The question of terrorist motivation is far from new, and has received an enormous variety of answers. This is hardly surprising, for terrorism has assumed widely differing characteristics from age to age and from country to country. Any explanation that attempts to account for all its many manifestations is bound to be either exceedingly vague or altogether wrong. It has been said that highly idealistic and deeply motivated young people have opted for terrorism when they faced unresolved grievances and when there was no other way of registering protest and effecting change. Dostoyevsky and many oth ers would hardly have agreed. It has also been said that terrorists are criminals, moral imbeciles, mentally deranged people or sadists (or sado-masochists). Sweeping definitions of this kind are bound to pro voke scepticism. Terrorist movements are usually some kind of youth movements and to dwell upon the idealistic character of youth move ments is only stressing the obvious: they are not out for personal gain and they always oppose the status quo. But political goals are not necessarily wholly altruistic: idealism and interest may coincide, nor are personal ambitions absent; terrorists have also been driven on by impatience and a kind of machismo (or, more recently, its female equivalent). Terrorism has occurred with increasing frequency in societies in which peaceful change is possible. Grievances always exist, but in certain cases oppression has been borne without protest, whereas elsewhere and at other times relatively minor grievances have resulted in violent reaction. Nor is the choice of terrorism as a weapon altogether obvious, for frequently there are other ways of resistance, both political and military.
In short, the problem of terrorism is complicated, and what can be said without fear of contradiction about a terrorist group in one country is by no means true for other groups at other times and in other societies. Love of liberty, as well as the ardent love of others, were invoked by sympathetic observers trying to explain the motives of the terrorists of the last third of the nineteenth century — “the last, desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing space and life.”1 Emma Goldman noted that the anar chist terrorists were impelled to violence not by the teachings of Anarchism but by the tremendous pressure of conditions which made life unbearable to their sensitive natures. Compared to the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of vio lence were but a drop in the ocean: “High strung like a violin string, the anarchists weep and moan for life, so relentless, so cruel, so terribly inhuman. In a desperate moment the string breaks.”2
Other contemporary observers interpreted terrorism in a less complimentary light: it was altogether evil, a form of madness with perhaps an underlying physical disorder. It was noted that quite a few of the terrorists of the period suffered from epilepsy, tuberculosis and other diseases. Lombroso saw a connection between bomb throwing and pellagra and other vitamin deficiencies among the maize-eating people of southern Europe. Others detected a link with the general nervous overexcitement of the period which also mani fested itself by an exaggerated individualism and the spread of deca dent literature. The connection between terrorism and barometric pressure, moon phases, alcoholism and droughts was investigated, and cranial measurements of terrorists were very much in fashion.3
It is not true, however, that early interpretations of terrorism were merely hysterical and that there were no genuine attempts to understand their deeper motives. Many contemporary observers took a remarkably detached view, arguing, inter alia, that the importance of anarchist terrorism should not be exaggerated, that repression was less important than prevention and that capital punishment was not called for.4 Lombroso had doubts from the beginning about the efficacy of international cooperation against anarchist terrorism and also opposed capital punishment. He argued that punishment was no antidote to fanaticism. If, as he maintained, terrorism was an indirect form of suicide, capital punishment, leading to the desired end, would merely act as a spur.5 Zenker, one of the earliest historians of Anarchism, suggested that all exceptional (“emergency”) legislation against Anarchism should be avoided; it would be far more helpful if the state made an effort to redress social inequalities. But Zenker was too close and objective an observer to be satisfied with facile explanations and solutions; he stated expressis verbis that anarchist terrorism could by no means be explained by pauperism alone.6
By the turn of the century Anarchism had outgrown its terrorist phase, but terrorist actions did not cease. Compared with other manifestations of political violence, they seemed to be of minor importance and this is perhaps one of the reasons why no serious at tempt was made to study the phenomenon. There were other rea sons too, such as its fundamentally shocking and disturbing character, which may have inhibited serious study.7 It is also true that from an early stage terrorism was perceived as a very complex phenomenon, varying from country to country as the result of cultural traditions, social structures, political relationships and many other factors which made generalization very difficult indeed. One of the few attempts to give a definition and explanation was Hardman’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, published in the 1930s. The author defined terrorism as the method (or the theory behind the method) whereby an organized group or party sought to achieve its avowed aims chiefly through the systematic use of violence. Thus terrorism was different in substance not only from governmental terror but also from mob violence and mass insurrection. Hardman regarded the publicity value of terrorist acts as a cardinal point and he noted that the inspiration of terrorism could be left-wing as well as rightist and that terrorism had never attained real success as a complete revolutionary tactic. Some of his other observations, al though perhaps correct at the time, clearly show the changes that terrorism has undergone in recent times. Thus the doctrine of indis criminate terror did not yet exist in the 1930s: “Terrorist acts are directed against persons who as individuals, agents or representatives of authority interfere with the consummation of the objectives of such a group.”8 Nor is it likely that any observer of the terrorist movements of the 1960s and 1970s would still subscribe to the view that “the terrorist does not threaten; death or destruction is part of his programme of action” or “violence and death are not intended to produce revenue or to terrorize the persons attacked.” Books on terrorism continued to appear, but these were usually either histori cal monographs on recent Russian or Irish history or journalistic accounts of exotic movements such as the Macedonian IMRO or studies of the legal implications of terrorist operations.
It was only in the 1960s that social scientists became interested in political violence; some had believed that it was a relatively rare phenomenon; others may have neglected it for different reasons.9 Most of the research took place in the United States and had a definite connection with the Vietnam war and America’s own internal turmoil. The fact that there had always been a great deal of violence outside the United States had somehow not quite registered. With the experience of American suburbs in mind it was widely believed that political life all over the globe was steadily becoming more civilized and that stability could be regarded as the norm and politi cal violence as a regrettable aberration. When it was suddenly real ized that this appraisal may have been overoptimistic, the pendulum began to swing to the other extreme and the conviction gained ground that the frequency of violence must somehow reflect the inequities of society — the “system,” low income, bad housing, in sufficient education and so on. The shock of recognition was appar ently so great as to make comment quite incoherent on occasion: “If there is a streak of violence in the national character, then it is precisely that streak which sets itself in opposition to change.”10
The implied assumption was that a healthy society faced no such problems and that a government which could count on the loyalty of its citizens had no reason to fear terrorist outrages and other perils. These assumptions were at the bottom of the new departures in conflict studies which in turn were mainly based on the work done by Dollard and his collaborators on frustration and aggression just before the outbreak of the Second World War.11 They had stated that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, an assumption which was by no means universally shared. It came under attack, for instance, from ethologists who maintained that aggressive behavior was spontaneous, an inner drive. But most psychologists too found this theory wanting; “War occurs because fighting is a fundamental tendency in human beings,” one of them wrote.12 Anthony Storr noted that the frustration-aggression concept was widely accepted among Americans: perhaps it was true that perennial optimism made it hard for them to believe that there was anything unpleasant either in the physical world or in human nature which could not be “fixed.”*
The Dollard concept was widely accepted for a while by students of conflict who regarded protest and violence as the result of discon tent caused by frustration. And they saw social discontent as the discrepancy between demand and fulfillment. Or, in more scientific language, the higher the social-want formation and the lower the social-want satisfaction, the greater the systemic frustration. Vio lence, seen in this light, is the result of socialization patterns which either encourage or discourage aggression and of cultural traditions sanctioning collective responses to various kinds of deprivation.13 Students of conflict had a rich armory at their disposal to explain protest and violence-causal models, such as factor analysis and multi ple regression (multiple regression is a way of predicting the depen dent variable from two or more independent variables). Over the following years many dozens of papers and books were published investigating the correlation between violence on the one hand and on the other such variables as literacy, urbanization, caloric intake, GNP, and numbers of newspapers and physicians. This was the so-called frustration index. Its composition was, of course, bound to be highly arbitrary, for it could not be taken for granted that the circula tion of newspapers inevitably makes for happiness. Nor was it at all clear whether lack of schooling made for greater discontent than the existence of schools and universities together with an absence of sufficient jobs for their graduates.
By 1968 some 650 American political scientists listed “revolutions and political violence” as their field of specialization, and although their orientation and approach differed widely, many of them be lieved that group conflict within nations had common properties and causes that could be compared and explained by way of quantification.*
Within the context of macro cross-national research Rummel in vestigated dimensions of conflict behavior within and between na tions (1946-1959) and Raymond Tanter did the same for a shorter period (1958-1960). This led them into examining the relationship between domestic and foreign conflict behavior and finding, perhaps to their surprise, that there was apparently none. Perhaps there was a third factor that had been ignored, such as the personality charac teristics of the national decision-makers or perhaps there was a causal relationship after all that was still obscured by some unknown phenomena. Douglas Bwy examined political instability in Latin America, in many ways a more propitious topic precisely because the author was dealing with societies of roughly similar traditions. But the search did not lead very far, for it was established that there was no obvious correlation between the legitimacy ascribed to a political system and the intensity or frequency of violence. Riots broke out as frequently in highly legitimate as in less legitimate systems.14
Some researchers saw the decisive factor in the break-up of tradi tional society; others concentrated on the unequal distribution of property or land; and a third group took the social consequences of rapid economic development as their starting point. According to some investigators the most modern and most backward societies were the most stable, whereas those in the middle showed a high degree of instability. Sometimes the results were a little unexpected, showing in one case that the citizens of the United States (including blacks) were more content than those of other countries. Perhaps misery and frustration were insufficient to explain riots and anarchy; perhaps the need to prove machismo had to be taken into account as well as the desire to raise hell out of sheer exhilaration and habit of lawlessness.15
A study of violence in eighty-four countries reached the conclusion that a little repression increases instability, whereas a great deal of it has the opposite effect or, to put it more obscurely, “political instability is curvilinearly related to the level of the coerciveness of the political regime; the probability of a high level of political insta bility increases with mid-levels of coerciveness, insufficient to be a deterrent to aggression, but sufficient to increase the level of sys temic frustration.”
