Authors: Clive James
Accusations of police torture were frequently made, but Rognoni sounded convincing when he rejected them.
Occasionally he could not reject them, and had to explain. He said that some agents had got angry because of atrocities and had exceeded their authority. That sounded convincing too. The
impression he gives is of a man to whom terrorism was so repugnant that the planned use of counter-terror to fight it would have been inconceivable. We can safely draw a clear line
between him and the “dirty war”
caudillos
in the Americas: sadists who, when it came to leftist insurgency, had no other idea than
of getting their frightfulness in first. What we have to ask ourselves is whether Rognoni’s attitude to terrorism makes sense as a universal principle. It certainly made sense for Italy,
which, however sick (
malato
) it might have been, was a functioning democratic system. The Brigate Rosse, if they had had their way, would have converted
their country from a producer of wealth, however badly distributed, into a producer of poverty. But it isn’t hard to name countries, calling themselves democracies, in which injustice, to
the idealistic young, seemed so deeply institutionalized that terrorism occurred to them as the only workable response. They might have been wrong. They might have done better to choose exile, or
direct martyrdom. (When they were detected, they were martyred anyway.) They were bound to find themselves among strange bedfellows. It takes a very confident onlooker, however, to suppose that
he could never have found himself harbouring the same impulse. One of the strengths of the most unsettling works of art ever devoted to the subject, Gillo Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of Algiers
, was that some of the terrorists looked convincingly inspired by idealism when they were getting ready to sacrifice themselves. They were all too
willing to sacrifice innocent people as well—Pontecorvo didn’t gloss that over—but inspired they were. Desperation had brought them to it, but inspiration was what it was.
Religion makes inspiration easy. Young Hamas and Al Qaeda suicide bombers of today are promised a place in paradise, as of
tomorrow. It sounds more attractive than dying for dialectical materialism. But even a nominally Marxist terrorist is seldom likely to risk his life for communism. He risks his life for the
oppressed. (Should he succeed, they will almost certainly end up more oppressed than ever, but he is too young to have read the books that prove it.) Our revulsion comes from his readiness to
kill innocent people other than his own, but the mathematics might seem convincing. Kill a few innocent people in a nightclub now, and that will save the lives of thousands later. (In the 1960s,
the mathematics were put into a book, Robert Taber’s
The War of the Flea
: a little classic of casuistry which can be recommended, with a health
warning, to anyone who doubts just how dangerous the French intelligentsia could be in that period.) He assumes that there can be an
economy of killing, and the awful truth is
that he is not entirely absurd to think so. An economy of killing was in the minds of the terrorists who helped to found the state of Israel. Britain, the mandatory power, was a democractic state
within the meaning of Rognoni’s definition. Theoretically, it was open to persuasion by democractic means. Practically, the Israeli activists didn’t think it was. (It should be
remembered that British foreign policy had spent years looking as if it had been designed to support their view. The pre-war quotas set against Jewish immigration into Palestine had retained
their lethal effect even after the war, with British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin’s ill-disguised self-satisfaction being remembered in Israel as a particularly offensive insult.) The
terrorists of the Stern Gang, and the more militant members of the Irgun, saw no means of dissuading the British from their tutelary mission except by terror. The strategy was assumed to have
worked because Britain gave up:
post hoc ergo propter hoc
. (We can be sure that this apparent chain of cause and effect has been in the minds of IRA
strategists ever since.) When the Irgun massacred the Palestinian inhabitants of Deir Yassin—the empty houses could still be seen in my time, only a short walk into the suburbs of
Jerusalem—officers of the Haganah protested. Bar Lev, Haganah commander in the area, wanted to arrest the Irgun leaders, one of whom was Menachem Begin. David Ben-Gurion didn’t
listen. It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.
