Terrorism: The Deadly Dance

In Rolf Hochhuth’s thought-provoking play The Representative there is a memorable passage in which a young Jesuit in the Auschwitz death camp is protesting the massacre of Jews. Responds the camp doctor, himself a renegade priest, “It was your Church first showed that one could burn a man like coke. In Spain alone, and without crematoria, you incinerated three hundred and fifty thousand, and nearly all alive.…”

Terrorism in the Christian era began with Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents (Matt. 2), but there the target was limited. No such restraint characterized the Crusaders’ action in Jerusalem when in the summer of 1099 they indulged in indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims and Jews regardless of age or sex—and all done ostensibly in the name of the Prince of Peace. Soon afterwards began the series of inquisitions that lasted four centuries, when the church adopted savage measures to drive out demons in the name of a faith undefiled. A modern Irish atheist, indeed, could adduce sound historical backing for his demand that violence be got off the streets and put back into the churches where it belonged.

It is difficult to define terrorism or always to distinguish it clearly from violence. Terrorism depends on who is talking. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. John Vorster’s odious regime in South Africa purports to base its apartheid policy on biblical principles, but so too does the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism (PCR). PCR grants help support what many people regard as a different but equally odious brand of terrorism. As a speaker euphemistically put it in the 1966 Geneva Church and Society Conference: “Christians might be called upon to participate in acts of revolutionary violence.” Either this means killing others or it does not. Does this view, which Vorster has dismissed as a return to the cold steel mentality of the Middle Ages, debar Christians from condemning when “acts of revolutionary violence” lead to the murder of, say, missionary families in Rhodesia? This has nothing to do with any Just War theory. The PCR has caused bitter disunity in WCC member churches, evidenced recently when the Salvation Army suspended its membership in the council. Others have pointed out that antiracism should be color blind—and that the council would be equally well employed in combating atheism.

As a technical description, “terrorism” is historically linked with the French Revolution, and subsequently in Russia with dissident groups. The latter could be curiously fastidious (“if Dubassov is accompanied by his wife, I shall not throw the bomb”). Mussolini early declared war on Christianity, proclaiming the “holy religion of anarchy.” Hitler called terror the means to easy victory over reason.

Although terrorism is still a feature of right-wind dictatorships, its affiliations since World War II have been chiefly with the left, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. A frightening note is that no matter where individual or group terrorism goes, the state has been there before it.

Communism, aiming at world domination, supports group terrorism as a matter of political expediency. Fishing in troubled waters is commendable—so long as they are foreign waters. In training and equipping foreign terrorists, Communists have adapted an old piece of cynicism: “Where we Communists are in the minority we claim freedom to dissent in the name of your principles; where we are in the majority we deny such freedom in the name of our principles.” Iron Curtain countries are largely free from terrorist activity because it needs an environment in which it can organize and operate. In states where civil rights are suppressed no terrorism is permitted except that which is officially sanctioned by the regime. This may involve anything from near-genocide and torture to thuggery and harassment. Ex-President Peron of Argentina, at the other end of the political spectrum, found those tactics rebounding on his own head. During his long exile in Spain he had encouraged dissident groups in his homeland, but when he returned as president in 1973 he could not restrain the monster he himself had unleashed. Over a twenty-six-month period thereafter, as an Argentinian source has indicated, the country registered 5,079 terrorist incidents.

Worldwide terrorism has involved many lands and many nationalities, from Stockholm to Soweto, from Sydney to Santiago. It is man-made, unpredictable, often part of no pattern, and alarmingly random. In the hands of individuals or groups, terrorism is commonly the despairing gesture of those who see no prospect of success by persuasion. Its goal might theoretically be world revolution but it settles for provocation, taunting to overreaction. It shows no respect of person: During the past decade, U.S. ambassadors on three continents have been killed by groups or mobs. Not even in the world’s most peaceful capitals are diplomats now immune from sudden attack.

As always, however, it is the common people who suffer most. Newspapers regularly report modern massacres of innocents who, peaceably going about their business—in a Belfast restaurant, a Lufthansa jet plane, or a Tel Aviv market place—have their lives senselessly taken away. Perhaps the frightful carnage of twentieth-century wars has devalued human life, at the same time as modern technological advances have opened up ever more lethal and sophisticated ways of achieving barbarous aims—what Thoreau might have called “improved means to an unimproved end.” Anthony Storr has put it well in his book Human Aggression (1968): “We are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.”

Terrorism can escalate from inauspicious beginnings, with idealists championing causes that take them out of themselves, resolved to “rend the flowery lies from worlds vile with hypocrisy.” Alas, orderly revolutions are almost always in practice a contradiction in terms. Resistance tends to make moderate men extremists, wild men wilder. A vicious circle is initiated, new leaders come to power, power corrupts, drastic measures are called for lest it slip away—and new injustices provoke new rebellions. Somewhere along the line, those with reasonable grievances give up when the right of opposition is so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. We learn all too slowly that the opposite of what is wrong might itself be wrong.

