Thwarting Terrorism

...What we may call Terrorism II has emerged in its full degeneracy...

...Marx would have warmly approved of the standard of living American pension funds offer retiring workers, but I doubt he would have called the system socialism...

...The chances of anything sensible being done by the United Nations are, of course, negligible...

...The Caribbean and the Barbary Coast were soon replete with pirate states welcoming any individual marauder, as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...

...But the imposition of values is not itself merely a matter of persuasion and the issuing of good ideas: it is equally a matter of Law--the firm and public enforcement of the laws which bear these values...

...This principle has been extended further...

...The Symbionese Liberation Army arose, one gathers, as the result of sociological lecturers being allowed to talk to violent criminals...

...A simple enough formula...

...This is one example of the important change for the worse to be seen between the terrorism of two or three generations ago and what we are used to today...

...Even more intolerable is the transmission of terrorist equipment in Libyan diplomatic bags...

...So, on the one hand, these surrenders entailed the sacrifice of others about immediately...

...And the fact that Jesuits are now not uncommonly found among terrorists representing the newer despotic tradition will not surprise people who remember how they played the same role in the Gunpowder Plot...

...The new wet "liberalism"--a Liberalism II to match Terrorism II--affected all our policies...

...In a recent letter to the editor of Pensions and Investment, the pcnsion fund trade journal, Drucker estimated the markct value of stocks owned by pension funds, at the end of 1975, to be about $150 billion...

...At any rate, the new mood among the Western governments was the direct result of the bold Israeli action...

...Again, in spite of various appeals by pilots' organizations, no one declared that any state accepting a hijacked aircraft would be automatically barred from international air communications...

...The government shot every captured IRA man for whom there was any evidence that he had borne arms or had a weapon...

...This is not to say that the more general political, or political-moral, arguments against the PLO are not tenable...

...It seems obvious that we aren't to believe that...

...But by the late 30s the IRA had degenerated to present-day methods--leaving bombs in suitcases to blow up anyone who happened to be passing...

...It is significant that some of these types try to give themselves a slight air of responsibility by joining up with nationalist groups with whom they" have no ethnic or other affinity--as with the all-purpose export-reject Japanese assassins employed by the Arabs, or the purely English Dr...

...Drucker contends that pension funds are becoming the dominant force in the capital economy, that they now own 35% of the market Adam Meyerson is managing editor o f The Alternative...

...First the IRA offered a truce: this was refused...

...In his supposed history of the future, The Shape of Things to Come, H.G...

...There is the thrilled admiration, traditionally common among well-coddled spinsters, for the bravery undoubtedly exhibited in some of these cases...

...In the terrorism field, this takes the form of moral cowardice in the face of any Third World manifestation whatever, even gunmen...

...Yet Drucker illuminates an important issue even as he exaggerates with his rhetoric...

...Its majori W has become so accustomed to supporting all anti-Western behavior up to and including terrorism, and being met only by the most polite and understanding demurrers (except for the brief and inexplicable intrusion 0fDaniel P. Moynihan) that they would receive any firm demands from our people with the astonishment of a man being bitten by a rabbit...

...These attitudes dating from the Catholic past are nowadays deployed-as in sixteenth-century England--against "bourgeois democracy," the parliamentary civic order, and the market economy...

...And apologetics about means and ends once more abound...

...If the PLO had merely assassinated Israeli officials, it would be difficult for even the Israeli authorities to condemn these actions on purely moral grounds--since they have themselves celebrated the assassination of British officials in Palestine...

...Nor is such a condition of things necessarily the product of endless centuries of civilization: it was written of Edwin of Northumberland, in the early seventh century, that under him " i f a woman with a new born babe then wished to walk across the land from sea to sea, she would come to no harm...

...It has taken decades for any serious sign that the West may have reached the level of intelligence needed to perform this political and moral equivalent of counting up to two on one's fingers...

...It is clearly true that a society in which the terrorists did not roam freely or gain support or excuses had different values from our own...

...above all it takes the form of the first reaction being not to make a decision but to find a basis for negotiation...

...There is, of course, an anti-civic strain in Roman Catholicism...

...As so often, a firm and uncompromising initiative clears the air, and gives a lead to weaker sisters...

...There is, of course, terrorism and terrorism...

...But what has been done to discourage or denounce this...

...One may hope this will occur (it would of course involve the replacement of The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 23 virtually all Western representanves)--but it can be no more than a hope...

...and firm international action against any sort of support of or collusion with terrorism--such are the two faces of an adequate policy...

