The events that took place in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia, Russia during the early part of September 2004 can hardly have escaped the attention of anyone within the developed world. A large and well-organized group of terrorists, bandits, freedom fighters, rebels (call them whatever your ideology demands) from Chechnya occupied a major school complex during the first week of the new school term. Their issues and thus their motivation stemmed from accumulated grievances concerning the Russian treatment of their state and a long catalogue of historical injuries and political injustices compounded by invasion, large-scale loss of life and the destruction of their homeland and property. The Chechens seek independence and their fundamentalist wing expresses this nationalist longing through the random and localized oppression of others. Middle school No. 1 was not their first target and we must suppose that it will not be their last. The terrorists' weaponry is, at one level, propaganda but of course, the realm of ideas, when frustrated, often speaks through force. As Mao Tse-tung once wrote, 'political power comes from the barrel of a gun'. In this instance, the Chechen rebels demonstrated their intent with the support of heavy-duty armaments comprising rocket-launchers, rapid-fire field weapons and quantities of high explosives and munitions -much of which appears to have been secreted within the school buildings in advance of the attack and occupation. The propaganda will be our topic.The strategy of this occupation, as with many previous related incidents, was hostage-taking but on a grand scale both quantitatively and qualitatively. The hostages amounted to in excess of 1200 individuals: some were teachers and parents; however, the overwhelming body of this unfortunate group were children, and relatively young children at that. The symbolic combination and juxtapositioning of such destructive power with such powerlessness, of malign intent with such random innocence and manifest vulnerability provided a dramatic encoding of social and moral narratives that burst through the international media both claiming and maintaining headline status. This is not to suggest, as did Baudrillard in relation to the Gulf War, that the whole chain of events took place within the television. Far from it, the tragic litany of brutality and destruction that was to unfold was 5 EDITORIAL A new death of childhood Childhood
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