ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most puzzling and pressing form in which the question of evil surfaces for us today is the phenomenon of terrorism. While terrorism may be understandable and rational as an efficient strategy in a mediate way, in its immediacy it appears as an action directly aimed at doing evil: not evil against a particular person or group, but evil as such. Unlike the acts of a regular war, which do evil to someone in particular, contemporary terrorist acts seek to do something monstrous or catastrophic in itself. Only in the second turn, their action could serve an expressive purpose (to express one’s despair) or an instrumental purpose, to do harm to the world hegemony or to a regional hegemony, and/or provoke it into an adventurous and destabilizing military action. Hence, apart from the natural anger and hatred of the terrorists, their acts evoke the age-old question: how can humans will such a thing; how can such a diabolical evil, evil for the sake of evil, be a ‘maxim’ of someone’s behaviour? Contemporary ‘terrorism’ is one of the main military strategies of unpri-
vileged groups across the world, used both to achieve direct military goals and to make symbolic statements of opposition and dissent against the global hegemony of liberal capitalism. Terrorism against the indeterminate civilian population came to a dominance in the last decades, following the rise of fundamentalist Islamic radicals after the Iranian revolution, and particularly after the end of the Cold War, which turned the bilateral frame of the local conflicts (allies of the United States against the allies of the Soviet Union) into the asymmetrical frame (rebels and radicals against the rest of the ‘civilized world’). The disappearance of the symmetry in status and in the Enlightenment-based ideology (communism versus liberalism), the position of lonely partisans in the face of an all-powerful hegemony, facilitated the transition of many rebellious groups, particularly in Islamic countries, to the terrorist acts as purely negative self-manifestations. While violence against the civil population and hostage-taking have
always existed in wars, today’s radicals use them abundantly, sometimes as
their only strategy, and their acts of violence produce an enormous impact due to their dissemination through the world media, mainly television. The ‘terrorist’ acts are shocking in their use of violence and in the relatively arbitrary choice of victims. Therefore, they are not only shown on television worldwide, but they also attract the exceptional attention both of news agencies and of their audience. One other crucial factor in the efficiency and spread of terrorism is democracy, existing de jure and in some ways de facto, and thus making the whole population symbolically responsible for state policy and capable, through election or public opinion, to change that policy. The blind violence of terrorism, addressed from nobody to nobody, corresponds to the idea of modern democracy as of impersonal, post-regicide rule, as the classical professional war corresponded to the absolutist, personified states. I suggest, at least for the sake of this chapter, to limit the meaning of the
word ‘terrorism’ to the strategy of intimidation with regard to civil population. This definition differs from most definitions adopted in international and US law1 in that it narrows the ‘intimidation’ down to the civil population, instead of considering any intimidation to be a sign of terrorism. In the latter case, violence against soldiers or government officials, meant to intimidate other soldiers or officials, would count as terrorism, and then almost any act of war could be considered as such. Although, historically, ‘terrorism’ from below started in Russia, from violence against officials, such use of the term makes it entirely ideological, subjective and lacking historical specificity: any violence not recognized by the state, any breach of the peace would be considered as terrorism. The intimidating violence against civilians is, on the other hand, if not entirely new, at least objectively characteristic for the civil warfare of our times. Historically, the concept of ‘terrorism’ made a long journey, from the
pejorative title of the violent politics linked with the Jacobin Terror of the French revolutionary government, then to the revolutionary violence against the officials as practised by the nineteenth-century Russian narodniks, but also by the Red Brigades and RAF of the late twentieth century, to terrorism against the arbitrarily taken civilian population, practised in the twentieth century by the Algerian rebels, Palestinian liberation fighters, and currently by many clandestine groups in the historically Muslim region. What is common among these three different phenomena is their democratic character, the use of intimidation, and the recourse to the merely negative affirmation of sovereignty. But otherwise, these are three completely different concepts. The first two ‘terrorisms’ are not really unique: the policy of intimidation against enemies of the state and the war against the ruling class are not that special or surprising. Moreover, the identification of the addressed violence of the Russian nihilists and of the violence against arbitrary victims, in the case of, say, Al Qaeda, is an ideological statement which depends on belief in the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. Which, again, is not to say that there can be no drift between these two concepts, as we will further see in reading Dostoyevsky.