These considerations need to be kept in mind by anyone who, like myself, believes in the state of Israel’s right to
exist and regards the concerted attack by the Arab nations in 1948 as ample reason for Israel to be concerned in perpetuity about defensible borders. But it was worse than unfortunate, it was
tragic, that the apparently efficacious use of terror threw a long shadow. When the Arab countries had their man of the hour in Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the man of the hour in Israel was none other
than Menachem Begin, whose pedigree went back to Deir Yassin. Actually it went back further than that, into an experience under the Nazis which taught him that the only answer to threatened
extermination was to fight with any means: moral considerations were a culpable luxury, for which your own innocent people would have to pay. The two major totalitarian earthquakes of the
twentieth century—
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—had a seismic influence on the Middle East: wave after wave of distortion, the waves interfering with each
other in a pattern so complex that it looks like chaos.
But there was one influence easy to isolate. The state of Israel was built by people who knew all too
much about terror. Failure by the Arab powers to grasp this fact led them to the supreme stupidity of threatening extinction to people who had been threatened with it already by experts. But
Israeli leaders who take a hard line against Palestinian insurgency are asking a lot if they expect automatic moral condemnation from onlookers for the latest suicide bomb delivered by a young
Palestinian with a ticket to the beyond. The PLO has a suitably disgusting track record in which the Black September massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 was merely the most
attention-getting point. Hamas will probably top that sooner or later. But the state of Israel’s own track record goes back far beyond Ariel Sharon’s dubious achievements in the
Lebanon refugee camps. (All he did was stand by, but it was a murderous indifference.) It goes back to an act of terror by the Irgun. It goes back to the King David Hotel collapsing in Jerusalem.
When it did, the perpetrators got what they wanted.
Now their descendants must convince the Palestinians that similar means will never work. The Palestinians would be easier
to convince, of course, if their activists, and the Arab nations that stand behind them, had any real idea of the continuous historical tragedy that led up to the installation and consolidation
of a Jewish settlement in Palestine. Unfortunately the standard of informed commentary on the Arab side has been kept ruinously low by the absence of an independent, secular intelligentsia. I met
Edward Said, and liked him as anyone would. He had distinction of mind written all over him. He must have been already sick by then, but he looked haunted as well, and I don’t think it was
just by his outrage at Israel’s behaviour. He was haunted by the ironic fact that his only natural allies were liberals within Israel. An inch away from Amos Oz and a thousand miles from
Vanessa Redgrave, Said was an isolated figure, and he himself could never admit in print that the Arab nations dished their cause in advance by not persuading the Palestinians to accept their own
state in 1947, and by combining to attack the nascent Israeli state in 1948. If he had, he would probably have been assassinated. (As the assassination of Sadat proved,
the
Arab irredentists, like the Zionist ultras, have always been unerring in picking off any incipient mediators.) In the Israeli press, a constant feature is a
sottisier
of what the official Arab publications, including school textbooks, say about the eternal iniquity of the Jewish race and the holy necessity to eradicate it
from the face of the Earth. The Israelis scarcely need to quote any of that stuff out of context. Most of the remarks could have come out of the divinely inspired mouth of the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem at the time when he was in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it.
Compared with terrorism in the Middle East, terrorist campaigns elsewhere in the world tend to strike us as half-hearted:
Low Intensity Operations, as regular forces are wont to call them. We should resist that emphasis, or lack of emphasis. There has been nothing half-hearted about terror in Northern Ireland. But
there again, ambiguity looms. The Republic of Ireland owes its existence to terror. Terror worked. It was a terror campaign that forced the local constabulary and the British forces to
counter-terror. Not only the nauseating activities of the Black and Tans, but what the British army felt compelled to do to maintain order, was sufficient to demoralize the London government and
bring about Home Rule. Since partition, the IRA in the North, even when apparently dormant, has worked for the same result, and not entirely without success. At one stage even Conor Cruise
O’Brien was suggesting that a further partition was the only solution. It was possible to imagine the Protestant enclave being driven in upon itself to the point where its members would go
home. Certainly the terrorists were dreaming of something like that. If the Protestants had not been a majority in the North, it might have worked. Confined by a shorter perimeter, no longer a
majority in the North but still a minority within an almost united Ireland, the northern Protestants would be reduced to the position of the
pieds noirs
in
Algeria, who pointed out in vain that they
were
home: they were born there, and had no other home to go to. But there was always France, where the new man
in charge, Charles de Gaulle, having first pretended to listen to them, yielded to the inevitable. The inevitable had been made so by terror. Without the terror, the French army would not have
been driven first to torture, then to demoralization, and finally to subversion. Democratic means would never have changed the domocracy’s
mind: or so the National
Liberation Front strategists, armed with a plenitude of historic evidence, preferred to believe.
