The brief, 150-year history of terrorism, like that of so many other things, is the history of moral decline. Conflating the various phases of this history has given rise to a great deal of manipulation and confusion: the left-center newspapers and talking heads have denigrated heroism and the willingness to sacrifice (by evoking an image of an allegedly eternal fundamentalism and fanaticism), while on Pannon Radio, a radio station broadcasting extreme right-wing views in Hungary, a vodka-drenched baritone compared those who blew up the World Trade Center to Titusz Dugovics and Miklos Zrinyi, Hungarian heroes who immolated themselves in our gallant battles against the Paynim.

There have always been lonely assassins, of course. Tyrant killers, like Harmodius, Aristogiton, and Brutus, acting in the name of a “natural” law superior to positive law, have always been regarded as paragons of classical republican virtue. The Renaissance, humanist, and Jesuit bibliography on tyrannicide includes hundreds of volumes. Yet significant terrorist groups have long existed, beginning with the Carbonari movement against the Holy Alliance, with the underground lodges of Illuminati serving as its bases. And the remnants of the defeated groups of the French Revolution considered coup d’état and assassination legitimate and logical continuations of the revolutionary struggle, resorting to them as permissible tactics against the overwhelmingly superior, oppressive, and exploitative majority in the spirit of the classical republican tradition.

In Paris, even today, a boulevard is named after the insurrectionist and coup plotter Auguste Blanqui who stepped fresh from jail onto the stage of the 1848 French National Convention; and in Budapest, until very recently, a square bore the name of Janos Lekai, one of the founders of the Hungarian Communist Party who attempted to assassinate-unsuccessfully-Count Tisza, the former prime minister, in 1918. For the radical revolutionaries, assassinations and coups were not seen as crimes but rather as feats of heroic resistance, as acts of war. This is why revolutionaries never submitted to the jurisdiction of courts, which they viewed as the opposing party’s instrument of coercion in a (civil) war.

Terrorism, according to the well-known truism, is the weapon of the weak. Undoubtedly, it was not used by those who controlled the army, police, and the banks. On the contrary, it was the expression of admitted powerlessness and desperation against dynasties and governments that were regarded as tyrannical and oppressive. In their pamphlets, the nineteenth-century dynamite- and revolver-wielding heroes of the Narodnaya Volya said that the reason why they were forced to commit political assassinations was that in Russia there was no freedom of expression and no parliament, and thus they could not peacefully agitate among the peasants. This left them no outlet but the “propaganda of the actions.” (French, Italian, and Spanish terrorists, of course, confronted parliamentary regimes, based at that time almost everywhere on electoral laws that narrowly restricted suffrage. Radical propaganda in these countries was not impossible, only unsuccessful; the impediment was not so much brutal oppression but, rather, conformism-and this is a very different situation from a moral standpoint.)

Those members of La Montagne-anarchists, syndicalists, social revolutionaries, antimilitarists (“revolutionary defeatists”)-who decided to use daggers, pistols, and bombs, were leftists until World War One because, until that period, the establishment (the upper-middle class, large landowners, the state church, the soldateska [the officer caste] did not feel, could not feel, that it was on the defensive. The revolutionary Right-although its ideological antecedents reach all the way back to Joseph de Maistre-was formed only after World War One and the subsequent communist revolutions.

Since everything that is mysterious and unexpected seizes people’s imagination, the radical conspirators, coup plotters, assassins, and “professional revolutionaries” of the nineteenth century are the protagonists of an enormous literature of histories and memoirs. In recent decades, only one important book on the topic (Vera Figner’s Storm Over Russia) has appeared. What picture emerges from this vast literature? (The books that have had the most lasting impact—Joseph Conrad’s two works, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, and Chesterton’s masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday—are all hostile, of course.) The picture is fascinating and chilling. The typical assassin is an idealist bookworm, the product of deportation (katorga, or hard labor), and prison, and is much preoccupied with the social compassion damned by Hannah Arendt. He is a student of German classical idealism, the new social sciences, religious and economic history, and the priests of Rousseau’s “people” cult. He is obsessed with the public good, public interest, and public utility, as well as being an antireligious braggart or atheist, a proponent of “free love” (a total, ideological proponent, not a frivolous one), one who is willing to sacrifice his life and morals in exchange for no hope of reward of any kind of afterlife. “Nihilist” (the word was first used by the first international revolutionary, Anacharsis Cloots, in December 1793) and “intellectual” were synonymous at that time. Both words appeared in Russia in the 1860s and were used in connection with individuals who sacrificed themselves for the people, were devoted, ready to die, and were voluntarily déclassé. These people were the first candidate-successors of Hegel’s “universal class.” (In Hegel, the group that represents the whole is the civil service.) The next candidate class was to be the “proletariat.” Yet radical “direct action” in pursuit of socialist goals, without the benefit of a socialist mass movement, inevitably became a form of “moralizing” under the horrible circumstances of tyranny. It also lapsed into mere retaliatory measures against injustices committed, rather than becoming an instrument for achieving intelligible social objectives.

