Key ideas: Published in 2010. "I have written this book after having researched and published on the topic of modern terrorism for 25 years... I am concerned primarily with prototypes of terrorism perpetrated by the proverbial “true believers,” portrayed by Eric Hoffer as representatives of totalitarian or proto-totalitarian, fanatic movements. These violent factions and networks differ in their doctrines, but all “appeal to the same types of mind” of a dogma-driven zealot. As outlined in Hoffer’s classic book, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting concrete grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.” (A. Geifman)
“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development,” says Aristotle. We can gain a great deal by looking deeply to see why and how terrorism evolved. By scrutinizing the Russian precedent, the book seeks to illuminate the numerous obscure facets of fundamentalist terrorism that may be comprehended more clearly from a temporal distance...
Since the early 1900s, terrorists assassinated men in uniform as symbolic targets and destroyed inanimate emblems of authority and traditional culture. Increasingly, however, their main adversary has become the civilians, attacked randomly: in the late-imperial and Soviet periods as “class rivals”; presently in Israel as symbols of the insufferable “Zionist entity”; and in the West as the proponents of “godless materialism.” These “scenarios are not tactics directed toward an immediate, earthy, or strategic goal, but dramatic events,” staged to celebrate terrorism as a comprehensive psychological warfare and mechanism of coercion.
This study shifts attention from terrorists’ doctrines to their endeavors that have previously been hidden or ignored. The analysis emphasizes a vast discrepancy between the declared creed of terrorist leaders and the practices of the rank-and-file. In various epicenters of terror, the perpetrators of violence also persistently demonstrate utter dogmatic ignorance—glaring behind the poorly assimilated slogans, socialist or Islamist catchphrases, supplied by their dispatchers.
The discord between their avowed intentions and their actions suggests that what the terrorists say about their motives may not be what really drives them. Usually, their broadcast agenda is but a publicity device to legitimize violence. Instead of taking authentications at face value, it is essential to address the largely subconscious motivations behind archetypal terrorist behaviors.
When Lenin and his party took hold of power in 1917, for the first time in history former insurrectionists set out to implement a genocidal class-based and government-upheld utopia by methods they labeled the “Red Terror.”
The book compares Bolshevik policies with those of the Hamas, which had engaged in violence based on an apocalyptic ideology prior to its victory in the January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislation Council (PLC) and seizure of control over the Gaza Strip in July 2007. Immediately after their takeover, the Hamas began to impress the Shari’a laws and Islamist rites for the sake of fundamentalism with “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” Its “Muslim essence” and accentuated jihad (sacred war against enemies of faith) distinguish Hamas from secular nationalists and their terrorist tactics.
It is fighting “a holy war until final victory,” not only to receive from Israel the disputed territories but mainly to promote an extremist version of Islam under a proto-totalitarian administration—akin to the underlying objective of the Soviets to advance their millennial world revolution. The Bolshevik–Hamas comparison yields a behavioral typology of terrorists as fundamentalist leaders.
Russian extremists who came to dominate the political scene contrasted sharply with most of their predecessors, such as combatants of the legendary People’s Will party (Narodnaia Volia)—the first modern terrorist organization in the world. Operating in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the party chose its targets on the basis of individual responsibility and attacked influential officials of the autocratic regime, whom the revolutionaries held responsible for reactionary policies. Their objective was both a reprisal and “propaganda by deed.” As part of the group’s popular mobilization tactics, assassinations were to drum up the “sleepy Russian masses” for a colossal revolt.
These efforts failed, even though the terrorists did claim remarkable successes.... Yet formidable as it was, the People’s Will did not interrupt the habitual flow of life in the country—except once, on March 1, 1881.
On that day, a party member tossed a handheld bomb at Alexander II’s carriage, as it was passing over the capital’s Catherine Canal. Shaken but unscathed, he stepped out of the bulletproof vehicle to help the gravely injured driver; then, a second terrorist detonated his homemade explosive device under the tsar’s feet.
“I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground,” a high-ranking police officer remembered. “Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice cry, ‘Help!’ . . . Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay on the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others to crawl, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them...'
On the splintered flagstones, next to his injured and unconscious assassin, lay Alexander II, with blood pouring out of his shattered legs and his abdomen ripped open. He was mortally wounded and died in the Winter Palace a few hours later. The long hunt of the People’s Will for the “crowned game” was finally over. And the country was set off on a catastrophic course...
Unprecedented anywhere in the world, pervasive terror coincided with the political turmoil of 1905–1907 and was a symptom of the country’s deeper predicament—a rapid breakdown of the traditional environment following the 1861 serf emancipation.
