THE RETURN OF TERROR

...As far as one can distinguish terrorist from other methods (mass politics, guerrilla warfare, strikes, foreign pressures) in the Algerian struggle, they owed their relative success largely to the fact that the great mass of Algerians wished to see an end to French domination...

...Regardless of the intentions the terrorists bring to their act, it tends, out of desperation and through repetition, to become increasingly unselective...

...but to remove Brezhnev would mean—as the Marxists used to argue about removing one or another Czar—simply his replacement by another Soviet bureaucrat...

...Even a democratic country like Israel will only tolerate terrorism up to a certain point...

...Terrorism in its modem forms appears in the mid-19th century, during what might be called the primitive phase of radicalism...

...It is still another sign of the central reality of this century: that the ethos of totalitarianism has seeped into almost every segment of our life...

...exposed as a proud subjective consciousness what was the objective potentiality in the conduct of the other terrorists...

...The victims need have done nothing "wrong...

...While nowadays it seems obligatory for terrorists to proclaim some version of democratic ideology, the likelihood is that, because of their elitist structure and adventurist character, these movements will lead to new tyrannies if they take power...

...q Note: The literature on this subject, especially its historical aspects, is rich...

...They seldom came anywhere near succeeding...

...Whereupon the Tupamaros, composed largely of middle-class students cut off from the people, were themselves assaulted and apparently smashed by the military junta that took over the country and destroyed its liberties...

...yet it must be acknowledged that, as with all efforts to develop norms of conduct, there are bound to be exceptions...

...As Walter Laqueur notes: Once the Brazilian ALN and other such groups opted for individual terror, the Rio government responded by indiscriminate counter-terror...

...Varieties of Terror LIKE ALL important terms in our language, terrorism can encompass a wide range of conduct...

...That lonely figure with a gun or bomb, "the anonymous one in the crowd" whom Hans Magnus Enzensberger finds so attractive, would have a far greater chance to complete his mission successfully in a democratic country, or in a bumbling old-fashioned authoritarian one, than in a modern totalitarian state with it systematized repression, its enormous police apparatus, its readiness to punish large numbers of innocent people for the act of the terrorist...

...Yet there is both pathos and absurdity in all this...

...They have too much at stake, in both their limited collaboration and limited conflict...

...Against the French it also demonstrated a certain effectiveness at first, but by the late 1950s the French had shown themselves to be good students and were proving adept at counterterror...

...TV watchers seem able to take it all in, from direct shots of Vietnam warfare to "Gunsmoke...

...he must keep raising the ante...

...When certain sorts of "leftists" say to socialists like ourselves— they may say it with uneasy admiration, sometimes genuine qualms—that terrorism "works," they assume the existence of some sort of common goal...

...Michael Confino...

...But it was quite inevitable that the method that had been adopted with great reluctance, and out of a sense of desperation, should after a time come to seem attractive, worthy, even purifying in its own right...

...the despotism of gangsters without vocabulary by the despotism of gangsters who have picked up a few tags of modern ideology...

...Because the masses are mute, the despotism of the old rulers may be replaced by the despotism of new ones...

...However, in order to murder a prominent official you need not have the organized masses behind you...

...Such people find acceptable, sometimes attractice, the prospect of left-authoritarian dictatorship...

...Unburdened by the moral scruples of a Kalayev, the random terrorists choose to destroy whoever—innocent or guilty, adult or child—happens to be at the site where the bomb goes off...

...It shows that some people are serious enough to be ready to die and because they are, the indifferent masses may thereby be stirred into awareness...

...If we confine ourselves, for the moment, to the moral aspects of the question, two propositions seem as urgent as they are simple: what we object to, first of all, in terror is the killing, and the terrorizing, of innocent people...

...He must arrange events or stage pseudoevents that will yield a moment of notoriety...

...But what can the consequence of that be except an enormous increase in bloodshed, a ghastly civil war between Irish Catholics and Protestants...

...One wants to stress the distinctiveness of their rule...

...The New Conditions THERE IS a common opinion in the air that new circumstances enable terrorists to be more effective than they could be, say, a century ago...

...Usually regarding himself as a man of "the Left," though he can also be found on "the Right," he is contemptuous of democracy, seeing it as a mere "sham," which lulls the people into complacence and must be destroyed or exposed if that complacence is to be brought to an end...