Change leads to unrest; modern countries are more stable because they can satisfy the wants of their citizens; the less advanced countries are characterized by greater instability because of the aggres sive responses to systemic frustration evoked in the populace. But as there has been dissatisfaction in advanced societies as well as in backward ones, the investigators wisely hedged their bets: the satis faction of wants may have a feedback effect and may increase the drive for more satisfaction, thus adding to the sense of systemic frustration. It is only when a high enough level of satisfaction has been reached (on the Patty Hearst level, malevolent critics would add) that a country will tend toward stability rather than instability.16
The cross-national studies were usually based on the index of the New York Times or similar sources; assassinations committed by madmen and terrorist groups were listed side by side; the victims of the Nazi purge of June 1934 were enumerated but not those who had died as the result of the Soviet purge of 1936-1938. The authors of a study on assassination found it directly related, among other things, to external aggression and minority hostility. In these calculations, some of which had a distinctly Alice-in-Wonderland quality, East Germany, Jordan, Guatemala and Paraguay were defined as belonging to the “high external aggression” category; Bulgaria, Czecho slovakia, Afghanistan and Panama (to provide some random exam ples) were rated “low external aggression.” Turkey, Peru, Tunisia and Switzerland were countries with “high minority hostility” and Yugoslavia, the Philippines, Syria and the United Kingdom appear under “low minority hostility.”17
Other investigators had meanwhile reached the conclusion that their scales were not truly applicable to political violence in communist nations because these countries were not “scalable” and that the models of modernization and its effects did not apply to these countries either.18 But leaving aside questions of general principle such as the applicability of quantification, it was by no means certain whether Third World countries were “scalable” either, if only due to the difficulty in obtaining reliable data. The researchers were not unaware of the weaknesses of their concepts and conclusions all too often based on shotgun statistical marriages: “Factor analysis has been used to give the appearance of statistical order to what remains conceptual chaos.”19 Yet at the same time, until about 1972, the general feeling was one of great optimism. Thus the Feierabend study in 1966 stated: “Although exploratory in nature the findings are sufficiently striking and persuasive to argue for continuing with addi tional designs.”20 And Ted Gurr, writing in 1972, believed that the study of civil conflict was on the eve of a major breakthrough: “The accomplishment of these studies to date seem to me to have more than justified their doing. It is problematic but entirely possible on the basis of results thus far, that civil conflict will become one of the first fields of social science outside of psychology and economics in which parameter, etiology and processes are understood well enough to constitute a cohesive scientific field in the narrow sense of that term.”21 This optimism was not shared by all political scientists, let alone by historians. Harry Eckstein, writing in 1964 and again in 1969, expressed scepticism about the conclusions reached up till then. In 1975, Erich Weede, surveying the work of a whole decade, doubted whether there had been any progress at all.22 Eventually, the authors of the studies of the 1960s, who had emphasized the psychological origins of strife, themselves became dissatisfied with the results achieved so far. New investigations were launched with the emphasis on tension and strain rather than on relative depriva tion as in the older studies. Social tensions were now interpreted as the result of persistent strain or short-term stress. These strains were said to be particularly strong where a social system had a long tradi tion of conflict.
Internal conflict, according to this argument, occurs when injustice and inequality persist and when domestic rule is based on constraints rather than on consensus.23 This model tries to take into account economic and political discrimination as well as the presence of reli gious and nationalist-separatist trends and also economic depen dence on other countries. Another hypothesis was based on the as sumption that protests escalate into internal war as a result of negative sanctions on the part of the government.24 Protest provokes government repression, which itself helps to produce a fresh and more intense wave of protest and violence. Increased coerciveness offers no likelihood or guarantee of enhancing public order; on the contrary, it tends to undermine it. Thus, in the final analysis, government coerciveness is positively related to political instability. Such findings may have applied perhaps to a few countries but they were obviously wrong with regard to many others. Meanwhile, again from within the profession, some searching studies were challenging the conventional wisdom underlying most of the work that had been done. Was it really true that hardship was always the cause of collec tive violence and that there was a close correspondence between urbanization, crime and collective violence? Tilly and his colleagues, from studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, reached the conclusion that it was quite wrong to assume that urban growth — by dissolving ties, disrupting existing controls or disorienting new comers to the city — had a strong and consistent tendency to increase the level of crime, violence and disorder. More important yet, their research showed that there was no general connection between collective violence and hardship “such that an observer could prediet one from another ... and we suppose that the principal, immediate causes of collective violence are political.”25 A monograph on Africa showed that social mobilization on that continent, contrary to expectations, did not generally lead to frustration and violence.
Radical political scientists have sharply criticized their nonradical colleagues on many counts, but so far as methods of explaining politi cal violence are concerned, the differences between them and their colleagues are not readily discernible. Neither believe in history and the scope of the radicals’ work is conditioned by the liberal-demo cratic political regime in which they live; what Marx said about the conditioning of political consciousness is certainly applicable to them. A recent assessment of revolutionary warfare (including politi cal terrorism) by radical political scientists may serve as an exam ple.26 According to this school of thought, such warfare has acquired unprecedented popularity; it is a “moral explosion” among the disen chanted masses in under-developed countries. It does not break out where there are institutions and mechanisms through which one can hope to influence and change the existing system. The question of legitimacy is crucial: legitimacy comes to governments when citizens actively and meaningfully participate in the processes of government, that is when there is a maximum of self-government. There is little to quarrel with the sentiments expressed: that there should be a maximum of self-government in society, that governments should have legitimacy and that there should be free institutions goes with out saying. It may even be true that this concept is historically true with regard to one or two countries, for such is the variety of history that few theories are altogether wrong. But with the occurrence and success of terrorism on a worldwide basis such general propositions have no more relevance than the correlation between the incidence of storks and the birthrate in Sweden. There have been no moral explosions among the disenchanted masses of the underdeveloped countries of late because their new rulers have abandoned the moral inhibitions of the former colonial masters. As far as self-government is concerned, it is unfortunately true that, by and large, the less there has been of it in a country, the more immune the country has been from terrorism. Wherever the means of repression has been most complete and perfect there has been no terrorism at all. These facts are not in dispute, but there is a psychological resistance to accepting the obvious. Seldom has it been admitted that virtue in politics is not always rewarded. One of the few exceptions is Romero Maura in his discussion of Anarchism in Spain. One school of thought, Maura noted, has alleged that Anarchism was the explosive result of a lack of political freedom:
The safety-valve metaphor is popular but based on a misrepresentation of Spanish modern history, while failing to take into account the plain fact that anarchism and other revolutionary movements have only been strong in conditions where other, more moderate political alternatives were available.27
Thus the results of the application of political science to the study of internal conflict, far from proving anything, have been quite nega tive and no truly scientific (that is, predictive or explanatory) theories have emerged. One can think of a great many reasons why this should have been so, but three major causes immediately come to mind. A quantitative index cannot possibly reflect deprivation which defies “objective” measurement. Secondly, most of the research was unhistorical and thus ignored the fact that political violence has occurred in ages of rapid social change as well as in periods of stagna tion; it has happened in countries that were ethnically homogeneous as well as heterogeneous. Terrorism has been sponsored by the left as well as the right. There have been fundamental differences be tween anarchist and national-separatist terrorisms; “pure terrorism” is not unknown; terrorism has sometimes been merely one weapon among others used by political movements. Indeed, its very charac ter has been subject to change. In short, a good case can be made for the comparative study of terrorism, but it should have been apparent that not everything can be compared with everything else. Finally the analysis of political violence has not only been one-dimensional in time, i.e., synchronic instead of diachronic, exclusively preoc cupied with the present age and so ahistorical; it has also implicitly assumed democratic societies to be the norm and ignored modern dictatorships, and this at a time when only a relatively small part of humanity has the good fortune to live in democratic, or quasi-democratic, societies. This curious parochialism has resulted in assertions, such as that regimes resorting to coercion tend to defeat themselves, which cannot be seriously maintained in the light of historical experience, especially that of recent times. History may sometimes reward the virtuous, but this is unfortunately not a historical law; Meriam’s dictum, that “power is not strongest where it uses violence but weak est,” may or may not apply to certain cases in the past, it is certainly not valid in the age of totalitarian dictatorships. The use of the notion of legitimacy has only served to obscure some quite patent facts of the modern world. What is one to say about a quantitative analysis of 114 countries which indicates that as the legitimacy of governments decreases, internal violence increases or about a state depart ment conference which reaches the conclusion that recourse to re pression is a self-defeating tendency because it thereby loses the appearance of legitimacy?28 Can it be safely maintained that the governments of Uganda, Algeria, Afghanistan, Albania and Czechoslovakia (to chose a random few which know no terror except from above) are that much more legitimate than those of England, West Germany, Canada, France, Italy or Spain, which have been the targets of terrorist operations?
It has been said that even if there existed a valid theory of political instability and civil violence in general, it would still be a long way from a theory of terrorism.29 In fact, it is not at all clear whether there has to be any connection at all between these phenomena, for terrorism is usually resorted to by small groups of people whose motives may not necessarily be connected with observable “objec tive” political, economic, social or psychological trends. Even if it could be shown, for argument’s sake, that the feeling of relative deprivation is widespread in a certain country, it does not follow that the handful of active terrorists are those most acutely suffering from it. Thus, given the specific difficulties involved in the study of terrorism rather than political violence in general, it is not surprising that there has been no stampede to search for a general theory explaining the phenomenon. Eugen V. Walter, on the basis of a study of some primitive societies, has provided a “general theory of terrorism.” But his concern is with the rule of terror, with terror exercised by the holders of power. He excludes from his investigations movements attempting to overthrow established systems of power.30 Some au thors have provided general observations, but these are more in the nature of classification and definition. Thornton has described terror as a symbolic act in an internal war designed to influence political behavior by means entailing the use of the threat of violence.31 Brian Crozier has noted that terror is usually the weapon of the weak and that it is most suited to national liberation struggles against foreign ers. Paul Wilkinson has pointed out that the effects of terrorism are highly unpredictable and that terrorist violence can escalate until it is uncontrollable.32 All this is probably true but it is not of much help in understanding what causes terrorism. Political science, to para phrase G. M. Trevelyan, is not something you take to history; with luck it is something you carry away from history. Robert Moss has referred to the sense of relative deprivation and the legitimacy gap. Z. Ivianski has explained the Anarchist terrorism of the 1890s by reference to urbanization, cultural crisis, the breakdown of tradi tional society and mass migration. (It is quite true that, as Ivianski notes, in the 1890s many of the propagandists of the deed were immigrants, but this has, however, no significance with regard to Russian and Irish terrorism.) Paul Wilkinson has made a small bow to the cross-national studies on political violence of the 1960s. But these are foreign implants in otherwise valuable studies; they are hypotheses, only occasionally borne out by the historical evidence — not conclusions.33 Both Crozier and Thornton believe that terrorism is associated with the initial phase of guerrilla warfare. It would be easy to think of many instances, past and present, where this has not been the case; nor should too much be made of terrorism as a “symbolical act”; a campaign of systematic terror consists of many acts that are not symbolical at all. Hannah Arendt has noted a con nection between terrorism and protest against the anonymous char acter of modern society.34 But while obiter dicta of this kind contain a grain of truth, it is scarcely new; historians of Anarchism such as Zenker made similar observations many decades ago. On the other hand, it would appear that the anonymity of modern society in no way helps to explain the activities of the IRA, the ETA or Fatah; their complaints have a different character. According to Feliks Gross, a terroristic response arises as a result of foreign oppressive rule and conquest or oppressive domestic rule (the “Sociological factor”). But Gross quite rightly notes that objective circumstances per se are not a sufficient, perhaps not even a necessary condition of terrorism, for oppression must be perceived as such by a particular group. The formation or existence of a revolutionary party needs definite ideological objectives and also a certain personality type. Gross stresses the importance of ethnic and ideological-political tensions rather than economic and social conditions and notes that terror may be long-lasting and become institutionalized.35 There is little to quarrel with these observations as far as they go, but they are mainly based on the experience of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European terrorism; they do not necessarily apply elsewhere and, furthermore, they merely define conditions in which terrorism might, or might not, occur.
