TERRORISM. – The term denotes a method of political action based on the unconditional use of violence, without regard for any moral law or social or humanitarian principle, with the aim either of shaking and subverting an existing order through terror or of consolidating another order, generally imposed as a result of a successful revolutionary movement. An isolated act of violence, however heinous, or a sudden degeneration of popular uprising accompanied by inhuman and destructive procedures, does not constitute terrorism; rather, terrorism is to be seen as a systematic struggle that rests on the fanatical cult of force and employs it as a means of removing obstacles to the realization of a given political design.
Terrorism is therefore distinct from intimidation,
in which threats alone are used to exert moral pressure on minds and thus to bend them docilely to one’s own ends without resorting to the violent means that, by contrast, are adopted as standard practice in the terrorist system. For the same reason, it is necessary not to confuse the act that is commonly called terrorist with terrorism proper. The former occurs in any procedure against the life and property of private individuals or the public and may take place without any connection to a political movement or faction, whereas the latter is always connected with such movements and is not exhausted in a single criminal enterprise but becomes a program and ideology of violence, a method of struggle between social groups, one of which seeks to overthrow the dominance of the other or to suppress what it deems to be its adversary. Thus, in the procedures of terrorist currents, a reversal of fronts occurs: those that once fought against the true or supposed dispositions of the ruling class, once they have achieved success, turn the same violence against the defeated party or against anyone suspected of opposition to the new regime, with a disposition that is more ferocious and more generally contemptuous of human values.
Terrorism can accordingly be divided into revolutionary terrorism and governmental terrorism.
I. REVOLUTIONARY TERRORISM
Revolutionary terrorism, accepted as a program of action by generally small groups of fanatics prepared to dare anything, fights against the established order outside all law, with the aim of seizing control of the public sphere or at least of preparing the revolution by intimidating the government, whose leaders are threatened with death and sought out for elimination through criminal attacks. By isolating these figures through the fear they inspire in the people, the terrorists seek to demonstrate to the populace the precariousness of the regime and the existence of an organized and powerful opposition operating in the shadows and striking at the opportune moment.Revolutionary terrorism may be regarded as one of the principal aspects of the anarchist conception, with which it has been historically linked.
The apologies for violence by Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, who saw in it the only suitable means for achieving radical social change, exerted considerable influence on European anarchism and particularly on the soul of Russian youth. Developed and theorized by Kropotkin and other revolutionaries, it took on the aspect of a nihilistic conception at war with all the so-called conventional lies of civil society, as Kropotkin himself defined them. In this unhealthy hotbed of hatred, these fanatics were inflamed who lashed Europe with futile and universally condemned attacks on sovereigns and government officials. Yet the broadest historical implementation of the terrorist system occurred in Russia in the movement that, from 1878, took its name from the title of its clandestine newspaper, *Land and Freedom*. One of its adherents, Vera Zasulich, in January of that same year, shot at the police chief Trepov, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. Through the initiative of its followers, the head of the secret police fell victim, and in 1881 the same Tsar Alexander II was killed by a bomb thrown by the revolutionary Grinevitsky, after his comrades had succeeded in an attack on the royal train and in placing a mine in the dining hall of the Winter Palace.
The spirit and aims of this extremist association and the means it employed, like those of revolutionary terrorism in general, may be gathered from the program it published in 1879. In it, it was stated that terrorist activity, which consists in destroying the most dangerous persons in the government, in defending the party against espionage, and in punishing the authors of the most notable cases of violence and arbitrariness belonging to the government or 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 their confidence in the success of the cause, and finally to form and direct the forces suited to continue the struggle.
II. GOVERNMENTAL TERRORISM
Governmental terrorism replaces law and the rule of right 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 firm roots in the direction of the state, the precariousness of social conditions resulting from the revolution itself, and the dread of falling victim to a possible victorious reaction drive almost inevitably those already accustomed to violence to adopt the same means and employ it as a system of government. Its characteristics are the total suspension of law, the uncertainty of personal security, the rule of arbitrariness, and a ferocious and sanguinary disposition. Beneath a veneer of legality, all crimes become permissible. A mere suspicion not validated by evidence or membership in a social class are sufficient grounds for sending a citizen to death or making him disappear into prisons, exile, torture, and confiscation of property. Governmental terrorism is not a simple abuse of power but is itself a system that divides the people into two classes, the dominant and the dominated, upon which the former exercises despotic oppression.These distinctive features are found in the later period of the French Revolution, which spans from the end of May 1793 to 27 July of the following year and is designated by the epithet “period of the Terror.” During the brief rule of the bloodthirsty despot Robespierre, thousands of citizens met their death simply because they belonged to the aristocratic classes or the clergy, or merely because they were suspected of hostility to the new regime. The spirit of this government of terror is revealed in all its tragic reality by the decree passed by the Convention on 10 June, in which eleven categories of enemies of the people were listed, to be condemned without defense or trial on the mere presumption of guilt.
Even more sanguinary than the foregoing is the government of terror established by the Red Revolution after its victory over the old Tsarist regime. As early as 1918, thousands of people were slaughtered following an attempt on Lenin’s life. In 1920–21 in the Crimea, there occurred the collective massacre of all White officers and of anyone suspected of having aided them. From 1920 to 1934 the system was unleashed against the peasants, resisting collectivization, with twenty or thirty daily executions, and it still weighs heavily upon the Russian people today through the pervasive police regime and the periodic purges against those suspected of ideological deviation from the dominant party’s line. To grasp its character once more, one may consider the instructions issued as early as 1918 by the Čeka to its tribunals. These were not to trouble themselves with finding specific charges to prove that the accused had risen in word or deed against the Soviet Union, but were to regard as their primary duty to inquire into the class to which he belonged, his origins, his education, and his profession. These questions were to decide the fate of the accused. “In this,” concluded the instructions, “lies the meaning and essence of Red Terror.”
III. TERRORISM IN THE FIELD OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Terrorism, as a system of aggression regardless of any moral law, justice, or humanity, spread during the last world war into the field of international relations. Having cast aside all positive and natural norms governing the conduct of hostilities, the belligerent states no longer respected any limits in the use of offensive means. The so-called total war, theoretically endorsed by the apologists of violence, is nothing other than genuine terrorism, inspired by the same methods as revolutionary and governmental terror and aimed at the same goals: to break physically and morally the resistance of the adversary by spreading terror through the indiscriminate use of the most powerful means of destruction.The moral judgment of terrorism, in whatever sector of social life it exerts its activity—whether domestic or international—is implicit in its very description. Technically, moreover, as has been acknowledged by several revolutionaries, it does not serve the purposes for which it is intended: regimes do not fall as a result of terrorist acts, nor does the people rise up in response; on the contrary, they react against such acts unless other causes intervene to bring about political change through their own action.