Imperialism
Acts, Facts, and Records
Andrei Grachev
__TITLE__ In the GripPROGRESS
PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
Translated from the Russian Designed by Vadim Kuleshov
CONTENTS
An^peii Fpaqes
HOfl nPHHEJlOM TEPPOPA Ha amjiuiicKOM HSUKC
Page
Introduction...............7
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE.......11
1. "Primitive Magic"..........11
2. Terrorism or Liberation Struggle?.....16
3. Who Are These Terrorists?.......21
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM......25
1. "Crisis Is a Time of Extremes".....25
2. The Sway of Violence........31
3. Fear-Generated Terror.........36
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS........40
1. The Rightists Sound Assembly Call .... 40
2. A Criminal Record.........45
3. Right-Eye Blindness.........57
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES.....61
1. "Alchemists of the Revolution".....61
2. Political Provocateurs.........66
3. Black-Red Idol............75
V. THE EXPORTATION OF VIOLENCE.....85
© H3«aT6JibCTBO «nporpecc», 1982
L us Global Terrorism.........85
English translation © Progress Publishers 1982
2. The CIA: Terrorism as a Profession .... 90
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
~^^3^^- From Political Assassinations to Genocide . . 102
4. Mercenaries of the Undeclared War . . . .107
, 11105-32 016(01)-82
6ea o6tHB.ii.
0804000000 VI. TERRORISM AS STATE POLICY......H2
1. Heaven for Killers..........112
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
2. Far Away from God ..,
3. Hotbeds of Terror . .
116 124
138 138 140 147
150VII. INFORMATION TERRORISM ....
1. Records of Disinformation ....
2. Intellectual Mercenaries.....
3. Who Gains by the "Hand of Moscow''?
Conclusion............
The 20th century has often been described as atomic, electronic, or the age of information. Lately, a new definition has apeared: "the age of terror and violence", an appropriate appellation when one considers recent history---two world wars, scores of regional clashes and conflicts, millions of human lives taken by bullets, shells and atomic bombs--- and current reports coming in from every part of the globe about villages and towns bombed, statesmen killed and kidnapped, innocent people taken as hostages, planes hijacked, and so on.
Political terrorism has acquired dimensions so formidable that it can accurately be considered a typical phenomenon and an attribute of contemporary bourgeois society.
It is not the 20th century that has given birth to violence and terror. In the past centuries, too, terrorism, as state policy or separate acts against individuals, left its bloody mark on human history. But it is precisely in our century, probably because it is a century of information and atomic bombs, that this international phenomenon has become particularly dangerous and intolerable.
What kind of seeds sprout terrorism? How deep are its roots? What kind of soil feeds it? Who breeds it and for what purpose? Answers to these alarm" ing questions are numerous and varying.
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Trying to relieve the capitalist world of its responsibility for the emergence of this sinister phenomenon, some bourgeois ideologists do their utmost to present political violence as a manifestation of "universal evil", to pass it for a disease of the 20th century, which similarly affects capitalist, socialist and developing countries. Attempting to conceal its social origin, they proclaim it to be universal and emphasise that "terrorism ... has ... now become the primary form of conflict for our time".J
Others view terror as an indispensable concomitant of civilisation, a by-product of social, scientific and technological progress. They claim that terrorism is as linked to scientific and technological break-throughs as an atomic bomb is to the discovery of penicillin.
There are even those who try to employ the upsurge of political violence in the present-day world as a means of discrediting revolutionary, democratic and national liberation forces. At the same time, they justify the brutality of arbitrary rule and terror resorted to by reactionary and imperialist forces both in domestic and foreign policies.
In doing so, bourgeois ideologists hope to shift the responsibility for political violence and terrorism to left-wing forces, communist and national liberation movements, specifically to the Soviet Union. By distorting the essence of present-day terrorism, they try to use it to slander revolutionary struggles for the liberation of peoples who seek to shake off the yoke of colonialism and neo-- colonialism, and to depict socialist countries as strongholds of international terrorism.
Imperialist reactionary forces widely use the provocative activities of terrorists to identify the anti-
~^^1^^ Richard Clutterbuck, Guerrillas and Terrorists, London, 1977, p. 16.
imperialist and liberation struggle with international terrorism. They thus have a pretext for stepping up their expansionist and aggressive acts in world affairs. As Leonid Brezhnev noted at the 26th CPSU Congress, the most aggressive forces of imperialism "are trying to portray the liberation struggle of the masses as `terrorism' ". '
In order to justify its polir.y of undermining detente and escalating the arms race, the US Administration has purposely chosen as its motto a struggle against "international terrorism". Describing the Beagan Administration's position on terrorism, the American paper Newsday wrote in March 1981 that terrorism was just a modern version of cold-war anti-communism aimed at preparing Americans for a new round of interventions and growing military spending.
All these ploys are directed at concealing the truth and avoiding the indisputable fact---- emphasised by Lenin---that terrorism is closely linked to "the invasion of world imperialism, the war plots and the military pressure of world imperialism" which, in reality, is its "chief source".~^^2^^
As evidenced by current developments, the reactionaries of the world, particularly the USA, never cease their political and ideological sabotage, their adventurist acts and mass bloodshed and terror.
International brigandage is directed against the peoples and countries aspiring to strengthen their national independence, rid themselves of tyrannic and pro-imperialist regimes, and to opt for I he road of socio-economic progress.
Terrorism is a manifestation of a moral and political crisis of capitalist society which, being founded on social oppression, exploitation and viola-
~^^1^^ Documents and Resolutions. The 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow, 1981, p. 27.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 181.
10INTRODUCTION
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
tion of human rights, is incessantly generating terrorism and violence, poisoning social life and damaging the international situation.
Growing international terrorism is, to a considerable extent, a response to aggravating international tensions provoked by imperialist powers.
Arbitrary rule, violence and terrorism in the world are made possible by the policies of those who trample upon the legitimate rights and interests of sovereign states, who advocate racism and national hatred, who support reactionary dictatorial regimes, who fan international tensions and escalate the arms race, and who rouse the atmosphere of war hysteria and seek to keep independent states and nations in the grip of terror.
1. "Primitive Magic"
Soon after it moved into the White House, the Reagan Administration stated that the struggle against so-called international terrorism, allegedly inspired by the Soviet Union, was to be the highest priority of the US government. The then Secretary of State Alexander Haig announced that international terrorism would replace human rights as a problem of great concern. He disclosed the anti-Soviet thrust of the US Administration's campaign "to fight international terrorism". According to Haig, the present outburst of international terrorism and its concomitant----illegal intervention and the so-called national liberation wars waged by the Soviet Union or its proxies---is a principal threat and a chief source of concern for all free countries.
The Washington Post reported on February 7, 1981 that "the forces of terrorism have suddenly thrust the shadowy world of international terrorist activity into the front lines of US foreign policy". This appears "to be part of an attempt to broaden public perception of the Soviet threat to US interests---a threat customarily expressed primarily in terms of Soviet military power''.
``It is the Soviet Union," claims Haig, "which bears a major responsibility today for the proliferation and the hemorrhaging of international terrorism." *
i V.S, Nem & World Report, May 4, 1981, p. 27,
12IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
13Even the Western press admits that US attempts to portray objective social transformations in the world solely as a result of the Soviet Union's intrigues mirror either ignorance or most profound cynicism. Apparently, both of them are present. The attempt to identify the struggle of hundreds of millions of people against imperialism as terrorism mingles historical ignorance, malicious intent, and an inability and reluctance to comprehend the objective laws of social development. Having invented an "international terrorism" myth, the Washington politicians were probably sure that they had created a reliable ideological cover for interventionism and attempts to suppress national liberation movements. An upsurge of anti-Soviet propaganda based on international terrorism reflects Washington's reversal to the 1950s' mentality. The Westfdlische Ptundschcm noted that the "most primitive thing is to assert that terrorism is anything the other side is doing and what does not suit us. In this case it does not matter whether Reagan believes in the Soviet Union's plans to set up a world Communist state or not. If he believes, he appears to be ignorant, if he does not, he appears to be a cynic, neither of which does credit to a high-ranking representative of the free world.''
And still it is this primitive mentality that determines the current political course of the world's largest imperialist state, a course based on Reagan's assertion that the Soviet Union is the underlying cause of all the unrest in the world.
Describing the Reagan Administration's foreign policy, Ronald Steel, an analyst of American affairs, wrote that it was simple and straightforward anti-Sovietism. Any problem in the outside world was viewed through this lens. No wonder, therefore, that should the world with all its diversity and complexity be projected through such a lens one
would get a distorted and prejudiced picture of it, the one full of myths and hallucinations.
Everything has been turned upside down in Washington's new propaganda campaign aimed at using terrorism as a pretext for launching an offensive against national liberation movements. By exporting counter-revolution the reactionaries try to obstruct history and thus realise their dream.
In an editorial entitled "The World of Mr. Reagan in Reverse", L'Humanite wrote: "Reagan provided a very good illustration of his propaganda system in a TV interview. The peoples' struggle to liberate themselves from imperialist or bloody dictatorial rule is `terrorism'. The support rendered by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to these peoples is 'aid to terrorism'." ^^1^^
The Mexican El Dia pointed out that US leaders are more and more frequently replacing the word ``communism'' with the word ``terrorism''. The paper called the trick a "primitive magic''.
Imperialist powers are trying to ascribe to socialist countries and national liberation movements their own policy of plunder and aggression, their own amorality and inhumanity.
Addressing the 26th GPSU Congress, Gus Hall, General Secretary, CPUSA, said: "In the codebook of the Reagan Administration all struggles for national liberation, for socialism and the peoples' movements and struggles against imperialism and reactionary military fascist dictatorships are labelled 'international terrorism.'^^2^^ The big lie continues to grow.
The Pol Pot hangmen enjoy support and are called ``democrats'' rather than terrorists. Bands of
1 L'Humanite, March 5, 1981.
~^^2^^ The Words of Friends. Greetings Extended to the XXVI Congress of the CPSU by Communist, Workers', National-Democratic and Socialist Parties, Moscow, 1982, p. 283.
14THE Giuf OP TERROR
1. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
15fascist thugs---supported and financed by the United States---responsible for murders, tortures and terror in Chile, Haiti, Uruguay, Paraguay, Namibia and Guatemala supposedly have nothing in common with terrorists. The US-backed junta which murdered 40 thousand Salvadoreans within two years and a half is not a terrorist regime, and assassins attempting to take the life of Fidel Castro are no terrorists at all.
In the lexicon of the big lie the word ``terrorist'' is not applicable to the arsonists and murderers, trained, armed and sent from Pakistan to Afghanistan jointly by the USA and China.
