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Title: What is terrorism?
Author: Mare Almani
Language: en
Source: Retrieved on March 30, 2010 from http://www.non-fides.fr/?What-is-terrorism

Mare Almani

What is terrorism?

In May 1898, king Umberto I, worried about the news reaching him from

Milan where a general strike had broken out, entrusted general Bava

Beccaris with the task of repressing the revolt. The order is given to

the soldiers to shoot at sight, and Bava Beccaris opens fire on the town

with canon shot. The balance is 80 dead and 450 wounded. Proud of having

done his duty, the general telegraphs the king that Milan is now

‘pacified’. The head of the government, the marquis Di Rudini, prohibits

over one hundred opposition newspapers, the Bourses de Travail,

socialist circles, Mutual Societies, and also at least 70 diocesain

committees and 2,500 parish committees. Moreover, the universities of

Rome, Naples, Padova and Bologne are closed, while thousands of arrests

are made. Umberto I immediately sends a telegramme of congratulations to

Bava Beccaris and decorates him with the cross of the Military Order of

Savoy ‘for precious services rendered to the institutions and

civilisation’. Two years later, on July 29 1800, the anarchist Gaetano

Bresci relieves king Umberto I of the weight of his responsibilities by

killing him in Monza. The King and the anarchist. Two assassins, their

hands stained with blood, that’s undeniable. Yet, can one put them on

the same level?I don’t think so, any more than one can consider the

motivations and consequences of their acts in the same way. And so,

because they can’t be united in a common execration, which of the two

committed an act of terrorism? The king who had the crowd massacred, or

the anarchist that slayed the king?

To ask oneself what is terrorism is one of those questions that it would

seem pointless to ask, because it is destined to get a univoque answer.

In reality — when it is formulated rigorously — it doesn’t fail to give

rise to surprising reactions. The answers are actually different and

contradictory. ‘Terrorism is the violence of those that fight the

State’, some say, ‘Terrorism is the violence of the State’, others

answer, ‘but no, terrorism is any act of political violence, no matter

where it comes from’, the last point out. And all the debates that open

up in the face of the distinctions that can then be made on the subject:

for example, terrorism is only violence against people or can also be

against things? Must it necessarily have a political motivation or is it

only characterised by the panic is seminates? The multiplicity of

meanings assigned to this term is suspect. The sensation here is not of

finding oneself in the presence of the usual malcomprehensions linked to

the incapacity of words to express a reality whose complexity goes

beyond the symbols that would like to represent it. On the contrary, one

gets the impression that one is face to face with deliberate confusion,

a relativism of interpretations created artificially with the intention

of emptying ideas of their meaning, or neutralising practical strength,

banalising the whole question by reducing all reflection that one might

carry out on the subject to chatter.

All the same, this nine-letter word must have an origin, a history, from

which it would be possible to deduct a meaning capable of dissipating at

least a good part of the ambiguities that its use generates today. And

that is in fact so.

The first definition that is given of this term by most dictionaries is

of an historical character: ‘the government of terror in France’. One

thereby discovers the precise origin of the word. Terrorism corresponds

to the period of the French Revolution that goes from April 1793 to July

1794, when the Committe of public health led by Robespierre and

Saint-Just ordered a huge number of capital executions. The terror was

therefore represented by the guillotine whose blade cut the head off

thousands of people who, one presumes, constituted a threat for the

security of the new State in formation. Starting off from this base, the

same dictionaries add by extension a more general definition of

terrorism: ‘all methods of government based on terror’.

At the present time this interpretation of the concept of terrorism is

extremely clear. First of all, it highlights the narrow line that exists

between terrorism and the State. Terrorism is born with the State, is

exercised by the State, is precisely a ‘method of government’ that the

State uses against its enemies to guarantee its own conservation. ‘The

guillotine — said Victor Hugo — is the concretisation of law’. Only the

State can promulgate laws. And law, far from being the expression of

this social contract garantor of harmonious cohabitation among humans,

represents the barbed wire with which power protects its

privileges.Whoever dares to go beyond it will have to pass through the

hands of the hangman. In fact, before the month of April 1793, some

so-called common law criminals and some insurgents had already climbed

the scaffold.

