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Magical Aspects of Political Terrorism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
One of the most intriguing and painful anomalies of the modern world—so diffused that it has almost become a universal culture— is the incredible number of individuals and groups who kill, torture, burn, kidnap, imprison or merely outrage other people with a clear conscience when a political motive may be alleged. Added to them is the much larger number of people and institutions that tolerate, approve, encourage, praise and even bless that type of behavior when it occurs within a political context. Included in this generic political violence is „the kind of behavior that is much more serious and that we may call terrorist, the behavior of those who seek to impose their will through the commission of atrocities that sow a generalized terror or a panic fear, and then to manipulate the reactions these atrocities provoke. Here “private” terrorists, as well as “semi-state” and “state” terrorists commit acts that would not be tolerated in normal, non-political life, and the public that approves this conduct would never accept it if it occurred in everyday life.
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- Copyright © 1984 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 I call "private" terrorists those who function outside the official organizations of the country in which they are active; "semi-state" are those that are tolerated or supported by these; in Latin America these are the Agrupaciones Anticomunistas Argentinas (3A), the Mano Blanca in the Caribbean, ORDEN and Union Guerrera Blanca (UGB) in El Salvador, Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, the Escuadrón de la Muerte in Brazil. I call "state" the official organisms of terrorism in the populations themselves that function on the lines of the model of political police in totalitarian states. In this characterization the respective ideological legitimacies of the atrocities committed by each kind of terrorism are of little interest.
2 Fornari, Franco, Psicoanálisis de la Guerra, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1972, p. 10. The original Italian edition is by Feltrinelli, 1966.
3 Stéphane, André, L'Univers Contestationnaire, Paris, Payot, 1969, p. 201.
4 I do not refer to the principles of legitimacy but to the modes of political and economical actions. See Bryan R. Wilson, "Instrumental and Procedural Values of the Economy", in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sept., 1979, p. 273.
5 Russell, Charles A., Banker, L. J. and Miller, B. H., "Out-inventing the Terrorists", in Yonah Alexander, David Carlton and Paul Wilkinson (eds.), Terror ism : Theory and Practice, Boulder, Westview Press, 1979, pp. 31 and 21.
6 Declarations published in the newspaper "La Opinión" of Buenos Aires, Apr. 10, 1974, p. 14.
7 For lack of imagination, it did not occur to Fanon to recommend the creation of an Orden Honorífica for these purificados like the Blutorden in Nazi Germany for those who had killed enemies during the 1923 putsch and the presentation of a dagger to each one, like those received by members of the Allgemeine SS after their first assassination. Apparently, the magic of the Nordic whites was more ostentatious and probably superior.
8 See the Final Report of the Interdisciplinary Meeting of Experts on the Study of the Causes of Violence convoked by Unesco in Paris, Nov. 12, 1975 and published in the volume La Violence et ses causes, Paris, Unesco, 1980, especially the study by the eminent social psychologist Otto Klineberg; Part II of the publica tion by Alexander, Carlton and Wilkinson (eds.), op. cit.; Ch. 5 of Terrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, by Y. Alexander and J. M. Finger, New York, John Jay Press, 1979; Ch. 10 of Corporative Revolutionary Movements, by Thomas Greene, New York, 1974; the exhaustive analysis in two volumes by H. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War. Jessie Bernard, an important figure in sociology, gave the first alert in 1957 in her contribution to the Unesco publication The Nature of Conflict, Paris, Unesco, 1957. See also Th. Abel in International Social Science Journal, Vol. XXXI, p. 225, n. 2.
9 Durkheim, Émile, Règles de la méthode sociologique, Preface to the 2nd ed., Ch. 5 and Conclusion.
10 Talcott Parsons, T., "The Point of View of the Author" in The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1961, p. 342 (underlined in the original).
11 See Amitai Etzioni, The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes, New York, Free Press, 1969, Ch. 8, 10 and 15.
