Insurgent Terrorism

Gerald Cromer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351155540
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Terrorists engage in propaganda and rhetoric, even though they prefer the power of deed over word. They use a wide variety of mechanisms of moral disengagement to convince themselves of the rightness of their actions, a necessary prerequisite for taking up arms. The articles collected together in this excellent volume focus on the rhetoric and propaganda used by insurgent terrorists to justify their resort to violence. The volume includes a thoughtful introduction which summarizes the main findings of the literature, drawing attention to the many different kinds of terrorist propaganda and the underlying similarity between them.

Part I
In the Beginning

[1]
Understanding the Next Act

Nathan Leites
The Rand Corporation

Abstract The practitioner and analyst of Russian unconventional warfare in 1812, Denis Davydov, distinguished three levels of violence: (big) war, small war, and “burning one or two granaries” (Laqueur 1976, p. 46), for which he had no name and which I shall call small violence, or microviolence; even if passenger terminals of metropolitan airports or 747s were, in the near future, to be substituted for granaries. What differentiates microviolence—a mere quantity—is that with “small war” you may expect to impose substantial attrition on the enemy at least over the long run, and with “microviolence” not even that.

The numerous writings concerned with “urban guerrillas” and modern “terrorists” have focused on what they do, and—to some extent—on what makes them do it: which environments and personalities dispose to microviolence. Even the most sophisticated treatments, such as the recent analyses by J. Bowyer Bell and Walter Laqueur, do not systematically consider what they thought they were doing, precisely what good it would do.

To be sure, in some cases where microviolence occurs on behalf of a widely shared cause—usually an ethnic one, whether it be Basque, Palestinian, Irish—a large part of the answer is evident. But what about the Weathermen, the Japanese United Red Army, the Italian Brigate Rosse, the West German Rote Armee Fraktion and June 2 Movement? It is with these that I shall largely deal.

Data on their calculations are meager, and those extant are not easily available. Hence the following pages are a very first approximation, much in need of correction, amplification, further illustration. But as no piece of similar structure has, to my knowledge, been written, the present one might yet be useful. I am aware of the disproportion between the importance of the subjects addressed in many of the following sections on the one hand, and their brevity on the other hand. But, apart from the faults in what I am saying, this should incite rather than repel.

Not all of the microviolent ones with whom I deal show all of the characteristics I shall describe. It might be a subsequent task to establish major constellations.

Of the factual assertions that enter into the microviolents’ calculations, many are, to put it mildly, dubious; often so clearly that I have left it to the reader to note the contrast with reality.

The microviolent ones inhabit a universe of estimates and preferences strikingly different from that of those who devise and execute countermeasures against acts of terror. If some of the latter gained from the following pages a more vivid understanding of their strange adversaries, this study might be of some use.

Sometimes I shall present reactions attributed to microviolent ones as if they had written this essay; the context will, I trust, convey this. Emphases, unless otherwise stated, are mine.

In analyses of “terrorists” in developed countries acting on behalf of a radicalism which is little shared, one question has often been slighted: how do they make it plausible to themselves that their acts serve the attainment of their goal? The pages to follow aim at drawing a first map of answers.

The essay was written in early 1977. No attempt has been made to incorporate the evidence which has become available since then.

I. Impacts

Section 1: Bombing into Awareness

“The urban guerrilla,” “the first phase of revolutionary war,” observes a leader (Renato Curcio) of a group (Brigate Rosse) engaging in microviolence in a developed country (Italy) in the seventies, “is indispensable … for enlarging the ‘possible consciousness’ of the European proletariat …” (L’ Espresso, 2 March 1975, p. 33): a proposition widely accepted in groups of that kind. (They seem to be little aware of Bakunin already having thought so.) The “enlarging” of “consciousness” is to come about in a variety of ways.

First of all, as has very often been noted, by heightening attention to the users of microviolence—to their message.

If a large part of the population, in the belief of many partisans of microviolence, should be hostile to the present shape of things but isn’t, it is also because a barrier is interposed between the revolutionary message and the people. Acts of microviolence may be intended to break down that barrier; most obviously by coercing the authorities to allow the revolutionaries themselves or their messages access to the media.

It requires, the microviolent ones may point out, an extreme event to induce the media to break silence about them. “As I am nothing,” a French anarchist (Leon Lehautier) explained in the late nineteenth century, “if my protest does not entail a scandal which forcibly attracts attention to my grievances, it is as if I were not complaining at all” (Salmon 1959, p. 334). It was the death by hunger strike in prison of one of them (Holger Meins), the leaders of the West German Rote Armee Fraktion (the “Baader-Meinhof” group) point out (while engaged in the same conduct) to a left-of-center news magazine (Der Spiegel), which “has broken up the news boycott against the strike.” Therefore, “that there are many who wake up only when a person has already been murdered, understand only then what the issue is, is also due to you. Thus Der Spiegel has kept silence for eight weeks about the hunger strike of forty political prisoners. Your first report came on the fifty-third day of the strike, five days before the death of Holger” (Der Spiegel, 20 January 1975, p. 54).

