BOOKS
INDELICATE HOMICIDE
CARLOS: PORTRAIT OF A TERRORIST. By Colin Smith.
Holt, Rine–
hart
&
Winston. $8.95.
HITLER'S CHILDREN: THE STORY OF THE BAADER-MEINHOF
TERRORIST GANG. By Jllilan Becker.
Lippincott. $12.50.
Terrorists figure among the most prominent characters in
the modern novel. Reviewing my own collection of favorite heroes, I
see Conrad's diminutive professor, who roams the streets of London
wrapped in enough explosives
to
obliterate every surrounding trace of
life should they come to arrest him; the silhouette of Cheng, whose
knife, buried deep in the sleeping man's flesh, is the spectacular
opening of Malraux's
La condition humaine;
and that handful of
justes,
whom Camus also calls delicate murderers, preparing the bomb
to kill the grand duke.
Whether they operate in Victorian London, Czarist Russia, or the
Kuomitang China, these professionals in terror-and their counter–
parts from other books I recall - have two things in common. First,
they are convinced that individual violence can bring about positive
social change, accelerating the progress of history. Second, they are
intellectuals- or, to put it more precisely, intelligent people- for
whom action is the outgrowth of analysis and firm philosophical
convictions. Typically, they are the most bitter of moralists.
But the romantic notion of the terrorist is not peculiar to the
novel.
It
is chiefly in political writing from and about Latin America
that one notices a comparable idealization of violence as an agent of
social change, as well as an idealization of the revolutionary as a being
who fuses theory and practice, intelligence and action, ethical behavior
and military aptitude. These days, however, the illusions of theory as
the basis for guerrilla activity and of armed propaganda and revolu–
tionary violence as the only response
to
the violence of social and
economic structures in Latin America have turned out to be obvious
fa ll acies , especially after all the refutations inflicted on them by
reality. Such ideas have not advanced the revolution in Latin America.
On the contrary, they have alienated large segments of the population
from the political vanguard, segments such as the farmers , the working
and middle classes who favor change but who nowhere support the
