THIS ESSAY ASKS some quintessentially philosophical questions about violence and terrorism: Is violence “special,” demanding a particular kind of moral treatment? Can a state properly be called “terrorist”? Is there anything worthwhile in the old radical distinction between “red” and “white” terror? It begins with a prior question, whether philosophy has anything to contribute to the discussion of violence in the first place. The philosophical treatment of violence, and particularly of terrorist violence, suffers more than most political philosophy from a disproportion between the inevitable and proper impracticality of philosophical inquiry and the all too urgent practicality of the problems addressed. Every time the Irish Republican Army blows an innocent family to pieces, and each time an Israeli reprisal raid on a Palestinian camp reduces a child to bloody rags, the life of reason is mocked and the hope recedes of a politics based on debate and conciliation, a politics based, if you like, on “reflective equilibrium” rather than partisan passion. It is all too easy to see why an ordinary citizen, not otherwise ill disposed to intellectual activity, might question the point of a philosophical account of violence and terrorism. He or she would surely think a political sociology of terrorism was worth having; if it was soundly based, we might understand what drove the warring factions into violent conflict, and that might enable us to see the terms of a peace treaty and how we might deflate their readiness to act violently. By the same token, the ordinary citizen would think a psychopathology of violence worth having as offering some hope of identifying, and then isolating and controlling, those who are too readily attracted to political violence. What comparable promise can philosophy make?
In one view, gallantly defended over many years by Richard Hare, philosophical clarification can contribute something useful, though nothing very exciting. By attending carefully to the logic of moral discourse, we can separate factual disputes from differences of moral outlook. Sometimes people will see that their disputes are merely factual disputes, and moral passion will evaporate. Sometimes they will see that their views are not moral views at all, and they will see them as mere expressions of taste or of simple self-interest. If they really want to be governed by morality rather than self-interest or the passions of the moment, they will rethink the morally proper path of action. Whether rethinking will lead to agreement—or enough agreement to reduce the amount of violence in the world—does not depend on the logic of moral discourse. The character whom Hare nicknames the “fanatic” will pursue his moral goals even if the result is destruction for himself, and with him there is no arguing. The only hope must be that there are few, or no, reflective fanatics. If the old empiricist view is warranted, and human nature is sufficiently uniform for few ultimate moral differences to survive genuine factual agreement, then we may hope that if we become clear about what separates us, we shall find that little does.1
Hare’s critics have observed that the real difficulty lies in getting even the unfanatical to engage in such reflection in the first place, and have doubted whether this is a task for philosophers at all. Most writers gloomily accept that a readiness to engage in such reflection postdates the attainment of peace and cannot be expected ahead of that event. Hobbes can speak for many. Whether or not he meant to say that even coherent speech depends upon the existence of a sovereign power sufficient to “overawe them all,” he was sure that the theorems of his philosophy had authoritatively to be dinned into people’s skulls before they would do any good.2 Once there was peace, people would see the point of peace and would listen to the arguments; until there was peace, they would be carried away by self-love, pride, and religious frenzy. Securing the peace could not be left to philosophers.
The example of Hobbes, indeed, shows how few philosophers have said anything both useful and interesting about violence. Hobbes himself aimed to be useful, but not to say anything philosophically interesting about violence. Although he explores the philosophical complexities of basing political obligation on natural insecurity and the fear of sudden and violent death, he does not offer a “philosophy of violence.” He was an original theorist of the problems of deterrence; he was theologically unconventional in his insistence that God had obtained his kingdom “by violence.” Still, it was not a philosophically interesting fact that men feared violent death above all else. It was important, for it provided the essential motivation for peace, but the treatment of the fear of violent death is rhetorically rather than intellectually central to the plot of Leviathan. Hobbes’s rhetoric performed the task that Richard Hare brackets away—it got people to think morally. Hobbes rubbed people’s faces in their fear of violent death because the philosophical demonstration of the laws of nature would have an impact only on people who had been put in the right frame of mind by that earlier psychological move.3 One might say the discussion of violence was intended to be useful rather than philosophically illuminating.
