The New World Disorder
Manor, F.S.
"The New World Disorder" were fighting your way past five city gates and six generals. Beggars, male and female, old and young, blocked you off front and back. Some would even tug at your clothes to attract attention....
...and this is exactly what he did...
...We expect democratic order to prevail everywhere in the world but fail to oppose those bent on its destruction...
...against malefactors like those from a Canadian border town who allegedly shipped conventional weapons to South Africa...
...And there is perhaps an ironic reciprocity to the weakness shown among Western powers: Washington bans the sale of weapons to the British police forces in Northern Ireland because Washington has to be neutral in the battle between the Irish terrorists and the forces of law and order...
...There Johnson described as a part of terrorists' strategy their demands "for official inquiries, or international inquiries . . . . We find governments failing, time and again, in their duty to persuade the public--and this is the real heart of the matter--that terrorists are not misguided politicians...
...Indeed, we were very proud of the commercial side of the venture: Before Afghanistan, many American politicians sold the idea of detente on the basis of its economic reward, never mind the political consequences_9 At the same time, here at home, money was, and is, freely expended to mobilize the police forces of two countries, Canada and the United States...
...They had spies within the highest reaches of Venetian government, and, according to the historian Alberto Tenenti, did not fail "to revenge themselves savagely on those who had betrayed them...
...Modern political philosophies now giving force to the agents of terrorism and intensity to their threat to the democratic West have valid historical precedents, historical analogies by which we may see just how serious the consequences of terrorism may be...
...But even short of that, the pirates' depredations caused periodical food shortages in Rome and disrupted communications, just as today's hijackings so often disrupt the ease and safety of air travel...
...In small restaurants or at food stalls, whenever an overseas Chinese or someone from Hong Kong or Macao is spotted eating, he is surrounded by little beggars demanding money and food...
...In 78 B.C...
...We still refuse to recognize the axiom that there can be no common ground between democracy, however imperfect, and Marxist tyranny...
...Piracy, for instance, was a kind of terrorism, combining as it did criminal gain and political power, just as today's terrorism does...
...I presume that in Russian it makes sense...
...We have forgotten the lessons of such "compromises" between democracies and Marxists as were attempted at the end of the war in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans...
...But this is not the case...
...The terror was such that Dalmatian subjects [of Venice] preferred to incur the rigors of Venetian law rather than expose themselves to the reprisals of these plunderers...
...The Carter administration is merely reaping the fruits sown by a State Department which has appeased terrorists of every kind, whether politically "incorporated" or not...
...Thus, at the United Nations, where such predilections flourish, no majority can be found that will introduce effective measures against it...
...The result was, it was no one's affair...
...A certain mystique of violence pervaded this extraordinary society, and here one cannot but recall Frantz Fanon's preaching that violence is psychologically beneficial...
...Yet many influential Venetians were so blinded by terrorist propaganda that they argued that the pirates were as useful to Venice as they were to Austria, Venice's chief foe...
...More important, we ignore that there is a common ground between Marxist tyranny and international terrorism...
...Something similar is behind the way the West refused to recognize the results of a democratic election in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia when a majority of citizens elected Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was proWestern_9 Every Western country, with Washington in the lead, insisted that the F.S...
...Were not the Sandinistas officially favored as fine upstanding democrats...
...All of which is symptomatic of a disposition that has led the West to appease international terrorists of all kinds, especially those on whom we confer some political legitimacy by regarding as real their bogus claims to national recognition, or, as in the case of Iran, to national retribution...
...The departments of overseas Chinese and foreign affairs said they were not authorized to handle such matters...
...Thus, in the first nine months of 1979 there were 2,662 terrorist attacks in the Western world...
...There was even a "new breed of presentably dressed highclass beggars" who would "suavely overtake you, walk with you shoulder to shoulder, and then whisper softly, 'Overseas visitor, how about helping me out with 8-9 yuan?' If you gave him less, he would continue walking alongside, pestering...
...This, however, was one of the rare instances in history where terrorism came off second best...
...Moreover, with the defeat of Mithridates by Rome and the termination with extreme prejudice of the pirates, the plague was ended and travel on the Mediterranean was safe...
...Like a hawk snatching a little chick, he will grab all the chicken or fried bean curd on the table in a single SWOOp...
...Most of the people writing about terrorism (the psychology and sociology of terrorism have become a major literary industry) maintain that terrorism as we know it is only two centuries old...
...Thus, they describe terrorist groups as "armies," they broadcast "official . . . . they communiques, identify murderers as "chiefs of staff" or "brigade commanders," they describe brutal murders as "executions...
...In such conditions some visitors "actually shut themselves inside the hotel...
...Mediterranean pirates, during Rome's ascendancy, not only extorted ransom, but destabilized the Roman state, for which they received the full support of King Mithridates of Pontus, 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 in northern Asia Minor...
