How Some of the Seeds Were Sown
DURING the 1940’s the Nazis occupied Europe. Underground resistance was organized. Movements were supported by Allied governments operating through Britain. The British Royal Air Force dropped illustrated pamphlets over Europe in numerous languages on how to prepare ambushes, sabotage railways, harass an army of occupation, kill informers. Underground groups were supplied machine guns, grenades and plastic bombs. The Nazis might have called them terrorists. Their compatriots respected and honored them. Their exploits became heroic deeds to the Western world.
This bit of flashback has been cited by some to illustrate how an insurgent spirit may be born out of what appear at the time to be lofty ideals and noble motives. But the cancer of terrorism is no respecter of victims. It devours the very ones who first champion it. West Germany, France and Italy today are hotbeds of terrorists of left, right and other persuasions. A generation of freedom fighters spawned offspring bent on the violent overthrow of the very social order that threw off Hitler’s rule.
Stirrings of Revolution
Fidel Castro ignited a revolutionary spirit that spread in left-wing circles throughout Latin America. During the early 1960’s insurgent movements proliferated through Brazil, Guatemala, Peru and other countries.
“I was born in Argentina, I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala,” wrote Che Guevara, a disciple of Castro. This Spanish-Irishman, a wandering missionary of revolution, was finally killed in 1967 in Bolivia. He gained a sort of “knightly aura” the world over as “a social reformer in arms who fought only with the support of the oppressed people.”
Frantz Fanon, a black doctor, was head of the psychiatric department of Blida Hospital in Algiers when the Arabs began fighting for liberation from the French in 1952. In writings, such as his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon helped crystallize the thinking of left-wing intellectuals. For too long, he contended, colonial powers had exploited the masses of Africa, Asia, Latin America or wherever, through deportations, massacres, forced labor and slavery. There was a terrible reckoning due. Violence, he preached, ‘frees the exploited one and restores his self-respect.’ Fanon’s dictums prompted a pattern of thought among intellectuals of this persuasion in the West.
As the anticolonist wars in several parts of the earth came to an end in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the concept of a Third World of poor and miserable countries evolved. It attracted the compassion of young intellectuals. Wealthier countries, they argued, should do more to help less fortunate peoples. Men like Castro, Che Guevara and Fanon became heroes in the universities. Students in Europe and America got caught up in the literature of subversion.
Berlin-born Herbert Marcuse, professor of political thought at the University of California, in concord with intellectuals at Free University in West Berlin, Trento University in northern Italy and other centers of the new thinking, nurtured a trend in revolution. It transferred the insurgency of Latin America, Africa and other Third World areas to the well-to-do countries. There, students disgusted with ‘comfortable consumerism and ostentatious wealth,’ saw reason to revolt, to overthrow the established order.
The Revolution Spreads
“In West Germany most of the early supporters were found in the ranks of clergymen, doctors, professors and journalists,” according to Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne. In their comprehensive study, The Terrorists, these journalists trace the revolutionary development (in West Germany) among middle- and upper-class men and women. (Half the 28 most-wanted urban guerrillas on the police list in 1979 were women.)
Freed from the burden of military expenditures, following World War II West Germans enjoyed a flush of prosperity while most of the world suffered from want. Some young, idealistic Germans protested loudly. The spirit caught flame in other countries. In Paris, French students marched under the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchy. Students won some reforms in the “overcrowded and archaic universities” of France and Germany. But when they called on workers to march the streets and barricade factories, the great crusade to overthrow capitalism fizzled.
Revolt, however, was fueled by other fires. In 1967 the Shah of Iran visited West Germany. Demonstrators marched in protest, and a policeman killed Benno Ohnesorg, a mild-mannered student from Hannover. In 1970 students at Kent State University in Ohio protested American invasion of Cambodia. National Guardsmen opened fire. Four students were killed and 10 wounded. Everywhere, radical students saw established authorities as violent oppressors.
Reactionaries struck back when German radicals set fire to a Frankfurt department store—“to show the comfortable burghers what the horrors of war in Vietnam were really like.” To defend themselves they acquired weapons. To pay for weapons they robbed banks. From bank robbing the very momentum carried them headlong into more violence. It was a process that earned young students a fearsome label: terrorists.
It led some to a life-style of communal living, mate swapping, marijuana smoking, sensual pleasures. Mixed and mingled in it all was an illusion of upholding high-minded ideals. Sense-drowning incitements attracted recruits even from among young women of aristocratic backgrounds. But the lure of excitement and rewards also attracted some who were common criminals with little more idealism than a brute.
Do Terrorists Mirror Bad Governments?
Historian Henry Steel Commager blamed the ‘crisis of violence’ rising in America during the 1970’s on the bad example of government. The United States, he said, was dropping nine times as many bombs on Indochina as had been dropped in all the South Pacific during World War II. “Of what use is it for the President to authorize and perpetuate this violence in his capacity as commander in chief,” questioned Commager, “and then to deplore violence on the campus in his capacity as President?”
Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the National Commission on Violence issued a study of worldwide civil strife. Out of every 1,000 Americans it found that 11 took part in civil strife between 1963 and 1968. Americans ranked first among 17 Western democracies and 24th among the 114 larger nations and colonies of the world. Yet for all their antigovernment demonstrations and race riots, Americans have yet to organize for violence along the lines of hard-core terrorist groups that operate in Western Europe. Not that this can’t happen, the study concluded, because “Americans have always been a violent people.”
What Do They Say for Themselves?
Underground or aboveground, there are movements organized to wage guerrilla warfare in any way they can, each for its own cause. For the Palestinians the cause is nationalism—they want a homeland of their own. ETA (The Basque Homeland Party) seeks an independent state composed of four predominantly Basque provinces in Spain and three in France. The Irish Republican Army fights to throw off British rule and establish a form of Irish independence.
Left-wing terrorists in Italy want to reorder Italian society along lines more extreme than the “soft” communist mold. Right-wing groups want to turn Italy back to fascism.
West German and Japanese terrorists advocate all-out world revolution in favor of a radically new order. Others, like Muslim insurgents in the Philippines and the Warriors of Christ the King in Spain, fight for religious emancipation. Others appear to have goals fused of politics and religion. The soldiers who shouted “Glory for Egypt, attack!” as their gunfire mowed down President Anwar Sadat in Cairo, were executed as part of a terrorist cell of religious zealots accused of wanting to create a fundamentalist Islamic state in Egypt. Then there are those labeled terrorists whose motives appear to rise no higher than the profit they reap from crime.
But, for the most part, those viewed and feared by others as terrorists see themselves as idealists, visionaries, revolutionaries. “Let us be clear about one thing. We will export our revolution everywhere, to every country that opposes us.” That declaration is attributed to Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi. In Western eyes he is viewed as a fundamentalist Muslim who calls for a “holy war” against Zionism and dreams of uniting the world’s 160 million Arabs under his leadership. With billions of dollars of oil money at his command, Colonel Qaddafi is taken seriously by United States political leaders. They believe that he is capable of infiltrating a country with trained revolutionaries. But Qaddafi does not see himself as a terrorist. The terrorists, he says, are elsewhere. “Israel is terrorizing the Arabs with its nuclear program. The West German people are terrorized because the United States is putting missiles there. We in Libya are terrorized by the presence of the American fleet in the Mediterranean. This is real terrorism.”
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‘Of what use is it for the President to perpetuate violence in Indochina and deplore violence on the campus?’
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‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’
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An increasing number of women take part
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Some claim that World War II sowed the seeds of present-day terrorism