Conversely, philosophers who have thought that violence was a central part of politics and a subject for philosophy have not intended to be useful. Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva” flying at dusk reminds us what politics and law are, not what they ought to be,4 and it is no part of Hegel’s philosophy of history to deny that history has been a slaughter-bench or to encourage us to lament the fact.5 Nietzsche’s political reflections have been domesticated by writers who think that he should have had the aim of teaching us how to be less violent because less repressed, but it is hard to see such humanitarian concerns in the text.6 He was no friend to political violence in its modern form because he was no friend to the modern state or to modern political concerns in general. Nonetheless, even if the modern hero is an artist, a poet, or a philosopher, he must also be a hero, and the impulse behind the demand that he stake his life on his quest for a meaning to his life comes directly from archaic heroes whose lives were literally staked on the outcome of violent personal encounters. The last thing Nietzsche hoped to be in appealing to this image was useful. Georges Sorel has often been softened in the same fashion because he emphasized that frustrated liberal rationalists were bloodthirstier in their disappointment with their fellows than “pessimists,” who never expected to create utopia in the first place.7 There, too, it is hard to accept that Sorel’s hard-boiled insistence that he preached no messages disguised a humanitarian soul. His pessimists accept violence as natural and proper; their ethic is the ethic of a good fight, not of the avoidance of a fight. It is proper to observe that Sorel is no friend to terror, murder, or torture; but he is not interested in “violence minimization.”
The list could be prolonged, but it is long enough. In the past two or three decades, there have been three kinds of “philosophies of violence,” two of which have operated in the same metaphysical mode and have therefore taken in each other’s washing, while the third has defended a toughly utilitarian stance and provides much of the substance of this essay. On the one side, there have been the existentialist or Sartrean reflections of Frantz Fanon, emphasizing the purgative and creative role of violence.8 In this view, violence is indeed at the heart of politics, and the fact is to be understood, and embraced when understood. This line of thought is indebted to Nietzsche, but even more to the idea that social subordination, especially the racial subordination of colonized blacks, exists because the oppressed sees himself through the eyes of his oppressor. Kill the oppressor, and you not only reduce the enemies’ ranks, you add a brand-new individual to the ranks of the revolted. This positive enthusiasm for violence need not rest on a Nietzschean or Sartrean foundation, of course. Sartre’s own reflections on violence occur in a work that claimed that twentieth-century philosophy is essentially Marxist, and the New Left was quick to embrace Marx’s suggestion that the proletariat discovers itself only in the process of insurrection and that the need for revolution is apparent only to those who engage in it.9 Whether or not power flows from the barrel of a gun, self-understanding does. The supports for such a view are many; sometimes, as with Fanon, the emphasis lies on the psychological transfiguration of the actor; sometimes, as with Baader-Meinhof, the thought is that a social order that relies on a disguised (but real) terrorism to secure itself against its victims will be forced to unmask itself and provoke the retaliation from below that Marxists have awaited since 1848; sometimes, as with Marx himself, the thought is that combat welds us into a fighting force and makes clearer what the conflict is about.10 What holds these disparate ideas together is the thought that the hierarchical order of all political systems, and the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of all economic systems, are, in the last resort, sustained by violence; whether countersystem violence clarifies our minds, strengthens our resolve, or replaces repressive violence by creative and progressive violence, everything rests on a sociological assumption about the way order is sustained.
It would be tiresome to dwell on what often accompanies such thoughts—the attempt to reconceptualize “violence” and “terrorism” in such a way that inequality just is a form of violence, or in such a way that the gaudy consumer society of the middle 1960s appears as a society of psychological terrorism by its very nature. It is worth noting such brazen reconceptualizations, however, since one way in which the costs of violence and the evils of terrorism may be played down is by insisting that violence and terrorism “are always with us,” and so suggesting that revolt, murder, assassination, and hijacking are pretty much on a level with the continued prosperity of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.11 Skepticism about such claims is no obstacle to agreeing that prosperous societies may harbor a lot of violence in their bosoms, as the United States plainly does, or may impose a great deal of it outside their own boundaries, either through the deliberate actions of their rulers or by unwittingly causing upheavals elsewhere that lead to indigenous violence. Nineteenth-century Britain was domestically tranquil, but frequently engaged in violent, though usually small-scale, conflicts abroad; and all developed countries have inadvertently brought the sort of social and economic disruption to simpler societies that has led to domestic violence there.12
The antithesis to this thesis, so to speak, is represented in Hannah Arendt’s On Violence. It addresses the Sorelian or Fanonesque enthusiasm for violence, but its primary purpose is to contradict the New Left thought that power flows from the barrel of a gun. Power is quite another phenomenon from violence, and entirely at odds with violence: “Politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. . . . Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”13 Her account of what power is and how it relates to the characteristic means employed by governments and their opponents is enigmatic, but it suffices to pick on two thoughts. The first is that violence represents “one against all”; the solitary man with the rifle tries to overawe numbers of other people. Power represents “all against one”; the community opposes its will to the will of the single individual. It is thus a failure of social will that creates a shortage of power and leaves people only the recourse to the techniques of violence.14 The second, which follows, is that power rests on agreement; it is because the many constitute themselves a political body that they have a single will that they can oppose to that of any single individual. Although Arendt’s formulation of these points reflects concerns familiar in The Human Condition and elsewhere, such as her distaste for the human sciences and her insistence that politics is profoundly non-“natural,” the contrast between the deliberative and willed nature of politics and the suddenness and reactiveness of violence is not unfamiliar in other writers. The enigmatic formulation of her views sets her at a greater distance from everyday sociological views than does their substance.
