ON TERRORISM
Plastrik, Stanley
We are in for an increasingly hard time of it. Like bad money in circulation, individual terrorism and acts of violence committed in the name of "the revolution" have a way of showing up...
...Even the short-run results must be questioned...
...What will have changed for the hungry and poverty-stricken of California if $2 million, $4 million, or even $6 million in food is distributed among them...
...An absolute faith in some metaphysical ideal ("the revolution") is matched by an absolute distrust of living people...
...Except thatthis struggle may be more difficult now, given an inevitable hardening of the Right and a weakening of the Left, thanks to the often confused, ambiguous response of the "California Left" to the Hearst kidnapping...
...It is a sordid and increasingly repulsive story...
...In emphasizing the argument that terror is counterproductive (which it certainly is), the Left has perhaps...
...The Left needs to affirm Gandhi's notion of the sacredness of human life...
...As the Leninists substitute a party for the working class, then the party organization for the party, and a central committee for the organization, ending with the ultimate substitution of a Stalin for the central committee...
...She rates the same freedom from fear, terror, and kidnapping that belongs to us all...
...so the terrorists substitute themselves for the broad, open democratic movement, ultimately arriving at the criminal deed as a substitute for the revolution...
...Nor the argument of efficacy, that terror is counterproductive and destructive, leaving one further from his goals than before...
...The political struggle to overturn reactionary Reaganism will remain...
...P. COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 143...
...It matters not one iota that Patricia Hearst is a "rich girl," or that she is related to the notorious Hearst family...
...And finally, if it is possible to understand— without excusing or justifying—the desperate action of a militant black or other oppressed individual, coming out of a ghetto or refugee camp, humiliated and frustrated his entire life, what is one to say about the self-styled, middleclass revolutionaries egging him on from the sidelines...
...The classical socialist and Marxist case against individual terrorism is well-known and still valid...
...in the second case, we are confronted by a cynical elitism that warrants contempt and rejection...
...The current wave of terrorism has added a whole new vocabulary to international language: Palestinian Fedayeen, Uruguayan Tupamaros, Indian Naxelites, Chilean Miristas, etc.—all living by "the deed": kidnapping, summary trial and execution, skyjacking, and airport or Munich massacres...
...When Abby Hoffman's Yippies and a clownish Jerry Rubin carried out symbolic acts against American institutions in a series of pranks, one was amused, or not amused, according to one's sense of humor...
...In the first case, we are dealing with tragedy and hopelessness that ought to spur us on to reaffirm the need for basic changes in the society...
...The lesson of Ferdinand Lassalle's famous play, Franz von Sickingen, has not changed over the years...
...An independent Arab Palestine seems as remote as ever...
...will be precisely what it was before...
...bourgeois democratic Uruguay has become a military dictatorship...
...The need for jobs, training, education, housing, etc...
...Gandhi's reserve police...
...While the California kidnapping of the young Hearst woman still unresolved at the time of this writing—may not necessarily stimulate similar criminal actions in the country, such deeds are now clearly part of a worldwide phenomenon...
...But, thrown off balance for a moment, the enemy quickly recovers, mobilizes his vastly superior resources (the repressive apparatus of state power) and, assured by long experience that he need not worry that terror will stir the masses into action, he proceeds with a vengeance...
...Like bad money in circulation, individual terrorism and acts of violence committed in the name of "the revolution" have a way of showing up cyclically...
...Further, if ends and means are so intertwined that one cannot be detached from the other without damage, •then evil means can only lead to evil results...
...the fate of Allende's Chile is fresh in our memories...
...the Naxelites of India were hunted down like dogs by Mrs...
...unconsciously tended to play down the profound moral repulsion with which it ought to reject the slightest suggestion of individual terror...
...Whatever success terrorist tactics yield is invariably momentary and passing, dependent upon catching the enemy by surprise...
...But when Jerry Rubin expresses an ill-concealed admiration for the tactics of the Symbionese Army of Liberation, it becomes a different matter...
...The action against her is profoundly immoral...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