...According to Suetonius, "he had often smilingly sworn, while in their power, that he would capture and crucify them...
...Together, they almost brought the Republic to its knees...
...Manor THE NEW WORLD DISORDER If terrorism is war by other means, we aren't even holding our position...
...asked a writer in Encounter magazine in 1973...
...We live in a peculiar age...
...Douglas Hurd, the junior minister at the British Foreign Office urged the Israelis during his pre-Christmas visit to Jerusalem to reach an early agreement with the PLO because, he said, it was now prepared to renounce the use of force...
...The Uskoks, as these predecessors of modern terrorists were called, were never more than a thousand men, yet they succeeded in building an organization so efficient that nothing could uproot it...
...Clearly, the Soviets see what the West has yet to understand: that terrorism today is war by other means...
...A few days later, on Christmas Eve...
...and Afghanistan...
...The reply: There was no one to take charge...
...It was bitter irony, Prince Charles said, that a man who had helped defeat tyranny and oppression should get blown to bits "through the agency of some of the most cowardly minds imaginable . . . . Perhaps the manner of his passing will awaken us--if it is not too late--to civilized democracy's vulnerability to the kind of sub-human extremism that blows up people when it feels like it...
...Of course, this vacillation and pusillanimity of the Western powers, together with the latent sympathy that exists among their press for terrorism, have greatly facilitated the aims of terrorists and of the powers that back them, so that, as Richard Clutterbuck pointed out in his Guerrillas ana ITerrom'sts, "individual violence is now more often used than invasion or bombardment as a means of international coercion...
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...In 1972 the total number was 206...
...In Iran they refer to "trials," as if we are dealing with a legitimate government that knows the proper rule of law, rather than with gangsters and their kangaroo courts...
...Similarly, American money and weapons are flowing to the IRA terrorists, which makes Britain very angry but not angry enough to forgo the sale of highly sophisticated weapons to Jordan, weapons that inevitably end up in PLO hands...
...Nor is it correct to say that terrorists never achieve anything: About 80 percent of terrorist attacks succeed either in gaining freedom for imprisoned comrades or in obtaining substantial ransom or in achieving publicity...
...But the idea of destabilizing an enemy country with terrorists, and then fleeing to sanctuary, is as old as written history...
...In this way, the argot of terrorism, together with the ideology which lies behind it, has taken on a certain international respectability, especially when aligned with political predilections derived from theories of revolution...
...One of the czars of television news (I cannot recall whether it was CBS or NBC), having reported the indictment of terrorism by the "angry young man" then proceeded, with the evenhandedness that equates the robber with the robbed, to read on: "On the other side, the anger of IRA was expressed today by the deaths o f . . . " Prince Charles was sounding a theme that had been taken up at length by Paul Johnson, the British writer and journalist, a few months before at a conference on international terrorism held at the Jonathan Institute in Jerusalem...
...Seven years of unremittent Soviet-sponsored terror does not seem to have produced an answer...
...Soviet-armed terrorists of the "Patriotic Front" be given an equal chance to seize power...
...That is why there is a kind of justice in Teheran...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUNE 1980 21...
...The parallels with today's terrorism, and the West's response to it, are as obvious as the implications are ominous...
...Even as Carter was courting Yassir Ararat, the PLO helped to topple the Shah...
...the PLO opened artillery fire in Southern Lebanon, shelling Christian church-goers on their way to midnight mass...
...One wonders whether it might not be too late, especially as one watched American television's reaction to the Prince's words...
...And Washington alone is not to blame...
...Ten to twenty cents was not enough for them...
...The reasons for this are many, and if history is any guide there is more coming into play than merely the ideologies of the moment...
...How long will it take for governments and peoples to realize that the effects of modern terrorism are as contagious as smallpox and as poisonous as air-pollution and as dangerous to non-immunized societies as measles was to the American Indians...
...General George Keegan told the Jonathan Institute conference that over 150,000 full-time Soviet military intelligence officers, including KGB and military personnel, are involved in the training of foreign terrorists...
...Its roots, they say, are in the French Revolution and the Russian nihilist movement...
...Johnson is obviously talking about the method by which democracies come to suffer that vulnerability about which Prince Charles spoke so eloquently, and, again, one has only to turn to the media, especially television, to give the proposition empirical validity...
...The commune, city and district said they were powerless to do anything...
...In some places, beggar children pestered the travelers...
...The preceding details of a travel report were published in the Hong Kong Ming Pao Daily on November 21, 1979--30 years after Mao Tse-tung arrived triumphant in Peking and began a new era in China...
...This, of course, makes the West's appeasing of terrorists, whether they be Iranian militants, Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or the PLO, all the more execrable, because, seen this way, what is at stake is no less than the future of the West...