Talcott Parsons’s view of power as essentially residing in the hands of an organized community and consisting in a capacity to set and achieve societal goals may not be terribly persuasive as a general definition of power, but it picks up one concern of those who want to distinguish private violence from public power, and it does it in much the same way as does Arendt’s view.15 In this Parsonian view, power is creative, whereas violence is essentially destructive; and although he makes nothing of it, it is also important that power is public. Nobody need be ashamed of exercising power; violence belongs with the surreptitious and the antisocial. Ceteris paribus, employing violent means is a source of shame.16 Once again, violence is special, but this time deplorably so.
The third strain of thought is tough-mindedly utilitarian and strives for matter-of-factness. It has many exemplars. If Romantic Marxists hanker after Götterdämmerung, the ranks of the toughly utilitarian are swelled by unromantic Marxists ready to calculate the costs and benefits of insurrectionary politics and the revolutionary overthrow of whatever social and political order is under their gaze. To avoid clogging this account with excursions into the distinctively Marxian aspects of the case, however, we may here concentrate our attention on Ted Honderich’s Violence for Equality—an expanded version of his earlier Three Essays on Political Violence.17 Honderich does not need to insist that much of the inequality he is concerned with is instituted and maintained by force. It plainly is, particularly in dependent colonized or neocolonial societies, or in nominally independent states that in fact are dictatorships sustained at arm’s length by American or Soviet pressure. There is no need here to balance Honderich’s emphases by pointing to the conjunction of economic equality and political subordination that was characteristic of the satellite states of Eastern Europe, where it was equality rather than inequality that was forcibly instituted and sustained.18 All this can be put to one side to isolate the one argument at stake, which is that liberal political theorists are prone to suggest that violence is never a legitimate means to secure egalitarian social goals, whereas from a utilitarian standpoint, it is clear that some equalizing of economic outcomes would increase general well-being, and that the question whether egalitarian violence is justified reduces essentially to a calculation of the costs of that improvement. In this view, either it is presumed that violence is not peculiarly evil, or it is presumed that even if it is, the ills to which it is addressed are themselves so awful that the evil of violence is not different in kind from the evils it may put a stop to—one must presume this to see the issue as amenable to utilitarian decision making at all.19 Violence, in this view, is the use of a lot of force; terrorism is the use of particularly frightening kinds of force and threatened force. That both states and individuals can resort to violence and terror is obvious. The utilitarian radical’s preference for “red” terror is simple enough. Red terror is simply terror employed in the interests of justice and equality, white terror simply terror employed in the interests of an inegalitarian status quo. Since there is nothing morally peculiar about violence, all interesting questions can be translated into issues of the high social and psychological costs of achieving or resisting social change. Again, the one thing to notice is that anyone trying to lessen our discomfort at the thought of violent measures will, even if he or she is of an unromantic and utilitarian turn of mind, want to remind us of “the violence of normal times,” the quantity of unacknowledged, removable, but systematically applied damage done to individuals without overt or visible violence, but possible only because real violence lurks in the background.20
This position is unexceptionable in its own terms, although insofar as it is a classically utilitarian argument, it must suffer from the difficulties that beset all utilitarian arguments. But the remainder of this essay comes back to this point a long way round, by first tackling two issues that obstruct our adopting so simple a position. The first issue is whether it is right to treat all violence as essentially alike, or whether we must distinguish between state violence and individual violence; and in asking that question, terrorism is a paradigm case. If states employ violence to get their own way, and if states can be terrorist states in just the same way as individuals can be individual terrorists, then terrorism is discussable in simple utilitarian terms, for violent means are simply violent means, and their drawbacks can be set against the ends they serve.21 It is clear why we can expect this result; utilitarianism has no special place for such notions as legitimacy, and is intrinsically hostile to trying to give a special moral status to the distinction between de jure—that is, official and licensed—exercises of legitimate force and de facto—that is, unofficial and unlicensed—violence. The question we face is how far we can go in carving out room for such notions in a generally utilitarian framework. The second issue, tackled very briefly, is whether there is any distinction between red and white terror. On the face of it, anyone of a utilitarian disposition will think the distinction farfetched or an awkward way of making a tautological point: whether terror is employed for supposedly “progressive” purposes—red terror—or for supposedly “reactionary” purposes—white terror—is neither here nor there, since the only question worth asking is whether the costs of either promoting or resisting change are outweighed by the gains of so doing. Again, our problem is whether we can find some room for the distinction, either to discredit or, more guardedly, simply to complicate a utilitarian perspective.
