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certain types of lives, discharges impulses and appetites that can be
associated only arbitrarily with the revolutionary goal of transforming
society. We already recognize one of the dangers in the notion that
political objectives can be accomplished by imitating the actions of
gangsters: a moral cover is provided for gangsterism and the ranks of
the revolution are opened to delinquents. Mythified by the surround–
ing publicity and freed from ethical prohibition, political violence
lends a hand to many people: it gives company to the lonely and
entertainment to the bored, it compensates the frustrated and provides
savage therapy for the neurotic. As technology produces ever more
deadly and easily manipulated weapons, the destructive capability of
terrorism advances without respite; through terrorism society may be
effectively converted into what the defenders of violence say it already
is: a jungle, a madhouse, or an inferno. Before this apocalypse, perhaps
it would be worthwhile to ask, as Camus did in
L 'homme revolte,
if
any political practice that places abstract ideas above human life is
admissible, and whether it is not the means that ought to justify the
ends.
But that will not happen easily. At the beginning of the century, a
determined partisan of violence, Georges Sorel, wrote in an essay on
what he called "the catastrophic imagination of socialism":
"Il jaut
juger les myths comme des moyen d'agir sur le present; toute discus–
sion sur la maniere de les appliquer materiellement sur le cours de
l'histoire est depourvue de sens."
The myth he was referring to was the
general strike, but his statement might be applied to the myth of
revolutionary violence as a remedy for putting an end to reactionary
violence. Experience proves that violence does not suppress previous
violence but rather increases it. Furthermore, experience proves that to
persevere in the belief in remedial violence is to push contemporary
society toward final catastrophe. Nevertheless, the myth endures, fed by
the despair of some people and the cowardice and ingenuousness of
others, provoking throughout the world the slaughter of its daily
hecatombs.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