For Latin America, the situation has been analysed by Mario Vargas Llosa with clarity, subtlety and an
admirably firm hand. A one-time leftist himself—his years at Sartre’s feet turned his head, until Camus began to set it straight—Vargas Llosa found on his return to the Spanish
world that the arguments in favour of Marxist insurgency were a confidence trick. New students of Spanish (who would be wise to start with books of essays anyway) could hardly do better than to
track Vargas Llosa’s long series of articles on the subject: they run right through his landmark collection
Contra viento y marea
and on into his
late-flowering, consistently brilliant
El lenguaje de la pasión
. He paints a repetitive but startling picture—the same thing happening again
and again, like successive frames in a strip of film—of insurgent groups such as Peru’s Tupamaros subverting the institutions of their countries to the point where a militarized junta
launches terror in its turn, with the result that the institutions erode, underdevelopment plunges to new depths, and the oppressed in whose name the insurgents acted end up more helpless than
ever. He gives a classic account of a remorselessly recurring pattern. But not even Vargas Llosa can quite bring himself to face the possibility that if the institutions weren’t working in
the first place then a convulsion was what they needed.
The standard promise of the terrorist is to reveal the true nature of the state by unmasking the police force as
militarists and the military as fascists. In the Americas, that was roughly what terrorist insurgency did. In Argentina, for example, it was only when the bourgeoisie found its own children being
taken and tortured that it woke up from its habitual complacency: and the complacency had been complicity, in corruption, exploitation and the deeply damaging sleep of reason. Throughout the
Americas, after the CIA’s ground-breaking adventure in Guatemala in the 1950s, there were many young idealists with good cause to believe that the oppressor, drawing on support from
Washington, would go on robbing the common people forever. The results of that belief were disastrous, and particularly so for the common people. But the belief can’t be dismissed. Vargas
Llosa, with an artist’s mind and a politician’s practical knowledge, is understandably reluctant to reach the philosopher’s uncomfortable conclusion that chaos might
have been constructive. But terror, if it was criminally foolish in presuming to dramatize the true nature of states, was historically functional in dramatizing the desperation of
societies content to call themselves moribund rather than admit themselves unjust. Luckily, apart from all the dead Indians, everyone involved spoke the same language. When a proper dialogue
started at last, they all understood each other. It is some comfort to realize that bright young idealists in Latin American universities today are reading about these matters in the crystalline
Spanish of Vargas Llosa rather than in hasty translations of Regis Debray’s inexcusably irresponsible diatribes. But the voice of a man like Vargas Llosa rings so clearly now only because
the air was cleared in the first place of its perennial miasma. If the Americas had waited until the United Fruit Company had evolved into a benevolent institution, they might still be waiting.
Finally the disastrous pro-strongman foreign policy of the United States was reversed under President Reagan. When Reagan came to office, only two of the U.S.-favoured states in Latin America
were democracies. When he left office, there were only two that weren’t. It was one of the great foreign policy revisions in recent history, but it didn’t happen because Reagan was a
genius of sympathetic perception. It happened because there had been telegenic chaos. None of this means, of course, that dead terrorists should be venerated as heroes. Most of them were ruthless
dogmatists and many of them were homicidal maniacs. But the problem remains of the ones who were neither.