...But on the other, it also guaranteed the further kidnapping of diplomats and the further release of terrorists throughout the world...

...All in all, in the world of 1970, as against the world of 1910, not only is a level of terrorism accepted which would have horrified and astonished our grandfathers, but a level of crime too...

...A recent article in Newsweek urges that a change in values is needed to remove the terrorists...

...The PLO, however, permitted itself indiscriminate mass murders and plane hijacking...

...And since, according to orthodox Marxist analysis, stock ownership amounts to ownership of the means of production, Drucker argues that America is inadvertently but rapidly becoming socialist--not in the modern sense of the state managing the economy, but in the classical Marxist sense of the workers collectively owning the means of production...

...To produce any real change would take a determined and constant effort over quite a period...

...But can the rest of the civilized world, which has let things slide so badly, really pull itself together and follow this fine example...

...Fraser in Australia, Mrs...

...Of course, one important factor was that the moderates then in charge in Dublin were themselves men of equal ruthlessness...

...But of course, it needs courage too: not much, but more than has yet been available in capitals other than Jerusalem...

...Wells specifically posits a wave of terrorism, in the form of assassinations, against his World State, and makes it clear that they are to be coped with by ruthless executions which, some years and thousands of lives later, eventually eliminate the problem...

...In Guatemala, West Germany showed an even more absurd lack of a sense of value: for when the Guatemalans would not launch assorted killers into their society in order to save a German, and the German was killed by his captors, the Germans blamed the murder on--guess who--the Guatemalan government, and withdrew their diplomats...

...So the share of pension funds was somewhere around 20.9...

...The American attitude later hardened...

...This is now, of course, regular practice in all terrorist circles...

...With his extraordinary breadth of interests-ranging from Kierkegaard to Japanese art, from jurisprudence to the psychological value of cosmetics--he can put together seemingly unconnected ideas and call our attention to phenomena that elude more rigorous specialists...

...The criminals, who had previously thought of themselves as humdrum murderers and rapists, were told that they represented a valid protest against society...

...Rose Dugdale who started dropping dynamite in milk churns on the Irish border...

...But it would at least have been some slight concession to decency...

...The sociologists, who had hitherto confined themselves to talking drivel, found a way of transferring from" the world of hypothetical to that of real violence...

...What we have seen is the lack of firm, clear, and self-confident political will--the same problem that bedevils the West in every sphere...

...According to the Securities & Exchange Commission, the market value of all listed stocks at the end of 1975 was $718.3 bJ, t~,ion...

...In the Irish Civil War, when the IRA shot a member of the Free State government, four IRA men in jail were immediately executed in reprisal...

...In the first place, Drucker overstates the role of pension funds in the stock markets: rather than the 35% figure he gives, the funds own slightly over 20% of the market value of listed stocks.* Far more important, Drucker misleads his readers when he talks of workers owning the American economy...

...If not--and the answer is indeed not--he is in the position of some Chicagoan so revolted by the excesses of the O'Banion Gang that he joins AI Capone...

...Part of our present troubles with terrorism started when in 1969 the United States put pressure on Brazil to release a group of imprisoned terrorists in order to save the life of a kidnapped diplomat...

...George F. Will has pointed out that such actions as that at Entebbe do not stop people hating the Israelis...

...Whatever the form of terrorism, it is at least a principle of international law that countries do not arm and equip terrorist bands operating in the countries of "friendly" states...

...This is at least partly because the diplomatic communities are no longer small bodies of skilled men fully integrated into their country's political machine and carrying out the policies and orders of the executive, but an enormous amorphous jelly with interests and attitudes of its own...

...In these and similar cases, no one seems even to have gone through the form of demanding a parole from the terrorists, that they would not continue such activity...

...The combination does not seem very prevalent at present...

...But in the vast majority of cases, it is the employers, whether corporate or government, who manage the pension funds--either directly or, more commonly, through financial intermediaries such as bank trust departments...

...Overdramatize Drucker has certainly done in The Unseen Revolution...

...government's suppression of the IRA in the 20s is not a model which can necessarily be applied everywhere...

...It was also a strike, and again virtually the first of its kind, against one of those pirate states which conspire and collude with terrorism...

...If the civilized nations can indeed get together and produce an anti-terrorist charter, with an agreement on sanctions against offending organizations and states, prospects are better...

...Terrorism is a fairly broad concept, going beyond mere assassination...

...By this criterion the basic question is that of the political order...