From what has been said so far, it seems that quantitative research into the origins and character of political violence has not contributed much to the understanding of terrorism. The more ambitious the project, the wider its scope, the more sweeping the hypotheses, the more reckless the quantification of data, the more disappointing the results. But this is not to say that the study of terrorist movements is a priori unfeasible and that it should not be undertaken. There is an accidental element in the emergence of terrorism and for this reason a truly scientific, predictive study is indeed impossible. But it is also true that terrorism is more likely to occur in certain social and political conditions than in others and that there are interesting parallels between the etiology and the properties of terrorist movements which have been insufficiently investigated. To compare the Narodo-voltsy of the 1870s with the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Baader-Meinhof Gang would clearly be a waste of time, but a compar ative study of “urban guerrilla” groups in Latin America or a juxtapo sition of past and present nationalist terrorist groups such as the IRA, the Basque ETA and perhaps the Macedonian IMRO and the Croat Ustasha could be of considerable interest.
It is quite likely that the record would not have been so negative if an idea first suggested in the 1960s had been followed up and expanded. H. Eckstein noted at the time that etiologies of internal wars were chaotic and unproductive because, among other things, they concentrated on insurgents and ignored incumbents. In real life, internal war results from the interplay of forces and counter-forces, from a balance of possibilities. There are forces pushing toward internal war, but there are also prerequisites for and obstacles to it.36 The idea that revolutions were as much due to the incapacity of elites as to the vigor and skill of the challengers of the system had of course been expressed before; but it had not served as a point of departure for the study of terrorism. Such an investigation ranging over the last hundred years would, at the very least, have saved a great deal of time and effort and prevented a great many projects that were doomed to failure from the very beginning. It would have shown that terrorism, however justified the grievances of its propo nents, has under no circumstances succeeded against effective dicta torship; it has not managed to weaken it, modify its policies or affect its course of action in any way. If terrorism has had any success at all, it has been against democratic governments and ineffective, meaning obsolete or halfhearted, dictatorships. It has been relatively fre quent among separatist-nationalist minorities; it was predominantly “right-wing” in character between the two world wars and it has more often than not been left-wing — with some important excep tions — since the 1950s.
The indiscriminate use of terms such as “left-wing” and “right-wing” and the inclination to take political ideology at face value have made an understanding of the issues involved all the more difficult. Slogans apart, “left-wing” and “right-wing” terrorism have more in common than is usually acknowledged. Terrorism always assumes the protective coloring of certain features of the Zeitgeist, which was Fascist in the 1920s and 1930s but took a different direction in the 1960s and 1970s. In actual fact, however, underlying both “left-wing” and “right-wing” terrorism there is usually a free-floating activism — populist, frequently nationalist, intense in character but vague and confused. Writing well before the recent wave of terrorism, the late G. D. H. Cole, a man of impeccable left-wing credentials, noted that in a later age the Anarchist terrorists of the 1890s would probably have been Fascists. Such a generalization may well be unfair toward the Anarchists of the 1890s but it provides food for thought with regard to terrorist politics of a later age. Many Latin American ter rorists of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, would almost certainly have been Fascist, had they been born twenty years earlier.
Accepting the disturbing fact that effective dictatorships are immune to terror but that even the most just and permissive democratic countries are not, it would still be of interest to know why certain democratic societies (Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and a few others) have witnessed relatively little terror. It will be noted that the population of these countries is small, that these states are predominantly Protestant in character, and that their political culture in recent history has been generally peaceful. As for the non-Communist dictatorships, some have managed with comparatively little repression to subdue or pre vent opposition, whereas others have had to invest much greater efforts, and this quite irrespective of how far the grievances of the opposition were justified. It would be interesting to know why cer tain national minorities have accepted their fate qua minorities while others have launched into bitter and protracted warfare. In certain cases, separatist terrorism may be explained with reference to outside support but this is not always true, and in the last resort the outcome of such confrontation depends upon the terrorists’ de termination and that of their opponents. It is doubtful whether studying the impact of economic development on the spread of ter rorism will provide many new clues for understanding the phenome non. The relationship seems to be tenuous in the extreme. Stagnation certainly is not the reason; industrial development in Ulster has been faster than in England, and the same applies to the Basque region in comparison to Spain as a whole. Terrorism in Latin America has occurred in the countries with the highest per capita income such as Cuba and Venezuela and it has been more rampant in developed Uruguay and Argentina than in backward Paraguay or Ecuador. Yet it would not be difficult to think of prolonged and bloody periods of violencia, Colombian style, in poor and stagnant societies. To un ravel the mysterious character of terrorist movements with refer ence to general economic trends is like using a giant nutcracker to crack a very tiny object, which might not even be a nut. There should be no illusions about what can be discovered about the origins and the character of terrorism: all that can be established is that terrorism is more likely to occur in certain circumstances than in others and that in some conditions it cannot take root at all.
Fiction holds more promise for the understanding of the terrorist phenomenon than political science, but some words of caution are nevertheless called for. Terrorism has figured prominently in works of modern literature, but the novels, plays, poems and films are of unequal value in providing historical evidence and psychological explanation.*
The main difficulty, however, is that of approach and method. For the student of terrorism, fiction is a quarry in which rich finds can be made; it is no place for leisurely strolls. Above all, it is a most awk ward subject for generalizations. It is easy to point to certain com mon patterns in the study of terrorism as practiced by political scien tists, for there are only a very few basic schools of thought with only minor variations within each trend. The conclusions may not be true but they are certainly stated in an orderly unequivocal fashion as befitting a scientific discipline. With the transition from the sciences to the arts we move from the level of certainties to the realm of impression. To provide a coherent framework of orderly and lucid argument, to single out common patterns becomes well nigh impos sible. It can be done but only by singling out certain themes in certain books (or plays or movies) at the expense of others. Literature as a source for the study of terrorism is still virtually terra incognita; a survey of a hitherto uncharted field may be more profitable at this stage than the attempt to impose a single clear pattern on the stories of individual heroes and villains.
For the student of terrorism, as distinct from the lover of literature, Ropshin (Savinkov) the Russian ex-terrorist turned writer, is as of much interest as Dostoyevsky and Liam O’Flaherty is more revealing than Henry James. O’Flaherty’s preoccupation is not with the art of the novel but with the authenticity of the account. O’Fla herty served with the IRA whereas the author of Princess Casamassima later wrote that his novel “proceeded quite directly from the habit and the interest of walking the streets of London.”37 (“Hya cinth Robinson sprung at me out of the London pavement.”) The streets of London have a great deal to offer but there are obvious limits to what they can teach about terrorists, their motives, thoughts and actions. Henry James and Joseph Conrad were attracted by cer tain specific facets of terrorism, the most dramatic, grotesque or fascinating ones for the student of the human soul. They also used it, as did Dostoyevsky, to juxtapose destructive terrorism and their own philosophy. Among the most dramatic (and politically most interesting) aspects of terrorism is of course the Judas Motive. It has been noted that Mr. Leopold Bloom thinks on not less than three occasions of Carey, the small-time building contractor and the chief organizer of the Phoenix Park murders who became a witness for the prosecu tion; and this in a book (Ulysses) written more than two decades after the event.38 Terrorism inspired Borges to outline a plot on the theme of the traitor and the hero “which I shall perhaps write someday.”39 Betrayal is the main motive in Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes and countless other novels. It is of course true that few, if any, terrorist groups escaped defectors and traitors in their ranks. However, the heavy emphasis on treason to the detri ment of other motives is bound to distort the general picture. It may result in a brilliant work of fiction, but then the novelist is preoc cupied with the fate of the individual, whereas the historian pays more attention to social and political movements. Robert Louis Ste venson and G. K. Chesterton were attracted by the grotesque ele ment in terrorism. The hero in Stevenson’s The Dynamiters is the redoubtable Zero, who wants to bomb Shakespeare’s statue in Leicester Square but instead blows up the home of an inoffensive lady, believing that this will shake England to the heart and that “Gladstone, the truculent old man, will quail before the pointing finger of revenge.”40 Gabriel Syme, the writer-hero of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, is involved in the exploits of a group of anarchists, all of whom are police agents spying on each other. One of the high points of the novel is a chase through London on the back of an elephant.41 Joseph Conrad made his views on Russia quite clear in his introduction to Under Western Eyes. His heroes are the “apes of a sinister jungle”; one of them, Nikita, is the “perfect flower of the terrorist wilderness.” Conrad noted of his character: “What troubled me most in dealing with him was not his monstrosity but his banal ity.” The behavior of the terrorists reflects the moral and emotional reactions of the Russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness “which, in general human terms could be reduced to the formula of senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” Mr. Conrad clearly did not love Russians; nor did he like Anarchists, who, without exception, are depicted as degenerates of ludicrous physique or madmen like the “Professor” in The Secret Agent, who always left home with a bomb in his pocket so that at a moment’s notice he could blow up himself as well as the policeman trying to arrest him.