Arendt claims that violence is an individual or antipolitical use of force, whereas what a state employs is, strictly speaking, power.22 The first reaction of many of her readers is to throw up their hands and insist that violence is a matter of the kind of force employed, and the amount of force employed, and the degree of resistance that has to be overcome rather than a matter of who employs it or whether they are licensed to employ it or whether they have the majority of the people with them. The British army in Northern Ireland meets IRA violence with official violence; certainly, it relies on its own legitimacy to secure the uncoerced support of the bulk of the population in its fight against IRA terrorists, but what it employs against the terrorists when it has to is violence. Yet there is a certain awkwardness about saying simply that the IRA’s campaign of unofficial violence is being met with a campaign of official violence. Or, better, anyone who said that would mean it as a criticism rather than as a neutral description of the facts. So the reader who throws up his or her hands at Arendt’s sharp distinction between power and violence may need a more elaborate response.
A fortiori, if we flinch at the idea that what is leveled against the IRA is just “official violence,” then the thought that the state meets IRA terror with legitimate, or official, terror will seem even more awkward. The neatest route to good sense is not wholly clear, however. It is not enough merely to stare at such terms as “force,” “violence,” and “terror” as if we might divine their essences; we have to come to terms with the reasons why we are pulled in two directions, recognizing on the one hand that states secure obedience by coercing the recalcitrant and threatening violently inflicted harm to anyone tempted to rebellion, and on the other that states regard such sanctions as something to be relied on only when appeals to authority have failed. In spite of Max Weber and Jeremy Bentham both, we are not tempted to define a state’s authority in terms of its ability to command a monopoly of legitimate violence, though we may well be willing to concede that a state cannot be expected to exercise the authority it claims unless it can also command a (near) monopoly on violence.23 It appears, on inspection, that there are some quite strong reasons behind our sense of the awkwardness of certain ways of talking, even if they do not license categorical claims of the kind that Arendt makes.
In thinking about the state’s use of terror, one writer takes a position extreme enough to anchor one end of our argument. This is Joseph de Maistre, whose St. Petersburg Dialogues contain a long and rather revolting description of a man being broken on the wheel for blasphemy or parricide. The point of the passage is the ambiguous status of the hangman. The hangman cannot be thought of as a member of society, though he prays in God’s church and is evidently one of our species. For he lacks crucial human qualities, and what he does cannot be made sense of in ordinary human terms. Nonetheless, he is the key to social order: “And yet all grandeur, all power and all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears.”24 That is, in Maistre’s scheme of things, states secure themselves by terrorist methods. To call them terrorist methods needs a little explanation, and in giving it, we can see what is peculiar about terrorism in the usual sense and why it is worth distinguishing it from legitimate force.
The point is this: the activities of terrorists are marked by two characteristics. The first is a willingness to employ methods that deprive their victims or targets of the power of a graduated, rational response. This is what Maistre thought authority required. It is certainly what most people think is intolerable about terrorism. There is a disproportion between the goals aimed at and the sanctions threatened that takes terrorist “bargaining” out of the realms of bargaining as usually understood and turns it into the simple imposition of the will of one party. Consider the IRA. The goal of a united Ireland is not a simple goal—it is exceedingly hard to say what arrangements would be needed to stabilize a united Irish state, because so much would depend on the frame of mind of the citizenry at the point where a united state was instituted. Even if there is less “pure” mutual detestation between the two communities, North and South, than there appears to be, there is a great deal of mutual apprehension; a combination of high apprehension and a belief that it might be possible to unscramble any union would surely be likely to replace IRA terrorism with Ulster Volunteer Force terrorism in an attempt to take the Six Counties out of a united Ireland. The resolution of the difficulties facing union, or rather reunion, would be a complicated matter to bargain one’s way through, assuming we had two governments and a good many community representatives at the bargaining table. If IRA terrorism is seen as a way of getting a united Ireland that anyone wants to live in, it must look absurd. Its only purpose must be to so intimidate and alienate the army, Ulster Protestants, and the ordinary civil authorities that they acquiesce in some simple demand—such as “Brits Out.” Similar tactics got the British out of Palestine, even if the subsequent forty years are a bad advertisement for securing nationhood in such a way. As Arendt remarks, though apropos of nowhere in particular, the main thing that violence is good at bringing about is more violence.25 Governments that refuse to negotiate with terrorists almost perpetrate a pleonasm inasmuch as it is not the terrorists’ intention to negotiate over anything except the question “What will you give me to stop?” This question, the blackmailer’s or the terrorist’s question, suggests that the terrorist’s demands are, as they commonly say, “nonnegotiable” and that the terrorist is interested only in applying whatever pressure is necessary to get his or her own way in something simple and immediate.26
