The big ideological switch: the new crime of “terrorism” (10)

Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mystification at the service of Imperialism

10 - The big ideological switch: the new crime of “terrorism”

 

Iñaki Aginaga and Felipe Campo

The introduction of the new crime of “terrorism”: characteristic of the new imperialistic and fascist totalitarianism currently imposed at a planetary scale, has turned it in reality into “the” currently and virtually universal, unique, supreme, absolute, total and tentacular crime of the new hegemonic law corresponding to the political order of the twenty-first century; a crime that has been established by reduction, incorporation and assimilation of all the others. The Berlin and Moscow trials did never have a similar instrument. The de facto Governments have sought and found in the incrimination of “terrorism” the absolute weapon of repression: to this offence is reduced – in the last resort – any eventual opposition; and all political repression is, nowadays, repression of “terrorism”. Its efficiency is such, that it imposes itself on all competition and has ousted all traditional crime: whether common or political, which has become unusual and obsolete by their own comparative mediocre performance. No Government with open conflicts can do without a repressive bargain like that.

“Terrorism” is and is now called everything that the established power says that it is and decides to call it ‘terrorism’;  that is, everything that the true holders of Terrorism want it to be and be called. By simple constituent definition, “terrorism” is no longer an objective activity, regardless of who does make it: is a subjective activity constituted as such depending on who its perpetrator may be. That’s to say: Governments, whatever they do, do not do “terrorism” nor stop doing it, because it is not and is not called “terrorism” what Governments do. As a last resort and supreme simplification, the subjective reference – regardless of any objective evidence – decides on the qualification.

For the established totalitarian power, “violence and terrorism” mean, are, and are called – by a decision-making construction and by variable and constituent designation and definition – things that others do, and “non-violence” is the own behaviour, because precisely for that purpose the concepts have been manufactured and designed. That is, they mean and are what in each case suits best to the political power them to mean and be “violence and terrorism”; and what in each case the supreme instances of Violence and Terrorism decide to be and be called “violence and terrorism”. “Is terrorism what our enemies are doing”; with which it’s unnecessary any further observation or verification on the latter’s behaviour. It can be thus assured: with the incontestable though vacuous tautological necessity of any truism, that it is always the opposition, the others, and never the own power, who do commit acts of “violence and terrorism”. What excludes – also by tautologically final but futile inference – any doubt about the “violent or non-violent” character of the respective actions: of the others and of the own ones. Nevertheless, a definition that corresponds to this real and operational concept of “terrorism” as it has been set out by the Governments, that is: just as we have formulated it, would be unpresentable for the purposes of propaganda.

Even so, such a concept of “terrorism” that is useful or acceptable for the States involved in the operation of ideological distortion, must be adapted to the purpose of strictly corresponding to their interests and behaviour; while retaining, at the same time, an objective appearance in such a way that its aforementioned purpose be not too noticeable. This is: it must fake and destroy – according to the usual ideological technique – the traditional concepts and terms of violence and terrorism; recuperate and transfer to different ideas their negative theoretical and affective charge; and exclude the responsibility of Governments and include all Resistance to the State monopoly of criminal Violence and Terror. Thus, the uniqueness of the general concept of violence: which is applicable to all acts involving its factual use regardless of who applies it, disappears to be replaced by special ideas and terms.

The diverse synonymous or equivalent terms: corresponding to this unique concept, are being made also different, so that there may not be left in the univocity of the words any trace of the identity of the concept. There appear in this way “capabilities, civil and military means, force and combat forces”, on the one hand; “violence and terrorism”, on the other. (The trend to the differentiation-specialization of the terms according to the two meanings is as semantically arbitrary as badly established in practice.)