Anarchism was a riddle as far as Western European public opinion at the time was concerned. The newspapers reported the existence of a mysterious society of ruthless men who had as their watchword the murder of monarchs and the overthrow of governments.42 About the origin of these wild men there was, at best, speculation. Were they socialists or nihilists (whatever that meant), misguided idealists, criminals or madmen? Henry James could not make up his mind. In Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson is a young skilled worker who joins the Anarchists because of vague social sympathy (the same motive broadly speaking applies to the princess herself). He commits suicide when asked to murder on behalf of a cause in which he no longer believes. Hyacinth is a mere fellow-traveler, “divided to the point of torture” by sympathies pulling him in different directions. In the same novel a few real revolutionaries such as Muniment and Hoffendall make their appearance and so far as they are concerned it is not at all clear what causes them to act as they do. It has been said that there is no political event in the novel which is not confirmed by multitudinous record (Lionel Trilling). But although Henry James read about Fenians and Anarchists he was, of course, dealing with a world with which he lacked intimate contact. Ricarda Huch, a German Neo-Romantic writer, knew, if possible, even less at first hand about terrorists than Henry James and her novel Der letzte Sommer (The Last Summer), written in 1910, seemed at the time altogether unreal. It is the story of Lju, a young teacher who joins the household of a high Tsarist official, one of his functions being the protection of Jegor, the governor. He comes to like and respect the family but this does not prevent him from carrying out his mis sion, which is to kill his employer. A most ingenious method is used: the letter “J” in the official’s typewriter is the fuse for a bomb which explodes the moment Jegor signs the letter he has written to his children. This needless to say is also the end of the novel.*
A fairly realistic picture of “propaganda of the deed” emerges from several semi-documentary novels of varying literary quality published around the beginning of the century. Zola’s Paris (1898) is not one of his outstanding works but it conveys interesting impres sions of the age of spectacular assassinations. The reader is subjected to a lecture on explosives, pursues the Anarchist through the Bois de Boulogne, watches his trial and execution.43 London is the scene of Mackay’s The Anarchists, which is mainly devoted to disputes be tween advocates of physical violence (Trupp) and those (Auban) who argue that the terrorists simply play into the hands of the authori ties.44 Mackay, born in Britain, grew up in Germany and wrote in German. His subsequent literary and political career led him far away from the Anarchist ideals of his youth. Mackay’s novel is now virtually unreadable, but this is by no means true with regard to two other novels, one in Spanish, the other in Czech, which have unfortu nately remained quite unknown outside their own countries. Pio Baroja’s Aurora Roja, which takes place in Paris and Madrid around the turn of the century, is full of discussions about socialism and Anarchism, the future of Spain and the use of dynamite. It is a far more vivid novel than Mackay’s work, not only because a great many historical figures make their appearance.45 The hero, Juan Alcazar, is a young painter and sculptor who reaches the conclusion that he must fight for women and children and for all weak and defenseless people. For their sake society must be destroyed and the social fabric brutally cauterized. All ways, all means are good if they lead to revolution, un Aurora de un nuevo dia. But the idealistic young hero fails in a world in which base egotism prevails; a comrade says at his graveside that he became a rebel because he wanted to be just (fue un rebelde porque quiso ser unjusto).46*
Even closer to historical events is a Czech novel, Marie Majerova’s Namesti Republiky.47 This is the story of a young Polish-Jewish tailor, Jakub Goldshmid (“Luka Vershinin”), who moves to Paris and joins the Libertad terrorist group. Disappointed by the false freedom of French republicanism on the one hand and repelled by the cynical attitude of Libertad on the other, he decides to do something that (he hopes) will trigger off a revolutionary rising. On May 1, 1905, he shoots three officers on the Place de la Republique. But, far from rising, the masses want to lynch him and he is saved only by the arrival of the police.48 Frank Harris’s The Bomb (1908) is also based on a well-known historical incident — the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. Harris, who lived in America for several years, tells the story of Louis Lingg, one of the main defendants in the subsequent trial, through the device of the recollections of one Rudolf Schnaubelt, who, for the purposes of the novel, is the man who threw the bomb. Schnaubelt, a recent immigrant, joins Lingg’s Anarchist circle, having been shocked by the exploitation of foreign workers. Lingg says that he believes in force, the supreme arbiter of human affairs: “One cannot meet bludgeons with words, nor blows by turning the other cheek. Violence must be met by violence.” Much of the material used by Harris is drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts; the Anarchists are depicted in a sympathetic light and The Bomb has been considered by later critics as a little masterpiece. It has been given high marks by left-wing reviewers, despite the somewhat un stable convictions of the author.
In the 1890s there was already the vision of terror and counterter-ror leading to universal disaster. In Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Col umn, New York is burned to the ground in the Brotherhood of Destruction’s rebellion against a small oligarchy which maintains itself in power with a fleet of dirigibles armed with gas bombs; this is a remarkable piece of science fiction considering that the novel was written in 1891. In Part Two of Bjørnson’s Over Aevne (Beyond Human Powers), Elias Sang, the leader of the striking workers, con fronts the brutal and arrogant Holger, representing the interest of “grand capital.” He too decides to use dynamite as his ultima ratio; Sang is killed in the process and Holger crippled, but the last act witnesses a not altogether convincing reconciliation. Bjørnson did not like Anarchists but he noted that they were the modern martyrs, welcoming death with a smile because they believed like Christ that their martyrdom would redeem humanity.49
Terrorism as a moral problem continued to preoccupy some of the leading writers of the 1930s and 1940s. Brecht, as so often, was an exception; he was fascinated by violence and wanted to shock the public: the young comrade (in Die Massnahme) has to be killed because out of foolish pity and a misplaced sense of honor and justice he had revealed his own identity and so endangered the whole con spiratorial group: “Hence we decided to cut off our own foot from the body.” True, the Communists are unhappy (“it is horrible to kill”) and before committing the deed they ask the victim’s permission.50
The dilemma of terrorism reappears in Sartre’s Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands), and Camus’ Les Justes. The action in Sartre’s play takes place in a south European country. Hugo decides to kill Hoederer, the party secretary. Although there are political reasons, his real motives are personal: he wants to be recognized by his comrades not only as a journalist but also as a doer. In the end, after many hesitations, he does kill Hoederer, but only after finding his wife in Hoederer’s arms. Hugo knows full well that he too will now be liquidated and that this has given meaning to his action. Though dramatically effective, Les Mains sales is confusing; like Brecht’s play it was sharply attacked by the Communists, much to Sartre’s dismay, but it has remained one of his great popular successes.
Moral issues are more clear-cut in Camus’ play which takes Kalyayev’s assassination of the Grand Duke Serge as its starting point.51 The first attempt has failed because Kalyayev did not want to kill the Grand Duke’s children who were with him. There is a bitter quarrel among the terrorists: Dora, Annenkov and Voinov justify his action because the new and better world should not be inaugurated by the murder of children. On the other hand Stepan, the iron Jacobin, argues that in the scale of the fate of humanity the lives of two children weigh lightly when measured against the thousands who will die every year of starvation — unless the system is destroyed. But Kalyayev does not accept the argument: certainly the Grand Duke has to die and he has to do the deed. But murder is wrong; all life is sacred and the crime has to be expiated by the death of the murderer. And so, after the assassination, Kalyayev does not ask for a pardon which he might have been given. When the news of his execution arrives, Dora, his mistress, announces that she will be the next to throw a bomb.
Dostoyevsky’s Besy (The Possessed), written in 1871-1872, is the best known “terrorist” novel in world literature and is largely based on the Bakunin-Nechaev affair. Pyotr Verkhovenski, possessed by the idea of destruction, kills the student Shatov, a fellow conspirator, allegedly because he represents a threat of denunciation. In fact he kills him out of pure boredom. In Ivan Leskov’s Nekuda (Nowhere to Go) (1864) the Nihilists, with one exception, are all either infantile characters or degenerates, and in Na Nozhakh (At Daggers Drawn) (1870-1871) they act as “contract killers,” murdering a rich husband to enable his widow to inherit. They promote murder, theft and corruption in every possible way. Leskov was accused by his more progressive contemporaries of having been commissioned to write this novel by the secret police. He himself claimed that he had simply provided a “photographic rendering of reality.”52
The terrorist motive fascinated many Russian writers of the second half of the nineteenth century; the avant-garde defended the “Nihil ists” but, in view of Tsarist censorship, this had to be done in Aesopian language. In contrast the anti-Nihilist novels and plays (of Klyushnikov, Markevich, Ustryalov, Prince Meshcherski) were far more outspoken. This entire literature is now deservedly forgotten with the exception of the works of Turgenev, whose Nihilists were not, however, terrorists.