The difficult transformation process in Europe turned into a crisis in Russia, where it surfaced suddenly around 1900 and spiraled swiftly into a political calamity. “It was as if something was in the air hovering over each and every one of us,” remembered poetess Zinaida Gippius recalled: people “rushed about, never understanding why they did so, nor knowing what to do with themselves.” Frustration and anger accumulated almost visibly....
Revolution appeals to those who “crave to be rid of an unwanted self.” The ideal potential convert to radicalism “is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness” of his existence. This is why the true believer clings to the cause with a fervent attachment and attributes sanctity to it: the movement attracts and holds a following because—magically—it reduces the traumatizing effect of individuation and satisfies “the passion for self-renunciation.”
A sad irony of Russian history was that terrorism of the early 1900s reached its apogee upon the establishment of the constitutional order, after the emperor had granted the Manifesto of October 1905. The “October Manifesto” guaranteed legislative parliamentary powers to the State Duma and fundamental civil liberties to the Russian citizens. The radicals took this concession for what it indeed was—a sign of autocracy’s weakness, which only encouraged them to take steps toward further destabilization and ultimate disintegration of their “terror-friendly” environment by way of bulging militancy.
The situation may appear familiar and akin to one following Israel’s effort to attain peace with its neighbors by signing the so-called Oslo Accords of 1993, otherwise known as the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, envisaged as a milestone in the process toward a resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
As part of the compromise, Israel agreed to withdraw its military forces from sections of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, areas to be incorporated into the new Palestinian Authority (PA), and recognized Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate voice of the “self-governing Palestinian people.”
In return, on paper the PLO renounced terrorism against Israel—in practice causing the outburst of the worst forms of violence in its history within the next decade, as well as deterioration of living conditions in the PA.
By late 1905, a bomb tossed under the carriage of a powerful public figure was a trademark of the SR assassinations. Whether or not the bureaucrats survived, their coachmen often suffered injuries and death. The closest contemporary analogy would be bus drivers in Jerusalem, victims of bomb blasts inside their vehicles during Intifada. Similarly, coachmen of Russia’s statesmen unexpectedly found themselves trapped in one of the most hazardous occupations at the time. The bomb that tore to pieces the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich also severely wounded his coachman, and within days, commoners in the capitals recited a popular poem, titled “His Excellency’s Driver”:
Saddened by the past examples,
A driver to a powerful lord
Tries to soften SR terrorists
With lamenting, pleading word:
“Worthy terrorists, I toast you
And wish you a speedy victory!
But I beg you to take measure
For my personal safety.
I’m concerned about the future,
Fear cuts me like a knife;
Can you find a type of bomb
That would spare the driver’s life?
It took months before the Russian authorities began to overcome their initial paralysis for the benefit of an effective counterterrorist policy. The effort was associated primarily with the person of Petr Stolypin, appointed to the post of interior minister...
“Sedition, unrest and criminal attacks” had placed the empire under siege, the extremists had declared war on the government, which was forced to respond accordingly, with “rapid, firm and undeviating” measures, the interior minister announced in his new hard-line policy aimed to demonstrate that terror could be stopped.
It was the Maximalists who took up the challenge to prove him wrong. On August 12, 1906, two men dressed in gendarme uniforms and one in civilian clothes entered the Stolypin’s St. Petersburg mansion on Aptekarskii Island. When guards tried to stop them, the terrorists detonated their 16-pound bombs in the anteroom, instantly killing themselves along with 27 innocent petitioners—the poor, women, and the elderly—all awaiting appointment with the interior minister during his visiting hours.
The Maximalists missed their main target: by chance Stolypin’s office was the single room that suffered relatively little harm;... However, along with dozens of others casualties, the terrorists wounded the minister’s four-year-old son, crippled his teenage daughter, and caused enormous property damage
On Stolypin, who as governor had been terrorists’ target in the past, the viciousness of this suicide attack had an effect contrary to the intended fear. “You will not intimidate us,” he declared from the Duma floor, and on August 19, 1906, initiated a system of field courts-martial for civilians in regions proclaimed to be under either martial law or “extraordinary security.”
Appointed by local military commanders, five officer-judges in these courts would issue rulings against individuals whose implication in extremist practices—such as terrorist attacks, robberies, as well as fabricating, concealing, or utilizing explosive devices—were obvious enough not to require prolonged investigation. Defendants were allowed to call on witness, but they had no access to legal advice during the closed hearings, which convened within 24 hours of the arrest and reached verdicts in 48 hours. The verdicts could not be appealed and would be implemented no later than 24 hours after pronouncement...