...Toward this end, there has arisen a rationale among certain sorts of mindless "leftists" that the methods of terrorism are "merely" an extension of the repressiveness common to all societies...

...The followers of Messali Hadj, a veteran leader of Algerian nationalism, were a special target of this FLN terrorism, and here it certainly "worked...

...in turn, a terrorist kidnapping governmental officials is intimidating them through the exertion of a counterauthority...

...to which his rapt audiences would chant in reply, "Boom, boom...

...And it is wrong because minorities in a democratic society, as long as their freedom to dissent is largely protected, do not have the right to impose their will upon the majority through violence...

...and the closer to random terror we get, the more reprehensible such actions become...

...a principle can be dispossessed or punctured and another put in its place, but it cannot achieve social revolution...

...it replaces by a series of individual political assassinations, which always [!] hit their target, the massive revolutionary movements, where people often rise against each other because of misunderstanding...

...Where socialists, Marxist and non-Marxist, expected that the struggles imposed on the people by an exploitative society would prod them into political awareness, the terrorists seek, in effect, to replace the consciousness of the people by their self-anointed will...

...All the contending classes are warped and undernourished...

...focused random — the placing of explosives where significant agents of oppression are likely to gather, so that the victims, even if individually unknown, are judged to be more or less equally "appropriate...

...And this necessarily involves publicity, since it is impossible to reconcile the idea of such a vast propaganda within the necessarily restricted circle of a conspiracy...

...But at least it is a possibility...

...Through bold acts of terrorism the Tupamaros helped to undermine a weak democratic regime, one of the very few in Latin America that had allowed civil liberties...

...With the methods used by the IRA against English people, or the methods used by the PLO against Israeli civilians, even foreign travelers in Israel, we reach a kind of terrorism beyond civilized conception...

...So long as incidents such as Ma'alot and Kiryat Shmoney remain relatively rare, the Israeli government will act within the limits of the law...

...and since authority breeds insecurity, it follows—does it not?—that "essentially" insecurity is a mode of terror...

...The IRA, so far as one can judge, lacks mass support in either portion of Ireland...

...The terrorist surrenders the possibility of sharing the experiences, or heeding the cautions, of a political movement...

...Whereupon the French, under de Gaulle's leadership, made a decision that the political and economic costs of trying to maintain their domination of Algeria would now be too high...

...dynastic assassination — self-explanatory...

...I believe that the traditional socialist arguments— explicitly political, though also sometimes bashfully moral—against individual terror still hold...

...he must threaten and act upon his threats so as to seize his 50 seconds of the six o'clock news...

...Does It "Work...

...As a rule, unless dealing with a government already on the verge of collapse and quite without popular support, these advantages figure significantly only at the outset...

...The recipe for explosives is accessible to all, and a Browning can be obtained anywhere...

...This example reveals characteristic difficulties: the underground may have reasoned that to destroy its enemies, who wore German uniforms, was an act of war and therefore, strictly speaking, not terrorism—yet what about the Polish waiters who worked in that cafe...

...that it was a sin for which a man should suffer the penalty of his own life...

...Finally, the argument against terrorism is more than a matter of political expediency...

...Nicholas Morozov glorified the small group because it could close itself off from enemies and spies...

...we believe that socialism is realizable only through democracy...

...A solitary murder, criminal or political, has by now come to seem so much a part of our "normal" life, it can hardly excite much inter232 IRVING HOWE est...

...Terror may be the weapon of lonely fanatics or a huddle of conspirators intent upon forcing history through their own self-sacrifice and other people's blood...

...For despite a spectacularly brutal and unselective use of random terror, the PLO has at no point seriously threatened Israeli authority...

...In a hallucinatory transaction he "becomes" the people...

...Now, for those of us who have lived through the decades of the totalitarian experience, it may be possible to reflect a little more deeply on the inherent moral, which is also to say, political features of terrorism...

...About this variety of terror, however, I shall have nothing more to say...

...random — the placing of explosives where people gather: post offices, railroads, cafes, etc...

...If you refuse all distinctions, you need have no problems...