Terrorists come in a bewildering variety of guises, despite an American finding that more than 95 per cent of hijackers are in the eighteen to forty-five age group and buy one-way tickets in cash. There are malcontents and madmen, criminals and opportunists, hired mercenaries and espousers of causes irredeemably lost. There are acts of terrorism leveled at the wrong target in the name of nationalism (South Moluccans holding school children hostage in Holland) or religion (extremist Muslims incinerating 400 moviegoers in Iran). Other actions begin quietly enough, but things go wrong, horror is piled on horror, victims are done to death and, in Paul Tournier’s phrase, “the dance of violence goes round endlessly.”

Sometimes a tortuous logic is employed. “If I shoot at your toga, and there happens to be a man inside,” Red Brigade leader Alberto Franceschini told an Italian judge, “I’m sorry, but there’s not much I can do about it.” There is, moreover, a growing tendency to disclaim accountability to civil courts on the grounds of having engaged in what the IRA calls “political acts” (a specious but dangerous philosophy that could justify a multitude of crimes). In 1972 the Japanese terrorists who came eight thousand miles to slaughter or wound 101 passengers at Lod Airport in Israel said they were trying to revive “spiritual fervor” in their Arab allies who were flagging in the cause. This may have been because mainline Arab groups, modern pioneers in the field, are belatedly recognizing that terrorism ultimately is self-defeating. Things have changed since 1970 when skyjackings by the Palestine Liberation Organization were so common that a Christian traveler in the Middle East evolved a surefire formula for safe journeying: “Fly United Arab Airlines,” he would urge, “they don’t hijack their own people.”

Skyjacking seems nonetheless to be once more on the increase: fifteen incidents in 1976, thirty-one in 1977, and figures for 1978 picking up after a lull. Contrary to expectations, the incidence of terrorism is not decreasing. The West German federal prosecutor, ambassadors of Britain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, several Spanish police chiefs, and Italy’s most prominent statesman have been among recent victims. Italy, indeed, is reported to be having a terrorist boom, with the 702 incidents of 1975 having rocketed threefold over the past year. “Kill one, frighten ten thousand” is an old Chinese slogan (a million would be nearer the mark, opines a British observer).

An insidious feature of terrorism is that it glorifies and condones murder in the name of principle. To say that the principle is not always clear is irrelevant. Never really answered was the hijacked TWA captain’s plaintive but profound question: “Tell me, please, what are we being killed for?” Can we visualize a world in which terrorists could live peaceably?

Terrorism, some would argue, may be justified because of social deprivation, injustice, or by the vision of a homeland apparently lost irrevocably, but even those who see violence as an inescapable feature of the human condition recognize the need for a strong stand against terrorism. Such a stand, at least in one area, was at the heart of measures approved in the summer of 1978 by the U.S.A. and six other nations. These would block air service to countries that harbor airplane hijackers. In the future the seven will ask the country granting them permission to land whether it will return plane, passengers, and crew. If the response is unsatisfactory, no plane from the signatory nations would fly to that country, and its planes would in turn be refused landing rights by the seven. This will go some way toward endorsing John F. Kennedy’s 1961 appeal to the United Nations: “Let us call a truce to terrorism.” It looks as though this may be done only by adopting the consistently firm stance: Never give in, no matter who. It would be anomalous to resist tyrants in time of war and to encourage them at other times.

Original sin, nevertheless, does not allow any of us to slip into a them-us mentality, nor does a careful reading of the Sermon on the Mount. Too readily we assume we are on the side of the angels forgetting that these enemies of society are products of a world which we, all of us, have helped formulate.—J.D.D.

Learning From Louise

In an unpretentious letter to The Lancet last month two British doctors formally announced to their colleagues that “a 30-year-old nulliparous [one who has not previously borne a child] married woman was safely delivered by caesarian section … of a normal healthy infant weighing 270 grams.” What made the birth remarkable was that it came “after the reimplantation of a human embryo”—the world’s first test-tube baby. The attendant doctors told pressmen that this was not an open invitation to other women whose Fallopian tubes are blocked irreparably, and that they had not been “concerned with anything else but helping an infertile couple.”

This is a little disingenuous. The ship of science has sailed boldly into uncharted waters, and it made waves that affect us all. Out of this significant scientific achievement, this act of compassion, all sorts of moral questions arise. Is this variation from normal conception a violation of God’s plan? Does it really “countenance technological larks when half the world is hungry”? Does such a mode of breeding make a child “a pure consumer item”?

Stanley M. Kessler, chairman of the (Conservative) Rabbinical Assembly’s Bio-Ethics Committee, sees in the development a “Brave New World” syndrome “where the laboratory technician can become as God, deciding which conception in vitro shall be womb-implanted and which shall be washed down the drain. Which shall live? Which shall be kept from life?” All this involves profound questions addressed to a society confronted with both artificial insemination and liberalized views on abortion.

While science hails its triumph and a slightly bewildered church ponders the implications, the parents of Louise Brown have reportedly sold exclusive rights to their story to a London tabloid for about $600,000. That may ultimately be the saddest feature of all.

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