The Rationale of Terror
Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife.
Tactically, that act of terror eliminated the reformist Ferdinand, who meant to address the grievances of his Slav subjects by granting them greater autonomy and equality with Austrians and Hungarians inside the empire.
Strategically, the assassination succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Black Hand plotters.
Hard-liners in Austria demanded an ultimatum to Serbia. When her demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war. Czar Nicholas mobilized in support of Russia's little Slav brothers. The Kaiser ordered mobilization. When the French refused to declare neutrality, Germany declared war. In hours, the British Cabinet had reversed itself to back war with Germany on behalf of Belgium and France.
Princip had lit the fuse that set off in six weeks the greatest war in history. While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Hungarians. The Habsburg Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished.
Last week's Mumbai massacre seems a similar triumph of terror.
Tactically, by sending a platoon of suicide warriors into India's financial capital, terrorizing a train station, two five-star hotels and a Jewish center, and killing nearly 200 in over 60 hours, the plotters assured themselves of round-the-clock worldwide television coverage.
In so riveting the world's attention for four days, this terrorist atrocity was a success.
And by using Pakistanis to perpetrate the massacres and Karachi as port of embarkation, the plotters focused India's rage exactly where they want it, against Pakistan. By this slaughter in India's commercial capital, the Islamists have destroyed the detente Pakistan was seeking with India and pushed both toward war. Out to murder moderation and stoke militancy, the terrorists succeeded.
Years ago, this writer observed:
"Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means."
Yet terrorism—the killing of innocents for political ends—can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama. What, then, may we surmise are the tactical and strategic goals of the terror masters of Mumbai?
To humiliate, wound and outrage India in her pride as a great new democratic and economic power in Asia. To imperil Mumbai's future as a safe and secure financial capital in which to live, work and invest. To awe the world and inspire Islam's young by their audacity. To attain immortality.
But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani government.
Pakistan's offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and the border region, battling al-Qaida and the Taliban, withdrawing from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where 170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.
President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty." For war in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists across what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "Global Balkans."
War would pit two nuclear powers against each other for the first time since the Sino-Soviet border clash of 1969. It would spawn bloodshed between Muslim and Hindu in India. It would see the collapse of Pakistan, its possible dissolution and a military dictator in a nation already divided against itself over whether to continue resisting al-Qaida and the Taliban, or cut ties to the unpopular Americans.
Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9-11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaida source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.
For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.
India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.
But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.
Should it come, they win—and enter history as revolutionary terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9-11.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
@41 George
Shut up!
Gargi:
Some years back (time flies), I recall an article in the neolib leaning New Republic, which negatively spoke of an Indian military official in former Yugoslavia, who was presented as having a pro-Serb bias.
The NR article said that he was motivated by the equating of Muslim nationalists breaking up the Indian idea from shortly after WW II to the present, with the Bosnian Muslim nationalists.
Whereas Slovenia and Croatia had a more defined identity, Bosnia was/is more of a hodge podge, as Kissinger and ohers have noted.
An argument can be made that India, Russia (last decade in Chechnya), Israel (with its problems) and Serbia have common interests on a key issue - that doesn't exclude a number of predominately Muslim nations - which share a principle of defending boundaries over support for terror based separatist tendencies.
All:
WW I proved disasterous in how Europe was reconfigurated. The reconfiguration was inevitable. However, it didn't have to happen in the way it did.
I share Boba's view that Serbia shouldn't be made the heavy for provoking that war.
43Josh Cooney:
You probably don't realize how well you have hit the proverbial nail on the head with your quip! (at least that's what I conclude it was).
Correct me if I am wrong here, but in every trouble spot in the world today we find the mark of the British Empire which, probably in ignorance, planted the seeds for today's troubles, so long ago.
As to the "peace loving Germans and... cowards in England"..., you said it.
Personally I would restrict the last part of your comment to the British civil service and government types.