From the “heroic” times of individual or State terrorism, States are trying to reduce the common and traditional concept of “terrorism” so as to get themselves being excluded from their authorship, which is basically attributed to Peoples and to all liberation movement, the national ones in particular. Thanks to the new ideology and the new law on “terrorism”, the States disappear as perpetrators of the new “terrorism”. And if – by constituent designation and definition – the States “cannot” be terrorists, then they cannot cause victims of “terrorism” either: only the perpetrators of attempts can cause victims of “terrorism”. After the arrival of the new international disorder of 21st century, States do accuse each other of supporting, instigating or financing “terrorism”, but not of practicing it themselves. The consensus and solidarity of the Governments in this matter are so wide, that not even in the event of a “preventive war against terrorism” has any course the imputation of State terrorism.

According to the imperialistic and fascist totalitarianism, the individual attempts are the only form of violence and terrorism in present time. The criminal Violence and Terrorism constituent of totalitarian States in times of peace, and their mass killings in time of war, simply disappear. After having manipulated for a century the term and concept of “terrorism”, the ideological agents of the imperialism have managed to adapt them to the needs of its monopolies of criminal Violence and Terror.

An interpretation at the same time super-reductive and super-extensive both of the “crime” as well as of the criminal responsibility: subjective or objective, individual or collective, does constitute the infernal mechanism which allows the unitary and totalitarian simplification in order to identify and incriminate, or not, whoever suits best. This interpretation is established by an arbitrary application of criteria based on the authorship, analogy, complicity, action and omission; on the community of purposes (not referred to specific purposes that are constituent of terrorism but to any purpose with implications on it); on the social situation and result; on the relationship or acquaintance between persons; or on the lack of accusation, denunciation or moral condemnation. All of them procedures that reached an outstanding – although comparatively moderate – theoretical and practical elaboration from the pre-war totalitarian legal systems. All this turns the current crime of “terrorism”: inflated, hypertrophied and doped by the emergence of the new international order or disorder, into the unique political crime, by incorporation and assimilation of all the others in it.

The “unique crime” is a fondness of the criminal law of totalitarianism, like the “unique course” is it of its culinary régime. Now is and is called “terrorism” every non-State action, omission, fact, purpose, situation, association, complicity, relationship, communication, publication or opinion which a State does reprove. It’s the absolute generic offence to the service of State Terrorism. The incapacity of the hegemonic Empire so as to impose an acceptable definition for the concept of “terrorism” to the General Assembly of the UNO, has been remedied by the Security Council and the Secretary General with the preparation of lists in which there can be hung up or taken down all one wants, without having any annoying logical and legal constraints.

Traditional ideologies tried to define good and the evil – along with their avatars – as strictly as possible; on the contrary, with the new imperialistic world order the definition is deliberately avoided. But the blatant inability to propose a comprehensive, unambiguous, stable and ideologically presentable definition for concepts that are functionally and really different, contradictory, equivocal and volatile (a patent inability after the significant, proclaimed, pathetic and unsuccessful endeavours of the EU in this regard), is not a disadvantage but rather the opposite, since it allows the imperialism to apply them or not in all cases. Such failure is remedied and replaced with the preparation, publication and updating of a mere catalogue: always discretionary and unilaterally revisable case by case, of “terrorist activities and organizations”; thus escaping from the theoretical, technical and practical problems of the ideological dirty war.

The imperialistic and fascist ideological technique on violence plays with diverse ideas, which are not only incompatible with the evident reality of the monopoly of criminal Violence that sustains the imperialistic and fascist régime but are also formally contradictory with the ideas that officially describe it as “democratic and non-violent”. To obtain such a result would certainly be impossible without the monopolies of criminal Violence, propaganda and brainwashing, without the Terror they inspire, and without the total censorship that prevents any criticism of the hypocrisy and stupidity of fascist ideology, absolutely dominant for more than eighty years already in our Country.

The functional inflation-deflation of the term and concept of “terrorism” serve to imperialism and fascism for the unhindered development of official Repression and Terror. Imperialism and fascism are built so as not to leave ways for another “opposition and resistance” different than the manufactured by themselves. The concept and the term of violence have passed to be integrated into the concept and the term of terrorism, without confusing between themselves. From being species of violence, the meaning, comprehension and extension of “terrorism” have passed to be a genus that exceeds it, due to the incorporation of activities and situations that exceed all violence.

