ABSTRACT
Violence has become a tragic commonplace in our time. Crimes of violence – murder, aggravated assault, robbery and rape – number over two million a year in the United States alone. Violence frequently plays a part in contemporary human relations. Wife-beating and child abuse, for example, are far more widespread than was previously recognized; more than half of all murders are by people acquainted with the victim. The young especially turn to violence, perhaps as a way of finding a place in the world. Well over one-third of the persons arrested for murder are under the age of twenty-five. The madness of our time is homicidal. “We are mad not only individually but nationally,” said the Stoic philosopher and statesman Seneca, 2,000 years ago. “We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crimes of slaughtering whole peoples?”1 Only a tortuous dialectic can defend as sanity the continuing violence in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ireland, Ethiopia, South Africa, Lebanon, Gaza, the Persian Gulf, Kashmir, Punjab, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and so around the world. Power has always been associated with violence. Power is distinguished from influence by the severity of the sanctions it has at its disposal; bodily harm is among the most severe. Metaphors for the exercise of power drawn from bodily violence abound: to put the screws on, twist one’s arm, ram down one’s throat, have under one’s thumb, have someone by the short hair (or more vulnerable parts), push him to the wall, be on his back, have the upper hand, or lay a heavy hand on him, as in the recurrent Scriptural idiom, “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”2 Other metaphors describe the exercise of power as crushing the body: ride roughshod over, treat like dirt under one’s feet, or use as a doormat. To submit to power is to knuckle under or bend the neck, to fall on one’s knees or to take it lying down. That power can dehumanize is conveyed in a number of expressions. People can be treated like horses: to hold the reins, be in the saddle, crack the whip or have the whip hand. They can be treated like dogs: bring to heel, make one lie down and roll over, or hold in leash. Other domesticated animals are also invoked: to exercise power is to ride herd, lead by the nose, hog-tie or rule the roost. Today the metaphors of power and violence have become literal, made explicit in action as well as in expression. Violence in our time is largely political, as
once it was largely economic, and before then largely a matter of status. It was argued that “The chief scandal of our age is the assassination of innocence in the name of justice.” This is scandal enough; more shameful is that we no longer recognize the difference between innocence and guilt. Moral degradation has corrupted not only the truth of moral judgments but also their meaning. Killing was once a sin, then it became a crime, and at last an illness; now it is a political statement. Standards of religion, law and psychiatry have been replaced by norms of political correctness. Moral assessment has given way to calculations of political effectiveness. Resurgent barbarism knows nothing of psychiatry, and claims validation by religion and law. Far beyond the rhetoric of “police brutality” in American protest movements is the systematic use of torture by regimes in Central and South America, Africa and elsewhere, as well as public executions, the cutting off of hands, decapitation and stoning in Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria and so-called “moderate” states like Saudi Arabia. Violence often takes the place of more orderly patterns of political succession. In the Middle East, since the midtwentieth century alone there have been over twenty assassinations of heads of states or officials of cabinet level, more than thirty coups or revolutions, and over thirty additional unsuccessful attempts. From the Iliad and the Aeneid to the classics of romanticism, violence has been glamorized. The irrationality of the heroes of chivalry was shown for what it was in Don Quixote. Byron countered with Childe Harold and Tennyson with Idylls of the King, to which Mark Twain rejoined with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The neo-romanticism of our day heroizes modern virtuosos of violence: the gunfighter of the Old West, the gangster, the private eye, the secret agent and finally the terrorist. The popular culture that applauds violent characters like Mickey Spillane, James Bond and Rambo also produces folk heroes like Che Guevara and Carlos, Zarqawi and Bin Laden. The glorification of violence was characteristic of Fascism. Today the glorification has been taken up by the self-styled “progressives” and “revolutionaries.” The contemporary counterpart of the statement, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver,”3 is Yasser Arafat, who appeared before the assembly of nations with a pistol at his side, affecting the uncouth image and accoutrements of brute force. Widespread today is a cult of violence, complete with sacrifices, priesthood and theologians. Violence is praised in our time as poverty was in another age it is said to build character and to be the cradle of all the virtues. “Irrepressible violence is man recreating himself,” Sartre declared; “through mad fury the wretched of the earth become men.”4 Politics makes strange bedfellows and stranger psychologists. Reason might conclude instead that mad fury is characteristic of madmen. Among those concerned with political change, the dogma is proclaimed that any change that does not come from the barrel of a rifle is not worthwhile, not a “genuine revolution.” Violence is not seen as the final recourse of reason at bay; the cult of violence gives the appeal to force an unchallenged priority in the