Allegations about "outside instigators", "foreign centres" and the notorious "hand of Moscow" directing ``terrorist'' activities are invented in order to slander and compromise social protest movements, the liberation struggles of working people and the oppressed population in the zone of imperialist domination. These allegations also serve to deprive progressive movements of national roots and objective premises and to present their activity as an "international plot''.
This is no new ploy. In the past, bourgeois ideologists tried to label any revolutionary movement as terrorist. Moreover, bourgeois theorists sought to disprove the Marxist-Leninist theory about the ways in which human society develops and, using the struggle against terrorism as a pretext, to step up repressions against Communists and all those opposed to capitalist rule.
To prove the false thesis of the Soviet Union's "support of international terrorism" and to substantiate it theoretically, these people resort to the most incredible fabrications and outright misinformation. They try to ``link'' terrorism with MarxistLeninist theory, to revive the old myth about Communists advocating ``conspiracies'' and terrorism.
According to the U.S. News & World Report of May 4, 1981, "Russia's support of terrorism can be traced back to Lenin, who preached it as an effective means of bringing down a government". Simultaneously, references are made to history which is alleged to prove the Russians' "innate bent" for terrorist acts.
Richard Pipes, a close-to-Reagan functionary of the National Security Council, sees the roots of " Soviet terrorism" and, for that matter, of modern terrorism in general as going back to 1879 when the Narodnaya Volya organisation was set up. According to him, this organisation was the forerunner of all terrorist organisations of today. But it is well known that Narodnaya Volya, crushed by tsarism nearly 100 years ago, had nothing to do with the Marxist movement which made the October Revolution in Russia possible.
Any unbiased student of the Marxist movement in Russia knows that from the very inception the Bolshevik Party resolutely rejected terrorism as a means of political activity. Speaking on behalf of the RSDLP Central Committee at a congress of the Social-Democratic Party of Switzerland in 1916, Lenin said: "We are convinced that the experience of revolution and counter-revolution in Russia has proved the correctness of our Party's more than twenty-year struggle against terrorism as tactics." *
He also wrote: "We maintain ... our old conviction, confirmed by decades of experience, that individual terrorist acts are inexpedient methods of political struggle." In Lenin's words, "as revolutionary tactics individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered genuine political struggle".^^2^^ The present-
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 123.
~^^2^^ Ibid., Vol. 35, p. 238.
16IN THE GRIP OP TERROR
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
17day international communist movement also rejects terrorism.
It will be recalled that in the early 1930s certain circles tried to accuse Communists of organising international terrorism. The fascist regimes in Italy and Germany were most active in these attempts. On February 27, 1933, Hermann Goering declared from the steps of the Reichstag, set on fire at his command, that Communists were responsible for that terrorist act. The news about the fire, dictated by Goering himself, read that it was "the most atrocious terrorist act of Bolshevism in Germany''.
The fire, for which Communists were blamed, was used as a pretext for the notorious Leipzig trial and subsequently for unleashing monstrous fascist terror. It should be remembered that during the Second World War, too, the Nazis labelled courageous anti-fascists, members of the Resistance movement and Soviet partisans as ``terrorists'' and ``arsonists''.
It seems that neither the military-political defeat of fascism nor its ideological bankruptcy taught a lesson to those who are trying today to rekindle the myth about "Bolshevist terrorism". The only difference is that today it is fighters for national liberation and social emancipation who are accused of terrorism.
era of socialist revolutions, ushered in by the Great October Revolution in Russia, the bourgeoisie identified terrorists with Bolsheviks and all Communists. These days, with the disintegration of the world colonial system, the label ``terrorists'' is pinned on fighters for national liberation and independence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, on fighters for every people's right to control its national wealth, to freely choose its road of social development. The people's justifiable struggle against imperialism and for freedom, independence and democratic development is called criminal.
The US Administration has left no doubt that by "international terrorism" it means, first of all, the peoples' struggle for national liberation and social emancipation. In his interview with the French weekly L'Express, Alexander Haig said: "I cannot think of any circumstances under which the American government could approve of or at least tolerate national liberation movements'." ^^1^^
Among terrorists Ronald Reagan lists the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the liberation movements in Namibia and El Salvador which are fighting for liberation and legitimate national rights. "Sub-Saharan Africa is one place where the Soviet Union makes no bones about its support of political violence, which the Kremlin regards as 'wars of national liberation' ", wrote the U.S. News &World Report on May 4, 1981.
``Since that time we've been plagued with similar situations in Ethiopia, in South Yemen, North Yemen, Afghanistan, in Kampuchea," said Alexander Haig in an interview with Time. "And we now see a very clearly delineated Soviet-Cuban strategy to create Marxist-Leninist regimes in Cen-
2. Terrorism or Liberation Struggle?
For a long time now, reactionary forces have been portraying fighters for social renovation as the chief source of chaos, violence and terror. Since the French Revolution of 1789, all European monarchs labelled the then revolutionary, anti-feudal bourgeois leaders as Jacobins and terrorists. In the
~^^1^^ L'Express, February 7, 1981.
2-0246
18IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
t. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
tral America---Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in the first place." J
Commenting on a statement by Haig, L' Humanite wrote on January 30, 1981: "One might think that we had returned to the American propaganda of the days when over half a million GIs tried to destroy Vietnam with napalm and defoliants, while the Soviet Union fulfilled its duty of solidarity with the people fighting for freedom. A colonel of the Saigon expeditionary corps who in his ascension to the White House does not seem to have learned anything as he is still lumping together national liberation movement and terrorism.''
Thus, those who have fought for the independence of India and Indonesia, Algeria and Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique and many other countries with a combined population of about two billion people are also called terrorists.
To identify terrorism with the peoples' struggle for national economic liberation and social emancipation makes a mockery of the aspirations of hundreds of millions of people in three continents who have been fighting against colonialism and its vestiges as well as against foreign interference.
It is only natural that sober-minded Americans also criticise their Washington leaders whose allegations have aroused world-wide indignation. Ramsey Clark, for example, the former US Attorney General who participated in the Second Session of the Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes of the Racist and Apartheid Regimes in Southern Africa, held in Luanda in January-February 1981, said that it is absolutely illegal to put the liberation movements on a level with terrorism, for they pursue diametrically opposing goals. As a rule, terrorists are individuals or groupings pursuing exclusively
mercenary aims, while liberation movements fight for the freedom and independence of their peoples. They protect the interests of nations rather than of individuals. People who say otherwise should correlate their words with reality, added Ramsey Clark.
Refuting the allegations about "international terrorism", Yassir Arafat said that, by American standards, Charles de Gaulle and President Pertini of Italy might also be called ``terrorists'', for they had fought for their peoples' freedom, against foreign rule and fascism.
``How inconsistent the new theories of terrorism are," reads a TASS statement, "can be seen from the following: according to their logic, George Washington and other founding fathers of the United States who led the American colonies in their struggle for independence should also be listed as terrorists. How absurd is this hatred for social change in the world, this unwillingness or inability to comprehend the historically conditioned nature of these changes." d
To identify national liberation movements with terrorism is a mean and dishonest ploy aimed at depriving peoples of the right to struggle for freedom, independence, national interests and sovereignty. The legality of this struggle has been recognised by the international community and upheld by the United Nations.
In December 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted, at the Soviet initiative, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. This was followed in 1973 by the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. These declarations have outlawed colonial-
ime, March 16, 1981.
Pravda, February 3, 1981.
2*
20IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
21ism, racism and apartheid and have reaffirmed that peoples who are oppressed and discriminated against have the right to struggle for their freedom and independence. "All armed action or repressive measures of all kinds," reads the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, "directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence, and the integrity of their national territory shall be respected." J
Regardless of whether the counteraction to national liberation is carried out as overt intervention, support for dictatorial regimes, smuggling in mercenaries to other countries or an overthrow of governments disliked by imperialists and assassination of progressive leaders, international terror is not a national liberation movement.
Thus, illegal and criminal acts are perpetrated by forces which oppose peoples fighting for their freedom and crush popular activity directed at gaining freedom and independence.
In 1972, the 27th Session of the UN General Assembly discussed measures to prevent international terrorism and adopted a resolution entitled "Measures to Prevent International Terrorism Which Endangers or Takes Innocent Human Lives or Jeopardizes Fundamental Freedoms, and Study of the Underlying Causes of Those Forms of Terrorism and Acts of Violence Which Lie in Misery, Frustration, Grievance and Despair and Which Cause Some People to Sacrifice Human Lives, Including Their Own, in an Attempt to Effect Radical Changes''.
That resolution reaffirmed "the inalienable right to self-determination and independence of all peoples under colonial and racist regimes and other forms of alien domination" and the legitimacy of their struggle, "in particular the struggle of national liberation movements in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter and the relevant resolutions of the organs of the United Nations". The General Assembly also condemned "the continuation of repressive and terrorist acts by colonial, racist and alien regimes in denying peoples their legitimate right to self-determination and independence and other human rights and fundamental freedoms".i
By these documents the United Nations has identified true terrorists, i.e., states and regimes using mass violence as an instrument of home and foreign policies, of expansionism and interference in other peoples' internal affairs.
3. Who Are These Terrorists?
Having entered the international arena with a "big stick", a set of lockpicks and other accessories of "power diplomacy", the Reagan Administration resorted to the traditional ploy of professional criminals and cried out at the top of its voice: "Stop thief!", that is to say, terrorist.
Speaking before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in March 1981, US Stale Secretary Alexander Haig announced that the Soviet Union and other socialist countries ran special camps in their territories to train thousands of terrorists from various parts of the world. But such camps do not
~^^1^^ UN General Assembly. 15 Session. Resolutions, 1960, New York, 1960, p. 67.
~^^1^^ Official Records of the General Assembly, TwentySeventh Session, Annexes, Document A/8969,
22IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
I. THE WORLD IN REVERSE
23exist in these countries. They can be found on the territory of ... the United States itself.
The France Press Agency reported that mercenaries trained in the United States for operations against "world communism" in various "hot spots", from Angola to Afghanistan and from El Salvador to the Middle East, had gathered near Phoenix, Arizona.
Recently, a big camp was found in Florida where well-armed terrorists learned from American instructors elements of hand-to-hand combat. Their Vietnam-veteran commander held passports from different countries, including Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. According to Le Monde, these terrorists were Nicaraguan or Cuban emigres trained by the CIA for operations in their own countries.
Additionally, the CIA conducts overt and officially authorised subversive and terrorist operations. In 1977, the U.S. News & World Report said that between 1961 and 1976 the CIA carried out about 900 major covert operations against ``unwelcome'' statesmen and governments.
And is there any difference between camps where mercenaries are trained and from where they will be secretly sent to foreign territories, and a government-run centre for the rapid deployment force designed for armed intervention in other countries' affairs and sanctioned by the US President? In both cases the actions are nothing but crimes, violence or terror. Once again the ``stop-thief'' call betrays the culprit.