Under Stolypin’s leadership, the “most sustained, brutal and . . . controversial repressive campaign lasted for eight months when military jurisprudence resembled legality only vaguely. A typical sentence handed down by the field courts was hard labor—up to 15 years for manufacture and possession of explosives, and death—almost without exception as a reprisal for being involved in terrorist acts and armed robberies. As a result, by the time the extra-judicial system expired in April 1907, between 950 and 1,100 extremists had been shot or hanged by the military execution squads.... Probably the most talented minister since the death of the great 19th-century administrative genius Alexander Speransky, Stolypin envisaged a series of imperative domestic reforms, infeasible before he had harnessed radicalism—the challenge he took on as a hard-liner and a commanding “master of the situation.”
Fury erupted against the “Bloody Nicholas” and his extra-legal procedures to suppress the extremists. The liberal left cursed Stolypin; world-famous novelist Leo Tolstoy, the “voice of consciousness” of the nation, announced that state violence was far worse than terrorism from below. The establishment suffered from an overwhelmingly negative public image in Europe as well: “virtually all leaders of society and most of the press vehemently denounced” Russian despotism. The extremists hated the prime minister more than the inert Nicholas II and considered Stolypin their number one enemy, whose elimination was “even more important than the removal of the Tsar himself.”
As long as “bombs are used as an argument, ruthless retribution is certainly a natural response,” the prime minister countered in response to overwhelming criticism.
To be sure, the courts-marshal and other counterterrorist measures did deter many extremists: having reached its peak in August 1906, the wave of attacks against state officials slowly began to wane. Reduced violence coincided with the general weakening of the revolutionary storm—attributable in equal measure to Stolypin’s relentless effort against the radicals and to his impressive socioeconomic reforms, aimed primarily at enhancing citizens’ responsibility for the adherence to common and property laws...
Fatefully, Stolypin had fallen victim to the last major terrorist incident in the prerevolutionary period. When a new surge of antigovernment activity broke out in early 1917, there became apparent on the political scene a glaring absence of a statesman sufficiently committed and equipped with enough fortitude to overcome the crisis.
“I want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.”
“Why do evil?”
“So that everything might be destroyed. Ah, how nice it would be if everything were destroyed.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
For the anarchists, Maximalists, and members of many obscure extremist gangs, the political goal to overthrow the government of Nicholas II was only a partial objective. Their “program maximum” included the demolition of the contemporary order entirely—with all its laws and institutions, its religion and customs, and its traditions and relationships....
Their hostility thus extended to the bourgeoisie, against whom they wished to take direct action “without entering into any compromises” and “without putting forth any concrete demands.” By “direct action” these radicals meant terrorist assaults on their class enemies’ lives and property...
Hailing class revenge, extremists tossed hand grenades into first-class railway compartments full of apparently prosperous passengers. On November 1905, a group of Anarchists-Communists threw two bombs, packed with nails and bullets, into a large family café in the Hotel Bristol, where more than two hundred customers were present. The terrorists’ only aim, as stated in a post factum leaflet, was “to see how the foul bourgeois would squirm in death agony.”
“Allah willing, this unjust state will be erased” from the face of the earth, the Palestinian religious leaders announce during public prayers, one of those leaders being Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi of Gaza. “The time will come, by Allah’s will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of this earth,” proclaims another cleric, Ziad Abu Alhaj, on public television. The extremists have repeatedly declared any and all Israeli citizens to be legitimate targets because they represent (even if not necessarily espouse) Zionism, the mortal enemy.
Terrorists strike at defenseless citizens because they anticipate a greater rate of success than if they were to attack well-protected military targets. Perhaps more importantly, the psychological effect of arbitrary civilian death is much stronger than the impact of casualties among the enemy in uniform.
In April 2004, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in east Jerusalem, directed by activist Basem ‘Eid, published a report on the “Intrafada,” as inhabitants of Gaza, Ramallah, Jenin, and other cities call the state of near-anarchy prevailing in the Palestinian Authority. Militant bands employ readily available firearms to enhance their arbitrary rule, the way their predecessors did in Russia a century ago.
Seeking to strengthen their own position, officials encourage domestic conflicts and often side with gangs and militias that terrorize and abuse the peaceful Arab populace in the PA territories on a daily basis. The town of Nablus is said to have been at one point “ruled by two armed illiterate thugs.” People on the PA payroll perpetrate 90 percent of gangland lawlessness, and from 1993 to 2003, combatants were the cause of 16 percent of all civilian deaths among Palestinian Arabs, according to the report.
Arab militants intimidate the civilian population under their control by “show trials” of alleged Israeli “spies and collaborators,” who are summarily executed by hanging or by firing squad, as they have been on numerous occasions in the Palestinian Authority. Aside from those sentences to death by three-judge “military courts,” many are lynched while in detention, on their way to or even during trial...