When Vera Zasulich (who later became a famous correspondent of Marx’s) shot and wounded General Trepov, who had ordered prisoners to be flogged and beat women (revolutionary schoolgirls) with his bare hands, was acquitted by a jury in March 1878, 2,000 cheering university students from Saint Petersburg carried her out of the courtroom on their shoulders. Many think that this is when the czar’s empire was toppled.

The question whether emergency law prevails in times of civil war has provoked much thought by many thinkers since the Gracchi, and is still valid. The Gordian knot-cutting answer to the question lay in the evolution of the modern state’s absolute monopoly on the instrument of coercion, which was meant to ward off the permanent danger created by civil wars (revolutions), thus tearing the republican tradition in two. The state’s monopoly on coercion, which-as an atavism, together with the right to bear arms and the right to organize militias-is formally still included in the oldest written Constitution, the American one, makes the right to resist (ius resistendi) illusory. This monopoly deprives the government of morality, and, even though it protects the people from rebellions and arbitrary expropriation, rejects the ultima ratio against tyrants in exchange for domestic tranquillity and public peace. The outlawing of rebellions, something that the Roman Republic and the medieval monarchies could not achieve, forced governments to make valuable concessions with regard to the predictability of the law, the scope of rights, and the publicity that keeps the government under control (freedom of thought). On the other hand, it also created political criminality, thus filling prisons and Lagers with hundreds of thousands of ostensible rebels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This is the source of the widely cited paradox: that while men in uniform are allowed to use force (kill, beat, lock people in prisons and mental asylums), civilians are not-at least, not until they turn into men in uniforms through a successful war of national independence, secession, revolution, political transition, and so on, which can, in retrospect, make the hitherto exclusive monopolists of coercion look illegitimate. From being a wanted terrorist, Yasser Arafat turned into an acknowledged and internationally acclaimed leader of a peculiar state-embryo (as did Jozef Pilsudski, Stalin, Menachem Begin, and others before him). One of the alleged commanders of the IRA terrorist organization, Martin McGuiness, is today the minister of education in the provincial government of Northern Ireland. If the American revolution had been defeated, the English would have hanged George Washington as a bandit.

As a consequence, those who exercise physical force that appears illegitimate from the standpoint of the state’s monopoly over the means of coercion may not be distinguished, once and for all, from those who exercise legitimate force. The refoundation of old states and the foundation of new states (in the twentieth century there were numerous examples of both) continuously create new sources of legitimization and new sources of law.
When assessing terrorism, therefore, we have to apply criteria relating to the substance, such as the goal of the terrorist acts, their inevitability, their method of operation, and the degree of suffering they cause. (On the intellectual history of revolutionary violence, see James Billington: Fire in the Minds of Men, second edition [New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999]).

One important example from the past has to do with the senseless mass slaughter perpetrated in World War One and aggravated by the unprecedented and disgraceful betrayal committed by social democracy. On these grounds, the peaceful, reformist, social-democratic writer Friedrich Adler shot to death Baron Sturgkh, the Austrian prime minister, in front of the Viennese Sacher Hotel, on October 21, 1916. After the war, when he was released from prison, Adler became a peaceful, reformist, social-democratic member of the parliament, minister, and a newspaper editor in Austria, where he was held in high esteem even by Catholic conservatives. The unspeakable suffering of humankind and the flood of nationalist lies made individual terror and political assassination seem permissible-in the eyes of idealist scholars and schoolgirls. The goal was to achieve eternal peace, end exploitation and oppression, supposedly “legitimize” state coercion, and bring about a self-governing, self-regulating, nonhierarchic, free society, without misery, repression, the obligation to work, or suppression. In other words, according to Adler, Ervin Szabo, Gyorgy Lukacs, Ilona Duczynska, and others, inherent in World War One was a civil war between the oppressed millions (who were forced into trenches and were destined to be gassed) and their executioners (that is to say, their own military leaders and emperors), who-like Clemenceau, Pétain, Hindenburg, Ludendorff- were, in addition, mentally deranged sociopaths, at least according to Wilhelm Reich.