It has been known for years now that as soon as a nation launches a struggle against a corrupt regime or an aggression against its sovereignty and territorial integrity, the world is shaken by heartrending cries about "Moscow's intrigues". As soon as a country embarks on a path of radical socioeconomic transformations it is accused of "submis-
sion" to the Soviet Union. And every time the Soviet Union and other socialist countries help in rebuffing foreign reaction, this help is interpreted as "Soviet interference''.
Consolidated independence of newly-free states does not suit imperialists. It is the fear of losing key positions in strategically important regions of the world as well as markets and sources of raw materials rather than international terrorism that causes US monopolists' "burning anxiety". Seeking to avenge their recent defeats and to reverse or at least hinder revolutionary liberation movements, US imperialists returned to the ``big-stick'' policy at the turn of the 1980s.
``Adventurism," emphasised Leonid Brezhnev at the 26th CPSU Congress, "and a readiness to gamble with the vital interests of humanity for narrow and selfish ends---this is what has emerged in a particularly bare-faced form in the policy of the more aggressive imperialist circles.... Indeed, they have set out to achieve the unachievable---to set up a barrier to progressive changes in the world, and to again become the rulers of the peoples' destiny." *
Deliberately juggling with and distorting facts, Western propaganda lists among the supporters of ``terrorism'' left-wing forces and progressive social and political movements and organisations. This enables the ruling circles of the imperialist powers to justify anti-popular policies of social repression and to try to attack the democratic achievements won by the working people in the capitalist countries.
For Washington the world is very simple: it has never seen genocide in Vietnam, Israel's aggression
~^^1^^ Documents and Resolutions. The 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, p. 27,
24IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
against the Arabs, SAVAK---the CIA-nurtured Shah's Gestapo, thousands of people tortured to death in Chile and Paraguay, in South Korea and Haiti. History has been ``cleansed'' of the adventuristic assault against Cuba, intervention in Kampuchea and of the raids by CIA mercenaries against Angola.
But there are plenty of ``terrorists'' in the world. It is they who fight to liberate the Arab lands from Israeli occupation, African countries from racist regimes, and Latin American states from bloody fascist dictatorships. And all of them are Moscow's, or at least Cuba's, ``agents''.
How can law and order be kept or, better still, enforced in this world? No problem. Three things are needed: a sure hand, a "world sheriff", and an international police corps. But to whom can the civilised---Western, of course---world entrust this difficult but noble task? Naturally, to the USA, to its military power, its nuclear sword, to its rapid deployment force.
Talk about international terrorism is nothing but a clumsy attempt to provide alibis for those who pursue a course of arbitrary rule, diktat and force in international relations, those who have promoted international terrorism to a state policy.
1. "Crisis Is a Time of Extremes"
The geographical area of political terror fully coincides with that of social and national oppression. Of late, political terror in the West has assumed unbelievable dimensions: a wave of political assassinations, explosions, kidnappings, armed raids into offices of political parties and organisations, arsons, street clashes, and acts of vandalism have swept capitalist countries. International relations as well as inter-state contacts and ties have also been affected by extremists' activities hampering international exchange and agreements on complex problems.
Political violence is deeply rooted in the presentday capitalist society. It is an ugly and monstrous creature brought to life by the world of injustice and inequality. Mass terrorism becomes especially active during periods of aggravated social tensions and deepening crises. We speak here of a general crisis affecting all aspects of capitalist public life ---economics, politics, culture, morals.
It is during the periods of escalating social crises when acts of reckless individuals and provocateurs, backed by forces of reaction, develop into a formidable social phenomenon which is employed by the ruling classes in their attempts to block the way of imminent social transformations. The 1970s turned out to be such a period for the capitalist world.
26IN THE GRIP OP TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
27L'Humanite wrote: "In the past decade `black' [fascist---A.G] as well as `red' [pseudo-- revolutionary---A.G.] terrorism intervened as a political factor each time serious upheavals threatened to shift the political axis to the left." i
Summing up the latest developments in Italy, a group of Italian political leaders anxiously stated that terrorism "had reappeared with all its aggressiveness and ability for provocations, with a strategy aimed at initiating a chain of murders, violence, a spiral of confrontations, and at creating pretexts for repressions. Thus, terrorism and armed violence occur on a wide scale and acquire a very alarming aspect.''^^2^^
The 1970s witnessed an escalated activity of various extreme right, semi-fascist as well as anarchist, Trotskyist and Maoist groupings that had lost their influence and much of their following in the previous years. A number of new extremist organisations made their appearance during the same period.
During that period, terrorists were responsible for a succession of cruel and bloody crimes which claimed hundreds of human lives. Terrorist acts by ultra-rightists---from an explosion in the Agricultural Bank of Milan in 1969 to monstrous crimes in Bologna, Munich and Paris in 1980---were accompanied by and intertwined with ``left''-- extremist crimes. Thus, the combined efforts of ``left'' and right terrorists, backed by influential political forces, launched a sinister spiral of political violence in capitalist countries in the 1970s.
There is hardly a single capitalist country which has not witnessed this dangerous phenomenon. Brought to life by common socio-economic causes
~^^1^^ L'Humanite, January 15, 1981.
~^^2^^ Terrorism? et democratic, Paris, 1978, p. 88,
and propped up by capitalist integration processes, individual acts of political terror fuse into a single phenomenon contaminating the whole capitalist world.
Affecting the major centres of political and economic power of the capitalist system, terrorism does not stop at the US and West European borders: various terrorist and extremist organisations are very active in Japan too. Neither could many developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America escape terrorism. It should be kept in mind that imperialist propaganda, equating struggle for national liberation with terrorist activity, goes out of its way to present this part of the world as the main source of political terrorism that is spreading throughout the globe.
Later we will discuss these groundless and unworthy accusations. For now we will simply note that there is a direct link between the objectively conditioned and legitimate struggle of developing nations for their liberation and the activities of local extremist and terrorist organisations.
Open political violence in the newly-free countries stems either from extremely reactionary forces and anti-popular dictatorial regimes or from ideologies of right or ``left'' extremism, borrowed from imperialist colonial powers or Maoist China. The closer a country is tied to imperialist interests, the stronger is its political and economic dependence on Western powers and the greater the cultural and ideological influence of the West, the more probable become the chances for political violence to penetrate its public life. This is especially true of countries with US-backed dictatorships in Latin America and of the repressive regimes in Iran (prior to the 1979 revolution), South Korea and Pakistan which are subordinate to US strategic interests,
28IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
It. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
29Bourgeois political scientists and the mass media which serve the interests of monopolies are using every means possible to camouflage the real cause behind the escalation of terrorism---the deepening crisis of the capitalist world. They deliberately play down the fact that it is capitalist society that, being inseparable from social oppression, constantly generates social violence within its bounds and proliferates it elsewhere.
Le Monde writes that "crises occur during a time of extremes. In addition, today there is a mass of declassed elements desperate for action." J This socially explosive mass is becoming critical as the capitalist society finds itself bogged deeper and ; deeper in an economic, political and spiritual crisis with no way out.
In the 1970s, a new aggravation of economic and j social contradictions within the capitalist system * further worsened the working people's position and considerably increased the number of jobless and \ other society outcasts. This provided a rich breeding grotind for extremist moods. The myths of cri; sis-free development of capitalism, of the eradica; tion of class antagonisms proved to be completely false. The workers' well-being noticeably deteriora; ted as did the social status of the ``middle'' class whose numbers had been increasing: civil servants, professionals, office workers, industrial engineers i and technicians, and students. The crisis brought ii them hardships and privations, causing discontent i and social despair.
Says Alfredo Reichlin of the Italian Communist I Party leadership: "Terrorism is an extreme expresi sion of the crisis of the industrialised capitalist society in its present phase. Its social base rests on the movement of the outcast and discontented
layers who do not believe in a mass democratic and political struggle." i
For their reinforcement extremist groups mainly depend on students, intellectuals, working and jobless youth, petty and middle bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, various national and racial minorities and immigrant workers.
For a long time now, the process of capitalist development has been accompanied by varying manifestations of petty-bourgeois revolutionarism, including extremism and terrorism, which escalated as the crisis grew deeper. As noted by Lenin, "a petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries".^^2^^
The aggravation of the most acute contradictions between monopoly bourgeoisie and non-proletarian groups of the working people is followed by sporadic growth of petty-bourgeois revolutionary and extremist moods. Socially, extremism draws on petty-bourgeois intellectuals and marginal social groups. The very logic of social development pushes the oppressed ``intermediate'' strata of the population, exploited and ruined by monopolies, to social protest, to an alliance with the working class in its struggle for a new social system guaranteeing freedom from war, oppression and exploitation. But seized by despair, they can easily fall victim to fascist organisations or ``lel't"-wing extremists.
Both ``left''- and right-wing political extremism is nothing more than specific and perverted response on the part of certain members of numerous ``middle'' and ``intermediate'' strata to a sharp deterioration of their material and social status, heavier domination by monopoly capital, swelling bu-
Le Monde, November 9-10, 1980.
~^^1^^ L'Humanite, April 11, 1978.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 32.
30IN THE GRIP OP TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
31reaucratisation, and growing authoritarianism of the state apparatus.
At the same time, the protest, anti-capitalist by its nature and origin, is not always conscious. As a result, the individualistic protest, accompanied by distrust of and prejudice towards the organised struggle of the working class and the working people, often evolves into an irrational and all-- destructive mutiny.
Especially susceptible to extremist theory and practice are certain groups of radical intellectuals, youth and students. They keenly react to injustice and contradictions of present-day capitalist society, but fail to realise that it is solely through joint action with the working class that they can eliminate injustice and safeguard their ideals and interests.
Joining social life, young people in the West run into obstacles and difficulties. They feel as if they are confronting a society which rejects them.
The desocialisation of youth and their failure to find a place in the job market turns a considerable number of young people into a reserve of rightand ``left''-wing extremists. It causes them to break away from the rest of society, and sets them against the whole political structure, democratic forces and working-class and trade union movements.
Growing numbers of youth see how the general crisis affecting both the economy and the political structure of capitalist society turns politics into political intrigues while various bourgeois and reformist parties replace each other at the helm with no economic improvement for the working masses. All this generates mistrust of politics and politicians and indifference towards elections and the activities of political parties.
A considerable portion of Western youth find themselves in a dead-lock. Trying to find a way
out, those young people who have lost confidence in the traditional political struggle and public activity to change the society and their own lives turn to terror.