More intriguing are the books published outside Russia and in Russia after 1905, when censorship was considerably relaxed. Serge Stepniak Kravchinski, a leading Narodovolets, was the author of sev eral indifferent novels, but he also wrote the classic account of the terrorist movement of the late 1870s.53 Underground Russia was clearly a labor of love; his heroes, the leading members of the Narod-naya Volya, are without exception idealists of the highest moral stan dards.* Stefanovich was an atheist, but his closest relationship was with his father, an old village priest. Lisogub is described as a “saint,” Vera Zasulich as a woman of “great moments and great decisions” and Sofia Perovskaya as a revolutionary of “iron will, iron self-disci pline who always went first into the fire.” True, there are passing references to Ossinski’s feverish excitement and to the fact that he loved women and was loved by them. It is also made clear that Klements was a charismatic leader but quite unsuited for work in a small conspirational group. On the whole, however, there were few shadows in this story of heroic and virtuous people and there is reason to assume that the picture is true to life: the men and women of the Narodnaya Volya were indeed most attractive human beings. This also emerges from other contemporary accounts. Young Vera Barantzova in Sophia Kovalevsky’s novel follows her terrorist hus band to his Siberian exile: “Are you weeping for me?” she said with a cheerful smile. “If only you knew how I pity those who are left behind.”54 There is always the motive of sacrifice by the chosen few and the belief in final victory. For example, one novel by Stepniak closes with a declaration that though the hero, Andrei Kozhukhov, has perished, the cause for which he died still lives: “It goes forward from defeat to defeat towards the final victory, which in this sad world of ours cannot be obtained save by the sufferings and the sacrifice of the chosen few.”55 The Narodovoltsy appear in a similar light in Leopold Stanislav Brzozowski’s Plomienie (Flames), which has remained almost totally unknown in the West.56
Where Conrad saw nothing but an “imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism,” Brzozowski invoked high moral pathos when describing the thoughts and actions of the handful of young heroes who challenged the overwhelming power of the Tsar ist regime. Where Conrad saw a strange conviction that a fundamen tal change of heart must follow the downfall of any given human institution (“these people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names”), his fellow Pole was dazzled by the vision of the emergence of a new man and a new society. Brzozowski’s novel is in the form of a diary kept by a young Polish nobleman, Michael Kaniowski, who throws his lot in with the revolutionaries of the 1870s. Nechaev, Mikhailov, Zhelyabov, Goldenberg and many others make their appearance, sometimes under hardly veiled noms de clef (Tikhonravov = Tikhomirov), and the author, on the whole, sticks fairly closely to the historical record. The reader follows the hero on his revolutionary grand tour to the Paris Commune, to the workers of the Swiss Jura and to Italy. But above all it is the political, cultural and social life of Russia of the period which constitutes the canvas of the great epic which ends with the release of Kaniowski from the Schlüsselburg fortress where he has been a prisoner for many years. Flames was clearly a labor of love: the Narodovoltsy are seen, as in so many other accounts of the period, as knights engaged in a hopeless struggle on behalf of a cause that will triumph only at some future date: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The religious elements of the novel are reflected in chapter headings such as Dies Ilia or Dolori et Amori Sacrum. Despite certain literary weaknesses, Flames is one of the most vivid accounts of the Narodo voltsy ever written and perhaps the most inspiring, yet the book never had the success it deserved. Written in Polish it remained a work of marginal interest in Brzozowski’s native country because it dealt with the revolutionary tradition of the oppressor nation. The Russians were reluctant to look for inspiration to an author whose own credentials were not above suspicion; some years after the novel was written, Burtsev, the indefatigable sleuth of the Russian revolu tionary movement, declared that the novelist had been a Tsarist police spy. But Burtsev, though the first to make it publicly known that Azev had been a police agent, was not infallible: Brzozowski’s friends all stood by him and defended him against the accusations.57 Burtsev’s informant was Bakaj, an official of the Okhrana in Warsaw with no conceivable personal motive for denouncing Brzozowski. Could Flames have been written by a police informant? The affair continued to preoccupy Polish literary circles throughout the 1920s and 1930s and although the evidence is perhaps not altogether con clusive, there is some reason to assume that Brzozowski (who died in Florence in 1910) may have acted at one time as a police informer. All this refers to the heroes of the 1870s and 1880s. The Russian terrorist movement of the early twentieth century was less fortunate in its authors — but it is also true that reality had become more complex and that the motives of terrorists were often less obvious. True, there were admirers of the movement from Gorky to Leonid Andreyev, but those with more intimate knowledge provided less flattering pictures. Boris Savinkov (Ropshin), the onetime leader of the terrorist organization of the Social Revolutionaries, is a good example. When planning assassinations in 1905 he was not plagued by doubts on the Tightness of his cause; the terrorist-hero of his novel four years later is a very different character, describing himself as bored by his own thoughts and desires: “People and their lives bore me. There is a wall between them and myself. Let love save the world. I need no love. I am alone. Damned be the world. . . .”58 Yet at the same time there is a preoccupation with moral issues: the choice, says the hero, is either to kill all the time or never to kill at all. Why should he be eulogized for having killed the police chief, and why should the colonel be a villain for hanging the revolutionaries? Did not he too act out of conviction and not for material gain? And, if so, who made these rules? Marx, Engels and Kant, who had never killed a man in their lives? In Savinkov’s Pale Horse, a story in diary form, each of the five heroes is driven by different motives: Vanya is a religious fanatic; Genrich is a socialist; and Fyodor is an “emotional terrorist” who opted for revolutionary violence, having seen a woman killed by the Cossacks during a riot. Erna participates because she loves George, the main hero, who does not believe in anything or anyone. The Pale Horse created a minor storm in Russian left-wing circles and was severely condemned by Savinkov’s erst while comrades. The storm became a major scandal in 1913 with the publication of RopshinSavinkov’s second novel To chevo ne bylo.59 Now the moral chaos is absolute; beneath a Nietzschean veneer there is only emptiness, crime and betrayal. The leader of the group, Dr. Berg (Azev?), a police agent, is killed by Abram, a Jewish terrorist.60 The whole atmosphere is one of hopelessness: the struggle cannot possibly be won, the government is bound to prevail. Savinkov’s subsequent fate is of some interest. He served in the French army during the First World War, was for a short time governor-general of Petrograd under Kerensky in 1917 and committed suicide or was killed in a Soviet prison in 1924, after allegedly having organized terrorist operations against the Bolsheviks.
Savinkov was a unique case among the Russian writers of his day; French and English literature on Anarchism, with some notable exceptions, reveals more about those who wrote it than those who engaged in it. Irish literature is far more rewarding in this respect. In Irish plays, novels and short stories one is never far from the bomb and the sniper — and this refers to Yeats and Joyce as well as to Brendan Behan, who at sixteen, arrived in Britain on the eve of the Second World War with a few bombs.61 It appears in Yeats’s Easter 1916 and his Rose Tree, that needs but to be watered to make the green come out again, or in the “Sixteen Dead Men” loitering there to stir the boiling pot. What Auden said about Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”) is perhaps even more true for the writers of the following generation. Sometimes the allusions are ob scure (as in Yeats’s Second Coming) and the experts are still hard at work interpreting them. Nor are they always complimentary; in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake the heroes of a past age usually appear in a lurid light, but then Joyce was never the paradigm of an Irish patriot. The “terrible beauty” is in any case balanced by a great many ugly things. But Yeats too was irked by the fact that the “Young Irelanders” treated literature as subservient to political doctrine, as an instrument for politics. And it has been noted that when Yeats justified the Easter Rising he did so on other than moral grounds — “A terrible beauty is born,” not a terrible virtue.62 There is Sean O’Casey’s moving epitaph to the heroes of 1916:
They had helped God to rouse up Ireland: let the people answer for them now! For them now, tired and worn, there was but a long, long sleep; a thin ribbon of flame from a line of levelled muskets, and then a long sleep. . . . But Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, walks from now, a flush on her haughty cheek. She hears the murmur in the people’s hearts. Her lovers are gathering around her, for things are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born,
poor, dear, deadmen; poor W. B. Yeats.63
But there is little of that pathos in O’Casey’s plays: the women are fanatics; the men fight because they are afraid to admit their fear or, worse, in order to plunder.64 Above all, almost everyone is given to boasting. In The Shadow of a Gunman Minnie, the admiring young woman, asks Davoren (“poet and poltroon”): “Do you never be afraid?” Davoren: “I’ll admit one does be a little nervous, at first, but a fellow gets used to it after a bit till, at last, a gunman throws a bomb as carelessly as a schoolboy throws a snowball.” But eventually Min nie gets out in the streets, shouts “up the Republic” at the top of her voice and is killed, while Davoren goes on hiding.65
The case of Jack Cliteroe in The Plough and the Stars (1926) is also quite revealing: “Why doesn’t Cliteroe have anything to do with the Citizens Army?” “Just because he wasn’t made a Captain of. He wasn’t goin’ to be in anything where he couldn’t be conspicuous. He was so cocksure of being made one that he bought a Sam Browne belt an’ was always puttin’ it on an’ standin’ at th’ door showing it off in.” There was a public scandal at the first performance and O’Casey had to leave Dublin for London. In Juno and the Paycock (which also became a film in 1930), young neurotic Johnny Boyle is executed by IRA fanatics for having betrayed his neighbor to the police. The Irish writers, playwrights and poets were awkward witnesses, perhaps doubly so because they knew the terrorists so well. Most of them came to agree with what O’Leary had said on an earlier occasion about the dynamiters: “There are things no man should do, even to save a nation.” Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan includes the old woman’s promise to those who die for Ireland: “They shall be remembered for ever.” In this play Ireland appears in the guise of an old woman but in the end she is transformed into her true like ness: “Did you see an old woman going down the path? I saw no old woman, but a young girl and she had the walk of a queen.” When in 1939 Yeats lay dying he remembered these words with a certain horror and asked himself the question, “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?”66
The real heroes in Sean O’Casey’s plays and in O’Flaherty’s novels are (noncombatant) women; the men are dubious types more often than not. Sean O’Faolain’s Leo O’Donnell is an anti-hero and Com mander Dan Gallagher in Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer tells his girlfriend that “they talk at headquarters about romanticism and leftism and all sorts of freak notions. What do they know about the peculiar type of hog mind that constitutes an Irish peasant?” Yet O’Flaherty, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain all fought in the ranks of the IRA (the last-mentioned was its director of publications) and O’Casey was a Communist of sorts. Whatever their professed politics, most terrorists are really mystics and the idea of martyrdom obsesses them. It is the central theme in one of Liam O’Flaherty’s novels. Crosbie, the martyr, is a strange mixture of mystic and Nietzschean, recalling some of Savinkov’s heroes. He is, in his own words, “a light shining in the darkness,” he needs no guide to heaven: “I’m waiting on the mountains in Europe and the whole of Christendom is waiting for the resurrection when the brazen gods of money and sensual pleasure shall be burned in the dust and Christ, our Saviour, again enthroned as the King of Kings. There will be peace between all men. There will be no hunger, no disease and the only suffering will be the craving of souls for union with God.”67 All this from a terrorist engaged in indiscriminate killing after the war against the foreign occupier has already been won.
The question of motive reappears time and again in the books written by insiders. There are the conventional explanations: to serve people, to save the nation, to redeem mankind. But there is also the bad conscience of the intellectual as described by Regis Debray. Frank, his hero, never finds real identity with the guerrillas; he joined them because he had pangs of conscience.
Ou etais-je le jour ou des paysans en sandales donnerent 1’assault a Dien Bien Phu? Le jour ou Frank Pais s’ecroula, crible par les flics de Batista sur un trottoir de Santiago de Cuba? . . . Tout occupe a siroter un vin de pays, a caresser les seins d’une brune un peu fugace. . . .