Whatever one might think, the guillotine is not actually an invention of

monsieur Guillotin. In France this instrument of capital execution

already had a history, but nobody had talked about Terror yet.It is only

when the authority of the State, then in the hands of the jacobins, is

threatened by a revolutionary wave, when it is no longer a question of

simple outlaws or isolated insurgents, but a huge social movement

capable of overthrowing it, only then does repressive violence come to

be called terror’.

But, apart from its institutional character, another characteristic

distinguishes terrorism: anyone can become a victim of it. During the

period of the Terror there were no fewer than 4,000 executions in Paris

alone. Louis Blanc found the identity of 2,750 guillotined people,

discovering that only 650 of them belonged to the wealthy classes. That

means that the State machine of the guillotine did not make many

distinctions, decapitating anyone it considered a nuisance or suspect.

It was not only noblemen, military men and priests that lost their heads

these days — as the most conservative and traditional propaganda would

have it — but above all simple artisans, peasants, poor people.

Terrorism is such because it strikes blindly, hence the feeling of

collective panic it inspires. The indiscriminate use of the guillotine,

systemised thanks to the simplification of judicial procedures consented

by the law of Prairial, created the ineluctable effect of chain

operations, annuling the individual differences between all the

decapitated. This practise of amalgam has a precise political sense:

regrouping into one single seance the people suspected of ‘crimes’ of a

nature or identity that were completely different. Terror aims at

eliminating individual differences to create popular consensus, and to

destroy ‘the abjection of the personal me’ (Robespierre), given that

there must only exist one single entity into which to melt individuals:

the State. Terrorism is therefore born as an institutional and

indiscriminate instrument. These two aspects also retentissent in

current expressions, as for example ‘terrorising bombardments’. Not only

does bombardment take place during wars carried out by States, it

seminates death and desolation among the whole population. One could say

the same thing concerning the psychological terrorism considered ‘a form

of intimidation or blackmail’ in order to manipulate public opinion,

effectuated above all through the means of communication, by the

exaggeration of the dangers of certain situations or even inventing

them, in order to induce the masses to behave in a certain way in

political, social and economic projects. One can see clearly how only

those who hold power are able to manipulate the great means of

communication and, through them, the ‘masses’, in order to reach their

aim.

Terrorism is therefore the blind violence of the State, as the origin of

the term shows clearly. But language is never a neutral expression. Far

from being merely descriptive, language is above all a code. The meaning

of words always points to the side on which the balance of power is

leaning. He who holds power also possesses the meaning of words. That

explains how it is that, over time, the concept of terrorism has taken

on a new meaning that completely contradicts its historical origins but

corresponds to the needs of power. Today, this concept is defined ‘a

method of political struggle based on intimidatory violence (murder,

sabotage, explosive attacks, etc.) generally used by revolutionary

groups or subversives (left or right)’. As we can see, this

interpretation, which began to spread at the end of the 19^(th) century,

is in complete opposition to what has been said until now.In the initial

acceptation of the word, it is the State that has recourse to terrorism

against its enemies; in the second, it is its enemies that use terrorism

against the State.The upturning of meaning could not be more explicit.

The usefulness of such an operation for the Reason of State is only too

clthe Terror in France was the work of a state born from the

Revolution.To justifythe present meaning of the concept of terrorism,

the dominant ideology has had to intervertire its subjects and attribute

to the Revolution the responsibility that in reality belongs to the

State. Ainsi, we are taught today that Terror is the work of the

Revolution which, in this far off historical context, took the form of

the State. Terror is therefore synonymous with revolutionary violence.

An acrobatic jump in logic that continues to enchant the parterres of

spectators the world over, who don’t seem to realise de l’arnaque more

than obvious.

In reality, one cannot attribute Terror to the Revolution, the insurgent

people, because it is only when the Revolution becomes a state that the

Terror has appeared. It is an enormous ideological lie and a gross

historical error to make Terror the very expression of ‘massacrante’

revolutionary violence, that in the streets, ythe days on the

barricades, of popular vengeance. Before April 17 1793 (day of the

foundatio of the revolutionarytribunal), the violence exercised against

power, even that which was particularly cruel, had never recouvert the

name of terrorism. Neither the bloody Jacqueries of the XIV century, nor

the excesses that deroule during the Great Revolution (such as for

example the demonstratio of the women of Marseille who carried a la

ronde, on top of a pike, the visceres of Major De Beausset to the sound

of ‘who’s for tripe?’) were ever considered as acts of terrorism.This

term indicates only the repressive violence of the State apparutus at

the moment in which it has to defend itself — for the first time in

history — from a revolutionary assault. En somme, the historic aspect of

the term shows how terrorism is violence of power that defends itself

from the Revolution, not Revolution attacking power.