Having abandoned the hope of seeing the existing political and state structures change their social status in one way or another, and being reluctant to believe in the working masses' revolutionary struggle for social transformations, the outcasts resort to violence as the only means of reminding society of their existence and problems, if not irrevocably changing it.
2. The Sway of Violence
The specific development of present-day Western society also ``helps'' the youth to turn to terror. The underprivileged youth more frequently regard violence as their first social experience: some of the young people regard it as a most suitable means to solve social conflicts. Lawyers note the trend of growing violence for ideological and political reasons and the spread of crime connected with underground movements and different cults and sects.
A crisis, or, as sociologists sometimes put it, a ``deficit'' of ideals among the younger generation in capitalist countries, is inseparable from the deepening moral and political crisis of the whole of society. It causes many young people, bereaved of any real prospects for their future, to resort to destruction as a sole objective of their existence.
Violence, totally senseless and useless, gains in scope in the capitalist world, especially in the United States which is trying to play the role of the "free world`s'' leader and the most zealous defender of "human rights''.
32IN THE GRIP OP TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OP THE PROBLEM
33Warreu E. Burger, US Chief Justice, bitterly admits that the Americans have become hostages in their own country. According to him, crime and fear of becoming a victim have stricken the American society which is unable to keep streets and schools safe and to protect the homes of American citizens.
William H. Webster, FBI Director, admited that in 1980 alone the "violence level" in the USA jumped 13 per cent. Violence has become an integral part of the social, moral and psychological environment in which millions of Americans live. Even President Reagan was forced to recognise that. "Just during the time you and I are together today," he said in September 1981, "at least one person will be murdered, 9 women will be raped, 67 other Americans will be robbed, 97 will be seriously assaulted and 389 homes will be burglarised. This all will happen in the next 30 minutes." d The figures are growing from year to year, and there is one to sum up the rest: in the past decade, violent crime reported to police has increased by 59 per cent.
Speaking before the Building Trade Unions' conference in Washington on March 30, 1981, Reagan voiced his concern over the wave of crime sweeping the United States. Several minutes after his speech he was wounded, thus becoming the ninth US President to be a victim of an assassination attempt. Four of the US Presidents were killed: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963.
But as a Hollywood actor, Reagan himself advocated violence. Indicative enough, the National Rifle Association of America welcomed the outcome
of the presidential election campaign, pointing out that even as the Republican presidential nominee, Reagan had protested against federal arms sale control. It is interesting to note that John Hinckley, who made the assassination attempt on Reagan, bought his popular "Saturday night special" in a Dallas gun shop and that he had hung in his room a picture of his idol, Lee Harvey Oswald, J. F. Kennedy's assassin.
According to the FBI, there are about a dozen terrorist organisations in the USA which commit murders for political reasons and intimidate and blackmail their ``opponents''.
The leading groups include the Ku Klux Klan, various Nazi groups, bands of Cuban emigres, followers of Croatian fascists, and others. Zionist extremists in the US also conduct criminal activities. The Jewish Defense League and other reactionary Jewish organisations are not new in the United States but lately they have stepped up their unruly activity against progressive forces, organised brazen anti-Soviet provocations and terrorist acts.
The federal authorities do little, if anything, to stop right-wing extremists, while they act as a dissent-oppressing tool towards progressive organisations.
In periods of strained social tension, the bourgeoisie supplements traditional forms of economic and political coercion and ideological brainwashing of the masses with sheer violence, calling in the police or troops to crush strikes and break up political demonstrations (for example, in the summer of 1980 French warships were used against fishermen on strike).
In addition to using the state's repressive machinery, monopolies set up their own armed ^overseers and guards. One of these hired ``gorillas'' shot in mid-1977 Pierre Maitre, a picketing strike member
3-0246
Le Monde, October 1, 1981.
34IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
li. THE ROOTS OP THE PROBLEM
35of the French Confederation Generale du Travail. In the United States, policemen are as quick to whip out a gun as professional criminals are. Within the past ten years, US law-enforcement officers killed 6,000 Americans between 10 and 80 years of age. Blacks account for 45 per cent of those victimised by the police.
As reported by the Inquiry, for many years now non-white districts of Los Angeles have become virtual "war zones" with police units playing the role of an "occupation army" and terrorising the local population. The magazine writes that policemen shoot first and ask questions later, and cites numerous murders committed by "limbs of the law''.
In 1967 alone, 32,000 troops fought demonstrators in American cities, while in April 1968, after Martin Luther King's assassination, protesters against racial discrimination and social injustice ran into 70,000 soldiers (with another 40,000 standing by in combat readiness). The massacre perpetrated by police and National Guardsmen against the black population of Miami shook the city in 1980.
In the summer of 1981, the British police were engaged in real combat actions against the population of Liverpool, London and other cities. Summing up the two-day battle in Liverpool, The Times wrote that 150 wounded people were taken to the Liverpool Royal Hospital, while the total number of wounded amounted to almost 250. Several dozen people were arrested. The paper quoted the Labour leader in the Liverpool municipality as saying that the root-cause of the unrest was the national policy of the present government, which deprived of work 40 per cent of the local able-bodied population. The Guardian wrote that the riots in various parts of the country might have different reasons but their cause was the same: a society which ruthlessly sends more and more young people to the
social dump generates discontent and brings pa-
• tience to the breaking point.
I A night of "national disgrace" is the name given j by the British press to the events in Southhall, a
• London borough, which in the summer of 1981 I became a scene of brutality committed by the police and neo-Nazis from the National Front against the emigrants from former British colonies.
The London newspapers reported that though the police had been informed about a provocation readied by the neo-Nazis against the Southhall population it did nothing to stop the unruly racists. On the contrary, policemen were also active in beating the coloured youth. As the British press noted, fascists and the police acted hand-in-hand.
The West Berlin police were especially brutal in treating the demonstrators protesting against the local authorities' housing policy: 1,800 policemen armed with water cannons, heavy construction machines and armoured personnel carriers assaulted eight buildings occupied by homeless youth.
Klaus Rattau, a 19-year-old youth, was killed when the police attacked the demonstrators. Demonstrator-erected barricades blazed and fierce clashes between protesters and heavily armed police raged in different parts of the city late into the night. Indignant at the police terror, thousands of West Berliners marched in grave silence through the central streets with torches and black flags.
Bourgeois sociologists believe that it is the greater totalitarianism of present-day capitalist society, the growing bureaucratisation of public life, and the invasion of privacy by various secret services which wiretap, open letters, set up dossiers and electronic files that push desperate people into terrorist actions. Hannah Arendt, a British researcher, writes that "the greater the bureaucratisation of public life, the greater will be the attraction of vio-
3*
36IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
37lence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted." ^^1^^
Isolated, feeling trapped and helpless in the face of an omnipotent, indifferent and ruthless authoritarian state, the greater number of young people join extremist groups where they are drugged into an illusion of action and ersatz collectivism.
tories and offices. It is evident that this society is synonymous with violence, injuries, ruined lives, and crippled youth." *
And finally, there is yet another important factor, namely, violence made by major imperialist powers a principle of their foreign policies. Terror, genocide, aggression and mass repressions are inherent in the daily foreign policy practices of imperialism.
Oswiecim and Hiroshima, Songmi and Kampuchea witnessed horrifying terrorism practised as state policy. Having become characteristic of the 20th century, terror as a means of solving minor and major, domestic and international problems seriously affected the young. Writes Hannah Arendt: "This is the first generation to grow up under the shadow of the atom bomb. They inherited from their parents' generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics: they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war.''^^2^^ In this context, extremists' terrorist acts acquire a ring of state terrorism. But terrorists' violence can by no means be compared with the violence of the bomber pilot "who flies miles above a country he may never have set foot in and releases bombs of terrible power and sophistication without feeling either anger or deep personal conviction".~^^3^^
Various forms of political violence are being used more extensively by ruling circles of bourgeois society to stem the processes undermining the foundations of the capitalist world. They strive to hinder
3. Fear-Generated Terror
While stating how seriously ill their violenceridden society is, the bourgeois press and political analysts try to avoid drawing the logical conclusion that capitalism is mainly responsible for political violence in public life and international relations.
It is the capitalist system based on the exploitation of man by man and on a ramified mechanism of economic coercion that accepts violence as law in public life.
Georges Marchais, General Secretary of the French Communist Party, writes: "We Communists know that a regime based on the domination of one class over the other and the whole of society is a regime that generates violence. We explain that during the crisis of capitalism the main violence is that exercised by the minority preserving its profits.
``Each of us knows this violence. It manifests itself in a thousand various forms in work, studies and in life marked by authoritarianism and oppression. Guards, hired by employers, and special brigades encroach on union rights. Every month tens of thousands of working people are fired from fac-
~^^1^^ L'Humanite, March 31, 1979.
~^^2^^ Hannah Arendt, Op. cit., p. 14.
~^^1^^ Hannah Arendt, On Violence, London, 1970, p. 81.
~^^3^^ David Apter and jamets 'loll, Anarchism Today, New York, 1972, p. 51.
38IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
II. THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM
30the development and cohesion of left-wing forces and the growing prestige and influence of the communist parties. In order to maintain capitalist `` order'' the bourgeoisie is being forced more frequently to resort to provoking disorder and to seeking help from criminals.
Political terrorism and right- and ``left''-wing extremism both reflect and promote escalating activity by reactionaries. Such activity is widespread in the present-day capitalist world. The financial olygarchy's long-established propensity for violence and military dictatorships as well as fascist regimes can be explained to a large extent by the fact that, during times of economic and social crises, these regimes seem to be more reliable in preserving big business' rule.
The extreme reactionaries' favourite tactic is to fan up tension, anxiety and fear through terrorist acts as well as economic and social chaos. Such a situation enables the military who sympathise with the ultra-rightists to usurp power under the pretext of "restoring order''.
Afraid of irrevocable historical changes sweeping the world, the forces of reaction and aggression do not cease their political and ideological sabotage, resorting to the most extreme adventuristic actions, including wholesale bloodshed, torture and terror. It is appropriate to quote here Frederick Engels' assessment of the nature of bourgeois terror: "It is the rule of people who themselves are terrorstricken. Terror implies mostly useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves." J
The use of terror in international relations and in domestic policy is an alarming symptom show-
ing that, in a bid to maintain the order that suits it and to achieve world hegemony, imperialism at the present stage of its development is betting on fascist ideology and practice, on bloody violence and aggression.
~^^1^^ Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1975, pp. 233-34.
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
411. The Rightists Sound Assembly Call
Recently, political life in the capitalist world has visibly taken an alarming turn to the right.
Right-wing political terrorism is traditionally used by the bourgeoisie to preserve and maintain its dictatorship. Amidst growing repressions against left-wing forces and with the connivance of state authorities, right-extremist groupings and underground neo-fascist organisations step up their activity.