“If you were to read the local Palestinian newspapers you would be appalled by dark headlines,” confirmed Basem ‘Eid in 2007: “killing, kidnapping, arson, shooting, revenge.” It is the gunmen who “threaten and spread fear among the Palestinians,” admits this Muslim human rights activist, also an opponent of Israel.
The conclusion of the 2004 Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group “Intrafada” report thus remains accurate: it is a mistake to attribute incessant violence in the region and the Arab plight exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It is an error to take at face value terrorists’ rhetoric, which holds foreign oppression responsible for the habitual bloodshed and routine victimization of the PA civilians, who suffer as a result of the extremists’ effort to dominate politics.
Despite their penchant for bemoaning the suffering masses, Russian radicals in the early 20th century persistently exhibited the mentality summarized by a trendy motto: “the worse, the better” (chem khuzhe, tem luchshe). The revolutionaries clung to “the millennial promise” of a foreseeable socialist or anarchist redemption, already thought to be looming on the horizon. For the “apocalyptic moment,” only yet another step toward the abyss was needed. Things must simply be allowed, or pushed, to become bad enough; such was the concept behind the “politique du pire.” In practical terms, the notion presupposed that further deterioration of the country’s domestic situation would contribute to the growing instability of the regime and thus benefit the radi- cal cause.
The closest contemporary analogy is revealed in patterns of suicide terrorism, when periodically “an extremist organization with maximalist goals launches a wave” of deadly missions “to break up ongoing negotiations between the Israeli government and a moderate grouping,” sabotaging all prospects of a potential peace.
It is highly revealing that the first organized conspiracies against the Russian imperial regime emerged in the year 1861, immediately after “tsar-liberator” Alexander II had freed millions of peasant serfs and initiated the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s. The 1881 assassination of the only liberal on the Russian throne was perhaps the most glaring example and symbol of “the worse, the better” tactic and its consequences. When the tsar walked out of his palace to die on the fateful day of March 1, he had left on his desk a completed proposal for a limited form of elective parliamentary representation—a project entailing a gigantic step in the steady course of the country’s liberalization.
Subversion would have been rendered meaningless, and the extremists’ position as self-proclaimed defenders of the common good would have become unjustifiable, had the liberal line been implemented. As it was, Alexander III, the disheartened son and successor of the assassinated reformer, promptly reversed this broadminded policy for the sake of “tightening the system.”
“You thought that my inner voices scream: ‘bread!’ and plead: come and save? You are doing me much honor, undeservingly. I know about the hunger . . . and all the horrors, but I am not sorry and won’t go save anyone. The last thing I would do, go to the cohort of the dying,” confessed an embittered young woman, Vladimir Zhabotinsky’s acquaintance from Odessa. She was about to join a cause that the extremists almost never unveiled—“the legion of destroyers . . . the cohort of the scorchers.”
Such is the mentality that drives terrorists at times of conflict to set up their rocket-launching sites in or near kindergartens and schools—to maximize inadvertent civilian casualties and use them to portray the enemy as “baby killers.” During the 2009 fighting in Gaza, the use of children as human shields became a trademark of the Hamas operations—a fact that its leaders flaunt. The terrorists have also incorporated other uninvolved civilians into their network, having built an extensive militant infrastructure in resident and industrial areas...
But perhaps “the worse, the better” tactic validates thievery amid shattering destitution. While enriching themselves, PA leaders persistently count on hardship as an effective propaganda device, to blame the enemy and validate violence in the eyes of the afflicted Gaza residents. Suffering—amplified when opportunity allows—thus turns into another means to promote the cause.
Unlike in the People’s Will era, when planners of terrorist acts were also the executioners, those who coordinated assaults since the early 20th century rarely took part in them. Terrorism now presupposed a division of labor...
One benefit of this policy became obvious immediately: whereas the practitioners of terror frequently fell into the hands of the security police, the leaders were apprehended very rarely. After 1905, the masterminds of terror easily found candidates for recruitment and, at least on the local level, sacrificed the rank-and-file just as easily, as dispensable and disposable contraptions.
As it turned out, the task required substantial psychological acumen, which the architect of all early PSR terrorist ventures, Grigorii Gershuni, demonstrated perhaps more than any other “soul hunter.”... Gershuni was “clever and cunning”; his fellow revolutionaries likened him to an awe-inspiring Mephistopheles, with “eyes that penetrated one’s soul and . . . an ironical smile on his face.”
Personally, he never resorted to arms but had “the power of influencing people almost to the point of hypnotism.”... Almost everyone he “worked on” to recruit for the Combat Organization “would soon totally submit to his will and become an unquestioning executor of his orders,” recalled former police officials. Still, he did not trust new conscripts to act on their own, so he typically stayed with a terrorist until the time of the attack. There was no escape from his constant urging, testified worker...