In so doing, the terrorist reveals the other aspect of terrorism that sets it apart from ordinary politics. The terrorist operates essentially by being willing to do what others would not knowingly and in full consciousness do. To be a terrorist is to notify everyone else that there are literally no limits to one’s willingness to behave badly. The terrorist in effect declares that in his or her moral universe, the categories of innocence and guilt have been abandoned; children may be taken hostage, old women thrown out of airplanes—anything goes so long as it terrifies one’s opponents. The two things go hand in hand; the element of shock involved in declaring one’s willingness to behave atrociously is both a natural and a predictable social response to the atrocious behavior itself, and the felt atrociousness of the behavior is partly a consequence of our sense that the terrorist really will stick at nothing. The degree of shock may also reflect baffled outrage at something that is a consequence of these two things, and that is the sense that the terrorist is inviting us and defying us to break all our own rules; the Irish Free State put down the IRA in the 1920s by executing hostages, and part of the horror of terrorism is just that it incites such wickedness in those whom it threatens. The glee of ordinarily decent Americans at the bombing of Tripoli in the spring of 1986 is perhaps a commentary on such tensions.
This may be the key to the urge to draw a categorical or conceptual distinction between—however one puts it—legitimate force and mere violence, between the state’s threat of punishment and the terrorist’s threat of “punishment,” the urge to say that power is one thing and violence another, the urge to deny that power can flow from the barrel of a gun, to deny that authority is accepted and effective threatening. For a state to trade in the currency of authority, and to claim the right to have its demands taken seriously, the state must work within a rough moral consensus; not only must its demands on the citizenry be demands that citizens think it reasonable to make of one another—the repression of violence, the security of contract, and so on—but their sanctions must also fall within that consensus.
This is not a precise claim. Little of the empirical literature on political ideology and citizen loyalty is precise even where it is considerably bolstered by statistical data, and I know of no empirical literature on just this point. Still, it explains two things that are obvious enough but readily overlooked. The first is the extent to which governments secure obedience without drawing attention to the sanctions that underlie their demands for it; individuals do what they are asked because they think they ought to do it whether asked or not, and their interest in their government’s capacity to wield sanctions is confined to the question whether the government can prevent others’ taking advantage of their own compliance.27 Taxpayers pay their fair share willingly enough so long as they believe that others who are tempted to cheat can be prevented from doing so; rational people put away their guns so long as they believe that the government can disarm others who might be tempted to take advantage of their unarmed state. We do not ask whether the state can terrify us into obedience. The other is the informal convention about the limits of punishment under which most societies appear to operate. Capital punishment for parking offenses would make vastly more difference to the number of parking offenders than it would to the murder rate. It would, however, be quite mad to hang someone for meter feeding or overstaying the allotted time, or for being ten feet nearer a hydrant than allowed. Herbert Hart refers to the idea of a “tariff” that guides judges and legislators in their view of what punishments to impose and how far to go in making use of the penalties provided for. Only serious outrages justify severe penalties. What seems at first glance to be the utilitarian view—that a very, very few judicial executions would have a disutility overwhelmingly offset by the increased utility of all those millions of occasions on which it became easier to park somewhere—is at odds with this “tariff” conception, according to which each crime can draw down only a penalty that is a good match on the same scale.28
This is confessedly an imprecise claim. It makes tolerably good sense nonetheless. In the first place, there are penalties and judicial practices that we—twentieth-century, liberal-democratic we—regard as dreadful, and yet understand as not all that dreadful in context. Treason, for instance, was punished in classical Roman law and in medieval English law not only by hideous physical ill-treatment of the actual traitor but by what amounted to perpetual disinheritance of the traitor’s family. It, so to speak, “tainted the blood” of the perpetrator. This strikes us as unjust and superstitious, and it was ruled out by the U.S. Bill of Rights, by the revolutionary constitutions of France, and by modern practice; but we do not feel inclined to hold that against the Romans and the medieval English. They held curious views about the divinity of authority, they were more inclined to merge individual and collective responsibility, and they lived in shakier societies than ours, ones where unusual deterrents seemed more reasonable.