Convinced that the present order cruelly frustrates the interests of most, which could be gratified only by the profound changes they favor, the microviolent ones are apt to take it for granted—in contrast, for instance, to revolutionaries in the Bolshevik tradition—that exposure to their ideas commends conversion to them. Thus the Brazilian “urban guerrillas” in the late sixties found it, in the estimate of a critic-revolutionary (João Quartim), “easy to confuse … the publicity which the bombings received with a… building up of strength among the people” (Kohl and Litt 1974, p. 153).The authorities’ high attention to us is undoubtedly accompanied by hostility and fear; surely, then, the people’s interest in us goes with love and trust.

And it also goes with gratitude in those cases where microviolence leads to benefits bestowed on some among the people; when, for instance, land registers containing the titles of big owners are burned or the rich coerced into donations to the poor; unless the microviolent ones themselves, in the words of a Brazilian (Joaquin Camara Ferreira), “attack food warehouses and distribute the food among the people; kill cattle and distribute the beef among the hungry…” (Moss 1972, p. 200). “The guerrillas,” Bernardine Dohrn remarks about the abduction of Patty Hearst, “have kidnapped the daughter of a rich and powerful man in order to provide food to the poor.” The point of their actions is that it “has unleashed … a leap in everyone’s consciousness…” (Letter of 20 February 1974, The Berkeley Barb, 1–7 March 1974). Microviolent ones may even aspire to instituting multiple reforms by permanent coercion. “The proletarian organization,” explains Horst Mahler, “can impose upon the rich obligations to contribute to collective institutions (nursery schools, health care centers, youth hostels, etc.)”; and “urban real estate can be gradually deprived of its power, rents can be lowered …” (Mahler 1971, pp. 32–33).

Or the intention may be to arouse favorable sentiments by exercising vengeance and punishment against the people’s enemies.

Again, microviolence may aim at obtaining documents or confessions compromising the established order (a prominent device of the Tupamaros).

If they are willing to go that far, the people may be expected to reason about those who commit microviolence, there must be much to their cause.

Look at the damage they are willing to incur. ‘‘By the attitude of the crowd” at the execution of Sofia Perovskaya for contributing to the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, “she understood,” Kropotkin surmised, “that she had dealt a mortal blow to the autocracy, and she read in the sad looks which were directed sympathetically towards her that by her death she was dealing an even more terrible blow from which the autocracy will never recover” (Joll 1964, p. 128). Having on 22 February 1974 sabotaged the meteorological tower at the nuclear plant site of Montague, Massachusetts, Samuel H. Lovejoy explained to a New York Times reporter: “I wanted people to think: ‘that guy’s willing to go to jail—these nuclear plants must be heavier than I thought.’” “The fact that… dozens of us are prepared to die…,” one of the Brazilians who had kidnapped the West German ambassador assured, “penetrates to the population” (Kohl and Litt 1974, p. 143).

And look at the damage the microviolent ones are willing to inflict: their targets must be bad indeed—so it may be hoped that the people will reason—-to deserve such treatment. The “systematic sabotage of American targets, from consulates to factories and officials” would, to a Brazilian (Jamil Rodriguez) be “actions whose function it is to unmask the enemy in the eyes of the masses” and “thus indirectly to transmit a political line” (Les Temps Modernes, March 1971, p. 1611).

Here violence is presumed to be sensed as bad in itself. But it may also be believed to be valued for its own sake by elements of the people—people attracted to revolutionaries precisely because they neither respect the law nor cherish the word (another forgotten idea of Bakunin’s). At the national council of the Students for a Democratic Society at Boulder, Colorado, 10–12 October 1968, “the Mother-fuckers [the SDS chapter from New York’s Lower East Side] argued that militant … action could capture the allegiance of … drop-outs living in hippie and working class communities who would be turned off by the ‘intellectual bullshit’ of traditional radicals” (Powers 1971, 93). “When I was at Ann Arbor,” Bill Ayres reminisced in the fall of 1969, “all the talk about revolution was in the abstract”; but “since we have moved to Detroit, we have made the revolution real.” Now “the Grease come up to us and say, ‘Hey, aren’t you the guys who beat up the pigs at McDonald’s last night? How come?’” The point is that “you understand the revolution when you make the revolution, not when you talk about it” (Powers 1971, pp. 147–48). In fact, “anybody who has been out to a high school, to a drive-in or to a community college in an aggressive and assertive way knows that the people out there loved the fuckin’ action and thought that it was out of sight” (Powers 1971, p. 201). In short, “when you say SDS in Detroit, they say, Oh, they are those broads who beat up guys’” (Powers 1971, p. 205).

