Jason McCue: Terrorism is a failed brand

48,167 views ・ 2012-10-03

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it.
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We are at war with a new form of terrorism.
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It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism,
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but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century.
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One of the big things about countering terrorism
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is, how do you perceive it?
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Because perception leads to your response to it.
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So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism,
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it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war.
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So how are you going to respond to it?
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Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind.
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You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach,
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and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect,
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then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it
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are much more asymmetrical.
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We live in a modern, global world.
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Terrorists have actually adapted to it.
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It's something we have to, too, and that means the people
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who are working on counterterrorism responses
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have to start, in effect, putting on
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their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever.
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For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at
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terrorism as though it was a global brand,
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say, Coca-Cola.
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Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter)
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If you look at it as a brand in those ways,
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what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product.
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As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health,
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it's bad for those who it affects,
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and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either.
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It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin.
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You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven.
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It's not going to happen, I don't think.
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And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism
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by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense.
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But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel.
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The brand has an Achilles' heel.
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We've mentioned the health,
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but it needs consumers to buy into it.
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The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency.
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They're the people who buy into the brand, support them,
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facilitate them, and they're the people
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we've got to reach out to.
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We've got to attack that brand in front of them.
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There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme.
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One is reducing their market. What I mean is,
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it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete.
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We've got to show we're a better product.
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If I'm trying to show we're a better product,
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I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay.
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We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need
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for the product itself. You could be looking there at
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poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things
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which feed terrorism.
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The other thing to do is to knock the product,
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attack the brand myth, as we've said.
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You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid.
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Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across.
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We've got to reveal the dangers in the product.
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Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism,
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as I've said, the terrorists.
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It's not just the marketeers of terrorism,
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which is those who finance, those who facilitate it,
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but it's the consumers of terrorism.
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We've got to get in to those homelands.
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That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength.
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That's where their consumers come from.
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And we have to get our messaging in there.
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So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction
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in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc.
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We've got to engage, we've got to educate,
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and we've got to have dialogue.
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Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds,
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think about delivery mechanisms.
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How are we going to do these attacks?
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Well, reducing the market is really one for governments
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and civil society. We've got to show we're better.
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We've got to show our values.
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We've got to practice what we preach.
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But when it comes to knocking the brand,
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if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi,
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I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola,
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anyone's going to believe us.
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So we've got to find a different mechanism,
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and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across
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is the victims of terrorism.
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They are somebody who can actually stand there and say,
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"This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days.
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It burnt my hand, whatever." You believe them.
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You can see their scars. You trust them.
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But whether it's victims, whether it's governments,
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NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland,
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we have to interact and engage with those different
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layers of terrorism, and, in effect,
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we do have to have a little dance with the devil.
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This is my favorite part of my speech.
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I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point,
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but — (Laughter) —
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TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me
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I've got to do a countdown, so
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I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist,
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sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) —
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I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and
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it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be,
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and it would be, "Body parts, not heart attacks."
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So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound)
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Very good. (Laughter)
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Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all.
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We're all victims of terrorism.
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There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life.
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There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there.
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The son's dead. The father lives.
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The father will probably kick himself for years to come
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that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid.
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He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably
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going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats.
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There's a very young, attractive lady over here,
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and she has something which I think's the worst form
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of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen
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out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel.
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What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant
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in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come,
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or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start
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rubbing her skin, and out of there will come
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a piece of that shrapnel.
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And that is a hard thing for the head to take.
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There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs
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in this bombing.
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She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount
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of money off our government
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for looking after what's happened to her.
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She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best
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universities. She's going to give up university
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to look after Mum.
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We're all here, and all of those who watch it
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are going to be traumatized by this event,
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but all of you here who are victims are going to learn
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some hard truths.
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That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while,
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we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society.
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We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them,
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and what I'm going to try and show is that actually,
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victims are the best weapon we have
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against more terrorism.
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How would the government at the turn of the millennium
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approach today? Well, we all know.
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What they'd have done then is an invasion.
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If the suicide bomber was from Wales,
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good luck to Wales, I'd say.
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Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation --
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which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know --
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it's a mistake.
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We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh,
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throughout the U.K., for Welsh people.
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Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes.
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They are looking at what I've started off on,
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on these more asymmetrical approaches to it,
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more modernist views, cause and effect.
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But mistakes of the past are inevitable.
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It's human nature.
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The fear and the pressure to do something on them
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is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes.
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They're not just going to be smart.
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There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up
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the point very beautifully. He said,
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"The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got
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to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once."
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So what we need to do is we have to effect it.
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We've got to start thinking about being more proactive.
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We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons
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in this war on terrorism.
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But of course, it's ideas -- is not something that governments do very well.
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I want to go back just to before the bang, to this idea of
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brand, and I was talking about Coke and Pepsi, etc.
