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is, of course, a very old story. The difference in our time is that the
phenomenon has never been so widely recognized by so many people.
The use of perverse methods in order to achieve their objectives has
drawn together antagonistic ideological regimes to the point where
they are virtually indistinguishable.
At the same time, the intellectual world of the Left suffers from a
curious paralysis. Aware of the "structural violence" of exploitation,
where small minorities live off the bulk of the population, or where
rich countries benefit from poor, the leftist intellectual has concluded
that it is reactionary or hypocritical to condemn the individual
violence by which radical groups fight these wrongs. The case of Jean–
Paul Sartre, who is mentioned in Jillian Becker's book, illuminates the
attitude of the progressive intellectual face to face with terrorism. The
most that this intellectual permits himself is disapproval of bombings,
murder, kidnappings, and robberies as
mistaken and counter–
productive
tactics. Which, from the moral point of view, is equivalent
to saying that those actions are legitimate. Sartre gives an example:
Didn't the resistance make use of these means to fight the Nazis? Taken
to its logical conclusion, this argument establishes, first, that the end
justifies the means and, second, that the morality or immorality of an
act can be determined by its efficacy.
Because of the complicity or silence of the leftist intellectuals, the
criticism of terrorism has become a monopoly of the Right, naturally
adding to the prestige of "revol utionaiy violence" for the young
nonconformists, who see those condemnations for what they usually
are: crocodile tears. There have never been so many theoretical studies
of ideologies, orthodoxies, and heterodoxies, as well as of the mytholo–
gies enveloping them. But what our epoch desperately needs is not so
much study of contemporary political rhetoric (the "ends") as analysis
of political conduct. The divorce between the one and the other is
universal.
People like Carlos and Andrees Baader are examples of this
divorce. Both are incapable of perceiving what the anarchist Ravachol
(who threw a bomb into the Cafe de la Paix in Paris, shouting "No one
is innocent!"), or the nineteenth-century Russian nihilists saw so
clearly: violence is an
evil-even
though they resigned themselves to it
as necessary. For this Venezuelan and this German, the bomb, the
submachine gun, robbery, and murder offer themselves without com–
plications, as if they were a banality or a sport. The use of violence,
more than a method for achieving political ideals, becomes a duty.
What it involves by way of risk, excitement, madness, or suicide attracts