Those who like nonpolitical violence may have fought against those who are prone to the political variety before fighting with them. “One Saturday afternoon in the middle of July [1969] about forty members of Motor City SDS had gone to Detroit Metropolitan Beach, known as Metro Beach by the white working class youths who spent weekends there. The Weathermen … planted the [Red] flag in the midst of a crowd and began to argue aggressively with the white youths, many of them Vietnam veterans, who gathered around. At one point an angry veteran said, ‘Let’s get the flag’ and a general brawl erupted.” As it should, for “the theory behind the Metro Beach riot … was that working class kids were turned off by sissy intellectuals who talked about fighting the ruling class, but always had some smooth reasons why the actual moment to fight had not arrived. By… proving their commitment by fighting the Weathermen would win the respect of working class kids. A punch in the nose, properly explained, would do more to radicalize the Grease (as working class kids were called) than years of patient explanation. ‘It was great’ Bill [Ayres] told one friend about the Metro Beach riot.‘…The kids love it’” (Powers 1971, pp. 132–33). “At the Metro Beach action,” the same participant-observer reports, “Motor City SDS got into a fight with a gang. But a week later the gang sent a message that they sure did dig beating up SDS, but they also did dig going to Chicago [for the Days of Rage] to beat up some pigs” (Powers 1971, p. 209).

Now that we have employed an extreme means, violence, on behalf of an extreme cause, we have even less than before the right to abandon that cause: in such fashion microviolence may be intended to commit.

It may commit, for instance, in a calculation often attributed to Palestinian “terrorists,” fickle Arab governments and publics who may be disposed to abandon the goal of ending the State of Israel.

And it may commit, in the first place, the microviolent ones themselves. “Middle class in origin,” an observer points out about “white radicals” in the United States of the late sixties, they “were sensitive to the charge that they could drop out of the movement at any moment and resume the… privileged lives they had left behind.” Now, “realizing this, and perhaps defensive about their own revolutionary inertia, black militants took a certain pleasure in attacking white radicals as summertime soldiers playing at revolution.” (Powers 1971, pp. 124–25.) Also, as Bernardine Dohrn recalled (in a statement of 21 May 1970), “the parents of ‘privileged’ kids have been saying for years that the revolution was a game for us” (Powers 1971, p. 213). “As,” according to the observer who quotes this remark, “even the police and the courts seemed to share… [this] belief,” “there was only one way white radicals could defend themselves against this charge: to become criminals for whom there would be no longer any choice of returning to straight society” (op. cit., 181).

They, by the very same acts, would also in their souls separate themselves even more from that society. They would be able to begin violence because they had already, to a perhaps only slight extent, reduced in themselves the sense that it was forbidden. But it would be the practice of violence that would—should—further enfeeble that inner obstacle, in a happy circle between violating waning prohibitions and feeling good about it. (Thus Pascal recommended to unbelievers that they stàrt using holy water; thus Giovanni Gentile suggested to Italian fascists that “the act precedes the norm.”)

Leaders may then be the ones who forbid themselves violence least and thus liberate their comrades. “They,” a former member of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Peter Homann) observes about two prominent militants (Ulrike Meinhof and Horst Mahler), “again and again came up against a limit which they at first did not dare overstep: they had internalized bourgeois legality.” But “then,” as the journalist interviewing the former microviolent one remarks, “came Andreas Baader,” who already had a penal record. Yes, “he transmitted the feeling that violating… laws is… a revolutionary act” (Der Spiegel, 25 November 1971, p. 62).

Such was a revolutionary act not only for the violator, but also for the people who will learn about—and from—such an act. For, as Horst Mahler explains, “education in bourgeois society cannot fully extinguish the spontaneous tendency to defend oneself against oppression by force”; “the potential for force of the oppressed is… merely tamed, always ready (auf dem Sprung) to appear once more in the right direction.” Now “the universality of obedience is an essential condition for obedience being maintained.” Hence, “if that obedience is… refused at length and demonstratively, with the claim to violate the law of the rulers in order to realize the higher right of the oppressed,” then “the norm [of obedience] finally loses its general validity… But “to break the habit (Entwöhnung) of obedience with regard to the bourgeois legal order” is “an essential precondition for revolutionizing the masses.” Once again, “it is not a question of theoretical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I IN THE BEGINNING
• PART II IN THE NAME OF THE CAUSE
• PART III IN THE MIRROR OF THE PAST
• PART IV IN THE NAME OF GOD
• PART V IN COMPARISON
• Name Index