ON VIOLENCE AND TERROR

...At the same time it has been claimed, by a Brazilian theorist of terrorism, that one of the objects of the terrorist is to force the democratic state itself to curb these and other freedoms and make itself so unattractive that the cause favored by the terrorist eventually seems preferable...

...I am deliberately confining myself to the consideration of political violence under democratic conditions because I believe this is the aspect of the matter that most concerns both you and me...

...In these conditions wellmeaning mediators should be discouraged...

...These imputed motivations are largely speculative but certainly no more speculative, and I think considerably more probable, than the notion that terrorists are exceptionally unselfish or, to use a favorite word of their admirers, "dedicated...

...media tion brings the terrorist prestige and encouragement, relief from pressure, and time to regroup...

...This is not now the case nor does it seem at all likely to be attained even in the next 100 years...

...for the democratic state—unless it is prepared to abdicate altogether—it can bring only a lull followed by a savage resumption of terror...

...I would agree, of course, that the defense of the democratic state against terrorists involves a certain kind of political violence—violence, that is to say, used in defense of a political system against people attempting to substitute for that, by violence, another system...

...Since the state is prepared to defend these inequalities by force if necessary, the whole system is often characterized as one of institutionalized violence...

...This presumption tends in turn to generate vaguely favorable notions about the merits of the cause in question, but in fact the presumption itself is unwarranted...

...This in itself is no guarantee of selflessness: some people like killing, frightening, and hurting people, and also like the other more or less tangible rewards that derive from the capacity to frighten, hurt, and kill...

...I also think it rather pointless to discuss whether people living, say, under a military dictatorship—which is in itself a form of armed conspiracy—should or should not set up another armed conspiracy in order to overthrow the ruling one...

...Democratic institutions can be altered by nonviolent means...

...Everything there would depend on one's guess as to the human costs involved and as to the likelihood of the new conspiracy being an improvement on the old one...

...This may take a long time, and may involve more suffering and death, but it can and must be done to avoid the far worse consequences that follow if a democracy flinches before the terrorist threat...

...It would be inappropriate on my part to affect such a detachment...

...All we know with certainty about the terrorist is what he does and what he says...

...Thus, if the democratic state is overthrown, the institutionalized violence will continue: what will have disappeared will be the democratic system and its safeguards...

...The Vietnam War, for example, was a negation not an assertion of democratic values...

...What he does is kill people, what he says is that he kills to attain certain political ends, but there is no reason why we should take what he says on trust...

...Violence is news: the greater the atrocity the greater the publicity...

...To ask the media for voluntary restraint is probably futile...

...II IN SOME left-wing commentary on current forms of terrorism we can see a romantic presumption in favor of the terrorist...

...He may be working for some political end, or he may be working under a political flag for essentially personal ends...

...To challenge that interpretation of history was therefore a significant part of the struggle against the IRA, and some progress has been made in that respect...

...This implies a stolid refusal to make any deal with the conspirators, to concede any of their demands, or to have any contact with them at all, other than those contacts that may be necessary for their apprehension and suppression and the protection of those whom they threaten...

...The responsibility of the media in this area is an extremely complex subject...

...I would prefer myself to follow the old usage whereby violence used by the state is described as force, and the more pejorative term reserved for the activities of the enemies of the state...

...IV THE BEST WAY for a democracy to deal with what is called political violence is to set aside its supposed ly political character and concentrate on its criminal aspect as an armed conspiracy...

...It is probably, though not certainly, better to live with this than to attempt to curb it, except in the area of broadcasting where a degree of state regulation is necessarily involved...

...But even while that war continued, the existence of democracy in America itself continued to be of positive value and made possible the protest movement against the war, which eventually helped to end it...

...It may be argued that the foundation of the Irish state, of whose government I am a member, provides a notable example to the contrary effect, since that state may be said to have been founded through a deal with IRA terrorists...

...IT is the nature of democracy and in part a source of its strength that it allows far freer range to its enemies than does any other system of government...

...These include power—the power that grows out of the barrel of a gun—a certain kind of glamour and prestige, money, and freedom from normal routines and constraints...

...I would therefore argue that presumptions in favor of the terrorist are superfluous and that it is more reasonable to look at him, as most people do, as a menace to society, which it is important to suppress...

...The writers appear to take a stand of something like neutrality between a democratic state and its armed internal enemies...

...The complete pacifist must of course reject the violence of the state, as well as that of its enemies, external and internal...

...But I am not inclined to quibble about the word and I agree that gunshot remains gunshot with whatever abstraction it may be covered...

...The romantic concept of the terrorist, besides being unjustified, is an obstacle to his suppression and that is why it is important to challenge this concept...

