Terrorist
acts may be perpetrated by individuals, by criminal and political
organisations, and by governments. The targets of terror and its
extent will vary accordingly, but the methods of instilling fear are
fairly constant, basically torture and violent death. Individual acts
are mostly psychotic, comparable to the Malay amok, though some, such
as the Oklahoma bomber, are motivated by a moral reasoning. Criminal
organisations practice terror on one another and on the community
they parasitize. Political organisations use terror against their
adversaries, usually governments. And governments use terror to stay
in power. Criminal terror goes back to banditry and piracy, and
governmental terror to prehistory, but the first recorded use of
organised terrorism for political motives is attributed to the
Zealots of Judea during the Roman occupation. A thousand years later
came the Nizari Ismaili “guardians” in their mountain stronghold
of Alamut. There were other exceptions, with peasant revolts during
and after the Middle Ages and the Anabaptists at the start of the
Reformation, but terror has usually been the instrument of central
powers against the people.
Since
the Inquisition, few governments have proclaimed publicly the rule of
terror as did the Comity for Public Safety led by Robespierre in
1793. “Virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which
virtue is powerless.” Stalin and Mao were coy about it, Ceausescu
never publicised it, nor has the North Korean nepotistic leadership.
The military commanded by Pinochet tried to hide their activities in
Chile, as they did in Indonesia under Suharto. Everywhere state
terror operates secretly, at home for most, but also abroad for those
states that have imperial pretensions. Backed by might, the state’s
auxiliaries kill, torture, incarcerate, extort and blackmail, usually
within the boundaries of made-to-measure laws, but not necessarily
so. The state and consenting social groups are the primary
instigators of terrorism, and by far its major practitioners. Their
terror is virtuous, that of their opponents is heinous. They bomb
overseas with impunity and very little discrimination, but those who
strike back are the enemies of humanity. The explosive vest is the
poor man’s reply to a laser guided missile. Suicide bombings
require more courage (faith, fanaticism) than their air-born
counterparts, but judging them to be morally inferior is a rich man’s
point of view. It is the judgment of power and wealth on “mop-heads”.
Their primitive technology seems to reflect their mental states and
condemns them to the dustbins of history. But their struggle can be
seen from a different perspective, as a move into the flow of history
from which they have been excluded for so long.
The
nation states of Europe are the result of a long, slow and very
painful process. It consisted in defining precise borders containing
a homogeneous population. It began when absolutism submitted the
feudal lords and imposed an official idiom and, because religious
reform coincided, an official dogma. Both movements seem to have been
facilitated by the new technologies of gunpowder and movable-type
printing, by the predominance of infantry in warfare and the
expanding diffusion of information and directives. In 1649 the
English parliament executed their king. This was the first step
towards abolishing absolute monarchy in Europe and replacing it by
the nation-state. A very sluggish march, as the emperors of Russia,
Germany and Austria were only deposed in the aftermath of WW1.
Meanwhile, France had followed the English precedent in the 1790s and
the Americas had broken with Europe and fought over their respective
borders to found nations of their own.
So
far nation building has been a very violent operation, with exogenous
conflicts over territory and influence, and endogenous ones between
cultural, ethnic, linguistic, geographic and religious groups. To
mark their difference from their neighbours, all members of a nation
had to be identical and interchangeable. Great bloody battles and
vast cemeteries would delimit Europe’s nations, but the everyday
violence of uniformity took place within the limits of those
artificially plotted lines. Apart from the usual armed repression two
new measures were introduced: education for all following a unique
syllabus and general conscription. Learning by rote and parade
marching in uniform would produce a nation of standard citizens.
Nicolas Chauvin, the fictitious French soldier-ploughman, vaguely
inspired by the Roman hero Cincinnatus, was exemplified and became
the model for chauvinism, for bellicose and exclusive patriotism. And
to a certain extent it worked. The dynastic and religious fighting
that had ravages Europe for centuries became nationalistic and
culminated in world conquest and world war.
The
period between Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and Franz Ferdinand’s
assassination in Sarajevo was one of rising social tensions. The
industrial revolution got into its stride and the rural exodus
concentrated poverty in sprawling manufacturing cities. The
propaganda for national unity was contradicted by a widening gap
between rich and poor. The success of socialist and internationalist
ideas was countered by chauvinism and jingoism (“We don’t want to
fight, but by jingo if we do…” a popular refrain in the 1870s),
reaching a paroxysm in 1914. At the same time, the nations that were
dividing up North and South America were facing the particular
problem of unifying the native population – where it had not been
exterminated – with those that had come from Europe and Africa. The
dominant Europeans identified themselves with the nation, thereby
denying the other groups their idioms, cultures and even their
physical appearances. This racial divide was also a social one, which
made it all the more difficult to resolve.