For the new dominant ideology, the terms, concepts and qualifications of “terrorism” and “violence”: corresponding to the ideological constellation of violence, do now lack univocal sense, do not mean anything precise, fixed or determined, and can therefore be applied to everything that is needed. In a last analysis and supreme simplification, they now mean what – case by case – the imperial or hegemonic Power decides them to mean; which allows to avoid the annoying consequences of any definition. 

In the current regressive context, the new “international law” imposed by the imperialism, ruining the earlier and “subversive” principles of the UNO in this regard, has managed to fraudulently and ambiguously recuperate the terms and concepts of “terrorism and violence”; not with a respective and appropriate meaning but with an amalgam of diverse ideas and meanings – formally contradictory but ideologically integrated – that do combine, follow or associate one another, separate, gather, stretch or shrink as it pleases and suits to the totalitarian régime (according to the demands of its propaganda, psychological warfare and political practice), in order to exclude its own activities and include those that are beyond its absolute power. The different conceptual versions are enforced – jointly or alternatively, in succession or simultaneously – according to their own and diverse utility, in correspondence with the mystery one and triune of the official non-violence.

In the ideological aggregates of modern imperialism and fascism, the vagueness and contradiction of terms and concepts do not cause any damage to their propaganda, neither does it the absence of any possible definition; they allow, quite on the contrary, to apply or avoid it in any case. Their applications are unlimited.

An analogic, punctual, elastic and discretionary “rating” of the “criminal” types: in keeping with the modern totalitarian model, offers the more practical and suitable degree of normative arbitrariness for the free-rein repressive policy that the new constituents of the totalitarian world order do need. The terror of masses “prepares the pacification and prevents or reduces the violence”. The consequent loss of “legal security” in traditional terms, without which there can be no normative fiducia, does meet (also here) its compensation in the increasing efficiency – unfettered and without restraint – of the repressive monopoly. (Legal security and arbitrariness are related concepts: as related as other “universal” legal principles. Strictly speaking they are “contrary qualities” in any political régime, whether despotic, totalitarian, liberal or democratic. Without their co-existence there is no room for law.)

As already indicated, an extensive interpretation, on the one hand, and a reductive one, on the other, did entirely change the comprehension and the extension of the concept of terrorism. Through this procedure, every concept and every term that are ideologically pejorative (especially those of violence and terrorism) are modified by the ideological agents of imperialism and fascism in order that they may correspond only to the adversary. If there occurs that in the reality of things their use corresponds to both contenders, then they are sorted and divided into different concepts and terms that hide the identity.

The concept of terrorism: originally referred to State Terrorism as it was practiced by the Government of France during the Reign of Terror, was withdrawn from all State violence and was limited to the individual attempts, and then to the attempts against civilians; being so that, for the imperialistic States, the civilians are for a long time – or have been again – not only a complementary or indiscriminate target of Violence and Terror but their favourite target: easier and more easily attainable and vulnerable than any other. Thus, in an astonishing way, they manage to induce the idea that Terrorism – the same as Violence – does not increase but ceases to exist when it reaches political and military dimensions that are supposed to exceed the level of current or virtual “terrorism and violence” attributed to the attempts, reputed as the only “terrorism”. The Molotov cocktail is terrorism; the weapons of mass destruction are not so. The attempts against the Tsar or the Austrian Archduke, against Sisi or Canovas were terrorism; the bombings over Durango, Gernika and Coventry, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Gaza were not so either.

The Council of Europe and the French legislation did eliminate even the constituent element of terror in its penal definition of terrorism, which thus extends as well to the “terrorism without terror”, surreptitiously replaced by intimidation and fear. The Spanish legal-political-ideological genius: which had already invented the policy without violence, and the non-violent armed forces of land, sea and air, has also done without the one and the other. “It is terrorism what we say it’s bloody terrorism! Just for that we won the war.” Why take restrictions when it comes to serving God and Spain? Everything that is done, said, not done or not said against the established régime is “terrorism”: which constitutes an invaluable contribution of the Spanish legislator to the international juridical community, and to its own fight against all “terrorism” that opposes its centennial State Terrorism against the subjugated Peoples.