...value of equities listed on American stock exchanges, and that in ten years they will own a majority of equity, in addition to holding a major proportion of corporate bonds and debentures...

...We have seen little serious effort to restore it, even on the part of those nations still having the wish for, and some sort of power to try to enforce, international order...

...The Israeli operation at Entebbe Airport on July 4 marked, or at least so one may hope, an epoch...

...Talentless and opportunityless rich women (and effeminate men), rather pathetica!ly seeking kicks, are common to all extremist movements...

...As so often with political matters there are gradations, rather than any clear-cut boundary, between the legitimate, the arguable, and the totally inadmissible...

...The People's Will terrorists of nineteenthcentury Russia, the assassins of the Emperor Alexander II, issued a statement strongly condemning assassinations in the United States, on the grounds that the Americans had, as they themselves had not, other means of political struggle...

...Employees therefore have no say about where to invest their pension assets or how to vote at stockholder meetings...

...Similarly, pension funds may have little to do with "socialism," but they are new institutional arrangements with a host of accom"I used Drucker's own figures to reach my calculation...

...Pension funds may control only 20% instead of 35% of equity, but they have grown dramatically all the same--in 1956 they owned only 3 %--and all indications suggest that their share of the market will expand much further...

...BOOK REVIEW The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America by Peter F. Drucker / Harper & Row / $8.95 Adam Meyerson Forget the central thesis of this book, but read it for its insights...

...The deformation professionelIe of Western representatives at the UN has often been noted, with its absurd conviction that to secure one more Afro-Asian vote on some minor motion is more important than to defend their own country's principles...

...The target is no longer the enemy, but simply the achievement of the maximum death and destruction of anyone at all, so that we get Japanese gunmen mowing down Puerto Rican nuns at Tel Aviv airport...

...On the one hand, widespread terrorism merges into something resembling guerilla warfare...

...Pension funds are set up for the sake of workers, who are therefore "beneficial owners...

...The interception at the Amsterdam airport of a Czechoslovak plane carrying a massive Soviet arms delivery to the IRA marked a gross, but too typical breach of this rule...

...Thus, the Western governments involved thought in terms of ransoming the lives of their own people with the lives of locals who would fall to the bullets of the newly released gunmen--a morally squalid procedure if ever there was one...

...Washington and Westminster exude a miasma of "enlightenment...

...But there are many hurdles yet...

...The leading figure, Kevin O'Higgins--himself of course always risking death, and eventually to perish at the hand of an assassin--is described by Yeats as "a soul incapable of remorse or rest...

...There seems little doubt that the majorities in the West would heartedly approve...

...In a complete autocracy, assassination is the only weapon available to an opposition...

...As has often been pointed out, a strong argument in favor of the death penalty for terrorists is that once they are shot no one is going to kidnap innocent strangers as blackmail for their release...

...Goebbels showed great moral and physical courage in July 1944: and so what...

...It was a remarkable change to find the United States, France, and Germany openly congratulating the Israelis, instead of retreating into the usual faults-on-both-sides, Third World-appeasement, United Nations flummery...

...The pretentious and illiterate name of the organization must of course be blamed on the '.'educated" section...

...Count von Stauffenberg would be hard to fault morally for trying to kill Hitler...

...International diplomacy in general long since reached a stage where no one takes a firm line at all about anything...

...It is the sort of bravery of which Pushkin says, in a fairly similar context, that those exhibiting it are men "who care little for their own skins and less for those of others...

...Let us repeat that, as in every other sphere, there seems no doubt that Western public opinion has swung away from appeasementminded liberalism...

...If we put aside farming, Drucker writes, a larger sector of the American economy is owned today by the American worker through his investment agent, the pension fund, than Allende in Chile had brought under government ownership to make Chile a "Socialist country," than Castro's Cuba has actually nationalized, or than had been nationalized in Hungary or Poland at the height of Stalinism...

...Valdemar"--intellectually and morally dead, but preserving an appearance of life in an unnatural fashion, pending collapse the more total for that...

...Peter Drucker is not only one of the business world's most respected management consultants...

...In fact even at its own level it is a contemptible lapse...

...But the cycle had started, and the cost was a number of lives of hostages kidnapped on the assumption that they would, or might, have been exchangeable for imprisoned gunmen...

...Precisely as terrorism became more vicious, it gained increasing support from "liberals"--just as (as George Orwell pointed out) the Soviet Union only became popular with Western intellectuals at the height of the Stalin Terror...