A second thing that is illuminated by the thought that governments must generally stick within the accepted moral boundaries in making and enforcing law is the Bill of Rights prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishment. One might think it sufficient to prohibit punishment of “excessive” cruelty or some such thing; but the idea that we want to prohibit unusualness has a certain logic to it. Terrorists ply a trade to which ingenuity and surprise are all too relevant; a terrorist organization whose tactics and methods were predictable would be out of business in a week. Equally, they have to beware of inducing a resigned acceptance of their activities among the population they attack. The IRA suffers to a degree from the fact that it tries to behave somewhat like an army and therefore murders a predictable group of people; since it kills fewer people than do everyday murderers in an average American city of the same population as the province, its activities can be put up with, even if not exactly shrugged off.29 Yet a campaign to create “pure” terror would put it at odds with its claims to be the army of a future republican government. The Baader-Meinhof gang caused more alarm in Germany than the IRA causes in Britain not just because German society is more readily alarmed than British—though it may be—but because its activities and targets were so much less predictable. Since its aim was to force the state to reveal its own terroristic aspect, its tactics were to unsettle and panic the government by opportunistic violence against targets it selected as peculiarly representative of capitalist oppression—judges and businessmen prominent among them—but without much apparent logic about who out of a large group was likely to be attacked.30 There lies another crucial difference from the behavior of governments: predictability and regularity are of the essence of government. Governments do not wish to leave their citizens in the dark about what is going to happen next. Indeed, there is something like a conceptual connection between purporting to be a government and attaching fixed sanctions to known demands. Hence, the thought that a government might resort to unusual penalties is not just disturbing as a matter of inducing anxiety among the citizenry; it is also disturbing as a blow to the idea that the government really means to govern.
To any claim about such a conceptual or near-conceptual connection between being a government and eschewing terror or violence, there are obvious counterexamples—certainly Nazi Germany, and probably both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. The government’s reliance on terror as a standard tool of government features prominently in most definitions of a totalitarian state.31 Such states display no sense that cruel and unusual punishment is somehow at odds with being a government at all. Anyone who finds this obvious will certainly think that I have absurdly underestimated the number of counterexamples. All too many governments have gone down the same track; Pinochet’s government in Chile and the military regime in Argentina connived at, sponsored, and perhaps deliberately organized the abduction, torture, and murder of women and children as well as of suspected terrorists; the Indonesian government behaves quite as badly in East Timor. Indeed, governments that engage in such activities may well outnumber those that do not.
There is no point in trying to maintain that the governments of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were not governments—Aristotle might well have thought that whatever they were, they were not political regimes, and Augustine would have had no qualms about describing them as mere “armed bands of robbers,” but that is not much help here.32 General Pinochet’s government was, for better or worse, the government of Chile; the Argentinian junta was manifestly the government of Argentina. If we think that there is, all the same, a large distinction between these and nonterrorist regimes, and thus wish to illuminate their relations with their subjects, and the odd combination of terrorist and legalistic behavior these involved, there is more mileage in the thought that such regimes have declared war on some segment of the population. That means that the government stands in a slightly odd relationship to its victims, treating them both as subjects and as enemies. Often such governments have themselves faced domestic terrorism, and claim that their behavior is a reaction to it. This is consilient with one liberal argument against terrorism, namely, that the great defect of terrorism is that it cannot undermine a determined government but does lead to the destruction of civil liberties. A government that behaves atrociously in the Argentine fashion accepts the declaration of war from below and fights with as few legal restraints as there would be on the field of battle. Since its opponents are not, in fact, enemy soldiers but all too often unprotected and innocent civilians, we have the horrors of civil war compounded.33
Of course, cases vary. In Chile, there was no justification for Pinochet’s savagery; but in Argentina there had been enough urban terrorism to give some color to the government’s claim that it was already fighting a virtual civil war, though the revolting behavior of its agents exceeded anything done by Pinochet’s forces. No such argument applies to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. One of the many madnesses of Hitler’s Germany and the Russia of the purges lay in the way they fought a crusade against their own subjects, none of whom had taken up arms against the regime, and few of whom had much idea wherein their offense lay. At the other end of the spectrum, British civil and political liberties have perhaps not been much more eroded by the campaign against the IRA than they would anyway have been under a prime minister of Margaret Thatcher’s temperament. Still, the campaign has seen some nasty innovations in reducing the defendants’ rights in criminal trials and has involved a good deal of passing brutality, some cases of what amounts to murder by the police, and the erosion of the rights of free travel and free speech.34
The rather feeble conclusion toward which this points is thus that the bold conceptual claims of writers such as Arendt pick up something important even if they misstate what it is. There is every reason in morality to wish governments to observe a distinction between force and (mere) violence, between legitimate punishment and attempts to terrorize their subjects, and there are plenty of empirical grounds for supposing that a stable and productive society is possible only if such distinctions are built into the legal practice of the society. But no conceptual argument could show that a government cannot maintain itself by terror or that it would cease to be a government if it did; certainly it sacrifices consent to brute force, but plenty of regimes have been happy enough to do that. One can see why so many writers have wanted to say that what exists in such conditions is not law, or is not government, or is not politics; but it seems better to admit that it is politics of a particularly disgusting kind than to get embroiled in conceptual squabbles. The point, after all, is less to find a label for it than to try to stop it.