12 Maslow, Abraham, "The Authoritarian Character Structure", Journal of So cial Psychology, Vol. XVIII, 1943, p. 402; Else Frenkel Brunswick, "Dynamic and Cognitive Personality Organization", in T. W. Adorno and others, The Authorita rian Personality, New York, Norton, 1968, Part II, Ch. 12.
13 Martin, James, The Tolerant Personality, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1964, pp 66-69.
14 Shils, Edward, "Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties", British Journal of Sociology, Vol. VIII, no. 2, 1957. In his analysis of revolutionary movements, Smelser speaks of the "value-oriented" beliefs that motivate the behavior of revolu tionary "value-oriented movements". Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, London, Routledge, 1962, pp 120, 313 and 338.
15 Concerning these objectival relationships between people and the manipula tions and damage to which they give rise, see José Enrique Miguens, La Otra Versión: Mitos, Magia e Ilusión Revolucionaria, Buenos Aires, Plus Ultra, 1978, pp. 68-70, 113 and 123-24.
16 I cannot include the bibliographical references for all quotations, because these publications and similar ones have disappeared from Argentine libraries. [The present article was written before October 1983. Editor's note].
17 Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, New York, Harper, 1951, n. 87.
18 Fenn, Richard, "The Secularization of Values: an Analytical Framework for the Study of Secularization", in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. VIII, No. 1, pp. 114-124. The concepts of ultimate and proximate goals and of instrumental and consumer values are often found in North American sociology.
19 See the foreword to the major work by Benjamin Nelson, "Rationales, Ration alizations and Revolutions," in Journal for the Study of Religions, Vol. VIII, no. 2, pp. 157-177.
20 Durkheim, Émile, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, p. 340, quoted by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Le totémisme aujourd'hui, Paris, Presses Universitaires, 1968, p. 138.
21 Medvedev, Roy A., Let History Judge: the Origins and Consequence of Stalinism, New York, Knopf, 1971, p. 351 (my underlining).
22 Among the most recent, Berger and Luckann, La Construcción Social de la Realidad, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1968, Part II, Ch. 2, "Legitimación".
23 Eco, Umberto, Apocalípticos e Integrados, Barcelona, Lumen, 1968, p. 384.
24 Cassirer, Ernest, Antropología Filosófica, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Econó mica, 1945, pp. 147-48.
25 The differences between the spheres of magic and religion that allow me to include terrorism as a social phenomenon in the first, cannot be explained, but they may be seen in my work "Lo sagrado y lo subversivo: Consideraciones sobre la relación entre la magia y la violencia política," in Escritos de Filosofia, Buenos Aires, Academia Nacional de Ciencias.
26 Weber, Max, Economía y sociedad, Vol. II, Part IV, 10, La Religión de la India, Ch. 10, La Etica Económica de las religiones Munndiales; and T. Parsons, Introduction to Sociology of Religion by Weber (North American edition, omitted in the British).
27 Croce, Benedetto, La Filosofía di Gianbattista Vico, Bari, Laterza, 1947, Ch. 2 and 5.
28 We must remember that for Vico truth is constructed by man and is interpreted through language and symbols.
29 Vico is not the first to point this out: Machiavelli did so earlier with the mythical figure of the centaur Chiron, the master of this kind of politics, the relationship of all this caste of half-man and half-beast with the god Pan "who has the character of discordant natures. This caste does not build cities nor found nations, because those of natural discordance are the first outlines of tyrants," Vol. III, p. 188, 180-181.
30 All the transcriptions I have put between quotation marks are taken verbatim from Gianbattista Vico, Ciencia Nueva, Mexico, El Colegio de México, 1941. Book II, Ch. 7 and 44; Book III, Ch. 30 and 34; Book IV, Ch. 9. 10 and 11; Table of popular traditions and Table of general discoveries.
32 Cox, Harvey, The Secular City: A Celebration of its Liberties and an Invitation to Its Discipline, New York, Macmillan, 1965, Part I, Ch. 1, "The Biblical Sense of Secularization," or Part II, Ch. 7, "The Church as Cultural Exorcist".
33 Foucault, Michel, L'Ordre du Discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p. 64.
34 Plato, Politics.