There is much talk about Gramsci and Lukacs, but in the end:
‘Peu m’importe en effet la destination — socialisme ou autre — voire meme le sort des autres voyageurs. Pourvu que ca roule.68
When the Macedonian revolt broke out around the turn of the century, Pejo Javorov was a young Bulgarian poet groping for the meaning of life. “All my interior world is in ruins,” he wrote to a friend; “I am lost if I do not find a new religion to inspire me.”69 He found it in the ranks of the IMRO and saw action on Ilin Den; he wrote some fine poems as a result. The enthusiasm lasted for a year or two, and then he was back to depression, hopelessness — and symbolist poetry in the French style.
The motive of the intellectual who vainly yearns to be a terrorist appears also in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night. * Joseph is told by the terrorist commander that he has that intellectual squint which makes him see both sides of a medal — “a luxury we cannot longer afford. We have to use violence and deception, to save others from violence and deception.” But despite his moral scruples Joseph asks permission to take part in an action — “even if only one.” It is so much easier for the young boy who, when asked what made him join the Freedom Fighters, answers: Exodus twenty, one, Deuteronomy nineteen, one, “Block out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” “Thine eye shall not pity.” “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood.” Koestler’s Joseph is a democratic socialist who turns to terrorism because he has realized that a nation of conscientious ob jectors cannot survive and that “if we left it to them we shall share the fate that befell their comrades in Germany, Austria, Italy and so on.” Hence the necessity to speak “the only language universally understood from Shanghai to Madrid, the new Esperanto that is so easy to learn — the gun under the leather jacket.”
The Bible provided constant inspiration to Avraham Stern (“Yair”): God himself is a warrior (Ish milkhama Adonai zvaot), armed strug gle and bomb throwing are acts of praise to God (Halleluya be Kra-vot ubepezazot). The kingdom of Israel, the central and somewhat vague concept in Yair’s thought, will be reached only by way of the valley of the shadow of death. The theme of death appears in almost every one of Stern’s poems, including the anthem of LEHI: “Un known soldiers without uniform, we have joined for our whole life — around us only horror and the shadow of death.”70
Joseph, Koestler’s hero, graduates from democratic socialism to terrorism. Gyorgy Kardos, another novelist of Hungarian origin, wrote a novel showing what made one terrorist give up the armed struggle — not weakness, but because he found fulfillment in another way of life. The action takes place in Mandatory Palestine in 1946 or 1947. David is on the run: the British chase him as a terrorist; Irgun is after him for failing to carry out an assignment. He hides on the farm of one Avraham Bogatyr, and his contempt for those who have opted for nonviolent resistance gradually turns into admiration.71
The Irish, Irgun, LEHI and Debray’s hero Frank, were bothered by a great many problems, but the question of purpose was not among them. The struggle against oppression was their overriding concern; right and wrong were certainties, they were fighting for a sacred cause. They would have been incapable of understanding the (mainly platonic) advocates of terrorism in America of a later generation, who saw their heroes in Bonnie and Clyde; indeed, any such argument would have appeared blasphemous. The very concept of destruction as instant theater would have been demeaning if not altogether incomprehensible.* This was the language of pseudo-terrorists. Yet in a strange way the nihilist syndrome was by no means new and it appeared on the right as well as among the left. Chen, the terrorist in Malraux’s Condition humaine, has ceased to believe in humanity long ago: “I do not like mankind to be so indifferent to wards all the suffering.” Yet in the end he throws himself with his bomb in front of the car in which he mistakenly believes Chiang Kai-shek is driving.
The question of purpose never bothered Ernst von Salomon and his comrades who assassinated Rathenau.72 “What do you want?” they were asked. “We could not answer because we could not even understand the question. We did not act according to plans and well-defined aims.” They were certainly not fighting “so that the people should be happy”; they were propelled into action by some inner force. From one excitement they went on to the next. Kern, the leader of the group, told them that he had been dead since November 9, 1918 — Armistice Day, the day of national disgrace. All that remained was the work of destruction: “We want the revolution. Our task is the ‘push’ not the seizure of power.”73 When asked what kind of motives they should admit to if caught by the police after the assassination, Kern answered, half bored, half amused: “Oh God, how little does it matter. Say that he was one of the Elders of Zion or that he let his sister marry Radek — who cares....” They feared one thing only — that the dead Rathenau would suddenly appear as a witness in their trial . . .
The nihilistic mood pervades much of the right-wing literature of the early 1920s. Schlageter, in Hanns Johst’s play of the same name (dedicated to Adolf Hitler in “loving admiration”) is not troubled by metaphysical question; since the French are occupying the Ruhr, it is the duty of every German patriot to resist them in every possible way — ethical problems do not bother the former soldier. If he has doubts at first, they concern the effect of terror:
Politics can’t be created with one bundle of Ekrasit, that’s just playing at terror: every action must have a purpose. . . . Twenty-five pounds of dynamite won’t free so much as a square yard of German soil. Individual Sturm und Drang without mass support is nonsense. ÜBERNITZ: No, our utter desperation should sweep away the slave mentality, the profit motive, and all petty bureaucracy.
SCHLAGETER: If so, all Germany will be a cemetery.
CBERNITZ: Better a decent cemetery than a fifth-rate old clothes
shop.
SCHLAGETER: That’s a matter of opinion.
But eventually he joins his friends in terrorist operations.
What does it matter whether I die of a bullet at twenty, or of cancer at forty, or of apoplexy at sixty. The people need priests who have the courage to sacrifice the best — priests who slaughter. . . .74
Arnolt Bronnen’s heroes, the Freikorps fighters in Upper Silesia, are cut from the same cloth. Bronnen, once a friend of Brecht and, like him, attracted by violent action, moved sharply to the right. To the Nazis, however, he always remained somewhat suspect and, while using him, they kept him at arm’s length. The same is true of Hans Fallada, who wrote a semi-documentary account of the bomb-throwing peasants of Schleswig-Holstein and who hoped that their violent actions would draw attention to their plight.75
In Salomon’s story, which has been mentioned earlier, Otto, the leader of a Communist fighting group, makes an appearance. He is a sympathetic young man, a fighter like the right-wingers to whom he shows a natural affinity: “Soon we were friends.” Such apparently incongruous friendships were by no means rare; activists, after all, have a great deal in common. In his autobiography Milovan Djilas relates that in prison the Communists soon found a common language with the Croat Ustasha, “national revolutionaries and fanatical believers.” They had a common enemy — the government — and they despised the democratic opposition for its lack of daring. The Communists certainly did not approve of the links of the Ustasha with Fascist Italy and with Hungary, but neither did they condemn them.76 Theirs was a “conditional friendship.”
For the Narodnaya Volya, the Irish or the Macedonians, sexual problems did not exist or, if they did, there was general agreement not to discuss them in public. Underground life in theory, if not always in practice, involved members of the group refraining from any close relationship; some even preached asceticism: everything that would deflect the terrorist from his main assignment was reprehensible. Whether this was repression, sublimation or simply the reaction of a generation with different values and standards is a question which could no doubt be discussed at great length. Sexual problems have indeed figured very prominently in the writings of contemporary terrorists, mainly in the United States and in Ger many, and the explosion of a bomb has come to be regarded as something like an ersatz orgasm. Michael Baumann, a former mem ber of a terrorist group, has even maintained that the choice or rejection of terrorism was “programmed” — the individual’s un avoidable reaction to the presence or absence of a fear of love: most terrorists, if not all, escaped from that fear into total violence. From his own experience, as well as the writings of Malatesta and Fromm, he reached the conclusion that revolutionary (meaning terrorist) practice and love could not coincide.77 He may well have been right with regard to the European and North American terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s; whether one can draw more far-reaching conclu sions from statements of this kind is less certain.
There is a literature on terrorism that sees its sole function in uplifting morale. The fight is total, the aim the destruction of the enemy; seen in this light, literature is also a weapon in the sacred struggle. A Bulgarian novel, critical of IMRO, would have been sacrilege about the turn of the century;* an Arab novel or play showering less than fulsome praise on Fatah or PFLP would be treason. However deserving the cause, books inspired by such terrorist groups can seldom or never be called literature, nor will they tell us much about the terrorists themselves. For, if there are no inner conflicts, no troubled consciences, if the heroes have no private lives and no weaknesses, if, in short, everyone does his duty, the only remaining problems are technical in character and more effectively tackled by military experts than by novelists or playwrights. This is true even with regard to the most accomplished novels produced by Palestinian writers such as Ghassen Khanafani, the editor of Al Hadaf, a periodical sponsored by the PFLP, who was killed in Beirut by a booby trap in his car. His main theme is that “there is nothing to say. . . . This matter can be settled only by war” (Return to Haifa, 1970).79 That Palestinian au thors show no detachment in their novels is perhaps only natural; what makes their novels less than credible is the absence of a wish to understand the enemy. The Palestinians are described as fearless patriots and handsome paragons of every manly and womanly virtue; the Jews more often than not are pimps and ugly prostitutes making love in mosques and graveyards when they are not engaged in killing Arab civilians as sadistically as possible.80 Moen Basisu provided an up-to-date version of Samson and Delilah, with Samson as a brutal Israeli officer defeated by Delilah, the self-sacrificing Arab patriot. In another novel (Sahra min Dam) even the Arab informer realizes the wickedness of his ways and joins the resistance. True, there is fre quent criticism of non-Palestinians who show little sympathy for the cause and visit the refugee camps as a tourist’s curiosity (Sharqawi). Just as the villains in these novels and plays are unconvincing, so are the heroes and some Arab critics have asked: if all Israelis were pimps and prostitutes, how could they have defeated us? The only Jews appearing in somewhat better light are those of Oriental (“Arab”) origin, which is a little ironic because it is precisely among these circles that goodwill toward Arabs is strictly limited, whereas the attitude of “European” Jews has been traditionally one of indiffer ence rather than hate.*
What has been said about Arab literature on Palestinian terrorism refers, mutatis mutandis, to much of Third World writing on terrorism. There were some exceptions in India, no doubt because public opinion was divided on whether terrorism was the most effective means in the struggle against the British, and also among some French-speaking North African writers who live in France.