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We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war.
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They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth
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against injustice, imperialism, etc.
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We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield.
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It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want.
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They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why
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the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this.
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If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially
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a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere
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which not many people had heard of.
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9/11 launched it. It was its big marketing day,
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and it was packaged for the 21st century. They knew what they were doing.
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They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image
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of creating a brand which can be franchised around
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the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice.
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We, as I've said, have got to hit that market,
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but we've got to use our heads rather than our might.
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If we perceive it in this way as a brand, or other ways of thinking at it like this,
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we will not resolve or counter terrorism.
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What I'd like to do is just briefly go through a few examples
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from my work on areas where we try and approach these things differently.
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The first one has been dubbed "lawfare,"
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for want of a better word.
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When we originally looked at bringing civil actions against terrorists,
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everyone thought we were a bit mad and mavericks
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and crackpots. Now it's got a title. Everyone's doing it.
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There's a bomb, people start suing.
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But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing.
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A civil action was brought from 1998.
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In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA,
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middle of a peace process.
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That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted
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for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process
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and what was going on, the greater good.
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It also meant, then, if you can imagine this,
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that the people who bombed your children
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and your husbands were walking around the supermarket
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that you lived in.
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Some of those victims said enough is enough.
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We brought a private action, and thank God, 10 years later,
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we actually won it. There is a slight appeal on
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at the moment so I have to be a bit careful,
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but I'm fairly confident.
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Why was it effective?
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It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done
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where there was a huge void.
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It was because the Real IRA and other terrorist groups,
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their whole strength is from the fact that they are
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an underdog. When we put the victims as the underdog
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and flipped it, they didn't know what to do.
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They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down.
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The bombs actually stopped -- fact -- because of this action.
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We became, or those victims became, more importantly,
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a ghost that haunted the terrorist organization.
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There's other examples. We have a case called Almog
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which is to do with a bank that was,
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allegedly, from our point of view,
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giving rewards to suicide bombers.
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Just by bringing the very action,
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that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed,
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the powers that be around the world, which for real politic
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reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue,
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because there was lots of competing interests,
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have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system.
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There's another case called the McDonald case,
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where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings,
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which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued,
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and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya.
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New Libya has been compassionate towards those victims,
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and started taking it -- so it started a whole new dialogue there.
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But the problem is, we need more and more support
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for these ideas and cases.
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Civil affairs and civil society initiatives.
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A good one is in Somalia. There's a war on piracy.
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If anyone thinks you can have a war on piracy
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like a war on terrorism and beat it, you're wrong.
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What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman.
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They used to be fisherman, of course,
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but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste
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in their water, so what we're trying to do is create
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security and employment by bringing a coastguard
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along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you,
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as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have
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the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people.
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These initiatives cost less than a missile,
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and certainly less than any soldier's life,
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but more importantly, it takes the war to their homelands,
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and not onto our shore,
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and we're looking at the causes.
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The last one I wanted to talk about was dialogue.
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The advantages of dialogue are obvious.
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It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding,
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reveals the strengths and weaknesses,
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and yes, like some of the speakers before,
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the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and
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it does then become, that process, part of normalization.
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But it's not an easy road. After the bomb,
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the victims are not into this.
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There's practical problems.
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It's politically risky for the protagonists
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and for the interlocutors. On one occasion
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I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like,
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they actually threw stones at me,
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and when I did a point they liked,
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they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter)
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Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem,
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you're doing it, you're talking to them.
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Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason,
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we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to
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have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure
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military perception of it.
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We need to foster more
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modern and asymmetrical responses to it.
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This isn't about being soft on terrorism.
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It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields.
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We must foster innovation, as I've said.
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Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors.
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The private sector has a role.
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The role we could do right now is going away
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and looking at how we can support victims around the world
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to bring initiatives.
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If I was to leave you with some big questions here which
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may change one's perception to it, and who knows what
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thoughts and responses will come out of it,
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but did myself and my terrorist group actually need
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to blow you up to make our point?
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We have to ask ourselves these questions, however unpalatable.
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Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian
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struggle somewhere in the world?
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What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice
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is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do?
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What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us?
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What happens if that bomb went off
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because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place
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to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction?
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What is definitely uncontroversial
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is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive,
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and more proactive, and I just want to leave you
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with one idea, which is that
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it's a provocative question for you to think about,
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and the answer will require sympathy with the devil.
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It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers
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and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change?
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What if society actually needs terrorism
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to change and adapt for the better?
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It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus
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and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane
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walking into the moonlight.
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What it would mean is that humans,
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in order to survive in development,
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quite Darwinian spirit here,
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inherently must dance with the devil.
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A lot of people say that communism was defeated
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by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory.
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Maybe the Rolling Stones has a place in this.
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Thank you.
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(Music) (Applause)
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Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause)
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