At the turn of the 1980s, the imperialists chose to worsen the international situation, abandon the principles of detente, reinstate the cold war and a period of military confrontation with the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Treaty states, and start a new round of the arms race. For these reasons, imperialism needs greater political support from the state, and will stop at nothing in its attempt to overcome the opposition of democratic public in creating such a socio-political force. And to achieve all this imperialists rely primarily, and with good reason, on neo-fascists.
The Western ruling circles and bourgeois propaganda deliberately play down the scope and significance of the activity of the right-extremist organisations which are responsible for explosions in Bologna, Munich and Paris and which kill dozens of people and mirror the desire of the "brown order"
advocates to coordinate their actions and spread them throughout the world.
It is estimated that neo-fascists are active in 60 countries which account for over one-third of the states in the world. At first sight, the camp of ``black'' terrorism comprises rather a motley collection of movements: the racist National Front in Britain and Gray Wolves in Turkey, the Hoffmann Military-Sports Group in West Germany and the Ku Klux Klan in the USA, the legal pro-fascist Italian Social Movement and the recently banned terrorist neo-Nazi La Federation de Faction nationale et europeenne (FANE) in France. Nevertheless, despite significant national differences in ideologies and tactics of these right-extremist organisations, there are a number of factors which give every reason to believe that there has been an international revival of right extremism and terrorism that is inherent in the capitalist world as a whole.
As Leonid Brezhnev has pointed out, "a bloody wave of right-extremist terror has today literally swept many states in various parts of the world. Prominent, including the highest state, political and religious leaders are chosen as targets of the terror. For all the diversity of specific circumstances, the common goal can still be easily traced! to destabilise political life in respective countries, suppress democracy and create conditions which would enable the most reactionary dictatorial regimes to come to power."'
Socially, the escalation of right-wing extremism is undoubtedly conditioned by the deepening crisis of the capitalist system, accompanied today by a grave exacerbation of the international situation caused by the imperialists' aggressive actions.
Pravda, June 10, 1981.
42IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
43Right-wing extremists hope to eradicate such evils of society as the crisis and alienation of the individual, growing social despair and other manifestations of society's degradation through a return to authoritarian rule.
On August 26, 1928, the 6th Congress of Comintern adopted a document "On the International Situation and the Tasks of the Communist International" which read: "A characteristic feature of fascism is that due to upheavals in the capitalist economy and as a consequence of specific objective and subjective circumstances the bourgeoisie uses ---in order to obstruct revolutionary development--- the discontent of the petty and middle urban and rural bourgeoisie and even of certain sections of the declassed proletariat to create a reactionary mass movement. Fascism resorts to direct violence in order to crush workers' and poor peasants' organisations and to seize power." *
The resolution of the 7th Comintern Congress, adopted on August 20, 1935, noted that the ruling bourgeoisie "is increasingly seeking salvation in fascism, in establishment of the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinist and the most imperialist elements in finance capital".~^^2^^
Modern successors of fascists make it clear that they are pursuing the same goals. They follow the sinister footsteps left by fascists in the 1920s-1930s and use the same methods: terror, provocations, and fear to cause despair, helplessness, disillusionment in traditional bourgeois institutions and to pave the
way for military dictatorships. In recent years, neofascist provocations---bomb explosions, raids against offices of left-wing organisations, assaults on democratic leaders, and so on---have become almost everyday events in nearly all major capitalist countries.
On August 15, 1980, after the Bologna explosion, International Herald Tribune wrote that "the ostensible aim of the right is to create sufficiently chaotic conditions for the people to demand a new Mussolini to restore order''.
Clemente Graziani, leader of an underground fascist organisation, wrote in his Neo-Fascist Notebook, seized by police in 1970, that in order to win, feelings of powerlessness, despair and complete submissiveness should be generated among the masses. The most ruthless terror is the main means of achieving this goal. Any moral and human principles should be cast aside and the main means should be to kill, to kill old people, women and children.
In implementing this strategy, Italian neo-- fascists have lately committed heinous crimes. The activities of right extremists are closely interwoven with those of the criminal underworld. "According to Italian secret services, neo-fascists and the mafia are closely collaborating in international smuggling, helping each other `recycle' the money they get through kidnapping hostages." *
Right-wing terrorists employ social disorder, fear and uncertainty about the future which today affect more and more people in capitalist countries. At the same time, they utilise the class fear of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, which is caused by the successes of the Left, the scope of the workingclass movement, and a panic generated by irres-
~^^1^^ Verbatim Report of the 6th Comintern Congress, IsSuo 6. Moscow. 1929, p. 65 (in Russian).
* Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. Resolutions and Decisions, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935, p. 13,
Le Salr, August 6, 1980.
44TN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
45ponsible acts of ``red'' extremists proclaiming their affiliation with left-wing forces.
American sociologist Richard Clutterbuck writes that the ``left''-wing extremists "accept that there is no 'revolutionary situation' in these [ industrialised capitalist---A.G.] countries at present, and that they must therefore go through a fascist stage first".d Using this logic, the leftists promote an alliance of reactionary forces and a rightward shift of those sections of the population which are otherwise opposed to fascism.
Recent sociological studies have revealed an extremely dangerous growth of conservative and antileft sentiments among certain segments of the population. The West German press has noticed an alarming paradox; the kidnapping of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by ``red'' terrorists from the Red Army Faction (RAF) caused widespread indignation among the people of West Germany while the kidnapping by neo-Nazis ex-Nazi hangman Herbert Kappler from a Rome hospital was enthusiastically welcomed.
Feeling that their cause is gaining support, neoNazis are attempting a political counter-offensive against the Left.
``Communists, in 1945 you killed our fathers. We will pluck your feathers, we will settle accounts with you. Long live the brown world order! Our bombs will explode until you are all gone. We will shed blood!" read a leaflet found at the site of an explosion organised by an ultra-right French group.~^^2^^
Today, right-wing extremists more frequently prefer overt actions and provocations rather than damnations and threats.
2. A Criminal Record
Terrorism, especially right-wing terrorism, has become particularly widespread in Italy, where there are over 20 neo-fascist organisations. In 1980, the number of victims of right-wing terror exceeded several times that of those who fell at the hands of ``left'' terrorists.
Six years separated two heinous crimes committed by ``black'' terrorists in Italy: in 1974, a bomb they planted in the Italicus express went off 15 kilometres short of the Bologna railway terminal killing 12 people. Had there not been an unexpected delay en route, the explosion would have occurred in the terminal. In August 1980, a bomb at the same terminal killed 76 people and wounded over 200. Italy had not seen anything like these terrible crimes since the end of the Second World War.
Prior to official identification of the perpetrators of the bombing Francesco Cossiga, speaking before the Italian Senate, defined the political nature of the crime saying that "by its repulsive logic of extermination this crime reminds us of the tragedies for which responsibility rests with Nazi and fascist barbarians".i According to Gossiga, "unlike left-wing terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it promotes panic and impusive reaction".~^^2^^
The criminals' political affiliation was not hard to establish: today, as in the 1960s when the official neo-fascist Italian Social Movement was followed by such underground groups as Ordine Nuovo, Anno Zero, and Lotta di Popolo, their criminal method is the same---massacre---as is their goal:
~^^1^^ R. Clutterbuck, Op. cit., p. 92.
~^^2^^ La Monde, November 9-10, 1980.
~^^1^^ Le Soir, August 6, 1980.
~^^2^^ International Herald Tribune, August 7, 1980.
THE GRIP OF TERROR
Hi. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
47to cause panic, destabilise public life, provoke a fascist coup and to impose an authoritarian regime.
Members of the neo-fascist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, who are assumed responsible for the 1980 terrorist attack in Bologna, consider themselves to be a full heir of Mussolini's storm troopers. They sing fascist songs and greet their leaders with "Heil Hitler''.
It is also not by chance that Bologna was chosen a target by the right-wing terrorists. The city has been ruled by the Left since the war and the neofascists were striking against them.
The revival of the Italian Right is usually traced back to the late 1960s, when the Ordine Nuovo and the National Vanguard committed their first terrorist acts at the University of Rome.
The Piazza Fontana crime in Milan on December 12, 1969 was the first in a sequence of attempts upon human lives. Within five years there were nearly 400 attempts. But it was the Piazza Fontana explosion, which claimed 16 lives, that signalled the beginning of the rightists' "strategy of tension" which has subsequently drawn the country into an abyss of violence and terror.
Soon new ultra-right organisations emerged: the Goebbels Group of Action, the Mussolini Team of Action, the Revolutionary Grouping of Action, Anno Zero (a restructured version of the Ordine Nuovo, out of existence since 1973) and the Ordine Nero formed in 1974.
At the same time, there was an escalation of crime: arms trade, bank robberies and kidnappings which provided financing for the neo-fascists. In October 1974, Italian Defence Minister Giulio Andreotti said that since 1970 the ultra-rightists attempted three coups, the most serious of which was masterminded by the "Black Prince", Valerio Borghese.
In 1972, right-wing terrorists killed Police Commissioner Calabresi, who was investigating the "Feltrinelli case".i To mislead the investigation, the rightists tried to implicate ``left''-wing extremists. Similarly, in 1974 the man who attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Mariano Rumor was proclaimed an ``anarchist'', though he was a criminal specially trained by Italian officers affiliated with the neofascist La Rosa dei venti. That provocation was meant as a signal for a military coup.
Soon, other provocations followed, one of which, a bomb explosion during a left demonstration in Brescia in 1974, claimed nine lives. All in all, over 200 people died at neo-fascists' hands in the last decade.
Despite the growing danger from the extreme right, the Italian judicial system and the press focus their attention on exposing leftist underground groups. The August 18, 1980 issue of Newsweek reported that "while the Rome government has mounted a well-publicised crackdown on left-wing terrorists, the neo-fascists have largely been left alone''.
Meanwhile, neo-fascism in Italy is becoming more daring and unscrupulous. It escalates violence and terror and infiltrates state agencies, especially the police, various security services and even parliament.
Along with extremists signing their bombs, people from the Italian Social Movement, which has representatives in parliament, also engage in killings.
Mayor Renato Zangheri of Bologna says that the goal of those supporting and directing the terrorists
~^^1^^ Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher known for his leftist views, founder of an extremist organisation. Causes of his death were never determined.
48IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
is clear: to throw Italy back to the dark period of fascism, to force the people to capitulate, to break up the democratic movement and to block social progress.
Over 70 neo-Nazi groups are active in West Germany. According to the Ministry of the Interior, between 1976 and 1979 the number of neo-fascist groups in that country more than doubled. The Department for Safeguarding the Constitution estimates their membership and following at 17,300. But this figure does not fully reveal the neo-Nazis' potential.