Fact is, by any measure you wish to enunciate, Germany is the most peace-loving country in Europe, with England and France at the head of the warmongering scale.
If you are interested I should be pleased to point you to the scholarly non-German study leading to this conclusion.
H.F. Wolff
Uh, pardon my ignorance, but whatsa Bosnian? Or a Kosovar?
In 1914, the population of Bosnia was 70% ethnic Serb. And the Kosovo (or Kosovan) Serbs were also still an overwhelming majority. But we all know what 20th Century events dwindled their numbers. Greetings from Sumadija, Serbia.
#53"Correct me if I am wrong here, but in every trouble spot in the world today we find the mark of the British Empire which, probably in ignorance, planted the seeds for today’s troubles, so long ago."
All our present troubles can be traced back to German rationalism. Emphasis on PERIOD!!!!!!!!!!!
I retract that last statement as it was simply an attempt to escalate an already silly argument. Nothing good is going to come out of a war of words over the the English-German conflict. If my statement holds any water it is in the fact that for the most part the English have resisted the totalizing ideologies that, it seems to me, originated in German and France. But I am no intellectual historian so I shouldn't act as if I am.
#53 "Fact is, by any measure you wish to enunciate, Germany is the most peace-loving country in Europe, with England and France at the head of the warmongering scale.
If you are interested I should be pleased to point you to the scholarly non-German study leading to this conclusion."
What's the study? I'm skeptical but I'll take a look at it.
57Josh Cooney:
If you are American, start with this one; otherwise ignore, or just glance over for some perspective.
http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/foabroad.htm
At time of WWI this book was written:
The Great Illusion by Norman Angel
Billings & Sons, Guildford
All of chapter 4 is interesting, pg 233 in particular. A review of this book is available on line.
The following is lengthy but I hope the editor will forgive me. You may wish to peruse it first and pick out the numerical stuff further down.
Historic German 'militarism'
A writer inclined to present France in an unfavorable light relative to Germany would find, in the story of the French invasions of Germany since 1300, a veritable propaganda arsenal. Though there were at least seventeen major French invasions of German territory in the period between 1300 and 1600, the period of French intervention that is genuinely appalling is that from 1635 to 1815. The French, after Richelieu earlier had kept the Thirty Years' War going through diplomacy, ravished Germany continuously from 1635 to 1648. They also invaded German territory seven times during the concluding phase of their war with Spain which ended in 1659. A few years later during the War of Devolution and again during their encounter with the Dutch in 1672, the French violated German territory on at least four occasions. Then, between 1678 and 1686, the French, through their reunion policy, committed at least ten major acts of aggression against Germany. The War of the League of Augsburg in 1688 actually began as a French "preventive war" against the German states with the unprovoked devastation of the Palatinate, as well as the destruction of Heidelberg, Worms, and Speyer. Further French invasions of Germany followed in 1702, 1733, and 1740. Again during the Seven Years War (1756-63) French aggression against German territory was repeated. Finally, during the periods of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Germany was repeatedly bled white by French invasions and coalition wars. One might reasonably conclude then that an estimate of thirty French invasions of German territory since the Middle Ages is a conservative understatement.
An examination of the available statistical evidence on the comparative warlikeness and addiction to militarism of the European powers since the end of the Middle Ages reveals some astonishing facts. Assuming the validity of the propagandist thesis of unique German aggressiveness, one might reasonably expect that a study of the relevant data concerning army size, casualties, number and magnitude of battles engaged in, military expenditures and so on, would reflect this alleged German iniquitousness. Yet such is very decidedly not the case.
It has been estimated by a careful scholar that there were "about twenty-six hundred important battles involving European states" in the 460 years between 1480 and 1940. Of these, France participated in forty-seven percent, "Germany (Prussia)" in twenty-five percent, and England and Russia in twenty-two percent each.6 The Prussian record can hardly be described as uniquely warlike on the basis of such evidence! It might also be added that geographic factors, like Britain's insular position and Russia's remoteness from the mainstream of European history during the period, doubtless helped considerably to reduce their percentage of involvement.