In Latin America there is a long-established tradition of revolution ary songs, the cancones de protesta, to which guerrilla and terrorist groups have made a significant contribution in recent decades.81 There was a similar tradition in pre-revolutionary Russia; some of the members of Narodnaya Volya, such as Morozov and Klements, wrote and composed songs which became quite popular. They ranged from ironic comment on Drenteln, the head of the Tsarist political police, to funeral songs for comrades who fell in the struggle for freedom, expressing the conviction that one day an avenger would arise — variations on Virgil’s Exoriare aliquis. . .,82 At this point the litera ture of and on terrorism begins to merge with its folklore, an intriguing topic but not the subject of the present study.
It has been shown how the terrorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made their way into world literature just as Brutus and Wilhelm Tell, Judith, and Charlotte Corday had attracted writ ers of earlier generations and for similar reasons. Sometimes it was the liberating deed rather than the ethical dilemma which fascinated the writers: Judith and Wilhelm Tell were in no danger of moral censure. With Caesar we move on to more uncertain and psychologi cally more interesting ground: the admiration for the great states man is tempered by criticism for the man who destroyed the tradi tion of freedom, and the tragedy of Caesar is also the tragedy of Brutus. Charlotte Corday is the first truly modern terrorist heroine: a vile reactionary in the eyes of the Jacobins, she is a figure of great courage and angelic purity for all those who dreaded and despised the extremists. Her personality expressed itself in a political act, but politics do not explain her personality; Jeanne d’Arc had acted on what her voices told her, but what had inspired Charlotte Corday? The great German writer Jean Paul, writing less than a decade after Marat’s assassination, saw the roots of her behavior partly in her education and reading: the heroes of ancient Rome had been her great example. But intellectual adventures alone were clearly insufficient as an explanation; a great many young people had read Plutarch, but she had killed Marat. Perhaps it was because as a woman she was not free to develop her strong personality, or because she was not distracted by (or had not found fulfillment in) love or marriage. Jean Paul’s Halbgesprache appeared in 1801; it would be a long time before nineteenth- and twentieth-century terrorists were treated with similar perception. Novels and plays are not an ideal vehicle for long ideological discussions as various abysmal failures demonstrated (Mackay). But literature was ideally suited to deal pre cisely with those vital issues for which there was no room in the learned treatises on the history of Anarchism and kindred political movements: the question of motive, the analysis of character.
This proved to be exceedingly difficult in the case of the Anarch ists, for they constituted a subculture (as it would now be called) on the fringes of society, far removed from the circles in which writers usually moved. Those who wrote about them drew, like everyone else, on newspaper reports rather than on personal experience. The Anarchist figures in the novels of the period are usually unconvincing, strange or sick people, marginal characters, outsiders, eccentric or perverse. All this may have been true, but it was not very satisfac tory, nor did it make for a clearer understanding of why these people had banded together and engaged in actions which shocked society so profoundly. Was it only their tortured inner life and some Herostratic impulse which impelled them to go out and knife kings and presidents and throw bombs in cafes and parliaments? They were clearly dissatisfied with society and wanted to take a kind of revenge. But at this point personal and political motives somehow merged, and the how and why usually remained a mystery. Furthermore, some of our Anarchist heroes and villains had not been mistreated by society: their childhood had been reasonably happy; they were by no means disadvantaged, so that personal revenge was certainly not their central motive. Nor were they particularly unbalanced or wicked or ambitious — which made it all the more difficult to under stand them.
With a few exceptions the Anarchists appeared as sinister or pa thetic miscreants in the literature of the period, fascinating, perhaps, but hardly ever true to life, and in the last resort inexplicable. A decade or two were to pass until Anarchists became more credible: the initial shock had passed (and so had the Anarchists-terrorists), a younger generation of writers had appeared, more familiar with their habits and ideas, more inclined to regard them as well meaning but misguided failures rather than as hostes humani generis.
It was easier for the Russians to understand their own terrorists. True, there was the same generation gap, the same consternation as young people began to adopt a strange life-style, propagate incom prehensible ideas and finally engage in dastardly actions such as killing the tsar. But in the final analysis they were flesh of their own flesh, the generation gap was not vast. And if Dostoyevski found terrorism in 1871 a sinister enigma, this was at least in part due to forgetfulness; two decades earlier he would have found it much easier to understand the Narodovoltsy. The interpretation of terrorism in the Russian novel varied, of course, with the politics of the writer. Hence the total rejection in the works of Dostoyevski and Leskov, for whom it was nothing less than the anti-Christ, the incar nation of all evil, the negation of all values. Hence, on the other hand, the boundless admiration of the progressive intelligentsia; in this climate of adulation a psychological analysis of the personal motives of these heroes and martyrs would have been as much out of place as an investigation into the sex life of a saint in an official Church history. Again, some time was to pass before the initial excitement died away and a calmer approach made it easier to rethink and refeel the motives which had induced young people to engage in desperate actions.
These were no declasse Bohemians or outcasts of society, but, quite often, the offspring of the elite; clearly their idealism could not be denied, they had no personal accounts to settle with society. On the other hand some specifically Russian features were evident: this, after all, was not the first generation of rebellious young intellectuals. But whereas their predecessors had talked revolution for nights on end, they were the first to act and did so with a frenzy quite un-Russian: Oblomov had passed away. But this had not come easily to them, nor were they really “nihilists.” On the contrary, they were very much preoccupied with moral questions and had an ethical code of behavior stricter in many ways than that of established soci ety with its dual standards. Only a few among them were strong and resolute characters and even they wavered and quarreled; some times they were unhappy and occasionally they gave up or even betrayed the cause. In short, they emerge as credible human beings from Russian literature.
Savinkov’s books shocked his left-wing contemporaries not merely because these were the novels of a man just about to renege the cause. The critics could not possibly accept the unflattering accounts of men and women who had daily risked their lives in the struggle against Tsarist despotism. Many of them had, in fact, made the ulti mate sacrifice. Perhaps the critics were right, perhaps the heavy emphasis on personal passion and prejudice distorted his descrip tions, perhaps one who had lost hope could not do justice to those who had not. But Savinkov had really been a leading terrorist, whereas his critics — were critics. They had never made a bomb, let alone killed anyone, and the most important decision facing them was the topic of their next essay.
Eventually the critics realized that though there were wonderful young men and women among the terrorists, the new generation was not quite comparable to that of 1880. Among the Narodovoltsy there had been Hamlet-like figures and some foolish young men who thought they could outwit the police while collaborating with them. But there had been no Azev. After the archtraitor had been un masked, the old innocence of terrorism had gone, it was no longer a subject on which one could write with ease. But the personality of Azev, too, remained an impenetrable mystery. It would have been easy to solve the enigma had he just been a police spy out to get the maximum of money from the chiefs of the Okhrana. But he was an agent on the greatest scale, he took their money and frequently delivered. Yet he was not their tool; he had political aims and ambi tions of his own which by no means always coincided with the views of the Okhrana. He played a double role so complex that its threads could never again be unraveled once the game was over.
The books on the Russian terrorists of 1905 were the first to raise some of the issues that were to recur ever after. They showed how difficult it was to separate real heroism and the lust for adventure, steadfastness and routine, how in certain conditions the borderline between loyalty to the cause and betrayal becomes almost invisible. They showed that most terrorists were bound to ask themselves sooner or later whether the game was worth the candle, and not merely because of the many losses in their ranks. Above all, they raised the moral question of the right to kill.
This dilemma did not trouble many later writers on nationalist terrorism. There were exceptions, above all Irish literature with its ambivalence about terrorism. “No people hate as we do,” Yeats had written. But he had also said that everything he loved had come to him through the English language. For a while, toward the end of the last century, the political and the literary movements in Ireland coincided or ran concurrently but later there was a parting of ways — the philistine character of Irish society and the hostile reception of their works drove some of the writers from Ireland and deeply wounded others. Most of them were to rally to the cause in 1916 and again in 1919, but with the establishment of the Free State there came a new wave of introspective criticism. Examples have been given for the spirit of candor with which former terrorists wrote about their past, their friends and their comrades-in-arms; it made the Irish literature of the 1920s and 1930s uniquely revealing for the compre hension of patriot and reformer alike.
The uses of fiction as a source for the understanding of terrorism are not unlimited. A witness recently advised a U.S. congressional committee that Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent should be made mandatory reading for every police officer in the United States: “Conrad tried to get into the human mind of an anarchist living in London in the early 1900’s. If a police officer could read this, he could start understanding how much a revolutionary is really motivated by po litical ideology and how much by individual needs.”83 Such recom mendations, though well meant, are, of course, a little nai’ve. Police officers (and not only they) will benefit from reading a book that has become a classic of world literature. It is equally clear that they will not draw any immediate profit for coping with the problems facing them in their work. Conrad’s hero, Adolf Verloc, it will be recalled, is a police agent; after his death Winnie, his widow, looks for help. Ossipon, the Anarchist and womanizer to whom she turns in utter despair, disappears with her savings and drives her to suicide. There have been Verlocs and Ossipons at all times and in all countries, but an analysis of their thoughts and actions, however intrinsically inter esting, is of no help in understanding why a young man or woman may join a Latin American terrorist group, the IRA or Weatherman. Nor does it explain what makes them commit acts of heroism and betrayal, what induces them to continue a hopeless struggle or to surrender. The writer, it must be emphasized once more, deals with the individual and his motives, putting the stress on boredom or ambition or selfless devotion as he sees fit. He cannot possibly provide an identity kit picture of the “typical” terrorist. There are, in any case, infinite varieties, and as terrorism has changed during the last century, so have those practicing it. Everyone is impelled by consid erations transcending the self as well as by motives of a personal character. Fiction cannot offer a master key to the soul of the terror ist; the most one can hope for is to detect certain common patterns in the character and mental makeup of the dramatis personae who acted as a group at a certain time and place. To accomplish even this modest task a great deal of empathy, psychological understanding and creative mastery is needed. Once this has been accepted a great deal can be learned about terrorism from contemporary fiction, pro vided these books, plays and films are not regarded as manuals for the study of terrorism, aspiring to photographic exactitude and uni versal applicability.*
*The frustration-aggression hypothesis was refined in the 1960s by Leonard Berkowitz. Frustration, as he saw it, produces an emotional state, anger, which heightens the probability of the occurrence of aggression. Berkowitz was more aware than his predecessors of outside stimuli; even if there was frustration and anger, the probability that aggression will take place still depends on the presence (or absence) of factors restraining aggression. Stated in this more cautious form the hypothesis seemed to be of greater validity but as a tool of empirical research it is still of limited use especially with regard to larger social groups. Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression (New York, 1962), and Reed Lawson, ed., Frustration, the Development of a Scientific Concept (New York, 1965).