The West German Ministry of the Interior admits a "growing attraction to violence" which has recently become evident in the country. Some 1,000 terrorist acts were recorded in 1980 alone, among them more frequent raids on Bundeswehr depots to seize modern weapons. The existence of numerous revanchist societies and unions of ex-servicemen, including SS-men, are tolerated by authorities who do not object to the neo-Nazis controlling over 100 publishing houses, printing approximately 200,000 copies of weekly publications, and running about two dozen paramilitary youth camps to train modern storm troopers.
The well-informed Der Spiegel had the following to say about neo-Nazi activities in West Germany: "The police are sure that, like anarchists, ultrarightists have created their underground long ago. Under tight conspiracy and false names, right-wing radicals, organised throughout the Federal Republic, mastermind actions which no longer have anything in common with verbal radicalism. Maintaining liaison through code-numbered messengers, neoNazis are stepping up their activities. Ultra-- rightists meet in the Kampfbund der Deutschen Soldaten (Frankfort on the Main), Stahlhelm, in military-sports and paramilitary groups. They hang
posters and write their slogans at night. They stockpile weapons---pistols, rifles, hand grenades, cartridges---'just in case'. They terrorise people, commit arson and detonate bombs.... There is ample evidence that the rightists often cross the boundary between verbal radicalism and a criminal act.''^^1^^
Until recently, the so-called Hoffmann MilitarySports Group acted with impunity in West Germany. A 1976 report by the Ministry of the Interior declared that the group was engaged in military training and acted as a strike force for the entire neo-Nazi movement in the country. Using a castle near Nuremberg as a base, members of the group, armed with modern weapons and donned in Nazi uniforms, carried on "military exercises" and rode in Wehrmacht trucks. The group's political programme demanded an end to the republic and the creation of an authoritarian state under a fuehrer. The Munich explosion in 1980, which killed 12 and wounded 215 people, was one step on the road to implement the group's programme.
The terrorists were apprehended. The federal prosecutor initiated an investigation which suddenly took a strange turn: even prior to its completion the Minister of the Interior hastened to announce that the bomb was exploded by an individual, and soon Karl-IIeinz Hoffmann, the group's leader, and five other members of the group were released Irom custody. Why? For lack of direct evidence, said the spokesman for the prosecution.
According to incomplete data collected by the Ministry of the Interior, over 1,500 neo-fascist acts were officially recorded in 1980 (in 1978 the figure was 922). In 104 cases force was used as opposed to 52 such cases in 1978. The same source shows that 500 weapons were seized from neo-Nazis.
~^^1^^ Der Spiegel, August 9, 1976. 4-0246
50IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
51H. Pensky, the SDPG expert on internal security in Bundestag, said in August 1979 that the " neoNazis of Germany are stockpiling their arsenals with weapons on a scale that hardly anyone could imagine. This is confirmed by irrefutable evidence. The police and the state security service have uncovered and confiscated from rightist radicals weapons in sufficient quantities to supply an army to fight a civil war.... It is known that the neo-Nazis are ever more determined to use force and that the threats they make today could turn into overt terrorism at any time. Those who make bombs are just awaiting the opportunity to explode them." *
In October 1981, members of the so-called People's Socialist Movement of Germany provoked a bloody clash with the police, again in Munich. The Presidium of the Alliance of Persons Persecuted under Nazism emphasised the openly terrorist nature of the People's Socialist Movement. In its declaration published in Frankfort on the Main, it reported that the neo-Nazi group was responsible for organised killings and dozens of armed assaults on democrats and anti-fascists. They also favoured proliferation of racism and close contacts with fascist organisations in other countries. The declaration stressed that though the Movement had been active for ten years, the authorities pretend that they lack sufficient evidence to take radical counter-measures.
As if to stress the international character of the offensive launched by right-wing extremists, a week after the Munich bomb explosion in October 1980, the French neo-Nazi group---La Federation de 1' action nationale et europeenne detonated a bomb near a Paris synagogue on Rue Copernic which killed four people and wounded 16.
The democratic forces in France have repeatedly
pointed out the dangerous escalation of neo-fascist activities. According to the Henry Curielle Association, neo-fascists committed 150 terrorist acts between June 1979 and September 1980. Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a Socialist deputy (now a minister), noted that "terroristic acts being committed by extreme rightist, Nazi or neo-fascist groups are gradually becoming commonplace in our political life".i The September 1980 issue of the French neo-fascist magazine Notre Europe wrote that "we will continue our actions directed against anything [we do not like---A.G.] because our struggle is legitimate and just, and because national-- socialism is the only hope for our race which is in jeopardy".^^2^^ Despite these defiant declarations, numerous acts of violence, blackmail and provocations committed by right-wing extremists, the authorities have done nothing to stem their activities. Moreover, it has been revealed that many French policemen sympathised and even participated in neofascist groups.
``In Paris," wrote International Herald Tribune, "the authorities apparently knew, but didn't care, that 30 policemen were members of one fascist group. A good many middle-class parents have also known, but apparently not cared, that in some Paris schools---some of the `best' schools---fascism had become the daring thing to do.. . . Yet it is probably better for everyone that it now has come into the open and those who have connived at it must now confront the consequences of what they have done.''~^^3^^
Great Britain, where about 200 neo-fascist organisations and groups have emerged since the war,
~^^1^^ Panorama, August 18, 1980.
~^^2^^ Le Monde, September 5, 1980.
~^^3^^ International Herald Tribune, October 9, 1981.
Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst, August 22, 1979.
4*
52IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
53can serve as an excellent example of escalating right-wing terrorism. The largest among them are the British Movement and the National Front which appeared in 1967 through the merger of the British National Party and the League of Empire Loyalists. The National Front, a successor to the Mosley fascist movement which was active in the 1930s, is connected with the conservative Monday Club, which The Guardian once equated with the American John Birch Society.
Smaller in size and less known is the League of St. George which is connected with the National Front and advocates the "positive side of nationalsocialism". The military-style Column-88 insists upon the creation of a single national-socialist party in Britain. United in the SS Wotan 18 group, adherents of Nazism are known for mailing packages with explosives to book shops selling progressive books. This list of such organisations is far from complete.
The rightists in Greece, Spain and Portugal have not accepted the collapse of the last European fascist regimes and dictatorships. In May 1981, a conspiracy of reactionary Greek officers was discovered to be plotting a coup d'etat and planning the restoration of the "black colonels'\thinspace" regime.
Not long before this act, on February 23-24, 1981, a group of Spanish Civil Guardsmen led by Lt.Col. Antonio Tejero Molina attempted a military coup by occupying the parliament building and detaining over 300 deputies and cabinet members as hostages. The pro-Franco military's aim was to set up a military government, to proclaim a state of emergency, revoke the constitution, introduce the death penalty, and to arrest political and trade union leaders. It should be noted that the Spanish rightists attempted their revenge for the defeat of Francoism precisely at the moment when neo-fascist organisa-
tions in other West European countries stepped up their activities, and ultra-conservatives in the USA gained government control.
According to Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, Spanish Socialist leader, the military hoped to take advantage of international tensions caused by the new US Administration's power politics. Moreover, certain members of the Reagan Administration maintained contacts with Spanish ultra-rightists and made it clear that they would not oppose the coup if it were a success.
The fiasco of the fascist coup in Spain did not dishearten its domestic and foreign right-extremist supporters. Attempts have been made to revive the Union Militar de Espana, an underground military organisation which prepared the way for Franco's take-over. The Spanish Sdbado Grdfico reported a Paris meeting (in April 1981) of rightist representatives from 19 countries, including West Germany, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, the Philippines, France, Italy and Spain. The topic of discussion was the preparation of a new anti-- government act by the Spanish reactionary military.
According to the magazine, the meeting reached an understanding that ultra-rightist activities would be coordinated in campaign to destabilise the situation in Spain. Among the other things, the campaign includes publication and dissemination of subversive leaflets and pamphlets among servicemen, and the creation in Spain of armed rightist groups. It also calls for ``black'' lists with the names of political, labour and public figures with progressive convictions as well as people favouring the process of democratisation.
The magazine also noted that the participants at the meeting decided to set up a special fund to render material aid to subversive elements in Spain
54IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
55and purchase weapons. Over 50,000,000 pesetas were raised as a first contribution.
The Portuguese ultra-rightists tried to use the abortive coup in Madrid for their own purposes. As Diario de Lisboa reported, in case of a successful outcome in Madrid Portuguese fascists planned an armed revolt in Lisbon. Most of those ready to take part in the fascist sally were members of such terrorist organisations as the Exercito de Libertacao de Portugal and the Movimento Democratico de Libertacao de Portugal.
In the spring of 1981, a new extreme rightist group, Commandos de 28 de maio appeared in Portugal. The organisation immediately made it known that it planned "the physical extermination" of Communist and Socialist leaders, members of the Revolutionary Council and of the progressive military.
During recent years, terrorism, especially rightwing terrorism, has affected political life in Turkey. Responsibility for the most serious crimes rests with the neo-fascist Nationalist Movement Party (NMP) led by Arpaslan Turkes. The Turkish paper Milliyet estimates that between 1971 and 1980 about 700 people fell victim to fascists from ultrarightist organisations. Extremists attacked offices of left-wing parties, democratic trade unions and educational establishments. In 1977, neo-fascists opened fire on a May Day demonstration in Istanbul, killing 40 people and wounding about 150. The neo-fascist-instigated bloody clashes in the city of Karaman Maras in late 1978 took 111 lives. It was found that the ultra-rightist terrorist, Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II and before that succeeded in killing the Milliyet editor-in-chief, also enjoyed neo-fascist and NMP support. The indictment read that the party received money from Nazi organisation and individuals
in the USA and other Western countries.
The wave of ultra-right radicalism is not confined to the European continent; racists' crimes became more frequent in the USA too. The murder of over 30 black children in Atlanta in 1981 can be cited as an example of inhuman violence and, simultaneously, of criminal indifference on the part of the authorities. Numerous national-socialist and neo-fascist organisations also stepped up their propaganda and activity. John Hinckley who tried to assassinate President Reagan belonged to one of them. And the Ku Klux Klan is setting up new camps to train professional terrorists.
The growing activity of the US ultra-rightists is to a considerable extent connected with the military-industrial complex which supports the rightists financially, materially and politically.
Here is how the U.S. News & World Report described American fascists' activity on November 7, 1977: "They wear brown shirts with swastikas and call themselves storm troopers. Many denounce Jews and non-whites and are involved in violence. And they are encouraged by a sudden interest in their spiritual leader---Adolf Hitler.
``These are the new American Nazis. Ten years after the death of its founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, the National Socialist Party has resurfaced in a score of cities across the U.S.''