Professor Quincy Wright offers this further statistical evidence for the same period, that is, 1480-1940:
Of the 278 wars involving European states during this period, the percentage of participation by the principal states was: England, 28; France, 26; Spain, 23; Russia, 22; Austria, 19; Turkey, 15; Poland, 11; Sweden, 9; Netherlands, 8; Germany (Prussia), 8; Italy (Savoy-Sardinia), 9; and Denmark, 7.7
In the circumstances, one is compelled to assent to Dr. Wright's conclusion that "attribution of a persistently warlike character to certain states ... seems not to have been based upon a comparison of any objective criteria of warlikeness."8
The distinguished sociologist and historian, Pitirim A. Sorokin, in his monumental study, Social and Cultural Dynamics,9 assembled data proving that historically, of all the nations of Europe, Germany had the lowest percentage of years with war. Spain, Poland, Lithuania, Greece, England, France, Russia, Holland, Austria, and Italy all exceeded Germany in this respect. Sorokin's conclusions are very much like those of Quincy Wright above. He writes that "the magnitude of 'militarism' or 'war effort' or 'war burden' shifts from country to country in the course of time. Furthermore ... there are no consistently peaceful and consistently militant countries."10
The eminent British military and naval historian, Captain Russell Grenfell, computed the record of numerical involvement in wars by the major European powers in the crucial century between Waterloo and Sarajevo as follows"11
Military involvement
Country Wars
Britain
10
Russia
7
France
5
Austria
3
Prussia-Germany
3
In the face of such evidence, it seems incredible that any really thoughtful person could still adhere to the old popular superstition concerning German "aggressiveness" and "militarism."
Public opinion of Germany to 1914
All these facts were very clearly reflected in world opinion at the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In the words of Professor Sidney Fay, "Bismark's unification of Germany was hailed at the time as a desirable, even glorious accomplishment of the spirit of nationalism."12 Writing in a similar vein, another distinguished American student of this period relates that:
Whatever opinion historians may now hold on the question of responsibility for the war, there was little difference of opinion on this point among contemporary neutrals ... When the war broke out, Englishmen were almost unanimous in believing that the conflict had been wantonly precipitated by the French Emperor, and that the fundamental cause for the war was the French desire to reestablish French hegemony on the continent by the defeat of Prussia and the acquisition of German territory.13
The English writers, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Freeman, were especially ardent in their enthusiasm for the cause of Prussia during the war of 1870. Carlyle, in a public letter to the Times in 1870, advanced arguments of an "historical, racial, and political" nature on behalf of the alleged necessity of a German victory over France. He concluded the letter on the warm note that Germany would become the "queen of the continent," something that appeared to him as "the most hopeful public fact that has occurred during my life."14 The glowing devotion to the cause of Germany of the famous "Oxford School" historian, Edward A. Freeman, was revealed in an open letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in November of 1870, when he asserted it was the "high mission" of Germany to bring an end to the French "conspiracy" against world peace.10
An obviously opposing view, whose judgment I question in view of the foregoing, but also basedmy observations and readings over the last 25 or so years:
Another British writer, E. O. Lorimer, in a volume entitled What the German Needs73 presented the following "diagnosis" of the Germans:
It is now widely accepted amongst those who have given thought to the problem of Germany ... that the world has not a normal, rational people to deal with, but a nation suffering from an acute attack of homicidal mania, rendered more dangerous by a background of specious philosophy and more horrible by a lust for inhuman, calculated cruelty; a nation moreover subject to the recurrence of similar attacks, of which this last is only the most severe ...
Well, I think we have a few facts to ponder, agreed?
H.F. Wolff
re.: #58:
Struck dumb?
Apple carts upset?
Sacred cows slaughtered?
We've all been had and lied to for 90+ years?
If you are interested in the motivation for propagating such enormous lies, I think I could provide that, also.
H.F. Wolff