...He would never give up until he achieved his goal...
...Ostensibly, the pirates' depredations were aimed at "the enemies of Christianity' '--the Turks and Jews (which did not prevent the Uskoks from capturing and selling into slavery an entire boatload of Franciscan monks)--but the main sufferers from the terror in the Adriatic were Venetian merchants and shippers...
...Iran, of course, is the best example of the West's appeasement: But one needn't refer to the Iranian crisis only, for appeasement and the character of mind to which it appeals long preceded Khomeini...
...Sometimes they would also resort to verbal abuse, like 'stinking overseas Chinese...
...it appears to be the ultimate crime when the South African government believes it should defend itself against Russian-armed and KGB-trained terrorists whose principal aim is to deprive the West of strategic raw materials in southern Africa...
...Behind this lies the idea that terrorist movements and their revolutionary organizations are spontaneous, isolated, and, because they derive from specific regional conditions, somehow legitimate...
...Even so, it is not difficult to assign the blame...
...In the end, piracy so disrupted the maritime trade of Venice that the republic sank to theE-ank of a second-class power...
...But Washington then is disappointed when the British talk about their "national interest" when giving less than full support to the United States in its fight with the Iranian terrorists...
...Last year the ad boa committee that has already spent eight years in drafting the text of the anti-terrorism resolution suggested that one of the causes of international terrorism is "connivance of states with regards to groups and organizations of Fascist, neo-Fascist and Zionist countries, including racism, racial domination, apartheid and policy of genocide...
...Washington, for example, pressured by the oil states, has pressed Israel for some time to install on the west bank of the Jordan River an independent Palestinian state that cannot but become the most dangerous addition to a host of states already providing official backing for international terrorism, states like Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, and Libya-and now Nicaragua, El Salvador...
...They held him for 40 days, and although they were friendly, Caesar appeared wholly immune to the so-called Stockholm syndrome (by which the captured come to sympathize with their captors...
...For a long time we sold to the Soviet Union, on cheap credit subsidized by the taxpayer, sophisticated computers and other technology that the Soviet Union has used in weaponry against the West...
...Manor is a retired journalist who throughout a long eureer reported on Nazi, Arab, and Communist terrorism...
...Even so, the Uskoks believed in the violence they practiced without the help of psychology, and the Venetian republic had the same ambivalent attitude towards these terrorists as the Western countries have towards the terrorists of our times...
...they are, first, last and all the time, cmminals--extraordinary criminals, indeed, in that they are exceptionally dangerous to us all and pose a unique threat not merely to the individuals they murder without compunction but to the whole fabric of society--but criminals just the same...
...A particularly vicious one will initiate a surprise attack...
...And it is now spreading its wings in our hemisphere as well: The PLO has a close relationship with the Argentinian Monteneros, whose leaders come from the converging streams of anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism and Marxist extremism...
...The Public Security Bureau said that the commune should be in charge of this...
...In fact, as in the examples I cited earlier, by failing to oppose terrorists we have lifted them to power, where we "re-name" them...
...Like the Venetians of 300 years ago, we continue to employ double standards...
...Wohis great credit, Prince Charles of Britain broke from the euphemisms habitually used by Western spokesmen in regard to international terrorism when, eschewing official circumlocution, he gave vent to his indignation over the murder of his great-uncle, Lord Admiral Mountbatten...
...Washington, for instance, has been explicit about siding with radicals in the hopes of moderating them, on the assumption that they will win out in the end with or without us...
...Press and electronic reporting have always magnified terrorist exploits, irrespective of their intrinsic importance, especially by adopting the vocabulary of terrorism...
...Mediterranean pirates captured Julius Caesar, already a rising military politician, then on his way to Rhodes...
...The estimated expenditure for these operations by the Soviet Union amounts to about halfa billion dollars annually, and 75 percent of this effort has been directed toward operations around the Persian Gulf...
...It has since helped to stir unrest in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1980 19 Turkey It has strong links with the Marxist wing of the Kurds...
...9 . . You went to the store, one of them followed you to the store...
...In the seventeenth century pirates supported by the enemies of Venice (mainly the Austrian Empire) fatally undermined the power and splendor of Venice...
...Chaim Herzog, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, has described how the UN majority has succeeded in perverting the 1972 anti-terrorist resolution until it now reads, in its draft form, like a terrorist's charter...
...Again, the clearest example of this last is Iran, where the attack against the United States embassy has dominated headlines for months, providing a daily platform for the most mendacious propaganda, the effect of which may be judged by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's poll showing a substantial majority favoring the surrender of a former ally, the Shah...
...The three travelers, however, complained to the Swatow authorities and asked why nothing was done to "solve" these problems...
...You went to the restaurant and he accompanied you to the restaurant...
Vol. 13 • June 1980 • No. 6