At present, most members of American neo-Nazi groups belong to the Ku Klux Klan which, sociologists believe, is regaining its influence as a movement. The Ku Klux Klan is a unique organisation among US ultra-rightists. It is the oldest (since 1865) and most influential---especially in the South---organisation specialising in terror against blacks and other national minorities, and in the advocacy of frenzied racism and anti-communism. In 1980, Ku Klux Klan militants numbered 15,000
56IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
III. ARMIES OF DARKNESS
57(twice the 1978 number and ten times more than in 1974), with 100,000 sympathisers. And the Klan does not confine itself to the traditional "deep South". Today, it is spreading its activity to formerly liberal New England. Big business is encouraging right-wing extremists, and the monopoly press is giving wide publicity to their activities.
The US Department of Justice blamed 68 crimes committed in 1980 on neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan. Then returns of the presidential election of November 1980 confirmed the growing influence of ultra-rightists.
On March 23, 1981, the Associated Press quoted the Georgia Ku Klux Klan leader as saying that with the advent of Reagan to power in Washington there is no longer any need for the Ku Klux Klan because the new Administration has "replaced us". Le Quotidien de Paris reported that for a long time now the United States had been publishing books, magazines, records and cassettes advocating Hitlerism. The National Socialist Party publishes a magazine with the same title as the Third Reich's paper Folkischer Beobachler and regards itself as "a militant organ of National Socialists in Great Germany''.
The growing activity of US rightists and ultrarightists mirrors the aggressive reaction of a rather wide section of the country's small business owners to both the aggravating socio-economic problems and the weakening position of US imperialism in general. That is why the demands to "teach liberals a lesson", to launch an offensive against working people and their democratic rights have been complemented by the ``new'' rightists' call to "put an end" to detente and to turn to stiff power politics in international relations. The rightists advocate an arms build-up, "despite the cost", renunciation of SALT-2, expansion and consolidation of US mili-
tary alliances throughout the world, stationing of American armed forces "wherever appropriate", a more active CIA, wider propaganda against socialist countries and the undermining of "communist regimes''.
The essence of the threat from the right, materially and spiritually fed by the US military-- industrial complex, lies in the fact that militaristic extremism poisons the political climate in the country and pushes it to dangerous acts in the international arena.
Thus, domestic violence logically fuses with terrorism proclaimed as state policy, and the use of force and coercion vis-a-vis individuals is extended to whole nations and peoples.
The extensive criminal record of right-wing extremists convincingly proves the fact that ``black'' terrorism, neo-fascist style, is becoming an ever more dangerous threat to progressive forces.
3. Right-Eye Blindness
Despite the growing threat from right-wing extremists openly proclaiming their goal as lying in the "physical elimination" of the Left, destruction of the political structures of the modern bourgeois state, eradication of parliamentary democracy and fundamental civil rights and freedoms, the ruling circles in capitalist states are amazingly indulgent and tolerant towards them. Right extremists' acts are often presented as insignificant and even harmless eccentricity on the part of "unbalanced elements''.
Right-wing terrorists in capitalist countries onioy practically complete impunity. Their principal feature lies in their ability to successfully use the "right-eye blindness" of Western society.
According to Hans Pisker of the Federal Procurator's Office, there can be found no traces of
III. ARMIES OP DARKNESS
59terrorist organisations pursuing ultra-right goals in West Germany.
The lenient, practically no-existent punishment which bourgeois justice metes out to right-wing extremists is calculated. When the Catanzaro court of appeal issued a no-guilty verdict to two Italian neo-fascists who exploded a bomb in the Milan Agricultural Bank in December 1969, the reaction in Italy was one of general indignation. Mussolini's followers act so brazenly because in most cases they go practically unpunished. For instance, the investigation of the Italicus explosion in 1974 lasted six years, though the perpetrators of the crime were apprehended shortly after the explosion. And the fact that the Bologna crime (1980) was committed the very next day after the verdict was passed on the Italicus case can hardly be regarded as accidental. Many participants in the abortive coup in Spain in February 1981 were released. The perpetrators of right-extremist terrorism in other Western countries also remain unpunished. In a number of cases the police and security services not only shut their eyes to the crimes, but support those who commit them.
A nation-wide scandal arose in France with the case of Paul Durand, a Paris police inspector, who was an active member of La Federation de 1'action Nationale et europeenne (according to L'Humanite, every fifth member of the Federation is a policeman) and was instructed by its leadership to contact local neo-fascists in Italy on the eve of the Bologna explosion.
The investigation of the Italicus case proved the direct involvement in this barbarous crime of the Italian security services and particularly of General Maletti, chief of the counter-intelligence service SID, and Captain Labruna, chief of the section of infiltration and manipulation of extremist organisa-
tions. Former CIA agent Luis M. Gonzalez-Mata revealed this fact in his book Les vrais maitres du monde. The verdict quoted in the book reads that "since 1969 the two accused used their official status to protect terrorists and systematically falsified the relevant information supplied to political and judicial authorities. Those terrorist acts would have proved impossible without complicity on the part of state security services and without funds supplied to various agents of the strategy of tension." *
A coup d'etat attempted by pro-fascist forces and ultra-right elements in the Italian state machinery and known to be a plot by La Rosa dei venti revealed the existence in Italy of secret services which are beyond the control of Italian institutions and are directly responsible to the Security Bureau of the Atlantic Pact.~^^2^^
The Belgian paper Le Soir wrote that "fascism has penetrated the state apparatus. Old Nazis can be found among functionaries, magistrates and businessmen in the FRG. Accomplices of the rightextremist OAS in France act with complete impunity. Inquiries are manipulated, often successfully, in Italy with the aim of blaming the Left with crimes committed by ultra-rightists, as was the case with the bloody attack on the Milan Agricultural
Bank.''~^^3^^
These days neo-fascist organisations are characterised by a more open coordination of their activity on an international scale. West German ultrarightists are closely connected with their `` comrades-in-arms'' in nearby countries and overseas. Gerhart Baum, the FRG Minister of the Interior, was forced to admit that "neo-Nazi groups, notably
~^^1^^ L. M. Gonzaloz-Mata, Les vrais maitres du monde, Paris, 1979, p. 81.
~^^2^^ L'lIunianiLe, November 15, 1979.
~^^3^^ Le Soir, September 6, 1980,
60IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES
tho National Democratic Party and young National Democrats, maintain contacts with like-minded groups abroad, above all, in Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Britain, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and the United States".J
Le Figaro also reaffirmed this dangerous trend by publishing an extensive report under the conspicuous title, "New European Order: Fascists, Unite!", where it wrote that "a fascist international which seems to unite all neo-Nazi and neo-fascist movements in Europe, as well as in South Africa and the United States, held a 'summit meeting' in Lyons.... It has become evident that the movement has acquired an international character.''^^2^^
Keeping right-wing extremist organisations on the political front, monopoly capital is preparing to use them as an assault weapon against left-wing forces in case of a sudden aggravation of social struggle and class contradictions. Also, with the deepening crisis of capitalism and the weakening international positions of imperialism, the ruling circles, big business magnates and the military-- industrial complex are more attracted than ever by authoritarian regimes. And the way to such regimes must be paved by right-wing extremists.
1. "Alchemists of the Revolution"
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, bourgeois ideologists have recently launched a drive against the progressive forces and the peoples demanding national and social emancipation. In so doing they make use of the fact that over the past years the revival of right-wing extremism of a neo-fascist nature was accompanied by a noticeable growth of the activity of leftist extremism, as well as of various terrorist movements and groups which use ``left'' phraseology and rel'erences to Marxism-- Leninism in order to ideologically justify Iheir criminal actions.
Leftist extremism was pushed to tho capitalist political front in the early 1970s by petty-bourgeois ideologists of ``left'' radicalism, on the one hand, and by bourgeois state and propaganda machinery, on the other. Ruling classes use ``red'' terror to blame for mounting social tensions, to justify the growing authoritarianism of the capitalist state and the offensive against the working people's democratic rights, and to split progressive forces.
Extremists are just a tip of the iceberg. Underwater there is a powerful enemy who failed with fascism and is now trying to win with pseudo-left ideology. ``Left''-wing extremist actions have served as a pretext for reactivating neo-fascist organisations which enroll those eager to "establish law and order" and set up "strong power" regimes, that is open reactionary dictatorships.
~^^1^^ Suddentschf. Zeitung, October 14, 1978.
~^^2^^ Le Figaro, February 17, 1975.
62IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES
Bourgeois ideologists are trying to blame the spread of terrorism in the 1970s on "May of 1968",i i.e., on the general activisation of democratic and anti-monopolist forces that occurred in capitalist countries then.
``The past decade," writes Claire Sterling, author of a widely publicised book, "belongs to the emerging forces of the radical left in Africa, Asia, South and North America, Europe, the Middle East. They come from the generation of 1968, an amazing year... .''~^^2^^
Attempts to equate modern terrorism with the people's struggle for social progress and with the activity of democratic and peace-loving forces are nothing but an obvious lie. Terrorism, i.e., an attempt to forcefully impose a small minority's interests on the majority, is the exact opposite of the mass democratic movement of 1968-1969. It rejects the basic ideas and slogans of the movement.
It is true that the working-class and student movement of 1968-1969 possessed a considerable democratic and anti-monopoly potential. At that time, broad non-proletarian sections of the population, especially young people, aware of the profound crisis of capitalism in all its aspects---socio-economic, ideological, political and cultural---actively opposed the bourgeois way of life.
The petty-bourgeois revolutionary upsurge of the late 1960s in Western Europe and the United Sta-
tes abated, first of all, because its leaders from among ``left''-wing radical ideologists did not consider the movement as an objective ally of the working class. Instead, they tried to oppose the intelligentsia and the middle and petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat, presenting them as the main and sole revolutionary force.
The movement suffered defeat because it had, to a considerable degree, assumed the character the capitalist society tried to foist on it with the help of irresponsible extremists.
Ideologists of extremism have long been parasitising on the dual mentality of petty-bourgeois sections which experience ever greater oppression at the hands of monopolies as the crisis of capitalism worsens.
Leaders of extremism bet on the most vulnerable aspects of petty-bourgeois mentality, namely fear of the working-class movement and reluctance to accept collectivism and any form of organisation. They adjust themselves to the specifics of pettybourgeois protest, try to incite the intelligentsia and other petty-bourgeois elements against the working class and the objectives of its struggle.
Distorting the essence of the main class conflict, which splits capitalist society, petty-bourgeois revolutionaries eventually doom themselves to failure.
The rapidly diminishing influence of ``loft''-wing radical ideologists on mass social movements in the mid-1970s reflected an obvious crisis in their theories and the failure of ``leff'-extremist leaders' hopes to edge the proletariat and its parties out of the leading positions in revolutionary struggle.