This discussion has been tied almost entirely to the question whether a government can be accused of behaving like a terrorist toward its own subjects. It has taken for granted that no useful distinction is to be drawn between red and white terror, since it has taken for granted that terrorism is no way to secure either justice—which is characteristically the goal of red terror—or order—which is the goal of white terror. To subvert that conclusion, one would have to demonstrate that there was some essential connection between the aspirations of the progressive and conservative forces and the brutalities they resort to. It is not impossible to make a start on such an argument. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s much-mocked defense of the United States’ authoritarian allies in Central America relies on the thought that totalitarian regimes have no logical stopping place in the infliction of violence; they wish to remodel human nature, and this is an endless task. The less horrible kind of authoritarian regime merely wishes to frighten a finite number of enemies so that the status quo can be maintained.35 Still, one might wonder what this implies about Hitler’s Germany, which was, by most lights, conservative or reactionary and showed no signs of such self-restraint; and in any scale of horror, General Galtieri’s Argentina does as badly as any regime of the left. The truth seems to be rather that regimes that live by brute force have every reason to go on using it, since they must create enemies as fast as they kill them and may well create imagined enemies a great deal faster than that. To find the distinction between red and white terror useful, we have to swallow a great deal of contentious sociological theory, which is, at the least, outside the scope of this essay.
It is time to conclude by listing fairly briefly some ways in which governments can straightforwardly be accused of engaging in terrorism and a few ways in which they may contentiously be said to be so engaging. The first two cases are simply those in which a government hires or employs or sponsors terrorists to attack either its own citizens or those of other countries. The status of the death squads of Central American countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador is, for for obvious reasons, veiled in obscurity; but in each case, they were probably hired, and certainly protected, by the regime of the day, and that, by anyone’s reckoning, made it a terrorist regime. If Syria paid for, protected, equipped, and assisted hijackers and would-be bombers of El Al aircraft, that makes the Syrian regime a terrorist regime. In neither case does it make the regime merely a terrorist regime, any more than the fact that governments of liberal democracies rely on armed force and possess large standing armies makes them merely military governments. But just as relations between government and the military in many democracies suggest that the continuum between military and nonmilitary regimes really is a continuum (even though the distinction between gaining power by military force and gaining it by other means remains a difference in kind), so the distinction between terrorist and nonterrorist regimes lies on a continuum where some hands are dirtier than others (though the distinction between states where the rulers acquired power by murder and violence and those where the rulers acquired power through the ballot box also remains a difference in kind).
There is, however, a rhetorical force to “terrorist regime” that goes beyond observing that regimes exist that hire assassins, hijackers, kidnappers, and bombers. There is at least a suggestion that these are regimes that are happy to do so and would rather get their way in this fashion than in any other; they are regimes that have been seduced by the allure of the gunman. Now, when one comes to decide which countries belong in this category, contentiousness is the order of the day; visiting Martians might well think that several Middle Eastern countries are in that condition—not official Iran, perhaps (if such an entity exists), and certainly not Egypt, but unofficial Iran, Libya, and Iraq quite plausibly. It is not a description these countries would themselves accept; and it is one that has been overused in American and Israeli rhetoric. On the other hand, visiting Martians might think that the Israeli government showed some of the symptoms, and that the actions of the Mossad were not far enough removed from those of Hezbollah to sustain the moral weight the Israeli government would like to place on the difference.
Martians might be persuaded either way by further argument; they might think that the Mossad was fastidiously controlled as a result of its official status, that it was careful in its choice of targets and sufficiently accurate in its operations to sustain the moral difference between a covert war against noninnocent enemies and a mere campaign of terror designed to shut up political dissent. They might, however, find themselves thinking that what was going on in the Middle East was a total war in which there were no innocent parties, and that Hezbollah was fighting as legitimate a war as anybody else. This essay is not committed to siding with one claim or the other, but to making some sense of the rhetoric in which arguments in this area are dressed.
