Terrorism

TERRORISM. - The term denotes a method of political action founded on the unconditional use of violence, without regard for any moral law, nor for any social or humanitarian principle, with the intent either of shaking and subverting an existing order through terror or of consolidating some other order, generally imposed as a consequence of a revolutionary movement crowned with success. An isolated act of violence, even if heinous, a sudden degeneration of a popular uprising, accompanied by inhuman and destructive proceedings, do not constitute terrorism, in which rather a system of struggle is to be discerned, one that rests on the fanatical cult of force, and this it employs as a means to suppress the obstacles that stand in the way of the realization of a given political design.

Terrorism for that very reason is distinguished from intimidation, in which only threats are used, in order to exert a moral pressure on minds and thus bend them docilely to one's own aims, without however resorting to violent means, adopted instead as ordinary practice by the terrorist system. For the same reason one must not confuse the act, which is usually customarily defined as terrorist, with terrorism properly so called. The first occurs in any proceeding against the life and the private and public goods and can take place without any connection to a political movement or faction, whereas the second is always connected with these, nor is it exhausted in a criminal enterprise, but becomes a program and an ideology of violence, a method of struggle between social groups, one of which tends to overthrow the dominion of the other or to suppress the one held to be an adversary. Thus there occurs in the proceedings of terrorist currents a reversal of front: those that previously fought against the true or supposed despotism of the dominant class, once success is obtained, turn the same violence against the defeated party or against anyone suspected of aversion to the new regime, with a despotism more ferocious and more general in its contempt for human values.

Terrorism can consequently be divided into revolutionary terrorism and governmental terrorism.

I. REVOLUTIONARY TERRORISM

Revolutionary T., accepted as a program of action by generally small groups of fanatics ready to dare anything, fights against the established order outside all law, with the aim of seizing the state, or at least of preparing the revolution, by intimidating the government, whose leading figures it threatens with death and seeks to eliminate through criminal attacks, isolating them by the fear aroused in the people, to whom it wishes by its acts to demonstrate the precariousness of the regime and the existence of an organized and powerful opposition, which operates in shadow and mystery and knows how to strike at the opportune moment.

Revolutionary T. can be considered as one of the principal aspects of the anarchist conception, with which it has been historically joined.

The apologies for violence of Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, who saw in it the only means suited to obtaining radical social changes, had a considerable influence on European anarchism and particularly on the soul of Russian youth. Developed and theorized by Kropotkin and by other revolutionaries, they took on the aspect of a nihilistic conception, at war with all the so-called conventional lies of civil society, as Kropotkin himself came to define them. In this unhealthy hotbed of hatred were kindled those fanatics who have afflicted Europe with attacks, useless and condemned by common sense, against sovereigns and men of government. But the widest historical realization of the terrorist system occurred in Russia, in the movement which from 1878, from the title of its clandestine newspaper, took the name of "Land and Liberty." One of its adherents, Vera Zasulich, in January of the same year, fired at the chief of police, Trepov, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. Through the initiative of its followers, the head of the espionage service fell victim and, in 1881, the tsar Alexander II himself, killed by a bomb thrown by the revolutionary Grinevitsky, after an attempt on the royal train and the placing of a mine in the dining room of the Winter Palace had proved vain.

The spirit and the aims of this extremist association and the means employed by it, as of revolutionary T. in general, can be gathered from the program published by it in 1879. In it, it was said that terrorist activity, which consists in destroying the most dangerous persons of the government, in defending the party against espionage, in punishing the authors of the most notable cases of violence and arbitrariness, belonging to the government or to the administration, has as its aim to shake the prestige of power, to demonstrate the possibility of struggle against it, and thus to stimulate the revolutionary spirit of the people and its confidence in the success of the cause, and finally to form and to orient the forces suited to continuing the struggle.

II. GOVERNMENT TERRORISM

The t. of government replaces law and the rule of law in the administration of the State, as a method for crushing any real or presumed opposition, particularly in regimes of revolutionary origin. The fear of not having struck firm roots in the direction of the State, the precariousness of social conditions, a consequence of the revolution itself, the fear of falling victim to a possible victorious reaction almost inevitably drag minds already accustomed to violence toward the use of the same means, adopting it as a system of government. Its characteristics are the total eclipse of law, the uncertainty of personal security, the dominion of arbitrariness, a fierce and bloodthirsty despotism. Under a legal cloak all misdeeds become lawful. A single suspicion unconfirmed by evidence, or membership in a social class, are sufficient causes to send any citizen to death or to make him disappear into prisons, to banish, torture and strip him of his goods. The t. of government is not a simple abuse of power, but is itself also a system, which divides the people into two classes, the dominant and the dominated, over which the former exercises a despotic oppression.

These distinctive notes are found in the most turbulent period of the French Revolution, which runs from the end of May 1793 to 27 July of the following year and is designated by the appellation "period of terror". During the brief dominion of the bloodthirsty despot Robespierre, thousands of citizens met their death, merely because they belonged to the aristocratic classes and the clergy or simply because they were suspected of being hostile to the new regime. The spirit of the t. of government shines through in all its tragic reality in the decree approved by the Convention on 10 June, in which eleven categories of enemies of the people were listed, to be condemned without defense or trial, for the simple reason of a presumption of guilt. Even more bloody than the preceding one is the t. of government established by the Red Revolution, after its victory over the old tsarist regime. Already in 1918 thousands of people were slaughtered, after an attempt on Lenin's life. In 1920-21 in Crimea there occurred the collective massacre of all the White officers and of all those suspected of having favored them. From 1929 to 1934 the system was unleashed against the peasants, reluctant to accept collectivization, with twenty or thirty capital executions daily, and even today it continues to weigh upon the Russian people, with its capillary police regime and periodic purges against all those suspected of deviationism from the ideologies of the dominant party. To grasp its character once again, the instructions that the Cheka imparted to the tribunals from 1918 onward may serve. These were not to linger over the search for specific charges, to demonstrate that the accused had risen up in words and deeds against the Soviet Union, but were to consider it their first duty to ask to which class he belonged, of what origin he was, what education he possessed, what profession he exercised. These questions were to decide the fate of the accused. In this consists, "the instructions concluded, the meaning and the essence of the red t."

III. TERRORISM IN THE FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

T., as a system of offense, heedless of any moral law, of justice and of humanity, extended, during the last world war, to the field of international relations. Once all positive and natural norms on the conduct of hostilities had been overstepped, the belligerent States no longer respected any limit in the use of the means of offense. So-called total war, theoretically approved by the apologists of violence, is nothing other than a true and proper t., which aspires to the same methods as the revolutionary and governmental kind and tends toward the same goals: to break physically and morally the resistance of the adversary, spreading terror through the indiscriminate use of the most powerful means of destruction.

The moral evaluation of t., in whatever sector of social life it may manifest its activity, domestic or international, is implicit in its description. Technically, moreover, as has been recognized by several revolutionaries, it does not serve the purposes to which it would be directed: neither do regimes fall as a result of terrorist acts, nor is the people stirred; on the contrary, it reacts against them, if other causes do not intervene to produce political changes through their action.

Antonio Messineo