topics: |  essays | terrorism

developed from the prestigious Reith Lectures, March 2004.
... if the world changed on September 11, 2001, then it also changed in 1988,
when Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and a year later, when a
UTA passenger flight exploded over Niger. Also the result of sabotage, that
last-named disaster was greeted by worldwide silence and "swallowed with
total equanimity by African heads of state."

Decades ago, the idea of collective fear had a tangible face: the
atom bomb. Today our shared anxiety has become far more complex and
insidious, arising from tyranny, terrorism, and the invisible power of the
"quasi state."

From Niger to lower Manhattan to Madrid, this invisible threat has erased
distinctions between citizens and soldiers; we're all potential targets
now. ... In the place of completely thought-through prescriptions, Soyinka
offers generalities...