TERRORISMO. — The term denotes a method of political action founded on the unrestrained use of violence, without regard for any moral law or any social or humanitarian principle, with the aim either of shaking and subverting an existing order through terror or of consolidating some other order, generally imposed as a consequence of a successful revolutionary movement. An isolated act of violence, however atrocious, or a sudden degeneration of a popular uprising accompanied by inhuman and destructive procedures, does not constitute terrorism; rather, terrorism is to be recognized as a system of struggle founded on the fanatical cult of force, which it employs as a means of suppressing the obstacles opposed to the implementation of a given political design.
Terrorism is thereby distinguished from intimidation,
in which threats alone are used to exert moral pressure on people’s minds and thus bend them docilely to one’s purposes, without, however, resorting to violent means, which are instead adopted as the ordinary practice of the terrorist system. For the same reason, one must not confuse the act usually defined as terrorist with terrorism properly so called. The former occurs in any proceeding directed against private and public life and property and may take place without any connection whatever with a political movement or faction, whereas the latter is always connected with them, nor is it exhausted in a criminal enterprise; rather, it becomes a program and ideology of violence, a method of struggle between social groups, one of which seeks to overthrow the domination of the other or to suppress the group regarded as its adversary. Thus, in the actions of terrorist currents, a reversal of positions takes place: those that previously fought against the real or supposed despotism of the ruling class, once they have achieved success, direct the same violence against the defeated party or against anyone suspected of hostility to the new regime, with a despotism more ferocious and more general in its contempt for human values.
Terrorism may consequently be divided into revolutionary terrorism and government terrorism.
I. REVOLUTIONARY TERRORISM
Revolutionary terrorism, adopted as a program of action by generally small groups of fanatics prepared to dare anything, combats the established order outside all law, with the aim of seizing control of public affairs, or at least of preparing the revolution, by intimidating the government, whose representatives it threatens with death and seeks to eliminate through criminal attacks, isolating them by means of the fear aroused among the people. Through its actions, it wishes to demonstrate to the people the precariousness of the regime and the existence of an organized and powerful opposition, which operates in the shadows and in secrecy and knows how to strike at the opportune moment.Revolutionary terrorism may be regarded as one of the principal aspects of the anarchist conception, with which it has historically been associated.
The apologies for violence by Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, who regarded it as the sole appropriate means of achieving radical social changes, had a considerable influence on European anarchism and particularly on the soul of Russian youth. Developed and theorized by Kropotkin and other revolutionaries, they assumed the character of a nihilistic conception, at war with all the so-called conventional lies of civil society, as Kropotkin himself called them. In this unhealthy hotbed of hatred, those fanatics were nurtured who afflicted Europe with attacks—useless and condemned by ordinary common sense—against sovereigns and men of government. But the broadest historical implementation of the terrorist system occurred in Russia, in the movement which, from 1878, took its name from that of its clandestine newspaper, «Land and Freedom». One of its members, Vera Zasulic, in January of that same year, fired at the chief of police, Trepov, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. On the initiative of its followers, the head of the espionage service fell victim; and in 1881, the tsar Alexander II himself was killed by a bomb thrown by the revolutionary Grunevitskij, after an attack on the royal train and the placing of a mine in the dining room of the Winter Palace had both proved unsuccessful.
The spirit and aims of this extremist association, and the means it employed, as well as those of revolutionary terrorism in general, can be gathered from the program it published in 1879. It stated that terrorist activity, which consists in destroying the most dangerous persons in the government, protecting the party against espionage, and punishing the perpetrators of the most notable acts of violence and arbitrariness belonging to the government or administration, has the purpose of shaking the prestige of power, demonstrating the possibility of struggling against it, and thus stimulating the revolutionary spirit of the people
and their confidence in the success of the cause, and finally of forming and directing the forces suited to continuing the struggle.
II. GOVERNMENT TERRORISM
Government terrorism replaces law and the rule of law in the administration of the State, as a method of crushing any real or presumed opposition, particularly in regimes of revolutionary origin. The fear of not having firmly established roots in the direction of the State, the precariousness of social conditions resulting from the revolution itself, the fear of falling victim to a possible victorious reaction, almost inevitably lead minds already accustomed to violence to use the same means, adopting it as a system of government. Its characteristics are the total eclipse of law, the uncertainty of personal security, the rule of arbitrariness, and fierce and bloody despotism. Under a legal cloak, every crime becomes lawful. A single suspicion unsupported by evidence, or membership in a social class, are sufficient grounds for putting to death or causing to disappear in prisons, banishing, torturing, and despoiling of their property any citizen whatsoever. Government terrorism is not a mere abuse of power, but is itself a system that divides the people into two classes, the ruling and the ruled, upon which the former exercises despotic oppression.These distinctive features are found in the most troubled 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 name of the “period of terror.” During the brief rule of the bloody despot Robespierre, thousands of citizens met their death solely because they belonged to the aristocratic classes and the clergy, or simply because they were suspected of hostility to the new regime. The spirit of government terrorism appears 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 defence or trial, for the mere reason of a presumption of guilt. Still bloodier than the preceding was the government terrorism established by the Red Revolution after its victory over the old tsarist regime. As early as 1918, thousands of persons were massacred following an attempt on Lenin’s life. In 1920-21, in the Crimea, there occurred the collective massacre of all White officers and of all those suspected of having aided 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, through the pervasive police regime and the periodic purges against those suspected of deviationism from the ideologies of the ruling party. To grasp its character once more, one may consider the instructions which, as early as 1918, the Čeka issued to the courts. These were not to delay in seeking certain charges in order to demonstrate that the accused had risen in word and deed against the Soviet Union, but were to regard it as their foremost duty to ask to what class he belonged, what his origin was, what education he possessed, and what profession he practised. These questions were to decide the fate of the accused. In this, “the instructions concluded, consists the meaning and essence of Red terrorism.
III. TERRORISM IN THE FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Terrorism, as a system of attack heedless of every moral law and of justice and humanity, extended during the last world war into the field of international relations. Having overstepped all positive and natural norms governing the conduct of hostilities, the belligerent States no longer respected any limit in the use of means of attack. So-called total war, theoretically approved by the apologists of violence, is nothing other than genuine terrorism,
The moral assessment of terrorism, in whatever sphere of social life it may carry on its activity, domestic or international, is implicit in its description. Technically, moreover, as has been acknowledged by several revolutionaries, it does not serve the ends toward which it would be directed: regimes do not fall as a result of terrorist acts, nor are the people stirred; rather, they react against them, unless other causes intervene to bring about political changes through their action.
BIRL.: H. Wallon, La terreur: études critiques sur l'histoire de France, Parigi 1881; S. M. Kravchinski, La Russia sotterranea, Milano 1896; K. Diehle, Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus und Anarchismus, Jena 1922; V. MALANKARESI, Histoire du terrorisme russe 1886-1916, Parigi 1930; J. Steiberg, Gewalt und Terror in der Revolution, Berlino 1931; G. Maranini, Classe e Stato nella Rivoluzione Francese, Perugia 1935; W. H. Chamberlin, L'età del ferro della Russia, Torino 1937; Id., Storia della Rivoluzione russa, I, ivi 1941; V. KRAKÓW, Ho scelto la libertà, Milano 1948. For terror in the French Revolution, see the well-known general works of Thiers, Taine, Mathiez, and Sorel. Antonio Messineo