happening.

An 18-year-old high school student from the Boston suburb of Methuen is facing two decades in prison, charged with “communicating a terrorist threat.” The young aspiring rapper, Cameron D’Ambrosio, a/k/a Cammy Dee, reportedly posted the following to his Facebook page on May 1, 2013: “Fuck a Boston bomb wait till u see the shit I do, I’m be famous rapping, and beat every murder charge that comes across me!”
Of course, lots of songs have violent lyrics. But that doesn’t make the people who sing them a public menace. (Full article.)

Can't say any of us were especially surprised. Although there's some irony to the fact that he got bagged for those lyrics when rappers like Immortal Technique have been saying things like--

...for years.

This is also one of the themes for Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End and its standalone novella followup, 404 Documents.

Here's a little snippet of chapter 1 from 404 Documents: 

My ‘friend’ Bradley the Buyer once said to me, “If you want to get press attention, don't write a good book. Blow up a mall.” 

It's sad that he was right. Not that I blew up that mall, mind you. I mean, I didn't set the charges. I wouldn't have any clue how to do that kind of thing. I was always zoning out in science class, staring at the dingy floor, eyes unfocused, thinking instead about the broken thermostat in our culture. There was clearly no self regulation. Or maybe that’s where The Buyer comes in. 

I'm getting off topic, right? Because you probably want to know more about this mall, bomb scare thing that made the news, and less about the systemic dynamics of a culture. But that's just how my mind works. Everything is numbers and patterns to me. 

Say you're wearing a plaid shirt, right? And you notice I can't pay attention to a word that you're saying. That's not because I'm addle-minded, though a lot of people think so.
It's because I'm thinking about the mathematical topology of the patches on your shirt, their surface area, the possible relation of numerological and linguistic categorization systems and those deformed surfaces. Your plaid shirt can teach you the theory of relativity, see? But you're not thinking about that. You're thinking about the news stories, the broken glass, the wall of shrieking housewives. 

We live in different worlds, you and I. 

I thought I'd let you know that, if you want to really understand what happened. It wasn't about politics. It was about physics and fate. This is my account of a bombing that never occurred, and the way it ruined my life. Maybe it's a cautionary tale and maybe not, but I assure you at least this much: this is the truth, so far as I recall it. Proceed with caution.
I’ve got to say, I learned a lot about myself, these past few months. All it took was an act of terrorism. ...Or at least, the story about an act of terrorism.

Pick up the eBook for $2.99.

The lines between fiction and reality blend more easily than most people realize, because, after all, all of our "reality" is turned into narrative before it ever reaches us. 

It is a sad reality that literary misunderstandings lead to prison times, to murder, to holy wars. This is the world we live in. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Murdered Soldiers & the Mythology of Terrorism

Wednesday 22nd 2013, 1421  - Woolwich, South London.

That’s when the call was placed to police - that’s when the authorities became aware that two men were hacking another to death with machetes. But there were witnesses to this act - it happened in broad daylight. Bloodstained hands were caught on camera-phones, tweets going viral while the perpetrators explained why they had done it, to passers by.

They didn’t run, they waited for police. Fourteen minutes later, armed police showed up, and were charged by at least one of the perpetrators. They promptly shot him. Both perpetrators are now in hospital, under guard.

The dead man was a serving soldier. The perpetrators were young black men, who were Muslims. Media makes much of them shouting ‘God is Great’ in Arabic, and their statements that the reason for this is Western troops in Muslim countries.

There will be countless other editorials on this act, and terrorism in general, for many years to come, but as a Briton of a certain age, I grew up with mainland terrorism. Irish Republican paramilitary groups were making threats and blowing things up and killing people throughout my childhood. It’s nothing particularly new, because ultimately, yesterday’s act was an ideological murder.

And those have been going on for hundreds of years - just look at the work of violent political messages throughout the years.

Here at Modern Mythology, ideas and myths are our speciality - and though ‘Terrorism’ has entered the mind of many across the world, if we break things down to their most fundamental level, ideological attacks - indeed any kind of violence are ultimately designed to effect some kind of change.

The techniques grouped together under the moniker of ‘Terrorism’ are asymmetric warfare designed to maximise their affect by influencing whole populations. The efficiency of a suicide bomber is that, until detonation, that person may be indistinguishable from any other person on the street. Threat may thus come from any direction - the entire population becomes weaponised, in a sense. Equally, with the Woolwich attack, the weapons used were easily obtainable - and the perpetrators did not resemble the traditional post-2001 image of terrorists.

They were not of Asian or Middle-Eastern appearance. They do not appear to have been part of a larger network - rather individuals only connected by the ideology of radical Islam, of which it is simply impossible to monitor every subscriber.

But let’s break things down even further, even beyond the murderer’s message or ideology. Let’s get down into the guts, to the action itself.