The extensive criteria and principles of analogy, purpose, association and amalgam: maintained in the qualification of the punishable act and applied to the suppression and prevention of the offence and the rest of “anti-social” activities, are typical of all totalitarian systems, and do serve the Terror of State and the defencelessness – legal, administrative, judicial and procedural – of any real opposition. And as if that weren’t enough, now the global scope and the ideological and political means of the current totalitarian system give them an unprecedented extent. From being considered as a virtue or a secondary and accessory offence (an accessory special issue of the penal purview), the “terrorism” has become in a record time, by constituent and imperative designation and definition, the axial reference for the international policy and ideology against the freedom of Peoples: the virtual, generic and universal substitute for all traditional offences. Its unmatched performance makes it advantageously and preferably applicable to all – practical or theoretical – opposition to the established powers. An opposition that, whether it be by action or omission, abstention or simple opinion, can be now legally pursued under the charge of “terrorism” on the initiative, accusation, denunciation, information, revenge or simple suspicion either of the organs, henchmen and minions of the totalitarian régime, or of individuals whose interests do benefit from repression.

Given that the more effective instruments expel those who are less, the crime of “terrorism” extends already to all fields, because it offers advantages of swiftness, radicalism and reach far greater than the common procedural ways. The fight of the global Imperialism and Fascism “against the terrorism” is, in reality, the Terrorism at their discretion against Peoples’ liberty and rights. The lists without criteria or afferent definition do of course reveal the theoretical failure of their authors; but they do also liberate and enhance the agents of State Repression and Terrorism.

[Recently a Spanish colonist: component of the military occupation forces in Nabarra as a member of the Spanish police – and his family, exasperated by the hatred and xenophobia permanently disseminated by the Spanish imperialistic ideology against the Basque People and its Movement of Resistance presented as “terrorism and terrorists”, have cool and hard murdered the baker of their neighbourhood (whom they have gone to kill from their house carrying the regulatory pistol and a knife with which they carried out the crime), while he was serving his bread shop, after having accused him of “supporting the terrorism because of not condemning it”. And the Prosecutor at the service of the Spanish colonialist and fascist juridical order played down the importance of what had happened qualifying it as “feuds between neighbours”.

This being so, anyone can imagine what these ones are capable to do in police stations with their “non-neighbours” prisoners during the long and numerous hours that they can hold them incommunicado, when they are able to do this in broad daylight and entering in the others’ house. But there should not be forgotten that those criminals: madly persuaded of being doing something praiseworthy, have been comforted during decades as “good, decent, democratic and non-violent” people by the criminal propaganda of Pnv collaborationists and institutionalists. These ones, who nearly for half a century have been qualifying the imperialistic and fascist Spanish régime as “democratic, non-nationalist and non-violent”, called – even the very eve of the murder – “vermin and soulless” those who didn’t do like themselves: to submit to the régime and condemn the Resistance against Spanish Fascism.

Their subterfuges will not deceive anyone. Their condemnation of the right of legitimate self-defence of our People (totally irrespective of whether this is being done correctly or incorrectly), and their non-condemnation of the criminal French-Spanish imperialistic régime of military occupation, do place them forever in their true position. Their task of deceiving the People they claim to represent, and of supporting and comforting the French-Spanish imperialistic fascism, could not be more repugnant, flagrant and complete.]

As in the best times of the oriental despotism in Spanish style, “We are living difficult times, in which it isn’t possible neither speak or be silent without danger” of being incriminated. However, neither the Inquisition, nor the Council of Troubles (“Council of Blood/Bloedraad”), nor the Committee of Public Health and the Revolutionary Court, nor the Soviet Popular Court, nor the Act of Defence of the Spanish Republic or the McCarthyism, did have at their disposal an incriminating instrument comparable to the current “offence of terrorism”, with which to make incur in the new criminal type anyone who is needed to be repressed.  Why forgo a juridical-ideological find like that? At least while it lasts, or while it is not too much worn out, or something better is not found.