...If he had any real sense of responsibility, he would make the effort to discover whether or no the rule of leftwing revolutionaries which he is in effect attempting to install has anywhere actually made the lot of the poor any better...

...The view that the criminal isn't really to blame, or has something to be said on his side, or at any rate must not be repressed with any great rigor, very much resembles the "liberal" view of terrorists...

...Before the first war a couple of girls could bicycle alone from the Pyrenees to the Baltic with almost no risk of molestation...

...Your people's priest who sees the Brazilian poor suffering and blames the Brazilian rich, goes out, gets a machine-pistol or a flame thrower or so, and joins a group of guerillas dedicated to overthrowing the system...

...Those who have breathed it, like glue-sniffers, find it very hard to return to sanity...

...This ambiguous--to put it mildly--attitude to terrorism on the part of some liberals is to be seen as part of a fairly recent corruption of the mind which has left "liberalism" in the condition of Poe's "M...

...And liberal and diplomatic voices have more recently been raised in favor of a softer policy--voices which may yet encourage terrorists with the hope of possible success in such projects...

...24 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976...

...For this squeamishness on such matters was not found in a previous generation of "progressives...

...And then it announced the end of armed operations...

...The priest, moreover, is also supporting political elements who have as one major aim the extirpation of Christianity...

...Thatcher in Great Britain, one hopes the next President of the United States--who have clear and uncluttered views and who may be able to enforce them...

...Even at this vile level, one can still admit a difference between a nationalist political movement with, by prevailing standards, a 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator October I976 genuine grievance, and the merely self-indulgent rich girl in her gelignite tantrums, such self-appointed messiahs as the BaaderMeinhof gang...

...And this applies not merely to the terrorists with some more or less genuine grievance, but even to the semi-lunatic Weathermen--"fine young people" or rather "fine young people really...

...The world order and community of nations which to some extent existed during the "International Anarchy" at the beginning of the century, has naturally not survived into an era when we have a full-blown United Nations with every kind of international charter...

...Nothing of the sort...

...Are we to believe that the vast increases in political terror and in common crime are totally unconnected...

...Whether these rather larger states will themselves ever dare actually to imitate the Israelis in similar circumstances is another matter...

...cancer specialists being blown up in the streets of London...

...The encouraging noises made at the recent EEC meeting and elsewhere may lead to something...

...Nor did his liberal readers complain...

...There is no reason why this should make for serious difficulties except in a junior high school debating society...

...There is the curious idea that somehow "diplomacy" is always able to reach a compromise satisfactory to all...

...The "revolution" he refers to is the remarkable growth in recent years of employee pension funds, particularly corporate funds established as fringe benefits for workers, but also pension plans for federal, state, and local employees, uniondominated funds, and most recently-thanks to liberalized tax benefits--individualized retirement accounts...

...But, he rightly adds, it is better to be hated than despised, and this is a point the Western powers should consider with some care...

...Not only was it the first occasion in which a major hijack operation was totally thwarted and its perpetrators destroyed...

...At the cost of seventy-odd executions the movement was crushed...

...There are politicians--Mr...

...The Irish Robert Conquest, Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is a poet and author of many books, including The Great Terror, one of the major works on Stalin's enormities...

...But how long will it take for this good sense to penetrate to the political leadership...

...He is also--though his analyses are often wrong--one of the most imaginative and thoughtful social critics of our time...

...Though English is his second language (he was born in Vienna and emigrated from Nazi Germany), he writes with a masterful facility that sometimes tends to overdramatize, but never fails to stimulate...

...However, it is worth recalling its methods...

...Most pension plans guarantee their beneficiaries annuities specified by collective bargaining, and employers must provide the pensions they promise no matter how well the pension fund is invested...

...In no time, each had been infected with the vices of the other...

...What appears to be needed is a ruthless moderate...

...Yet it has always been a principle, or at least the practice, in international affairs that states have been entitled to land troops in foreign territories for the limited purpose of saving their own nationals...

...Rigorous anti-terrorist laws, ruthlessly enforced, within the civilized countries...

...This would, no doubt, have been worth little: for, of course, the higher morality of the sacred struggle must take precedence over mere oaths and guarantees...

...The Irish Republicans from the nineteenth century to the early 20s generally limited themselves to assassinating British political and military leaders and the British soldiery...

...We are told that the Nazis during their rise to power had a strong and active following among thwarted society women...

...Among churchmen, too, spiritual arrogance has led to basic intellectual and logical error...