...Had Hitler or Stalin been destroyed in the mid-'30s, this would not have eliminated the systems they headed—we don't, in truth, know whether, or how, totalitarian regimes can be overthrown from within...

...The difference regarding methods reflects a much deeper difference regarding ends, just as the difference regarding ends dictates the difference regarding methods...

...turned the methods of terror against his own comrades...

...In any case, even when such movements seem to "work," by frightening or wearying opponents into granting power or recognition, they fail in another and more fundamental way...

...Morozov seems to have been a pure-spirited fanatic...

...After Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya sent a letter to the new Czar, Alexander III, promising that if public freedom were established, it would spontaneously suspend its own activity...

...It is just this "one step further" that makes terror momentarily effective and, to some people, exciting—at least until the victims can regroup behind new methods of defense...

...the concentration of modern technology enables a concentration of terror...

...As for the PLO, its methods have "worked" largely insofar as it has been floated—as the richest terrorist movement in history—by Arab oil...

...But no one, I think, would want to say that about a Brezhnev...

...A stalemate ensued...

...That it may provoke the English into throwing up their hands, deciding to withdraw from the "whole Irish mess," seems possible...

...There is something utterly astonishing in the self-assurance or naivete of a *Reading an earlier version of these notes, an editor of Dissent remarked that there has appeared in the last few decades a new kind of terrorist or, perhaps more frequently, admirer of terrorism...

...The Nazi and Stalinist regimes owed their worst excesses not merely to their intrinsic natures but also to the will of the two men who headed them...

...Any Englishman is judged to be an appropriate victim...

...If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy in the neck, what need is there for a class organization...

...The question of effectiveness is something else again...

...But then again, they may be stirred to nothing more than further acts of terror...

...For in most situations, the likely response—whether from a democratic regime, or a more or less authoritarian one— will be savage retaliation...

...All of these forms of terror (and further categories can of course be drawn) have certain features in common...

...The members of Narodynaya Volya itself called this "a despotic Utopia" and they always attacked it...

...and what was his name...

...The case of the much-romanticized Tupamaros in Uruguay is somewhat different...

...The Historical Background NONE OF these problems, alas, is exactly a fresh one, nor are the arguments that swirl around them...

...What else can it be...

...Individual recklessness, even irresponsibility, can certainly be found among 19th-century bomb-throwers, but rarely the kind of cold-blooded readiness to murder innocents — any Englishmen, any Israelis — which has characterized our own, more "advanced" times...

...A bomb placed in an airplane can destroy several hundred people...

...In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and their hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission...

...And in all strategies of terror there is an inherent tendency to go beyond the limits previously accepted, formally or informally, by both rulers and ruled...

...made amoralism into a creed...

...Responsible for the Holocaust was not just the Nazi regime but Hitler personally...

...And into many who do not...

...In 1911 Trotsky put forward the essentials of the Marxist reply to the terrorists and, at least on the tactical-strategic level, what he wrote still makes sense: Only the conscious and organized working class can send a strong representation into the halls of parliament...

...any Israeli...

...But it seems likely that such an act of individual assassination would have prevented some of the mass killings that Hitler and Stalin were soon to initiate...

...The probable consequences must then be a magnification of the repressiveness of the ruling power in authoritarian countries or, in countries where there has been one or another degree of democracy, the destruction of democratic rights...

...More recently, the IRA has left bombs in London post offices, pubs, and stores...

...Costa anticipated the more systematic rejection of terrorist methods by the 20th-century Marxists...

...The life of the terrorist is overwhelmed by loneliness, not merely because he cannot be certain whether to trust friend or comrade, but because he must cut himself off from all movements and communities in which choices might be weighed...

...Very similar ideas can be found among the earlier, 19th-century terrorists, also impressed by the possibilities of combining technology and heroism...

...Bakunin's remarkable letter to Nechaev appears in Natalie Herzen: Daughter of a Revolutionary, ed...

...the heroic act of terrorism, a gesture of mass culture...

...Those 19th-century Russian terrorists who believed they had to use the pistol and the bomb because they had no other way of fighting autocracy were honestly persuaded that their goal was to establish a democratic regime...

...Bulgarian revolutionists used the same methods, apparently out of similar persuasions...

...Wherever trade unions, political parties, all kinds of secondary organizations struggle over the division of the social product, the terrorist act is likely to seem, at best, a diversion and, at worst, a provocation...