Ernst Nolte, the “revolutionary conservative” German historian, calls the war of the Germans against the Entente Cordiale and the Comintern a “European civil war.” With this turn of phrase, he partially legitimizes Hitler’s “struggle” against the Jews of Germany, the Communists, social democrats, and liberal (“bourgeois”) democrats. The passionately nationalist death-squad officers who murdered the liberal Catholic Matthias Erzberger and the national-conservative Walther Rathenau, whom they held responsible for the “shame” of Versailles, undoubtedly believed the same thing. Nolte and other revisionist historians regard the Jews and leftists of Germany as “belligerent parties in a civil war.” Thus, the quasi-preventive (civil) war that Hitler fought against them-in their opinion-is not a criminal legal matter to be judged, say, as murder.

This so-called European civil war, of course, as with so many other things in Fascism, is but a pale replica of the “international class struggle” (here I refer to the politicized Bolshevik version of the notion). Yet behind the grotesque fallacy of a “European civil war,” however, lies a genuine historical process-which Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s solicitor general, as it were, and a talented legal theorist, discussed in detail-namely, the partisan war that perhaps first unfolded in the resistance against Napoleon in Spain and Russia, where irregular military groups (“guerrillas,” “partisans”), who mingled with civilians, occasionally became independent belligerent parties in the war. Thus, even though they were defending their country, they broke their states’ monopolies on coercion. The uniformed regular forces tried (“as a preventive measure”) to neutralize populations that were presumed to be a potential source of resistance. This is why and how the Boers were shut into the world’s first concentration camps by the British in Transvaal (South Africa). This is why the Austro-Hungarian army began World War One with the mass hanging of the Ruthenian, Romanian, and Serbian Greek Orthodox popes, “ethnic agitators,” and “deserters” (soldiers who escaped from the army). And this is why Japanese Americans were interned after Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In my essay on Bosnia, “The War of the Cowards” (published in Hungarian in the weekly newspaper Magyar Narancs), I described how an increasing number of civilians and a decreasing number of soldiers have died in the wars of the twentieth century-to the point where, in the former Yugoslavia, the victims were almost exclusively civilians. With the massacres it perpetrated in Bulgaria, and its extermination of the Anatolian Armenians and the Greeks of Ion, the Turkish army provided a model for the subsequent genocide in the Balkans and Asia Minor. The response of the democracies to the genocide of Slavs and Jews by the German Nazis was the genocide at Nagasaki and Dresden, which is impossible to justify by military considerations and can be explained only by pure ethnic-racist motivation.

As the purely military or regular warfare by uniformed soldiers increasingly turned against the population and made problematic the very concept of traditional military virtue and heroism (which is supposed to include actual risk taking and overcoming the fear of the equivalently armed rival), terrorism-the “weapon of the weak”-has been transformed as well. In the past, the lonely assassins, who thought of themselves as avengers representing the oppressed people, sniped at czars, heirs to the crown, presidents, police officers, colonial governors-indeed, real adversaries in a civil-war sense-who, more or less rationally could be viewed as the symbols or executioners of oppression. A state only rarely stood behind the solitary terrorist. (For example, the Hungarian Gombos government was behind the killing by the Ustasha-the Croatian Fascists-of the Serbian king and the French minister of foreign affairs in 1934, in Marseilles; and, after a while, East Germany stood behind the assassinations perpetrated by the West German Red Army Faction.)

When choosing a target, the would-be assassin/terrorist aimed to gain public support and often succeeded, chiefly by virtue of that notorious and familiar emotion klammheimliche Freude, the concealed joy of onlookers.

