Campaigns against terror: Who saw something? And who didn’t say anything?

After the attacks on the World Trade Center, there were calls for the population to be vigilant against possible terrorist threats. Which ones have stuck in your mind?

Arndt Brendecke: The most famous campaign is “If you see something, say something,” which was coined by advertising executive Allen Kay on the day after the attacks. His intention, as he later explained in interviews, was to help protect the city. At the same time, the security authorities wanted to enlist the vigilance of the population in defending against terror. The campaign was rolled out nationwide in 2010.

How was this appeal received?

The slogan is imprecise, as it’s about “something” undefined. This has a certain strength, because it can encompass a range of different perceptions, even unexpected ones. It doesn’t specify what form an imminent terror attack might take, or what the signs might be.

So this openness serves a purpose. But the slogan’s extreme vagueness also has its downsides. Such campaigns can heighten the sense of threat and reinforce stereotypes. For example, men with beards holding a plastic bag were reported. Attempts were later made to make the messaging more concrete – for instance, through announcements to watch out for unattended baggage, of a type already familiar from airports. But this becomes so specific that terrorists know what is likely to raise suspicion.

Different Countries, Different Responses to Terrorism

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Were there similar appeals in Europe?

The campaigns in Europe were different. In the United Kingdom there was a similar slogan – “See it. Say it. Sorted.” – but it was aimed less at preventing terrorism than at tackling criminality and antisocial behavior in train stations.

Other countries affected by terror – we might recall the 2004 bombings of commuter trains at Madrid’s Atocha station, for example, or various terror attacks in France – did not produce comparable campaigns to mobilize the vigilance of the population. Instead they responded with a greater institutional presence and technological upgrades. In practical terms this meant, for instance, more armed police officers on the streets. In addition, a traffic light system was introduced to indicate the current level of terrorist threat. Interestingly, the state assumes the role of watcher here, while in the US campaign the state does that too, but additionally calls on citizens to participate and become watchers in their own right.

Are there explanations for why the approaches were so different?

To my mind, we can see differences in political culture at work. In the political culture of the United States, there is greater expectation that citizens will take on responsibilities that are primarily regarded as the task of the state in the European countries we mentioned. In the older European state tradition, there is a clearer separation between institutional duties and private roles.

Threat as a Permanent Condition

Fear of terror was suddenly present after 9/11 when one took the subway or boarded an airplane. The attacks took place 25 years ago, but the fear has never entirely disappeared. Are such campaigns partly responsible for this?

Giving people an opportunity to take part helps them actively deal with fear in the first instance. Translating fear into action can offer relief. The paradoxical effect of vigilance campaigns, however, is that they tend to turn vigilance into a permanent state – and thus prevent relief. The threat is perpetuated, and citizens are not relieved from their roles as watchers[or: guardians]. It is called “Stay vigilant” after all.

It’s more a question of time whether specific threats are put in perspective. When a new event happens, a fresh attack – as happened in the US with the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 – people’s fears are reactivated. Then the questions resurface: Who saw something, or could have seen something? And who perhaps saw something but didn’t report it?

Can such campaigns have an unduly unsettling effect on society?

Yes. This can be seen as a secondary risk. In order to combat a primary risk – the threat of terrorism – it is accepted that secondary risks will arise. This can take the form of a persistent sense of threat that acquires paranoid dimensions, or a reinforcement of stereotypes. Critics argue that this allows institutions and the state to re-legitimize themselves in their role as protectors of the population and, for example, justify the expansion of surveillance technologies or police presence.

So the consequences are not simply positive or negative. And the question also arises: How effective are such campaigns? Have they actually thwarted terror attacks? In the United States we can point to the 2010 Times Square plot, which may very well have been foiled as a result of the campaign. But that is just one case. Most instances are difficult to evaluate – for example, because plots were uncovered at an early stage.

A Long History of Vigilance

You’re a historian. Did such campaigns exist in earlier eras?

Yes, and it’s for this reason that the “Cultures of Vigilance” Collaborative Research Centre at LMU has a strong historical perspective. Appeals to vigilance have a tremendously long history, and they are culturally conditioned as regards, say, how we understand the duties of a religious or civil subject. To cite an extreme example: In the seventh century before Christ, the Assyrian King Esarhaddon made his subjects swear an oath that stated: “If you hear any inappropriate remarks concerning the exercise of royal power, come to the court and report them.” Structurally, it’s the same sequence as in Allan Kay’s slogan: The first part is a call to observe a danger, and the second part is an appeal to communicate the observation. Only through these formulas can the attention of the population be instrumentalized for a superordinate goal, whether it’s preventing terror or sustaining the reign of a certain ruler.

Essentially, we can show that state institutions never function independently of the vigilance of citizens, which raises the question as to where exactly the boundary runs between the private sphere and the state.

Did the campaign impact social cohesion?

In the United States, we can observe growing polarization in society and a sharp turn toward fear-based politics. We must qualify this by noting that we have no control group – no world without 9/11 and the vigilance campaign. Since history happens only once and is highly complex, the origins of this polarization and fear-based politics cannot be definitively ascribed to a single cause.

What we can observe in the case of 9/11 and similar historical campaigns – such as religious campaigns to report heresy – is that they stimulate and politicize the social imagination. For 9/11, a group of artists captured this process with the slogan: “If you fear something, you‘ll see something.” The activation of private attention via the communication of danger unleashes imagination in ways that are almost impossible to control – for example, causing people to view others with the suspicion that they could be terrorists. There’s something paranoid about this. It overlays how we see the world, and thus the fabric of society, with a pattern of mistrust and suspicion.

One variant of the campaign in the US emphasized that truly everyone must participate. “There are 16 million eyes in the city. We are counting on all of them” ran the slogan on a poster filled with eyes. It conveys the idea that every citizen is obliged to contribute to security. This unleashing of social imagination culminated in the slogan “Trust your instincts.” As soon as you felt something was odd, you were supposed to report it. But how often do we feel that something is strange? What this does to societies is an interesting question.

About the person:

Prof. Dr. Arndt Brendecke is is Chair of Early Modern History at LMU, speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) “Cultures of Vigilance,” and principal investigator in the Cluster of Excellence “Cross-Cultural Philology.” In his own research, Brendecke investigates fields such as the colonial history of Latin America.

Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Vigilance”

In the “Cultures of Vigilance” Collaborative Research Centrer, researchers from various disciplines study questions of attentiveness in different historical, cultural, and social contexts. The period studied ranges from the Assyrian Empire to the present. Subprojects investigate topics such as the enforcement of dress codes through denunciations in the Middle Ages, the dynamics of self-observation in medieval religious literature, and changes in indigenous vigilance through drone technology in the Amazon. In formats such as the History Club, which is aimed at schoolchildren, the research results are brought out into society.