Where the Imaginary Meets the Virtual

Chapter 6 examines how the insurgent landscape has been transformed by the digital revolution; how migrant disaporas and social networks have been brought closer together by digital technologies in the Information Age, and how social movements, once below the radar of states or emergent states, affect and outmaneuver slow-moving bureaucracies. This begs the question: is Propaganda of the Deed active or reactive, truly strategic or opportunistic? The answer lies closer to strategic opportunism, offering a strategy of fluidity able to capitalize on the switch from a one-to-many model of historic communications to a many-to-many model of contemporary communications. Indeed, it exploits to the full the network effect across the Internet and mobile phone networks.

Television Memory

Chapter 5 shows how memory is shaped across the media landscape, and between its ownership and political elites. Then how event and spectacle challenge media memory in the media landscape. It used to be said that media outlets did not so much tell viewers what to think, rather what to think about. Today with billions of consumers driving waves and surges of opinion and snapshots of local life across global networks of users, that picture has been dramatically distorted. Insurgents make use of live event transmission. Speed is a rich concept and increasingly the unifying factor of all symbolic communication. Live-ness is its handmaid. It carries codes that audiences internalise; they manipulate different conceptions of time and memory. Propaganda of the Deed freeze-frames time, interrupting the continuity of the moment and public memory carried in the media universe.

Insurgent Memory and Narrative

People experience memories in the form of stories. Chapter 3 traces the ‘continuity of vision and action’ around which Irish republicans built their own account of history over two hundred years of militancy––how each new political incarnation and successive generation, each rooted in a different set of problems and contexts, wove their struggles into a cohesive, historical trajectory. And how discontinuity was blended into a closely guarded continuity. Meaningful schema of historical struggle are more persuasive to a population than an ideology served up cold. We chart the path from Wolfe Tone to Young Ireland to the Fenians and onto the IRB in the Easter Uprising and IRA in the Anglo-Irish civil war, and more recently the Provisional IRA.

The Insurgent Image

Pictures speak louder than words. Violent acts create opportunity spaces––a hiatus in the political status quo shaken beyond comprehension for a brief time. In that moment, the state struggles to control the normality of its monopoly on violence and people’s confidence in the state’s ability to deliver security. If that space is prepared before the event with stories of struggle and grievance, the act caught on camera becomes a metaphor and an icon through which audiences connect to frames of understanding. Complex problems are simplified. And for a brief time an opportunity space opens to be exploited. This may be called shock doctrine. Chapter 4 explores the meaning of violent images from Iran to Pakistan and Northern Ireland.

Conclusion

Propaganda of the Deed and its capture and projection of violent images as metaphors for historical grievance act as a lightning rod in the contemporary media landscape. Its role has been transformed since its emergence as a late 19th century weapon of anarchist insurgency. The speed of digital technologies and low cost, mass access to consumer technologies of communication sit at the heart of this change. Globalization; increased mass; the Digital Revolution; the mapping of virtual networks onto physical social networks; and the dominance of communications in today’s politics converge to make a complex environment. Added to this, the speed of communications moves messaging from the local to the global, and from tactical to strategic levels in an instant.

Afterword

Capturing the mood of the times and written in the winter of 2020, the author reflects on complex changes to our societies driven by and contained within the prevalence of violent images. These now form part of the daily rhetoric absorbed by casual consumers of information. But mobilisers and influencers also feed them systematically into both popular, spontaneous protest and organized militancy and insurgency. From white supremacist atrocity in New Zealand to the tragedy of the suffering wrought by Islamic State in Syria to street protests by #blacklivesmatter in the Unites States, we witness the winds of change that are contributing to violent images and Propaganda of the Deed serving as political weathervanes and lightning rods for insurgency, revolution, and protest in the 21st century.

Spontaneous Revolution

Chapter 7 looks at the historic tension between top-down command-and-control vanguardism and fluid, organic expressions of spontaneity within mass populations according to revolutionary theories. It evaluates whether violent images and the response they evoke in audiences are sufficient to mobilize populations to rise up without the need for an organizing, centralized elite or vanguard. In other words, a leaderless revolution. Symbol-rich, shock-and-awe images cross nation state borders via electronic connections before triggering local grievances within social movements and the social networks that both underpin them and link them in what individuals increasingly perceive as a common global imaginary. Is the future one of organized overthrow of governments or state implosion when political elites can no longer maintain their own security and tenure under the force of waves of televised protest?

Archipelago of Memories

Chapter 2 looks at how individual, group, and collective memory construction occurs in societies; how memories are blended into a form of story-telling that seeks to overturn the hegemonic account of history on which states are built and which is propagated through media outlets over generations. A constant process of reshaping and retelling the insurgent story challenges state control of history. Insurgents seeks to control the past, to take ownership of the present, in order to legitimize their right to the future. Propaganda of the Deed’s violent and heroic acts that travel as electronic images through global networks resonate with the constructed past––a past structured around moments of suffering, grievance, and atrocity.

The Terrorist Act as Communicator

Propaganda of the Deed has shifted its center of gravity since its emergence in the anarchist repertoire of the late 19th century. The act of terror as an act of communications faltered when anarchists failed to dominate the means of distributing their messages to a mass population. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the dynamism of mass media and prevalence of digitally connected consumers of historical media technologies and newer social media platforms have allowed state challengers to find support more easily and more rapidly at the grass roots. Chapter 1 draws on late 19th century anarchism, World War 1 propaganda, post-colonial struggles, Afghanistan’s Taliban, and al-Qaeda to chart changes in political communications in diverse conflict theatres.

The New Strategic Operating Concept

Propaganda of the Deed has become the new strategic operating concept for insurgents in the 21st century. Chapter 8 highlights why. Increased media competition and appetite for dramatic images to gain audience attention parallels individuals’ ability to self-generate political and social messages at low cost due to digital technologies. Economic and technological globalization have unlocked new spaces for insurgents and revolutionaries to occupy and exploit with new images and ideas. The central strategic operating concept acquires force where insurgent groups have the technical means to distribute messages but also the electronic and physical networks of dissemination where their ideas can gain traction. Through these networks, messages circumvent friction and move from a position of control or more appropriately, management, to a vicarious, self-generating life form where protest and militancy produce their own dynamic.