Today’s terrorism, however, targets randomly selected segments of the society, the innocent pedestrian, Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, airline passengers, or tourists on the Achille Lauro cruise ship, shoppers in the Haifa market, pub-goers in Ulster, employees of private firms, office workers, secretaries and computer experts at the World Trade Center, and basically anyone in Algeria (where both the perpetrators and the victims are Muslims). In this unprecedented moral decay-from a starting point that was not especially high-terrorism merely traces the steps of decadence to be seen in ostensibly adult, uniformed, regular warfare. Classical war was a clash between armies; and, in a classical civil war, the representatives of power collided with the rebels. Today, both regular and irregular troops kill-sometimes only with the silent, invisible, and impalpable means of embargoes and sanctions-civilians who, labeled as belonging to the enemy, are unarmed and unprotected.

There are examples of clashes between the two types of violence: when Czech patriots (who, if I am not mistaken, were at the same time British agents) murdered the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, one of the leaders of the Nazi regime (for whom we are not shedding tears, I suppose), then the national socialists (not the “Germans”) wiped out the population of the Czech village Lidice. To this outrage, the “democratic” Czechoslovak republic responded with the so-called Benes decrees that outlawed and then ordered the expulsion of non-Slavic-Hungarian and German-ethnicities and was stopped only by the communist dictatorship under pressure from Stalin and Rakosi (Hungary’s communist ruler at the time, who himself was in the process of interning and deporting the Hungarian middle class).

Heroism-self-sacrifice and acceptance of punishment in the war against tyranny-and the image of classical virtue that emerged from the competition among the original poleis fell into complete decay. Aristotle writes, somewhere in Book V of Politics, that “those who desire equality regularly revolt.” The essence of the classic republican virtue is the citizens’ equality of status and rights. Precisely for this reason, a member of the political community cannot be a piece of meat, waiting to be ripped into pieces. Rather, the innocent, unarmed citizen must be-should be-untouchable. This inviolability binds together the marginalized, desperate rebel and the anointed and wreathed hegemon, provided that they each seek to attain and to endure the decency and honor and the risk of being a hero, a reputation for which is otherwise not worth a penny.

The 19 Arab suicide—terrorists-as Susan Sontag noted in her passionate article in The New Yorker—were truly not cowardly in the physical sense of the word. What is familiar from the old times is their self-sacrifice. But what they stood for-namely, a repressive, amputating theocracy and not the misery of the third world, which is caused (over and beyond the insensitivity of global capital), mainly by the antilife character and sword-protected murderous chastity of Islamist devotion-is certainly worse than liberal capitalism, even with all of its injustice.

Despite 5,000 years of pertinent experience, some are still surprised by the antilife character of religions-of every organized religion. This is a phenomenon of which “intégriste”-and not, as it is often mistakenly called, “fundamentalist”-Islam’s understanding of female hair and face as obscene (along with its effort to force women to cover these body parts) is only a extreme symbol, since every single religion assails and amputates the foremost source of human happiness, sexuality.

The chador, the cutting out of the clitoris, the stoning to death of those committing adultery, the abolishing of all pleasures-these do not connote an ideal world for freedom-fighting heroes. The audacity and heroic masochism of Arab terrorists is futile. Probably equally futile, unfortunately, is the suffering of those who will be punished for the terrorists’ actions in the place of the terrorists. The Hindu nationalists who protest against Islam-and shut up their women in purdah and demolish beautiful medieval mosques-the American Protestant fundamentalists, anti-Semitic bishops and priests in Hungary, the Greek Orthodox archimandrites who protest against the Pope, the Jewish ultraorthodox who demand that all Arabs be killed, and all their fellow mental patients are no better than the Islamists in this regard. We should also speak up against the vulgar Weberianism (which is no more innocent than vulgar Marxism or vulgar Freudianism) that started spreading as a result of Samuel Huntington’s unfortunate book. Cultural determinism-according to which the pupils of all civilizations act as robots and automatically become prisoners of the reigning dogmas of their civilizations, a notion rebutted by the entire history of civilization-is not worth much more than a racist or biological determinism, its sole value perhaps that it allows Westerners to despise Semite Arabs, Indo-European Persians, and Pashtuns as “Islamists.” The hypocrisy such that a “liberal” Australia is not willing to give shelter to Afghan refugees who flee a Taliban regime that is condemned by the West is also despicable. Such racist, ethnic, and cultural hyperdeterminism, though modern, is as much the enemy of enlightenment as fundamentalism, integralism, cheap surrogate mysticism, “market fundamentalism,” Euromania, and other biased rubbish. We, the obsolete, critical Aufklärists hold-with Socrates-that it is better to suffer an injustice than to commit it.