For
centuries the nations of Europe fought to determine the imaginary
lines that separate them – even today Russia’s borders are moving
– whereas the nations that emerged from the European empires had
their limits drawn by their colonial masters as they struggled among
themselves, often with a ruler as shown by the numerous straight
lines on a world map. This game of mine-and-yours hacked up Africa
during the 19th century, taking no account of the
inhabitants. And in the East, the Durand Line (1893) delimited the
British Raj in India, cutting right through the Pashtun and Baloch
territories. This division was worsened when the British withdrew
(1947), after having sliced the Bengal and Punjab provinces in two to
make up East (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, and leaving Kashmir
in limbo. After WW1, Britain and France grabbed the Turkish
possessions from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Here, Sykes and
Picot drew the lines through tribal and ethnic distinctions,
separating and putting together haphazardly the multiple local
communities with a pen. In the wake of WW2, most European possessions
obtained independence after armed or civil struggles, but these new
states in their post-colonial configurations had no recent history,
no common bond beyond their fight against European occupation. Their
stories prior to this occupation had nothing to do with the limits of
their colonial borders. And the pre-colonial past was tribal, ethnic,
religious, feudal, all a long way from acquiring the building blocks
of nations. Having been kept out of history for so long, the present
is meaningless or, at best, an irrelevant foreign construction. These
people must go back in time to start all over again, back to the
colonial interruptions, back to the 19th century for some
but back to the 16th century for those who had been under
Ottoman dominion before the Sykes-Picot pact. If the hand-drawn
borders of empire cannot change, there will be a lot more killing and
displaced populations before the one-nation-fits-all comes into being
in Africa and the Middle East. The war zone of European nations has
infested the planet.
The
nation-state with its highly centralised power structure and its mass
of worker-conscripts was conceived by societies in the throes of
violent social upheavals before and after the Napoleonic wars. The
ideas of socialism that stemmed from enlightenment and the French
revolution were rigorously countered by regimentation in class rooms
and barracks, and by a chauvinistic ideology diffused by the press,
vaudevilles, imagery and literature. To oppose the urban worker’s
international movement, the European ruling classes instilled
bellicose nationalistic sentiments in the minds of their rural
majorities. In Britain, where half the population was already
urbanised in 1800 (two-thirds by 1850), jingoism could not play on
rural sentiments, but an Englishman’s home is a castle. Concerning the
period 1775-1783, Zinn commented in his People’s History (ch.5),
“The
military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time,
diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest
that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the
Revolution whose interest in Independence was not all that obvious.
Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations –
consciously or not – that war makes them more secure against
internal trouble.”
And at the time, Hegel had
described the situation briefly, “Nations, internally divided, seek
tranquillity within by making war without.” Two
hundred years on, this is still true. Even the oldest nations are far
from social and cultural unity, and their war machines are ever more
destructive. And yet the utility of nations is never seriously
questioned, neither by inter-nation-al nor by supra-nation-al
movements or organisations. The national concept denies diversity, so
that nations are continually combating its resurgences and turning
the violence outwards on their close and distant neighbours, so why
this relentless obsession and for whose benefit?
Absolutism
conceived the nation-state, and constitutionalism adopted and
enhanced it. Their common motives were the property and control of
land, trade and taxes, of wealth, industry and labour. Nations are
the property of a few who do not hesitate about making war with
worker-conscripts, to protect and increase that property. These days
however, those who own nations tend to own parts of many nations and
in making war they harm themselves as much as their competitors,
hence the restriction of fighting and destruction to peripheral
regions. And because wars remain an essential national ingredient,
there is a preference for cold or ubiquitous ones, wars that can run
for decades or centuries. Meanwhile new nations are going through the
old ordeals of enforced uniformity and its compensating belligerence.
And, in an Orwellian world of changing alliances and erased memories,
the inherent violence of nationalism and its reduced vision of social
relations are completely occulted. As the concept of nations and
their colonial borders are not at fault, the violence must be blamed
on evil forces, on murderous demagogues, on corrupt beliefs, on
nihilist destructiveness, on downright savagery, when in fact it is
an essential ingredient for the construction and perpetuation of
nation-states. This violence can be regretted, and could possibly be
attenuated, but it cannot be blamed or judged without questioning the
fundamental structures and ownership of national capitalist wealth.