All right remains nowadays subordinated to the war against the so-called “terrorism”, which knows no territorial, institutional, social and international limits of any kind. Special offences and crimes, special laws, special police with special powers and protocols, special courts, special procedures, special penalties and special weapons do implement without limitation the reigning principle of speciality. However there is nothing exceptional in them nor are they provisional or urgent measures, except for the “Basque” collaborationists and accomplices of French-Spanish imperialism, who pretend that this “normal” imperialistic and fascist domination over the Basque People is the normal state of democratic legality. The current global “anti-terrorist” policy is a martial law, or a permanent state of siege or war, in a strategy of war. In this context, the real forces of the imperialistic and fascist State do act directly, without the mediations, brakes and limitations that the democratic achievements or illusions had recommended or established.

The distinction or the confusion between the “common” and the “political” crimes does not affect in the least to the new crime of “terrorism”, which has jumped without difficulty and in both directions from the ones to the others, and which now, due to its special régime, is exorbitant and phagocytal of both of them. Consequently, the vocabulary has been modified in a repressive perspective: given its force of expansion and imposition, the agents that make up  the authoritarian ideological vector of the dominant society are those that establish the supposed “true and correct” meaning of the words. “Abandoned this issue to the enlightenment and conscience” – well known – of the judges, the qualification of “terrorism” is now used preferentially, in total substitution of the handy and most nefarious traditional common and political offences: violence, banditry, piracy, looting, murder, fire and havoc, kidnapping, subversion, sedition, insurgency, rebellion, treason etc.; qualifications these ones that have become obsolete because of their much lower performance.

On the other hand, the traditional accusations of a political nature such as “anarchists, communists and separatists” are now replaced by the “common” ones, such as “wrongdoers, scoundrels, malefactors, rotter, rogues, rabble, garbage, vermin, psychopaths” etc. Finally, the political accusations are complemented by the “ethical motions and grounds” (“ethical” impresses more the unlearned people, and for pedants it’s more classy than “moral”, although neither of them can tell the difference); leaving the Basque People’s fundamental rights and in particular its precondition: its international right of self-determination or independence, below ground, that is buried.

With all shamelessness, the official “Basque nationalists” do affirm in unison along with all Francoism: both in its traditional version of the Party of the Movement-Pp as well as in the transitive and National-socialist one of Falange-PsoE (which are the alternative allies of the “great” Pnv in the task), that “no one is superfluous here”; no one who is imperialist, of course. For those agents of imperialism, here only the fundamental human rights are unnecessary as well those who denounce their centennial violation by the criminal French-Spanish imperialism against the Basque People and its State, the Kingdom of Nabarre. And when the disasters caused by imperialism on other Peoples attacked and displaced from their lands are already irreparable, then there appear the hypocritical appeals of those impostors regarding the humanitarian law.

But on their lips, that appeal to the “humanitarian law” is a disgusting sarcasm aimed to cover up their silence – in fact acceptance – in the face of the falsification, the sabotage, and the violation of Fundamental Human Rights (and above all of the Self-Determination or Independence of the subjugated Peoples and the integrity of their States legitimately constituted on the principle of Peoples’ Self-Determination), and even in the face of the perpetration of war crimes, crimes against Humanity and genocide at the hands of terrorist imperialism. Apparently, what is serious is not that the imperialist and fascist criminals violate and liquidate these Fundamental Human Rights, as long as in doing so they respect a "humanitarian law" (!) in their bombings and massive crimes against the civilian population.

The spectacle of these fakers: respectfully asking the criminal Zionist aggressor respect for “humanitarian law” and for “the laws of war” while it is dropping its bombs on buildings in densely populated cities and on hospitals in the Gaza Strip, and while it is committing other war crimes and crimes against Humanity such as issuing an ultimatum demanding the displacement of populations from their homes (“it is impossible to evacuate those millions of people in 24 hours”, dare to say these wretched “champions of international justice” for all response in the face of these crimes, instead of demanding their immediate cessation and denouncing them as the horrendous crimes that they are), will go down in history to their shame.