In contrast to the People’s Will era, when terrorism was the tool of a tightly knit conspiracy of educated, theory-oriented dissenters from the privileged milieu and intelligentsia circles, by the early 20th century, intellectual principles in general and socialist ideology in particular largely had lost their relevance as primary motivation for violent action...
Ideological decline concurred with—and to a great extent resulted from—the democratization of the radicals’ ranks. Whereas there were no more than 100 extremists in the early 1860s, and some 500 adherents of the People’s Will in late 1870s, by 1907 the PSR counted 45,000 members... After 1905, the collective portrait of the revolutionary movement became as socially “complex as the social structure of Imperial Russia itself...
The extremists from the labor milieu could not compare with their predecessors in intellectual and ideological awareness—if only because of the overwhelming illiteracy among them in the post-1900 era. More often than not, they had received minimal schooling.... But that’s not to say that their ignorance deterred them from violent feats. Convoluted postulates were no longer essential guidelines for the terrorists.
The leaders’ attitude toward their sanguinary business is vivid in Savinkov’s novel Pale Horse (Kon’ blendnyi), originally published under his nom de plume V. Ropshin in 1909. Seeking to analyze the mentality of the assassin, the book reveals that whatever meager altruism once might have existed among the radicals has drowned in a sea of cynicism, negativity, moral corruption, and pure criminality.
Savinkov’s protagonist, a leader of the terrorist band, is a crippled soul and a loner, with an invariably skeptical approach to all ideas and ideals. He admits that he himself does not know why he participates in terror. He has no long-term goals. Profoundly egotistical, he is alienated not only from the “toilers,” eulogized in revolutionary rhetoric, but also from his own comrades—by the impenetrable inner wall that conceals the blankness of his insecure and ailing self....
The novel’s autobiographical character reveals that even in his own eyes, the author—a member of the SR Central Committee and a renowned head of the Combat Organization, second only to Gershuni—appeared to be none other than the embodiment of a certain Nikolai Stavrogin from Dostoevsky’s Devils. The archetypal creator of new terrorism was restless, anxious, prone to apocalyptic thinking, and death-driven.
He was also “the highly specialized technician of revolution,” as was his latter-day incarnation Ali Hassan Salameh (alias Abu Hassan), nicknamed the “Red Prince,” the notorious commander of Force, Arafat’s personal elite security squad and prominent member of Black September. Germany-educated, wealthy, ambitious, the flamboyant son of an upper-class Muslim family, and married to Lebanese celebrity Georgina Rizk, the 1971 Miss Universe, Salameh had been trained in guerrilla tactics in Egypt and the Soviet Union. He directed the assassination of Jordan Prime Minister Wasfi Tel (Wasfi al-Tal) and, among his other exploits, was behind the 1972 hijacking of Sabena Flight 572 from Vienna to Lod, Israel.
Many extremists behave as if they identify with heroes of the myths and legends in their national traditions. Others play divine beings, as did Mikhail Bakunin, who, prior to his conversion to anarchism, had given himself “over to religious passions that slid easily into messianic grandeur, in which he saw himself as another Jesus”: “My proud and inflexible will . . . my high destiny. I am a man. I will be God.” Bakunin exhibited conflicted, insecure, and authoritarian personality, which combined fixations on sexual incapacities and probably impotence with a “messiah complex . . . megalomaniac belief in his own power . . . hatred of this world” and fascination with Satan, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker” and liberator. “I suffer because I am a man and want to be God,” Bakunin confessed.
So would, in years to come, many other true believers, such as cult leader Shoko Asahara, who imitated Armageddon and promised the creation of “a new and transcendent human world” because he “wanted to be like Christ.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there appeared in the post-Communist Russia numerous publications declassifying the formerly top-secret information about terrorist training schools and camps on Soviet territory, as well as in Cuba, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. One such institution was the “Learning Center for preparation of foreign militants No. 165” in the Crimea. In the period between 1965 and 1990, this base alone graduated around 18,000 “combatants from various national-liberation movements in the countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”
Aside from terrorist training, “students” were indoctrinated in the basics of the class struggle: “First it is necessary to teach at whom to shoot, then how to shoot,” their instructors would say. “Moscow ran a virtual terrorist academy,” hosting thousands of third world revolutionaries in the guise of full-scholarship students at the Patrice Lumumba University.
At the time of perestroika, progressive rhetoric emphasizing emancipation of the toilers no longer brought rewards of weapons and money, and groups such as the PLO were quick to abandon their Marxist-Leninist orientation. So too did the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which since 2001 “shifted its emphasis” and adopted the language and the tactics of jihad “to attract a greater constituency.”