*T. R. Gurr, “The Calculus of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Social Issues, I (1972), 29. Below is a fairly representative but by no means exhaustive selection from this literature:
I. K. and R. L. Feierabend, “Social Change and Political Violence: Cross-National Patterns,” in H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr, Violence in America (1969). See also Journal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (1966); and J. V. Gillespie and B. A. Nesvold, Macro-Quantitative Analysis Conflict, Development and Democratization (Beverly Hills, Wi)-T. R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, 1970); also T. R. Gurr and R. Duvall, “Civil Conflict in the 19605,” in Comparative Political Studies, 6 (1973).
R. J. Rummel, “Dimensions of Conflict Behaviour within and between Nations,” General Systems Yearbook, 8 (1963).
R. J. Rummel: “Dimensions of Conflict Behaviour within Nations, 1946— 59. “Journal of Conflict Resolution, X, 65 et seq.
B. A. Nesvold, “A Scalogram Analysis of Political Violence,” in Gillespie and Nesvold, supra.
T. R. Gurr and C. Rutenberg, The Conditions of Civil Violence: First Tests of a Causal Model, Center for International Studies, Research Monograph 28 (Princeton, 1967).
W. H. Flanigan and E. Fogelman, “Patterns of Political Violence in Comparative historical perspective,” in Comparative Politics, 3 (1970).
P. R. Schneider and A. L. Schneider, “Social Mobilization, Political Institutions and Political Violence,” Comparative Political Studies, 4 (1971).
F. R. von der Mehden, Comparative Political Violence (New York, 1973).
G. B. Markus and B. A. Nesvold, “Governmental Coerciveness and Political Instabil ity,” Comparative Political Studies, 5 (1972).
R. Tanter, “Dimensions of Conflict Behaviour within and between Nations,” Jour nal of Conflict Resolution, 10 (1966).
*Some of the novels and plays mentioned subsequently inspired the moviemakers. This refers to Under Western Eyes (Sous les yeux de [‘Occident), with Jean-Louis Barrault (France, 1936); The Secret Agent (directed by Hitchcock, 1936); Sartre’s Les Mains sales (1951). The most impressive film was no doubt John Ford’s The Informer, based on Liam O’Flaherty’s novel, with Victor McLaglen in the role of Gypo Nolan, who betrays his comrades. There had been a silent version of The Informer directed by Arthur Robinson in 1929. John Ford made yet another film with an IRA background, The Plough and the Stars (1937), based on Sean O’Casey’s play, but this was much less successful than The Informer. Other memorable films with an Irish Civil War background were Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), starring James Mason; Ourselves Alone (1936), shown under the title River of Unrest in the United States; and Shake Hands with the Devil (1959), with James Cagney. During the Second World War two films on the Irish underground were produced in Nazi Germany, Der Fuchs von Glenarvon (1940), and Mein Leben fur Irland (1941). More recently Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Costas Gavras’s State of Siege offer much of interest to the student of terrorism. The former, a very impressive film “offers a blueprint for other struggles and revolutions,” teaching “urban guerrilla warfare” (Piernico Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” [New York 1973], IX). This film of “rare ideological consistency” can be shown in France but not in Algeria, for street demonstrations and the shouts “Free Ben Bella” might well be misunderstood in view of the fact that Ben Bella has been in Algerian prisons for twelve years. The latter film is a quasi-documentary study of the Tupamaros which, however, takes considerable liberties with the historical record — a countrywide vote is taken before the execution of the American hostage (Dan Mitrione). The very first “terrorist” feature film I have been able to discover was Protazanov’s Andrei Kozhukhov in 1917, with Ivan Moshukhin, known in Hollywood in later years as Ivan Mosjoukine, as the chief hero. This is based on Stepniak-Kravchinski’s novel The Road of a Nihilist of 1889, of which more below. There was an even earlier short American film Queen of the Nihilists (ca. 1910), but it dealt with escape from prison rather than with terrorist operations. A bowdlerized version of Dostoyevsky’s Possessed was produced in 1915 in Russia; also directed by Protazanov with Moshukhin in the title role (Protazanov was the first Russian producer of distinction). Andreyev’s Story of Seven Who Were Hanged was produced in Russia in 1920, and there was a film on Stepan Khalturin in 1925. A film on Nechayev was envisaged in the 1920s but the idea had to be dropped for ideological reasons. This is almost the sum total of films on nineteenth-century Russian terrorism, which both during and after Stalin has remained a very delicate subject — very much in contrast to the Russian military tradition from Alexander Nevski to Kutuzov which has pro vided Soviet moviemakers with a wealth of material. Terrorist operations were the subject of many movies with a Second World War background, most dramatically perhaps Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1957) and Popiol i Diament (Ashes and Diamonds) (1958). The setting of Kanal, the fate of a unit of the Armia Kraiowa forced into the sewers of Warsaw, was used in Aleksander Ford’s Piatka z ulicy Barskiej (The Five from i^arska Street). Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die, on the assassination of Heydrich, also might be mentioned in this context. The Molly Maguires (1969) with Richard Harris and Sean Connery was shot on location in Eckley, Pennsylvania, to give it greater authenticity; Eckley was said to be the ugliest town in America. Some critics complained that they found it impossible to identify with either warring side. This may be an excellent testimony for the historical accuracy of the film but it did not make it a box office success. There was a renewed interest in terrorism in the late 19605 and early 1970s, as manifested, for instance, in Chabrol’s Nada or in Alan Resnais’s La Guerre est Finie with Yves Montand, the story of the old Spanish revolutionary who finds it difficult to accept the changing world: Trente arts sont passes et les anciens m ‘emmerdent. ., The same motif, the inability of the Anarchist released from prison in the 1880s to adapt to the new political mood, recurs in Taviani’s San Michele (1971). There was a recent Swiss film on Nechayev in which the hero, contrary to historical evidence, has an affair with Natalie Herzen; a French movie on the exploits of the Bonnot gang in pre-World War I Paris; the Taviani brothers in Italy produced movies on various nineteenth- and twentieth-century terrorist groups and Brazilian filmmak ers operating in Chile (under Allende) and in Mexico chose similar topics. Some of these films were not widely shown and there are by now, in any case, far too many of them for enumeration. Some are listed in Guy Hennebelle, Cinema Militant (Paris, n.d.), and in Guide des films anti-imperialistes (Paris, n.d.).
*Sixty-six years later Ana Maria Gonzalez, aged eighteen, worked her way into the family of General Cardozo, chief of the Buenos Aires police, and became a close friend of his eldest daughter, Graciela. The general was warned by his own informants about Miss Gonzalez but disregarded these warnings. She often slept in their apartment and eventually planted a bomb under the general’s bed. Cardozo was killed; the corpse of Miss Gonzalez, a member of the ERP, was found a few days later in the streets of Buenos Aires. (New York Herald Tribune, June 22, 1976.)
*The Spanish Anarchists of the 19305 in Ramon Sender’s novel Siete Domingos Rojos (Seven Red Sundays) are Tolstoyans and vegetarians, but they have no hesitation about throwing bombs; furthermore, there is a substantial dose of egocentrism in their Weltanschauung. Thus Samar, the Anarchist, calls to the “naked crowds”: “I hate you all! The unhappy and the happy! I hate you and despise you! For the imbecility of your outlook, for the feebleness of your passions.” He dies when the prison is stormed, shouting, “Freedom or death,” for death, “metaphysically and actually, is the only possible freedom.”
* Underground Russia was basically an autobiographical account, the first of a great many. The recollections of Morozov, Frolenko, Vera Figner, Gershuni, Savinkov and others are one of the most important sources for the study of Russian terrorism. This is also true for some other terrorist groups; the autobiographical accounts of Natan Yalin-Mor and Geula Cohen are of greater interest than the novels written about Irgun and LEHI.
*Koestler was not, of course, an “insider.” But he knew and admired Jabotinsky who had been until his death in 1940 the supreme authority of Irgun. He also met some of the Irgun and LEHI commanders.
*”When in doubt, burn. Fire is the revolutionary’s god. Fire is instant theatre. No words can match fire. Burn the flag, burn the churches. Burn, burn, burn.” Barely five years later, Cleaver and Rubin were changed men, burning the gods of violence they had once worshipped.
*There were anti-IMRO novels, including one or two good ones, but they were written by Turks or Greeks. Bomba, a classic of modern Turkish literature, describes the misfortunes that befell the family of a Bulgarian freedom fighter who decided the time had come to give up the armed struggle.78
*Hebrew literature on the terrorist groups of the 19305 and 19405 is not of outstanding interest. The most ambitious novel from a literary point of view is Haim Hazaz’ Bekolar ehad (freely translated: Together [Tel Aviv, 1962]), a roman a clef describing the last days in prison of two young terrorists, Feinstein and Barsani, who blow themselves up on the eve of their execution. Yigal Mossenson’s Derekh Gever (The Way of a Man [Tel Aviv, 1950]) has the early postwar period as its background and the ambivalent attitudes of members of the Hagana toward the “dissidents” (i.e., terrorists). Some interesting and psychologically revealing novels by writers of a younger generation have appeared recently — for instance, Yizhak Ben Ner’s Mischakim bechoref (Games in Winter [Tel Aviv, 1976]).
*“There are, of course, many more novels, plays and movies of interest to the student of terrorism than have been mentioned here. Some have been inaccessible to the author; this refers, for instance, to Ramon Sempau’s Los victimarios (1906), an important document for the history of Spanish Anarchism around the turn of the century. Sempau was an active terrorist, sentenced to death by a military tribunal; he was later acquitted by a civil court. Others were written in languages with which I am not familiar — novels on Bengali terrorism, for instance, or on the Rumanian Iron Guard. Of late a great many novels have been published dealing with the most recent phase of terrorism; Klaus Rainer Rohl’s Die Genossin (Munich, 1975) is an unflattering portrait of the late Ulrike Meinhof by her ex-husband. Another interesting documentary novel dealing with the kidnapping of the FLQ is Brian Moore’s The Revolution Script (London, 1972). But there was no intention in the first place to provide a comprehensive survey of “terrorist literature”; in any case it is doubtful whether, after a certain point, further reading will throw any new light on terrorism.