Once they have contributed to the achievement of the objectives of imperialism: the destruction of Fundamental Rights of these Peoples and States, then and in order to soothe their miserable consciences, they feign to demand “respect for humanitarian law” from the aggressor who has destroyed the Fundamental Rights and has committed those crimes while they remained silent. After having contributed to the plunder, they then ask for moderation in the perpetrations of these crimes and for almsgiving to the dispossessed.

Theoretically, as to the purpose of attributing penal liability according to the new “terrorist” criminal type, the political end pursued by the Resistance loses importance and only the means matters, when it is considered reprehensible; which facilitates the international alliance against dissidence. Now then, the hackneyed aphorism “the end does not justify the means” (the others’), which has never convinced logicians or politicians, has resulted completely altered, and it is now the means that disqualify the end by itself. And the end thus disqualified, disqualifies in turn all its supporters – although not all of them participate in the same means – by simple analogy of ends. The analogy: characteristic way of penal definition in modern totalitarianism, did allow a discretionary modification in the qualification of the offence. The simple community of purposes (regardless of the respective means), and the simple analogy of means (regardless of the purposes), induces a qualification which extends the “terrorism” outside the field of means or purposes, depending on the case. Instead of establishing a designation and classification deduced from the offence and the offender, the determining ideas are now the protection, security and freedom of persons and goods; naturally those of fascists and imperialists.

The simple and banal traditional statements of the “crimes”, and their aggravating circumstances (defencelessness, premeditation, treachery etc., detailed in the traditional ideological-juridical jargon), did already allow to notice that such acts, facts or situations: constitutive and modifying the criminal liability of an offender or political enemy, are a pejorative tracing of the same facts that a political régime does consider meritorious and that it rewards with tributes, promotions, honorary distinctions, and substantial pay rises, when they are the work of its own “non-violent armed forces”. (The opposition and the revolution do reverse the order of factors.)

Northumberland.- Hold, Clifford! Do not honour him [York] so much / To prick thy finger, though to wound his heart: / [...]. It is war’s prize to take all vantages / And ten to one is no impeach of valour. (They lay hands on York, who struggles.)

Clifford:.- Ay, ay, so strives the woodcock with the gin.

Northumberland:.- So doth the cony struggle in the net.

York.- So triumph thieves upon their conquer’d booty;

So true men yield, with robbers so o’ermatch’d. (W. Shakespeare; Henry VI Pt 3, I, iv.)

“The plan of war consists in attacking the enemy at ten against one and, if possible, killing him from behind.” (General Mola.)

Major Grau: One of them [the Generals] is a... a murderer.

Inspector Morand: Only one? But murder is the occupation of Generals.

Major Grau: Then let us say that what is admirable on the large scale is monstrous on the small; and while we must give medals to mass-murderers, our Justice must strike to the small... entrepreneur.

Inspector Morand: Nicely put! (“The Night of the Generals”, 1967.)

The establishment of a “loose” idea of “terrorism” allows the arbitrary incrimination and persecution of whoever or whatever is wanted; and therefore the Kafkaesque effectiveness of State Terrorism is so much greater, since indeterminacy, arbitrariness and universality, that’s to say: unpredictability and defencelessness in its ineluctable eventuality, are its institutional notes. There’s no place for wishful thinking: for the totalitarianism, the goal is not to discover, fix or establish individual culpability and responsibility but to chase and weaken the Resistance, the actual or virtual opposition. Even over the ideological Resistance to the totalitarian monopolies of imperialistic and fascist propaganda looms now the accusation of terrorist apologia for terrorism, which resolves the issue through a quick (and and “non-violent”) expedient. It little matters who may fall or why: the State criminal Violence and Terror indiscriminate and of masses destroy the social basis and modify the collective behaviour.