Alliances based on common destructive goals surpass all ideological and national barriers and render them irrelevant. The early-20th-century Russian extremists shared expertise with fellow anarchists from Bulgaria and Italy on how to make explosives and smuggle them to the United States; just as readily, they extended collaboration to radical nationalists in India and Persia.
After the British had appointed Hajj Ali al Amin al Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, he organized the so-called fedayeen squads to terrorize Jewish residents. Twenty years later, during a rendezvous with Hitler on November 28, 1941, “the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world” in the Fuhrer’s eyes received firm assurances that “Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews” and “would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle.”
In our days, a Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber, on the board of directors of the Bank al Taqwa, accused of being a major donor to al-Qaeda, is a proponent for joining forces with the Islamists.
Dostoevsky noted the initial signs of criminalization already among the 19th-century radicals, who served as prototypes for his Devils. Among these rare pathological personalities, first place in disrepute went to an unscrupulous, self-seeking schemer named Sergei Nechaev, upon whom the novelist had based his sinister Petr Verkhovesnkii. Nechaev effectively combined “his own variety of charisma with astute psychological manipulation, fraud, intimidation, and blackmail . . . to rule a frail network of conspiratorial cells.”
He acquired notoriety in 1869 for instigating the murder of a comrade: to enhance his authority as leader of the radical “People’s Retribution” group, he falsely accused a rival of collaborating with the police. Nechaev’s concurrent aim was to solidify his following by binding its student-members with the jointly spilled blood.
His main contribution to the insurrection cause, however, was the coauthorship, with anarchist maharishi Bakunin, of the “Catechism of a Revolutionary”—a compilation of guiding principles for conduct of a professional radical.
An ideal member of a conspiratorial cell is an instrument of the revolution; he exists solely for its purposes, states the document, destined to become seminal in the subversive tradition. The devotee has to break “all the bonds which tie him to the social order . . . with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions.” He must be ready to kill pitilessly; “he should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world.” Indeed, “day and night he must have but one thought, one aim—merciless destruction” of the entire corrupt civilization. Of his environment he is an “implacable enemy”; he lives for the sole purpose of obliterating it speedily.
“Terrorism was given its specific modern forms” when, stimulated by the “Catechism,” scores of Russians converted to conspiracy.” Even though Nechaev-the-man was a black sheep of the revolutionary family, adherents to radical subculture found “Nechaevism” attractive. And what had been an aberration became the norm after 1900, with Nechaev turning into the spiritual father of a mass-scale extremist movement. “The new type” or “the new breed” of radical, as it was branded by contemporaries, at the height of the 1905 crisis in Russia came to dominate the antigovernment camp numerically and in spirit.
University professors, teachers, doctors, and lawyers came to regard assistance to the extremists as a “sign of good manners.” The liberal intelligentsia thus promoted a culture in which, under the impact of fabricated reverence for terror, common people came to venerate terrorists’ portraits, as if they were icons....
... the liberals’ surreptitious endorsement of terrorism contributed to the radical cause and encouraged further violence against the setting that nourished extremism...
From the early 1900s, the intelligentsia in Europe and elsewhere openly endorsed violence. Among the luminaries, Jean-Paul Sartre, a Maoist and “lifelong apologist for Bakunin-like revolt,” considered it to have “a regenerative effect on humanity,” quite in line with the radicals’ obsession with purification by fire..
The list of professional intellectuals directly engaged in violence is short in comparison with their numerous left-of-the-center colleagues who circuitously justify terrorists. The extremists strive to demolish the “bourgeois culture,” the intelligentsia’s habitat, with which it is in conflict. The literati share the pains of the Protean predicament. Many come from the orthodox- or neo-Marxist background and continue along the warpath against materialism or consumerism. It is “making us all into idiots,” deplores novelist Amos Oz...
Against the background of the contemporary spiritual crisis, the primary threat comes from Muslim fanatics, hostile to any way of life outside the confines of the Shari’a. Their primary target is the United States, the quintessence of iniquity: “Oh Americans . . . The time has come for Allah to declare war on you, oh usurers!”
But the fundamentalist enmity goes beyond specified hatred for the “Big Satan” and “Death to America” slogan. “We say to this West: By Allah, you will be defeated;” to regain universal control “the Arab and Islamic nation is rising.” This is a generic message, with minor variation communicated routinely: “Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was”; the conquests “will spread through Europe in its entirety and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe"
Just as consistently, the liberals make-believe that the militant language is directed at Israel alone. And, elucidates Paul Berman, for every violent word, Israel is to blame:
Each new act of murder and suicide testified on how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror . . . was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt. And, if unfathomable motives appeared to drive the suicide bombers forward, the oppressiveness of Israel was likewise deemed to be, by logical inference unfathomable—a bottomless oppression, which had given rise to the maximum of violence, which is suicide murder. The commuter buses, the pizza parlors, the discos, the hotel dining rooms, the bustling sidewalks— these exploded into random carnage. And, with every new atrocity, the search was on to find ever larger accusation to place at Israel’s feet.