...the despotism of colonels by the despotism of lieutenants...

...Whether this outcome proved that terrorism "works," the chuckleheads in Paris and New York who had celebrated the Tupamaros have yet to elaborate...

...IN COUNTRIES WITH highly developed and articulate class structures, terrorism has never succeeded, nor is it likely to succeed, in effecting any basic change of power—though it may, through an act of sudden blackmail, achieve a limited end, such as forcing the release of prisoners, etc...

...savage...

...The terrorism that has come back into fashion is that of insurgent conspiracies...

...The second volume of G. D. H. Cole's History of Socialist Thought should be consulted...

...He is also said to have refused to escape when he finally did shoot the Grand Duke, since, reports Gross, "he believed that the assassination was necessary, but nonetheless...

...In still another kind of situation terrorism may prove to have some effectiveness: when it is employed by a resistance movement against an alien occupying power...

...A dramatic kidnapping, like that of Patty Hearst, or a shootout with the police, like that of the SLA, can assure national coverage—for a little while...

...It can be argued, for instance, that the horrors of modern totalitarianism stem not merely from its systemic traits but also from the diseased personalities of individual dictators...

...Several of Trotsky's articles have been collected in a pamphlet, Against Individual Terrorism...

...THE RETURN OF TERROR 229 No doubt, there is something to this view, but precisely how much it is hard to say...

...What has happened since then, as part of the general breakdown of moral norms in the 20th 228 IRVING HOWE century, has been a turn among terrorists to increasingly indiscriminate methods—in part, no doubt, reflecting the fact that in modern warfare states have also turned to increasingly indiscriminate methods (we speak, not accidentally, of the terror bombing of cities during the Second World War...

...In the end, all of Nechaev's major collaborators had to break with him, so appalled were they by his methods...

...The Russian regime continues to be a dictatorship, though a less blatantly terroristic one...

...A rare sense of scruple, among terrorists or anyone else...

...Insofar as I have been able to gain a picture of what happened in Algeria, it is something like this: In the early 1950s the strand of Algerian nationalism that would later be known as the FLN, and that did in fact become the basis for the independent Algerian regime, started to employ terroristic methods—not only or, at the outset, mainly against the French, but especially against competing groups of Algerians...

...BUT the most urgent question, so late in the day, is perhaps this: what kind of people are you going to become if you resort systematically to such methods...

...Liberation, once a pacifist journal, features Hans Magnus Enzensberger with a lyrical potboiler, "The Roots of Terrorism," which ends with this paean to the terrorist: "One such dreamer, an anonymous one in the crowd, suffices to instill dread into all those who hold power on this earth...

...What has "worked" has been not the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich or of Israeli children at Ma'alot, but the ability of the oil-producing countries to intimidate Western Europe...

...and now it flourishes during what might be called its decadent phase...

...There is the systematic terror practiced by Stalin (whose methods were finally not much more enlightened than those of Shaka...

...power rests in the hands of a small elite, usually military or bonapartist...

...Did he never ask himself whether this elite of killers might not itself become brutalized and corrupted...

...All modern politics, to be sure, faces this problem, since any modern politics must seek publicity in behalf of its goals...

...Ivan Kalayev, a Socialist Revolutionary (SR), postponed a 1905 attempt upon the Grand Duke Sergei because the family of 227 this Russian prince was standing nearby and might have been hurt...

...In the late 19th century Marxists denounced the practice of terror on political grounds, to which we shall turn in a few moments...

...Precisely in the totalitarian states where, for lack of any peaceable means of political expression, the use of terror may become morally justifiable, it is probably least available as a practical measure...

...They can strike almost anywhere, and with surprise...

...Terror is the delusion of those who have lost the capacity to distinguish between hope and death...

...the struggle for the social product becomes especially acute because there is so little of it to go around...

...A few months gone by, other guns have blazed...

...Lacking the strength to engage in conventional, which is to say, limited war, the terrorists adopt the rationale of total war...

...Consider the man who tried to assassinate Governor Wallace: he said, upon his arrest, that finally he would force the world to pay attention to him...

...The logic is dazzling...

...Insofar as that seems true, the assassination of a totalitarian despot could in principle be considered...