Once the masses have been previously conditioned by the State national and international Terrorism established throughout the twentieth century, the denotation and connotation artfully associated to “terrorism” get to elicit in them particularly repulsive and negative reactions. The great traditional scarecrows agitated by the ideology of imperialism and fascism: liberalism, anarchism, socialism or communism, did leastways involve visions and projects of society. After the end of the cold war and the nuclear duopoly, those “dangerous spectres that are haunting the world” have been replaced by “terrorism”: the generic enemy, multi-purpose, virtually applicable to and compatible with everything. Be it red or white it doesn’t matter; which does count is if it is used to make an opposition to the established order, in which case it is “terrorism”.

Finally, in the new “terrorism”, the terror: note that should be the essential, becomes “technically” accidental. It is and is called now “terrorism” any behaviour or idea that a political agent does combat, although its nature or relationship of violence and terror are completely missing. It’s the only definition that the “legal” bodies: with the inescapable cynicism that the repressive practice does require, have been able to formulate. Its description is being referred to the action, complicity and preparation of violence contrary to the established totalitarian political régime. The possible and undesirable practical problems of qualification and imputation are in this way avoided.

The suction effect that the new type of crime of “universal offence” exerts on the traditional penal types is irresistible: how not to replace the old offences with a new one that offers much higher facilities for the qualifying and the procedure; with its simplicity, quick effect, economy of time and money, and superior results? The most effective method inevitably replaces those who are not or are less. Even the “private” feuds do refer to it, as it has always happened during hectic periods of revolutions and counter-revolutions.

The term and idea of “victims of violence and terrorism” are similarly adapted – by constituent designation and definition – in order to include in them the agents of the imperialism and fascism (to whom the “authorities” recognize, honour, exalt, beg, indemnify, compensate and reward), and to exclude, pursue, forget, condemn, humiliate and insult the countless victims of imperialistic and fascist Terrorism: in the first place the Peoples subjugated and oppressed for centuries. It is a symptom of the abject material and moral collapse of the official opposition – armed or unarmed – the fact that the “Basque” collaborationists and accomplices of the French-Spanish imperialism do actively take part of that official propaganda.

“Good and evil, just and unjust, antiterrorism and terrorism” are sometimes identified with “democracy and anti-democracy”. Only the supposedly “anti-democratic” violence is and is called “terrorism”; a criterion of an impossible correspondence with reality, even though – or just because of – this one: despite having been constituted by criminal Violence and war and State Terrorism, has been distorted and declared “democratic” by the totalitarian monopolies of propaganda, psychological warfare, indoctrination and ideological intoxication of masses.

Qualification, definition, description, identification, determination and recognition of “terrorism” are established according to quantitative and qualitative appreciations and evaluations of the whole, inseparable from the conceptual and terminological constellation in which they are performed. Once the qualification of a conflict has been left to the unilateral discretion of belligerents, the international norm disappears, replaced by the national rule or the armed conflict; just as the medieval notion of “just and unjust war” and the corresponding norm disappeared when the “ascending positivism” was installed, to leave these categories reserved for the subjective “appreciation” of States.

In a social organization where the political theory is a simple ideological – planned and manipulated – servant of the established totalitarian power, the term and the concept of “terrorism” are the new instrument of terrorist ideological conditioning of masses. It drives up not saliva but the adrenaline of the patients, as well as the fear as a primary and first political drive; it immediately generates or increases the hate against the other and the controlled and uncontrolled phobias; and it develops and channels the instinct of aggression and death. The new concept of “terrorism” has proved unparalleled as a political cover, justification or disqualification of all that is referred to it. Opposing against that “terrorism” is more effective, fast, profitable, popular and mobilizing than doing it against Anarchism, Communism, Fascism and Nationalism, or against war and violence in general.