The “accusation of terrorism . . . falls not on us but on the bourgeoisie. It forced terror on us,” Lenin claimed the exigency for killing in self-defense.Can you tell the differnece?
Solzhenitsyn in his epic "The Red Wheel," dedicated severeral chapters to the history of Russian terrorism. In one of the chapters he describes a scene where two aunts (both socialists) tell their young niece Veronika stories about her uncle Anton's 'heroic' terrorist actions. Uncle Anton, aunts say, lived like a hero and died like a hero. Veronika, wondering how "she could have strayed so far from the family traditions," asks a very good question:
“Dear aunts … We all love Uncle Anton, I as much as you. But all the same, if I may say so, he wasn’t a saint, he wasn’t an innocent little lamb. Wasn’t it he who started killing first?”
The aunts gasped. “Started first? Who started oppressing the people? Who first blocked all other roads to freedom?”
Veronica's aunts could have as "effectively" justified terrorism by using the modern left liberals rhetoric: "bottomless oppression, which had given rise to the maximum of violence" from Berman's quote above.
Or by repeating what a true modern intellectual, a Stanford lecturer told his students after the Oct 7, 2023 brutal attack on Israel: "Hamas’ actions were part of the resistance". Veronica's aunts would have just had to replace 'Hamas' with "Uncle Anton."
Historian Sander Gilman speaks of “self-loathing,” the phenomenon psychologists underpin to explain why progressive Jewish intellectuals turn against the environment which sustains them, while they undermine it from within. The inwardly directed ambivalence (in many cases heightened to flagrant negativity) and concomitant anxiety may account for the exaggerated attempt to demonstrate that one’s identity does not count and to deny the “retrograde” ties to their history, tradition, and faith as “the tyranny of the dead.” This form of self-hatred is all but novel. It is glaring when during his book-promotion trip in the United States, Professor Sand beseeched the Americans “to save” his people from themselves
New is the argument advanced by historian and Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin that this self-destructive tendency is a corollary of “Stockholm syndrome.” It has been diagnosed in terrorized individuals—hostages, who become loyal to and apologetic for their captors, responding to utmost danger, against which they develop “defense mechanisms,” such as identification with the aggressor....
“[I] can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be of- fended by a comparison with the Gestapo,” muses Professor Finkelstein, son of the Holocaust survivors. According to Levin, the Stockholm syndrome can be injurious to large groups, or society as a whole, and may be extended from the Israeli to other academic and cultural sites.
In the 1900s and once again in the 2000s, the intellectuals define cultural parameters and the acceptable modes of discourse with regards to terrorism. Thus the politically correct self-defeatist vernacular makes its way into newspapers and university classrooms. In other words, the Stockholm syndrome enters the public sphere.
We must execute not only the guilty.
Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.
—Bolshevik Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko
Execute mercilessly
—Lev Trotsky’s telegram to comrades in Astrakhan, March 1919
For the first time in history, the extremists of the new type acquired state con-trol in Russia, the country where modern terrorism had taken root.... Russia was thus the first country ever to live under a totalist ideology upheld by men with extensive terrorist backgrounds and experience...
Having taken over the Russian administration, Lenin and Trotsky labeled opponents of violence “eunuchs and pharisees” and proceeded to implement government-sponsored machinery of state terror—projecting the conspiratorial and semi-criminal nature of the Bolshevik faction onto the new dictatorial regime. The Bolsheviks endorsed a policy they called the “Red Terror”—an instrument of repression in the hands of the revolutionary government—as a precondition for success in a seemingly visionary endeavor by a handful of political extremists to establish control over Russia’s population.
Plekhanov was heard saying, and for once Lenin was in full agreement with the Mensheviks’ plan:
We will not shoot at the tsar and his servants now as the Socialists-Revolutionaries do, but after the victory we will erect a guillotine in Kazanskii Square for them and many others.
The “accusation of terrorism . . . falls not on us but on the bourgeoisie. It forced terror on us,” Lenin claimed the exigency for killing in self-defense, echoing the paranoid defensiveness of the terrorists during the underground period
At the same period, in June 1918, the first Cheka head, “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinskii, declared that terror was “an absolute necessity” and that the repressive measures must go on in the name of the revolution, “even if its sword does . . . sometimes fall upon the heads of the nnocent.”