...There were no trials and no death sentences...

...when we speak of terror we are talking about an ongoing social condition and not simply a tactic used by radicals...

...Young people, adventurers, semicriminals, all for radically different reasons stretching from pure idealism to mere malevolence, may be stirred to consciousness by acts of terror...

...One Russian terrorist, repudiated by his comrades but a figure all too anticipatory of the future, developed a theory of "permanent terrorism...

...To have removed Stalin by a bullet would have meant to remove a tyrant who had developed a taste for blood that went far beyond the repressiveness of the social system he represented...

...in the second, a purely mechanical reaction identical everywhere—in China as in France—very strikTHE RETURN OF TERROR 235 ing in its outward form (murder, explosions, etc...

...Through the recklessness and will of a chosen few, governments are to be toppled and tyrants checked...

...In a society where a reasonable (which is necessarily to say, an imperfect) measure of freedom to speak and organize is available, we must regard it as utterly impermissible to resort to terrorist methods or to give the faintest encouragement to them...

...Terrorism as it has been employed by the left cannot be considered in isolation from the context of social terror in which it takes place—whether in the overt form of violence legitimized by state authority, or in the more covert guise of the psychological bonds of fear and insecurity which dominate our lives...

...But let us agree, for the sake of the argu230 IRVING HOWE ment, that modern technology does give the terrorists certain advantages...

...James Jolt's The Anarchists is a very competent survey of anarchist politics, including its terrorist wing...

...There is the arbitrary terror of despots (the 19th-century Zulu king Shaka had his subjects murdered simply by pointing his finger...

...But there is a kind of terrorist in our own time who holds quite another, one might say, less "sentimental" view...

...It evoked a spectre that had horrified an entire generation of [Russian] Populists, the spectre of a revolution decreed from above, of reforming and revolutionary absolutism in Jacobin guise...

...One thinks, by way of historical precedent, of the terrorism used by revolutionary groups against despots (the Narodnaya Volya, or People's Will, of Russia in the 1880s) and against foreign overlords (the Bulgarian patriots against Turkish rulers in the early 20th century...

...Conditions of this sort prevailed in the occupied countries of Europe during the Second World War, though it seems hard to measure the extent to which acts of terror or sabotage seriously hampered the Nazi war machine...

...but absolutely harmless as far as the social system goes...

...Responsible for the Siberian slave camps was not merely the Communist regime but Stalin personally...

...To hold his "public," the terrorist must increasingly resort to acts that he had initially, one hopes, found repugnant...

...Some of the Russian terrorists made notable efforts to spare innocent bystanders or relatives of the victim...

...Franco Venturi's The Roots of Revolution, a major historical work, offers rich material on the 19th-century Russian revolutionists...

...A teacher requiring students to do homework is intimidating them through the exertion of authority...

...but rarely is it the weapon of mass movements engaged in public politics...

...This is an important point, but one that lies outside my present range...

...because even if the bomb throwers could win power through such methods they would no longer be, if ever they had been, the kind of people who could build a good society...

...The weight of 20th-century history makes all such questions seem painfully urgent, morally inescapable...

...236 IRVING HOWE figure like Morozov who proposed to check future tyrannies by creating an endless chain of terrorists...

...Were it only a question of a conflict between Israel and the PLO, Arafat would long ago have been reduced to sipping coffee in a Damascus cafe...

...In any case, the confusion can only be shortlived...

...In the peregrinations of the 19thcentury anarchists, as well as the desperadoes, adventurers, and quasi-criminals who crept into their ranks, one can find a few instances of what Gross calls random terror, or focused or semi-focused random terror...

...Or who, for that matter, remembers the Symbionese Liberation Army as anything but a raggle-taggle of lumpen and desperadoes...

...If that is what the admirers of terrorism mean by saying that it "works," I am prepared to cede the point...

...But the more principled anarchists who resorted to the bomb usually did try to limit their attacks to individuals or groups taken to be directly responsible for social evils: Russian aristocrats, Turkish officers, etc...

...so that the revolution occurs by itself from the bottom to the top and not vice versa...

...He chooses to force a confrontation with the state in the aftermath of which the people, like it or not, will have to choose...

...The point bears stressing...

...some Poles and Frenchmen against occupying Nazi forces...