The great traditional terrors of the dominant classes give now the place and are encompassed within the scope of the new and super-performing juridical-ideological find of “terrorism”. The traditional political offences: “sedition, treason, rebellion, insurrection, subversion, communism, anarchism, separatism, banditry, piracy or pillage”, the same as their respective agents (with the serial killer – and the psychiatric questions that he raises – as a diversion), had a characterized political content and an objective – general and differential – more or less reprehensible or objectionable. Instead, the censure against “terrorism” is always embodied in a broader context. Not everybody fits into a stable and defined concept of communism, anarchism etc.; but everyone fits, by simple inclusion, into a list or catalogue of “terrorists” established and updated without conceptual reference, acceptable or avowed. Not everyone can be easily labelled – though sometimes it has been done – as communist or anarchist etc., since they are concepts that are built, at the very least, by a concrete reference to property, Nation, State or Religion. Whereas everyone can be denounced as a “terrorist”, inasmuch as this term does not mean anything, or everything that is wanted to. The ideological advantage is achieved by the quantitative superiority in propaganda: the side that repeats it more times wins the match.

Yet, a concept which extends to everything and everyone, and that does not distinguish anything, has to be “completed” with another narrower one that extends only to the adversary. The present imperialistic and fascist ideology recuperates simultaneously and in succession the “vulgar” term and concept of terrorism, in order to use the repugnance and fear they inspire in the popular masses; but next it transfers their psychological connotation to a different content that co-exists with them and corresponds to the political and legal assigned functions to the new reduced concept. Once again, formally different and contradictory ideas are associated in the global body of the dominant ideology. Given its requirements, a double concept/term of ‘terrorism’ allows it to associate political effectiveness and propaganda, the same as it happens with the concept/term of ‘violence’.

Neither vulgar nor scientific knowledge are tools that could explain or justify the conceptual and semantic drift that has led to produce the shapeless and protean ideological monster now called “terrorism”. The new “terrorism” is, above all, an ideological invention, a weapon of mass destruction in the service of the imperialistic and fascist propaganda and psychological warfare, a creation of the new totalitarianism on a worldwide scale. Only Fascism could contrive, implement and use of such a procedure. By using it, it gets itself described.

The illusions and hopes build up by the subjugated Peoples about peace, freedom and democracy persist and resist all experience: not even the terrible hot or cold wars of the catastrophic 20th century have fully finished with them. The bigger is the disaster, more reasons have the oppressed masses to take refuge in their fictional paradises, and more facilities have the real powers to distribute among them the ideological narcotics and hallucinogens that keep them in their sad plight of passive herd, without neither conscience nor will nor capacity that are not those coming imposed to them by the established structure of totalitarian domination.

In 1914-1918 the Peoples were led to believe that the victory of Western Imperialism over the Germanic hordes would leave the field open for peace, freedom and democracy. In 1945 they believed the same thing, once the Axis Powers: the evil National-socialists and their allies, had been defeated counting with the problematic and disturbing help of their initial allies: the wicked Bolsheviks, turned into almost good anti-fascists but immediately converted in very bad Communists, while the old bad guys of the Axis became good Western Democrats. The Spanish Nationalist Fascism: bastion of the Francoist “organic democracy” and spearhead of its Crusade against the Muscovite barbarism, did not even have to turn into anything, and with the help of the liquidationist bureaucracy Pnv-Eta and its satellites did overnight become democratic even without a formal purge, of course keeping its imperialistic régime over the subjugated Basque People.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there disappeared at last all the obstacles to the peaceful reconciliation of Humanity in freedom, democracy and progress. But lo and behold that the new hegemonic universal Empire and its satellites “reveal” contradictions and give rise to oppositions that crystallize and coalesce in “The Axis of Evil and the international terrorism”: all the more dangerous because they are more abstract and indeterminate. There aren’t any more evil fascists or Communists or Anarchists, nor State or individual terrorisms: there are only Evil ones and plain terrorists, what allows to qualify or disqualify all you want. And everyone has signed up to do the same.

The ensuing “war of a new kind” against “terrorism” will be long and hard. For now it entails the totalitarian dismantling of all freedoms, the abolition of fundamental human rights on a global scale, and the reinforcement of Imperialism and Fascism. [But it will surely result in the definitive triumph of Good over Evil; and in peace, freedom and democracy. (To be continued.)]

(From: ‘Violence and Terrorism.- Their ideological mistification at the service of Imperialism’.)