On the usefulness of crime and terror

Organised crime has always plagued society. Its stock in trade is providing the illicit, with robbery and protection as peripheral activities, and with real estate and politics for laundering. Criminal gangs offer anything the law forbids, sex, drugs, gambling and, in some cases, black-market currency, clothes and food. Criminal enterprises depend as much on legislation as do law enforcement agencies. When the US prohibition of alcohol was repealed in 1933, bootleggers and federal investigators were out of work. Fortunately for them, new laws on hemp, poppies and coca came to the rescue. Society creates its criminals by prohibitive legislation and wealth inequality. And yet, society is constantly proclaiming that it will illuminate crime, not by revising its institutions but by hiring more police, lawyers, magistrates and prison guards.

Organised murder has a long history. Claudius Pulcher ruled Rome for a while with his hooligan gangs. The Zealots determined the fate of Judea and the siege of Jerusalem. And Ismaili assassins were active in both Moslem and Crusader states. India had its Thugs and China its Boxers. All these organisations were prone to killing their opponents, but they were usually isolated acts with knives (Sicarii, latin plural form of Sicarius "dagger-man" from sica, knife). Gunpowder brought new possibilities. Guy Fawkes’ failed attempt is still celebrated, but it was just one of many plots on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide. Pistols and bombs became the tools of religious assassinations. Then, as Europe’s religious wars abated to leave room for class wars, murder was politicised and was the favoured strategy of the nihilistic fringe of anarchism, with Colt’s revolvers and Nobel’s dynamite.

Government by fear is the method of all tyrannies. But government by terror was first proclaimed and legislated by the French parliament in 1792. It would end two years and some forty thousand victims later with the execution of Robespierre and his terrorist colleagues. The idea of terrorising a population into submission comes with the absolute power of armed force. It lies behind all forms of government, and even the more consensual have its potentiality. However, the French Jacobin regime was the first and last to vindicate terrorism (totalitarian states only practice it). Since then, designated terrorists have always been in opposition to the power structures in place. At the beginning of the 20^th century terrorism was associated with anarchist and nationalist movements, and a .38 semi-automatic pistol fired in Sarajevo sparked off WW1. After 1945, national liberation fronts were labelled as terrorists. During America’s war in South-East Asia, left wing radical groups were treated as terrorists, whether they had recourse to violence or not. And for the past two decades, Moslems have been the terror bogeyman. As for the continuous state terror, both at home and abroad, it has been constantly legitimated by mass propaganda.

Many crimes could be eliminated by legislative changes, theft could be reduced by a more egalitarian distribution of incomes, and violence is best treated by psychiatry. “The underlying causes of crime” that are so rarely mentioned. Terror – shooting people or blowing them up, or making them disappear – is predominantly used by governments to impose their will on their own and foreign societies. The violence exerted by police and military armed forces exceeds by far the violence that opposes them. But unofficial acts of terror, targeted or haphazard are used to justify and accentuate official terror tactics. Police depend on the law, the more it prohibits the more power they have. And governments welcome international violence and will even provoke it to mask the tensions of class confrontation. The nuclear Cold War was a paradigm, with plenty of peripheral fighting and a permanent threat of total destruction. Both sides used it to vindicate the atrocities they committed. There was a period of unease after the USSR’s economic crash and the perspective of universal peace, but the ten year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had created new possibilities. It was the cradle of a militant revival that spread to Moslem communities everywhere.

The end of state communism in Eastern Europe and Russia left an ideological void. After WW2 the world had split into two antagonistic entities, as irreconcilable as light and darkness. Both sides had structured themselves in opposition to the other, their difference became their raison d’être. Among other things, the Soviets reviled monarchy and religion, which meant that Americans supported them. This played out in Afghanistan, where Moscow was behind a secular and centralised military regime, while Washington, through its Saudi branch, financed and armed tribal rebels and an international Islamic brigade. These were reactionary forces based on ethnicity and religious orthodoxy. They ended up by driving out the Russian troops and their allies, and taking Kabul, largely due to their safe-havens in Pakistan and to the Soviet Union falling apart. However, the outcome of this latter proxy war brought to power a very retrograde form of society. In its total opposition to the communist block the West nurtured a contagious medieval regression.

Events in Afghanistan were a prelude to the chaos in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt and across Northern Africa to the Atlantic. Tribal traditions and religious fundamentalism are a regressive mix, an attempt at reviving the past that can only be desperate, violent and doomed. Meanwhile, governments everywhere have found a new enemy, so the threats of peace and of confronting their citizens’ demands are deferred indefinitely. Just as the police industry needs criminals, the military industry needs a foreign enemy. Both are profit driven and are intimately linked to government policy. The destruction of the remaining tribal societies and their “terrorist” offshoots has given a new lease of life to the masters of war and repression, with a fast expanding demand for their products. Where it not for the looming financial and climatic disasters, and the significance of an arc of alliances that joins up Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and Moscow, all would be for the best.