If one accepts the suggestion that succumbing to the allure of the gunman is part of what makes a government a terrorist government, the moral mess into which governments can get themselves is not always far from home; the British government’s readiness to hero-worship the Special Air Service is unlovely enough, and a taste for, and a belief in the possibilities of, covert violence has marked the behavior of the United States ever since the end of World War II. It is a vice that is likely to infect any regime that gained its nationhood by force of arms in the not too distant past; one of Israel’s difficulties in sustaining its own moral principles is just that Irgun and the Stern Gang were successful. It is doubtful whether the visiting Martians would think any government absolutely immune from at least the temptation.36
Finally, there is “ordinary” warfare. This is commonly taken to be a paradigm of what terrorism is not; it is violent, but it is overt, legitimate, directed against combatants, started and finished by legally recognizable acts, and so on. But this all supposes that governments do in fact manage to sustain all these crucial differences, and in the twentieth century there is no evidence that they do or that they have seriously intended to. “Total war” is, on the face of it, terrorism under the aspect of war; the British firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden were deliberate attempts to break civilian morale by killing as many noncombatants as possible. It was not a matter of arguing that munitions workers in Hamburg were as important to the war effort as soldiers on the Russian front and therefore legitimate targets, though it is sometimes passed off in that way. It was a deliberate attempt to erase a whole city, and that is to say that it was a deliberate attempt to massacre a large civilian population. President Truman’s justification of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the British defenses of the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, relied on the consequentialist argument that fewer people got killed that way than would have got killed if the war had been allowed to go on. Nonetheless, this was a defense of a massacre of the innocent, and thus a defense of essentially terrorist methods. It does not follow—except in some interpretations of just-war theory—that the defense is unacceptable.37
Couching things in those terms is, of course, rhetorically impossible to square with the repeated insistence of current Western governments that it is illicit to meet terrorism with terrorism and that the resort to terrorist methods is absolutely wrong. So used are we to the picture of the terrorist as essentially private and engaged in some revolutionary cause on the red end of the spectrum that we find it a wrench to contemplate the idea that terrorism can also be massive in scale, officially organized, delivered by people in uniform, subject to legally certified orders, and so on. But all the usual features of terrorism apply to total war; it is waged without distinction between the innocent and the guilty, and although we have got used to the idea that nuclear war is the ultimate horror of our time, we ought not to forget that its horrors are only those of Hamburg and Dresden magnified a good deal. Burning women and children to death as an instrument of policy is the same act whether the means chosen include incendiaries and high explosives or nuclear weapons.
Total war resembles terrorism in its contempt for negotiation, too. The demand for unconditional surrender may once, on the battlefield, have simply been a way of making the point that the opposing, losing army was in no condition to carry on.38 In the two world wars of this century, it became the decision that the Allies would stop at nothing to win and that winning was a matter not of inducing the other side to return to the negotiating table from the battlefield, but of annihilating its capacity to sustain the war. Aside from the tactics—it may well be that a better postwar settlement could have been achieved if the Allies had, from the very beginning and certainly after 1943, offered a negotiated peace to anyone who could remove Hitler and open negotiations—the morality of “unconditional surrender” is open to question. In its absolutism, it too much resembles the “nonnegotiability” of the terrorist’s demands.
We must now end by coming back to our utilitarian starting point. Does this bring us all the way back to the highly plausible view that violence is violence, whoever perpetrates it, and that whether it is public or private, we can ask only the question we began with—is it morally justified by its results? Not quite. If it is true that twentieth-century warfare has turned into officially practiced terrorism, not as a definitional or conceptual matter but morally speaking, we may still want to hang onto some of the moral and conceptual claims made in the just-war tradition, not, so to speak, seeing them as deliverances of pure reason or natural law, nor seeing them as somehow built into the fabric of the world, but seeing them rather as distinctions and calls to self-restraint that we may be able to enshrine in international law and international organization if we work at it.
One powerful domestic argument for maintaining regular, legal government is that it replaces the feud, private vengeance, and other forms of self-help that not only are frequently ineffective, but also readily degenerate into uncontrolled brutality and cruelty. Once one sees that the international system of self-help that is what war amounts to can operate in a controlled way but generally does not, one can begin to see how states can use force to get their own way without behaving too hideously, but also how perilous this process is and how likely it is that they will be faced with the choice between behaving as terrorists and making a humiliating retreat—or, as in the case of the United States in Vietnam—stumbling into doing both. If there is anything to be said for the philosophical investigation of such issues, it is that it can help us make our way more steadily through this moral minefield.