What a social monstruosity, what chef d’oeuvre of Machiavelism is this

revolutionary government! For any being that reasons, government and

revolution are incompatible.

Jean Varlet, Gare l’explosion, 15 vendemaire an III.

It should be said a ce propos that the persistence of this ambiguity has

been encouraged for a long time by the revolutionaries themselves, who

have accepted this qualificativ de bon gres, without realising that in

so doing they were helping the propaganda of the very State that they

wanted to strike. And if the concept of terrorism can legitimately find

its place in an authoritarian concept of revolution (as Lenin and Stalin

demonstrated in Russia), it is absolutely devoid of sense, not to say

abhorrant, in an anti-authoritarian perspective of liberation. It is not

by chance thast it is precisely the anarchists to have in first revu the

improper use of this term, perhaps pushed by events. In 1921 the tragic

attentat took place against the cinema-theatre Diana in Milan, causing

the death and wounding of numerous spectators, although it had the

objective the town prefect who was responsible for the imprisonment of

some well-known anarchists. In spite of the authors’ intentions, it was

an act of terrorism. As one can imagine, this act has led to many

arguments within the anarchist movement. Ainsi, in the face of the

condemnation of the gesture by many anarchists, both the revue

Anarchisme of Pisa, undoubtedly the most widely distributed publication

of autonomous anarchism in Italy, continued to defend ‘this cardinal

anarchist truth, of knowing the impossibility of separating terrorism

from insurrectionalism’, it began on the other hand to esquisser the

first critical reflections on the concept of terrorism: ‘why name and

tax with ‘catastrophic terror’ — which is the propre of the State — the

act of individual revolt? The State is terrorist, the revolutionary who

insurges, never!’ Half a century later, within a context of strong

social tension, this critique was to be taken up again and developed by

those who did not intend to accept the accusation of terrorism launched

by the state against its enemies.

Words have always been subject to an evolution in meaning. It is not

surprising that the meaning of the term terrorism has also been

modified. It is all the same unacceptable that it contradict each one of

its original characteristics, which are those of the institutional and

indiscriminate aspectof violence. This violence can be exercised against

people or against things, it can be physical or psychological, but in

order to be able to speak of terrorism, there must be at least one of

these two characteristics remains. For example, one has rightly spoken

of terrorism to indicate actions carried out by death squads of the

Spanish State against the militants of ETA. These actions were directed

against a precise objective, but it was all the same a question of a

form of institutional violence against a threat considered as

revolutionary. In the same way terrorism can not always be carried out

by institutions. But in order for us to consider it such, its

manifestations must then strike in an indiscriminate way. A bomb in a

station or an open supermarket or on a crowded beach can rightly be

defined terrorist. Even when it is fruit of the delirium of a ‘madman’

or when it is claimed by a revolutionary orga nisation, the result of

such an action is to seminate panic in the population.

When on the other hand violence is neither institutional nor

indiscriminate, it is a non-sense to speak of terrorism. An individual

that exterminates his family in prey of a crisis of madness is not a

terrorist. Any more than a revolutionary or a subversive organisation

that choses its objectives with care. Of course there is violence,

revolutionary violence, but not terrorism. It is aimed neither a

defending the State nor at seminating terror in the population. If,

during such attacks, the media talk of ‘collective psychosis’ or ‘whole

nations trembling in fear’, it is merely in reference to the old lie

that wants to identify a whole country with its representatives, in

order to better justify the pursuit of the private interests of some in

the name and at the cost of the social interests of all the others. If

someone were to start to kill politicians, industrialists and

magistrates, that would merely seminate terror among politicians,

industrialists and magistrates. Nobody else would be materially touched.

But if someone were to put a bomb in a train, anyone could be a victim,

without exclusion: the politician just like the enemy of politics, the

industrialist just like the worker, the magistrate just like the repris

de justice. In the first case we are faced with an example of

revolutionary violence, in the second it is a question of terrorism on

the other hand. And in spite of all objections, critiques and

perplexities that the first form of violence can raise, one certainly

cannot compare it to the second.

That said, we come back to the initial question. Between the king who

has the crowd massacred and the anarchist that shoots the king, who is

the terrorist?

Mare Almani