political arena. “The first maxim of your policy,” said Robespierre, “ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.”5 Ironically, only the so-called enemies of the people are ready to negotiate; terrorists have no use for talk as a way of conducting people. Frequent targets of the violence linked to terrorist action are the mediators of non-violent conflict-resolution: law-makers, judges and diplomats. In the cult of violence the appeal to reason is seen as only another line of defense of the status quo. Ethics does not condemn every use of force. There is a moral obligation, after all, to struggle against injustice; turning the other cheek is seldom an effective device for behavior-modification. The violence that ethics does condemn is that which claims innocent victims, as well as the violence resorted to when other means might be effective. The cult of violence does not regard violence merely as a means; violence is an end in itself. The rapist is not filled with lust but with hate; the mugger typically beats the victim after robbing them – robbing to have an occasion for the beating. The cult of violence has taken over the Fascist principle that a good war justifies the cause. It is against this background of violence that one must view the terrorism rampant in the world today. What is terror? The term functions as a political symbol, not only as a category of political science. As a political symbol, “terror” is often applied to any use of force which those applying the symbol regard as unjust, illegitimate or excessive. Israel, for instance, was widely accused of terror when it raided camps which the subsequent civil war in Lebanon revealed to be armed bases; on the other hand, attacks on Israeli troops or on United States Marines smack more of guerilla warfare than of terror. Loose usage of the word “terror” may be politically effective, but it contributes little to understanding. Political semantics is notoriously irresponsible. Calling an act “terror” does not make it so, though the label may make people think it so. By calling “terror” any violence of which the speaker disapproves, the moral condemnation of the act is assured, but the judgment is tautological. Contrariwise, supporters of terrorist acts may so restrict the label that on their usage there is no such thing as an act of terror at all. Moral discrimination calls for a more discriminating semantics. Terrorism is the use of force primarily to produce a certain fearful state of mind – terror, in fact. Some element of fear is evoked by every exercise of power. Violence, terrorist or not, evokes fear in order to coerce. The bank-robber uses a gun to frighten the teller; a military action aims to destroy, not just the enemy’s military capacity, but also the will to resist. In terrorism, fear is to be evoked in someone else in addition to those on whom the violence is being perpetrated. Terror is the use of force in a context that differentiates the victim of the violence employed from the target of the action, who is to be coerced by the violence. There is no terrorism unless victims are usefully distinguished from targets. Kidnapping, for example, is an act of terror because the person kidnapped is a hostage, someone irrelevant to the terrorist’s aim except by way of the psychological effect on the target of holding the victim captive. Since victim and target may be related in various ways, the distinction between them may be unclear or debatable. Victims may be agents of the target
– diplomats, soldiers, police, officials or totally uninvolved bystanders. It is these latter which differentiate terror from guerilla warfare. That terror is violence which deliberately claims innocent victims follows from this definition. Passengers on commercial airliners, customers, tourists, pilgrims and school children cannot be regarded as agents of political targets except in a sense so broad that agency loses its meaning. It is intrinsic to terror that the victims are so loosely identified with the target, if at all. Not every individual is equally responsible for every action of their government, or of a group – political, religious, racial or ethnic – of which they are a member. Morality can hold an individual responsible only in the measure of that individual’s impact on the group’s action. This is equally true of responsibility for terror. One who freely joins a terrorist group and volunteers for a terrorist mission is wholly responsible. Brainwashing or other subtle forms of coercion may lessen the responsibility. A functionary carrying out orders is less responsible than those who give the orders, although the functionary is not altogether free of responsibility. A citizen who dissents from policies he or she abhors and disobeys the laws by which the policies are carried out is free of responsibility altogether for the government’s actions. A former inmate of a concentration camp has a very different moral standing than a former member of the SS. The innocence of the victims of terror is often underlined by the locale of the terrorist action, which seldom can be given the remotest military significance: a school bus, a commercial airliner, an athletic competition, a supermarket, a department store, a hotel lobby, a theatre or a bar. All of these have been scenes of terroristic violence. The distinction between target and victim – and, correspondingly, between guerilla warfare and terror – is not always easy to draw. Bystanders may become unintended victims (like a passer-by hit by a ricocheting bullet) or incidental victims (like a bystander used as a shield in a shoot-out). In terror, there are victims who are neither unintended nor incidental. The fear meant to coerce the target is essential to the terrorist’s aim. Moral confusion is engendered by confused situations in which there are unintended victims, who are then thought to make the act terroristic. Seizing hostages is one thing; unintentionally killing bystanders in actions while combating terror is quite another. Establishing military installations among civilians – as was done systematically by many terrorist groups – puts innocent people at risk; it does not make every attack on those installations an act of terror. Acts of terror are often associated with other acts of violence, in which victim and target coincide. Such linked violence, though not terroristic itself, is a condition or consequence of terrorism. It is illustrated by a bank robbery carried out (for instance, by the Symbionese Liberation Army) to finance subsequent acts of terror; by a battle (as by the Hezbollah, against the Lebanese army regulars) to secure a base of operations for a terrorist group; or by an act of revenge (for example, the assassination of the official responsible for the capture and death of Che Guevara). Linked violence has a conditional rationale, subsidiary to that for the planned or past terror from which it derives. The morality of linked violence depends on the acts to which it is linked, as well as on the nature of the linkage.