In July 1918 the Bolsheviks massacred the Russian imperial family—a dramatic episode of primarily psychological significance, which took place six weeks before Red Terror was inaugurated as an official policy. The Soviets relegated responsibility for the decision to murder the Romanov family in Ekaterinburg to local revolutionary activists. In truth, the secret order to execute former tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and a valet, cook, parlor maid, and family doctor was issued in the Bolshevik head- quarters in Moscow and carried out by a special Cheka squad.
It was not for nothing that Lenin was a great admirer of Nechaev, the expert in bonding a subversive group with the accountability for a collective crime... The ruthlessness of this measure “showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.”
Faced with a wave of starving workers’ strikes and peasant uprisings, the government directed its wrath against the very groups whose alleged, if more than questionable, backing had served as an argument for the Bolsheviks’ political legitimacy
In two months of terror, between 10,000 and 15,000 summary executions took place, marking “a radical break with the practices of the Tsarist regime.” In almost 100 years, between 1825 and 1917, the imperial courts issued 6,321 politics-related death sentences, not all of which were carried out. As we have seen, before the revolution, the terrorists came to be responsible for exactly as many casualties among state officials in a single decade, invalidating a claim that “violence, alas, was reciprocal.”
Repressions against other political parties began as early as November 28, 1917, with the ban of the Kadets. Still supporting a parliamentary democracy, and still not realizing that the dream was over, they were the first among the liberal public intellectuals to pay for their collaboration with the extremists, who now declared them enemies of the people. From then on, Kadet publications were closed and supporters arrested.
In June 1918 the Bolshevik barred the SRs and the Mensheviks from the political process for alleged counterrevolutionary activities, and by late summer Lenin was already applying terror against former socialist comrades, many of whom were apprehended and incarcerated.
By the fall and winter of 1918–19, Bolshevik terror had achieved “a level of indiscriminate slaughter never before seen.” Persecutions were directed at virtually anyone representing the old regime’s upper classes, the bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia.
Many Western intellectuals, including such notables as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Bertolt Brecht, and Louis Aragon, were mesmerized by Communist Russia in its darkest hour of Stalin’s terror to the point of not noticing millions of his victims—imprisoned, purposely starved, exploited, and remolded into automatons to satisfy the needs of triumphant tyranny.
These great skeptics, who took no idea for granted, extolled the Soviet paradise and fell short of discerning the Big Lie for lack of powers other than mental, despite Lenin allegedly dubbing them “useful idiots of the West.”
Conversely, they used their intellect with utmost dexterity—as a shield—not to allow into consciousness and not to “admit to themselves or anyone else that the millennial experiment in which they had invested so much (intellectual) energy could have failed.”
“For the Palestinian people death has become an industry,” boast its official managers. The hate speech is an element of the gigantic enterprise of indoctrination, extending from Iran and Saudi Arabia to PA.
“O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists are the Jews . . . They are the ones who must be butchered and killed,” says a preacher, apparently convinced that his audience would not mind his claims’ inner contradiction; “Allah will torture them at your hands.”
This speech followed the October 12, 2000, lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, when the murderers entertained the crowds by dragging the mutilated bodies around the city chained to a car.
The carnage reached a climax when one of the slayers boasted his blood-stained palms to a maddened mob of “engineered haters”—a scene reminiscent of Orwell’s macabre festivities during “Hate Weeks.”
Since then, the episode has been repeatedly reenacted in Palestinian school plays as part of the campaign to initiate children in death culture early in their lives. A home video shows several children acting out a beheading...
Posters in kindergartens scream, “The children are holy martyrs of tomorrow.” Hamas-run TV produces and broadcasts a kids’ program in which a Mickey Mouse look-alike character named Farfur teaches the young viewers to pray until “world leadership under Islamic rule” is established
“We don’t encourage our children to hate the Jews. We just tell them . . . that the Jews killed their families, and they reach the conclusion to hate the Jews on their own,” explains an unsuccessful suicide terrorist, who, although imprisoned, dreams of having children some day—to bring them up as shahids
If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. . . . They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing,” clerics such as Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub say, , speaking very frankly in Arabic—making statements not intended for those who prefer to deceive themselves: “We will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.” It is as if the Biblical Amelek has decided to break portentous silence and finally speak his mind.
But terrorist rhetoric and activities show no correlation to a particular policy. “America, England, and Australia are cited as enemies, but alongside Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Japan, Russia, China, India, Sweden, Belgium,” and the list goes on.
“Embrace Islam . . . stop your oppressions, lies, immorality, and debauchery”; terrorists’ demands are ideological declarations, not attempts to start a dialogue. “Europe. You will pay. Your extermination is on its way.”
Tantamount to voluntary blindness would be to deny that a new “death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation.” When a stated goal is to create an “Islamic state of North America by . . . 2050,” unawareness of the totalist message would be akin to Orwellian “doublethink.”