...As a description, this has a certain limited validity...

...If people prepared to use violence to get their way actually do get their way, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that they will not be prepared to go on using violence to see that they go on getting their way...

...I am committed, both by personal conviction and by responsibilities, which I share, to the concept that armed conspiracies against a democratic state threaten us with a reversion to barbarism, and that the democratic state has the duty of defending civilization against these conspiracies by all means short of those that would themselves involve a descent into barbarism...

...Victory in that struggle depends on the degree to which the society at large sees the terrorist clearly as the enemy, and on the number of people who are prepared to run at least some degree of risk to combat terrorism...

...The life of a terrorist, risky as it is, has its rewards...

...Dedicated to what...

...For some personalities this combination may be attractive enough to make them want to continue their terrorist activity even if they know their ostensible political objectives to be unattainable...

...These factors vary in different conditions...

...The only unusual thing we know with certainty about the terrorist—the thing that marks him out from other people—is his unusual propensity to frighten, hurt, and kill people...

...A convinced religious pacifist would be prepared to accept even these consequences, but ordinary people would not...

...Any deal with any of them would be simple capitulation to the naked violence of small unrepresentative groups...

...For terrorists working in these conditions the publicity is an essential part of the game...

...No group of terrorists at present operating in these islands has any democratic mandate at all...

...The career of Joseph Stalin from the early bank robberies in Baku to the later Lordship of Gulag Archipelago might seem to cast some doubt on this hypothesis...

...When I speak of the defense of democracy, I am not of course in any way defending those colonial wars that have been waged by democracies in conditions where democracy is for home consumption, not for export...

...This is a religious position: it is also an anarchist position...

...Institutionalized violence is a necessary part of every organized state, since without its availability any state would disintegrate...

...To many, it is intensely enjoyable for its own sake but it also serves practical purposes...

...The Brazilian theory is, I think, pushed to fanciful lengths, but the problem of having to defend democracy by limiting some of its freedoms is a real one...

...This argument ignores the fact that the men with whom Lloyd George negotiated in 1921 had a democratic mandate from a great majority of the population of the new state—not a mandate for violence but a mandate to negotiate...

...The defense of democracy is another matter and permits, I think, of firmer judgment...

...the Provisional IRA campaign could probably not have lasted this long without the money that the publicizing of its exploits has drawn from North America...

...None of this works perfectly, but it works to some extent, and no such restrictions at all apply to other uses of violence, whether by nondemocratic states or by terrorist organizations...

...The freedom of the press includes the freedom to be sensational, and in a market economy sensational treatment of violence always finds ready buyers...

...Those who make most use of the term "institutionalized violence" often seem to suggest both that its existence justifies noninstitutional violence—that is, terrorism—and that the violence of the terrorist is calculated to bring about conditions in which institutionalized violence no longer exists...

...the use of violence by the democratic state is subject to scrutiny and criticism, and abuses can be punished and corrected...

...It helps with fund raising...

...On the one hand, it is quite certain that the terrorists do consciously use the freedoms of the media in their attempt to destroy the type of state that alone makes those freedoms possible...

...The publicity also both attracts recruits and tends to spread in the community generally an atmosphere of fear, which may often be helpful to terrorist operations...

...In my own country, Ireland, for example, a prevalent romantic- interpretation of history long favored recruitment for the IRA...

...But of course if these objectives are really thought of as attainable, there is also an attractive future role for the terrorist, as in the case of Stalin...

...The terrorist naturally takes full advantage of this and in particular derives sustenance from his peculiar relation to the media...

...Since he is prepared to risk his own life, as well as to take the lives of others, he is taken to be exceptionally unselfish, setting his cause above his own personal interests...

...In these conditions the disarming of the state would lead to its dissolution, to the distribution of power among groups prepared to use violence and probably to external intervention—all of which would entail greater violence than follows from the normal retention of the law-enforcing apparatus of the state...

...The security forces, the police with the army in reserve, are of course in the frontline in the struggle against antidemocratic terrorism...

...But those who make most use of the term tend to ignore the fact that the institutionalization of violence within a democratic system is the most responsible way available to us for containing violence...

...I have recently been reading a number of academic studies on this subject and related themes—terrorism, guerrilla war, vigilantism, etc., and I have been struck by the clinical detachment of the tone of several of these studies...

...It is true, of course, that even democratic and welfare states and their legal structures maintain and defend institutions and practices that involve very substantial inequalities both of rewards and opportunities...

...This would be wholly admirable if human beings had reached a stage where they could live in peace together without imposed restraints...

...There is ultimately no way of beating the terrorist except by convincing him, and above all his friends and financial supporters, that he has no chance at all of getting his own way...