...Kalayev, though prepared to kill the Grand Duke, whom he held personally responsible for oppressive acts, refused on principle to endanger people whom he took to be innocent...

...But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper...

...But is there a common goal...

...Staking everything on the act, he blocks off all that comes before and all that comes after...

...and "every new appearance of tyranny in the future will be met by new groups of people from the better elements of society, and these groups will destroy oppression by consecutive political assassinations...

...Soon enough, then, the initial advantage of the terrorists must lead to a mutual intensification of violence...

...Algerian revolutionists left bombs in public places in Paris, apparently convinced that one Frenchman blown to bits was pretty much like any other, even if a few of the victims might be among those who had been agitating for Algerian independence...

...Here the possible moral justification for tyrannicide is very much weaker than with regard to maniacal tyrants like Hitler and Stalin...

...because it creates an atmosphere in which brute violence replaces democratic discussion...

...Looking for "ultimate" confrontations, a stripping away of "democratic facades," they hope to provoke governments into a savagery that will demonstrate the truth of their contention that governments are...

...Choosing whom to punish, he replaces the justice, be it good or bad, of society...

...Nechaev systematized the deceit that conspiracy requires...

...In such countries—some of the Latin-American ones—acts of terror can sometimes upset whatever precarious relationship of forces has been established, since terror thrives on popular apathy and the absence, so to speak, of a thick social life...

...The terrorist carries a moral burden that only saints or fanatics would undertake—worst of all, fanatics mistaking themselves for saints...

...If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one's goal, why the efforts of the class struggle...

...it is even preferable, for the "perfection" of the terror, that they be innocent...

...With the rise of the modern nation-state and bourgeois democracy, terrorism was sharply repudiated by all wings of the socialist movement, and even some of the old terrorists had second thoughts...

...A pacific struggle of ideas will take the place of the violence which is much more repugnant to us than to your servitors...

...But if these attacks were to become a frequent occurrence, public pressure for drastic and illegal counter-measures would become overwhelming...

...Deciding whom to smite he replaces God (the Marxists would say, replaces the Party, which is perhaps the same thing...

...Indeed, precisely the increasing unselectivity makes terrorism so frightening...

...Such terrorism is wrong because it is inhumane...

...Often, it is part of the terrorist expectation, even desire, to evoke such a response...

...He discards responsibility to his people, his class, his generation...

...Whether a terrorist attempt, even a "successful" one, throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete political circumstances...

...Terrorism as a strategy for effecting social change has a potential for success only in countries with a weak socioeconomic infrastructure— and even there its record is not very impressive...

...Now it would be foolish to deny that the spectacle of self-sacrifice may elicit admiration...

...Had the July 1944 plot against Hitler succeeded, it would probably have had desirable effects...

...It would be a mistake to suppose that such conditions prevail today in Ireland...

...Similarly, to assassinate one of the Chilean officers who now form the repressive junta would be to leave that regime largely intact: another officer would take over...

...During the Second World War the Polish-Jewish underground planted explosives at the Cafe Cyganeria in Cracow, a meeting place for Nazi officers...

...Greater still is his political isolation...

...Time greets Arafat with an essay on how nations have been begotten in terrorism...

...He cannot hold an open discussion on where to throw his next bomb and, although he may keep mumbling "power to the people," he denies in effect whatever power the people may have in controlling his behavior...

...its tactic of planting bombs in crowded English cities is both a sign of weakness and despicable...

...Terrorism becomes an acte gratuit, a way of stamping individuality upon an indifferent world—or at least the thought of terrorism can be vicariously justified in this way...

...His urge to fraternity dissolves into a total hubris...

...To do this is a matter of widely diffusing the new principles in the masses...

...Loyalty must not be supposed to insure security, and what seems the psychopathology of the tyrant becomes the policy of the state...

...a city might be rendered helpless by a few desperadoes...

...In a society gripped by terror, the ruler seeks to create a state of fright through the sheer frequency and arbitrariness of his assaults...

...Perhaps the one element common to the various kinds of terror is the wish to create unmanageable fear through a use of violence that breaks down traditionally accepted distinctions between combatant and civilian...

...This is the kind of "leftist" who is drawn to terrorism not because he thinks it likely to be politically effective but because he is fascinated by its "expressive" potentiality, as a way of registering his presence at a time when he may fear he is actually powerless...

...A related argument one occasionally hears is that in a society gone soft or slack, the terrorist act serves as a purifying shock...

...far more sinister was the infamous Sergei Nechaev, immortalized in Dostoevsky's The Possessed...

...The case of Algeria is also pertinent, though THE RETURN OF TERROR 233 too complex for elaboration here...

...Trotsky's argument was essentially strategic— how best to build a revolutionary party?—and even then, it did not keep him from later justifying, sometimes glorifying, mass terror during the first stages of Bolshevik rule...

...In such cases, tyrannicide—whether or not advisable—seems at least permissible...

...but the classical debates between them and the anarchists, it now seems, were almost innocent in character, since only seldom was anything in question but an effort to assassinate an individual whom everyone acknowledged to be a terrible despot...

...A tacit equation has been set up in which authority comes to be the same as domination, domination the same as force, force the same as violence, violence the same as terror...

...Except perhaps—and even here we have reason to be skeptical—in the most self-disciplined kinds of action against precisely selected individual targets, the strategy of terror can succeed only through a steady abandonment of moral restraints...

...Who can be excited to libertarian sentiments by a terrorist movement motored by the oil of Feisal and tutored by the agents of Brezhnev...

...Here, in an editorial note appearing before Enzensberger's article in Liberation, is a revealing because unsophisticated instance of this rationale...

...Terrorism in Algeria can then be said to have worked to varying extents: a great deal against competing Algerian groups, and, to some degree difficult to measure, against the French...

...the capitalist state does not base itself on governmental ministers and cannot be eliminated with them...

...Both the dominant and subordinate classes in such societies, if they have enough freedom to maneuver and bargain, refuse the terrorist option...

...But why is readiness to die necessarily proof of seriousness...

...The basis of the terrorists' strength is then simply the fact that they find support among their own people, or at least protection...

...Andrea Costa, a comrade of the Italian anarchist leader Errico Malatesta, wrote in behalf of political organization: By means of a conspiracy, a change in the form of government can be obtained...

...Arafat, who sends terrorists to take children hostage, is cheered at the UN General Assembly, a body that has yet to bestir itself over the massacres of General Amin in Uganda...

...Or what might prevent it, if ever it did take power, from continuing to use precisely the methods to which it had become accustomed when struggling against power...

...In the first case, there is a social struggle, whose methods and means flow necessarily from the nature of the prevailing social order...

...and devote [itself] to the fruitful work of civilization, culture, and the welfare of the people...

...234 IRVING HOWE Most of the Narodnaya Volya group, writes Franco Venturi in his great book Roots of Revolution, were well aware of the dangers of their position...

...THE RETURN OF TERROR 237...

...I doubt it...

...In a useful but badly composed book, Violence in Politics, Feliks Gross offers some distinctions among kinds of terror: • individual — the killing of a person taken to be crucially representative of autocratic power...

...Add 20thcentury technology to 19th-century postures and the result, as Abbie Hoffman used to say, is "Boom...

...Terror flourishes on the bones of politics...

...One can conceive of rare exceptions in which socialists, or other people devoted to liberty, might sanction or at least consider the use of terrorist methods...

...And since the conflicts of social class must be bent to his will, he replaces history too...

...The problem today is that in a society where the channels of information require increasing quantities of sensation in order to hold attention, a terrorist wishing to become the conscience of society may soon find himself playing society's game...

...But the notion that the task of mobilizing sentiment and clarifying thought among the people can be shortcircuited through some electrical act of killing— this notion is undone precisely through those workings of the mass media that seem at first to lend it plausibility...

...The event supposed to shatter national complacency becomes the sedative depressing national consciousness...

...terrorists and their sympathizers (and no doubt THE RETURN OF TERROR 231 quite a few innocent bystanders) simply disappeared without a trace...

...When an American president, James Garfield, was assassinated during that same year, Narodnaya Volya denounced this act: In a land where the citizens are free to express their ideas, and where the will of the people does not merely make the law but appoints the person who is to carry the law into effect, in such a country political assassination is the manifestation of a despotic tendency identical with that to whose destruction in Russia we have devoted ourselves...