As a result, most of the ``left''-wing radical movements soon lost their social base and split into small groups, some of which slid from massive political struggle to extremism, from spontaneity to a strict paramilitary discipline in clandestine ter-
~^^1^^ In the spring and summer of 1968, large demonstrations of youth and students swept Western Europe and the United States under anti-war and anti-monopoly slogans. The movement reached its peak in May 1968 in France, where mass student demonstrations were backed up by a nation-wide strike of French workers.
~^^2^^ Claire Sterling, The Terror Network. The Secret War of International Terrorism, New York, 1981, p. 11.
64IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
rorist organisations. J. Janiski, a Polish scholar, wrote in 1976 in the collection of articles Ideologia I polityka wsloczesnego lewactwa (Ideology and Policies of Modern Leftism) that "the logic of facts has brought advocates of armed struggle to individual terror.
The shrinking social basis of leftist movements has intensified terrorist trends among them.''
These processes were equally typical of the United States and Western Europe, notably Italy. The leader of the Italian Federation of Young Communists, Gianfranco Borghini, wrote that, unlike the groups in 1968, the extremist groups had revealed the despair, catastrophic hopelessness and often rebelliousness of certain social strata and young people, so typical of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat, rather than a trend towards democratic and socialist renovation in Italy.
Theoretical bankruptcy and practical insolvency of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries who claimed to be leaders of a revolution "without and against the working class" brought them to an impasse, with extremism as the only way out for many of them. Social despair coupled with the inability to see the revolutionary potential of the masses pushed hundreds of disillusioned petty-bourgeois revolutionaries to voluntarism, reckless extremist actions and individual terror.
Having lost their ideological guidelines and influence upon mass movements, the desperate "May children" caught in the grip of two crises---that of capitalist society and that of leftist radicalism---- resorted to political violence and terror.
Lenin pointed out that weariness can bring revolutionary elements to desperation which in turn tends to breed anarchism among them. '
Arms and explosives found at the Bologna railway terminal. The explosion organised by neo-fascists in August 1980 killed 76 and wounded over 200 people
G. d'Urso, kidnapped by Italian Red Brigades, is alive. Aldo Moro and many others were killed
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32, p. 282.
Attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II
State racism in South
Africa. Police raid
against ``coloureds'' in a
Johannesburg suburb
Clashes in Belfast following the death of Robert Sands, a victim of a hunger strike in the Long Kesh concentration camp
Cuban counter-revolutionaries from the terrorist Alfa-66 organisation
••- - ft
SALVADOR-
IV. IN THE THROES OP TWO CRISES
65
Resort to anarchism and other more up-to-date versions of political extremism, including terrorism, is but a logical outcome of pseudo-- revolutionary forces relying on such a shaky Foundation as the protest of a petty bourgeois who, according to Lenin, "hysterically rushes about seeking a way out, seeking salvation, places his confidence in the proletariat and supports it one moment and the next gives way to fits of despair." i
A constant temptation to refute the objective laws of the world and society, which do not suit a petty-bourgeois revolutionary, pushes him to look for a much sought-after ''philosopher's stone", which will sustain his belief in the possibility of inventing "perpetual revolutionary motion" and thereby turns hundreds of rebels, unable to overstep the limits of petty-bourgeois protest, into pseudo-revolutionaries.
The same cause brings out various petty-- bourgeois revolutionary ideas, the time-worn anarchist type and new ideas in a ``teclmotronic'' guise of the 20th if not the 21st century. The constant demand for manuals on "anti-proletarian revolutions", encouraged by big business, generates supply: old anarchist manuals are reprinted and new " alchemists of the revolution" pick up a pen or whip out a revolver.
How sagacious Marx and Engels were when over a hundred years ago they described present-day members of "the red brigades" and "proletarian cells": "They are the alchemists of the revolution and are characterised by exactly the same chaotic thinking and blinkered obsessions as the alchemists of old. They leap at inventions which are supposed to work revolutionary miracles: incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which
Yesterday it was Vietnam today it is El Salvador, tomorrow it will be...
American arms sent from Pakistan and seized from Afghan counter-revolutionaries
~^^1^^ Ibid., Vol. 27, p. 276.
5-0246
IN THE GRIP OP TERROtt
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES
6?
are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational." i Democratic young people and terrorist groups have drifted further and further apart. The latter have turned to senseless acts and desperate crimes. Having lost their ties with real life and with advanced, truly democratic forces, the leftist extremist organisations openly opposed the whole of society in the late 1970s, especially working-class organisations and revolutionary parties.
In West Germany several extremists sot up the Red Army Faction---a terrorist organisation, whose aim was, according to its leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, to use violence in order to "win the Federal Republic of Germany from within". Leaflets issued by the RAF called for "armed resistance''.
Lesser organisations also sprang up, among them Antiimperialistischer Bund, Bewegung 2 Juni, and others. Their platform was most clearly described by a leaflet put out by the Revolutionarer Zorn organisation, which said that the revolutionary struggle will make sense only when cars, villas, planes and picture galleries are everywhere sot afire.
Implementing this programme, the Baader-- Meinhof group committed 54 murders, numerous burglaries, bank robberies and similar crimes in Ihe 1970s. The most sensational of these were the murder of Judge Giinter von Drenkmanii, an explosion in the West German embassy building in Stockholm, and the kidnapping of Peter Lorcnz, leader of Ihe West Berlin section of the Christian Democratic Union. In autumn of 1977, RAF terrorists kidnapped and killed Hanns Martin Schlcyer, a noted West German businessman, and hijacked a Lufthansa plane.
In Italy, the mass movement of left-radical students of 1967-1969, which was dying out, was replaced by a growing extremist movement. One such group which appeared in Milan in September 1969 was the Collective politico dolla metropoli, the aim of which was armed conflict. In autumn of 1970, a newly-formed organisation---the Red Brigades--- committed their first terrorist acts at Pirelli and the SIT-Siemens factories in Milan. The programme of this organisation, published in 1971, emphasised that political struggle could no longer be waged without a resort to violence. Before 1972, the Red
5*
2. Political Provocateurs
Right-wing terrorism is used by reactionary forces for repressions against progressives and intimidating political and trade union leaders. It sows fear and panic among the people.
Leftist terrorism plays the perfidious role of a political provocateur, splitting the united front of progressive forces and instigating mass enmity towards working-class revolutionary organisations, workers' liberation struggle and towards socialism.
The upsurge of the democratic forces' struggle in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, workers' achievements, the elimination of the last European dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal, and gains in detente forced right-wing extremists into a defensive position and made them wait for "better times". Under these circumstances, imperialist strategists decided to resort to ``red'' terror in a bid to replace and complement right-wing terrorism and launch a counter-offensive against the Left.
In the 1970s, extreme leftist and terrorist groups became particularly active in Italy, West Germany, France and Japan.
'Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 10, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, p. 318.
IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES
G9
Brigades perpetrated terrorist acts aimed at property damage---explosions, arson, and so on; later, they hegan kidnapping the "lackeys of imperialism"---businessmen, judges and union leaders.
In 1974, Italian leftist terrorism underwent, so to say, a qualitative transformation following a new upsurge of right-wing terrorism: mass murders in Brescia and Bologna and an abortive pro-fascist coup attempted by the extremist La Rosa dei venti.
The Red Brigades have declared their intention to use armed struggle not only as a defence against reaction but, more importantly, as a culmination of a proposed "communist revolution". They intend to pass from "armed propaganda" to a new strategy aimed at "hitting the bourgeois state right in the heart''.
Since that time, Italy has witnessed a new escalation of terrorism, and political murders have become an everyday occurrence. First, the Red Brigades used a ``gambizzazione'' method---leg shooting as a sign of warning. In this way they have wounded dozens of judges, journalists, businessmen and wardens. Next, they began to kill, and between 1971 and 1980 various extremist organisations killed 15 procurators, their deputies and judges.
The Aldo Moro tragedy aggravated the political situation in the country. The leader of the Christian Democratic Party was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on March 16, 1978 and killed two months later, on May 9.
During the first four months of 1980, Italian terrorists made 859 assassinations, killing 15 and wounding 83 people. They crowned the year by kidnapping a prominent judge, Giovanni d'Urso, and killing General Enrico Calvaliggi of the carabineers.
Together with Prima Linea and Groupes armees proletaries, the Red Brigades, the best known of
the left-extremist organisations, make up a sinister alliance known in Italy as the Armed Party.
Subversive activity is the terrorists' immediate task, while "forcible revolution" is their long-term objective, the way to which, they believe, should be well soaked with blood. Here is what was said of it by a Japanese terrorist member of the so-called United Red Army: "A revolutionary war is a war for justice which I define as the creation of a society without class struggle. Killing and destruction are a part of this war. We cannot restrict our struggle to destroying houses. We are sure killing people is inevitable." Andreas Baader of the West Gorman RAF was of the same opinion. He believed that the struggle against the system allowed for anything, betrayal included. "A crime is nothing more than a revolutionary outburst," he maintained. J
According to the ideologists of terrorism, violence and nothing but violence makes it possible to work political miracles---to abrogate the objective laws of social development and class struggle, in other words, to turn water into wine and quicksilver into gold. Worshipping violence as a religion, they virtually identify class violence with physical coercion and regard revolution as an act of will. As a result, extremists are often tempted to resort to violence in order to find answers to questions which cannot be answered through democratic discussion and political struggle.
Carlos Marighella, an "urban guerrilla warfare" theoretician, once wrote in his Mini-Manual for Urban Guerrillas: "Rejecting the so-called political solution, the urban guerrillas must become more aggressive and violent . . . heightening tho disastrous situation in which tho government must act.''^^2^^
~^^1^^ C. Sterling, Op, clt.. p. 167. ~^^8^^ Ibid.
70IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
IV. IN THE THROES OF TWO CRISES
71These ideas are shared by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the founder of a "guerrilla action" group, who wrote in 1968: "The guerrilla's task is to outrage [the state] in every way .. . and so reveal its harsh, repressive, reactionary essence.''^^1^^ His fellow-- fighter, Renato Curcio, founder of Italy's Red Rrigades, wrote: "Faced with working-class terror, the bourgeoisie by now has an obligatory course: to re-- establish control by intensified repression and progressive militarisation of the state.''~^^2^^
True Marxist revolutionaries by no means rule out the possibility, even the necessity in certain conditions, of revolutionary violence against class adversaries. They comnletely lack a fatalistic approach to the historical process and have no hope for objective historical development to automatically settle the most acute class contradictions. Lenin recalled that "Marx was also able to appreciate that there are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle".^^3^^
Lenin wrote. "The history of the Russian revolution shows that a party always resorts to individual terror when it does not enjoy the support of the masses.''~^^4^^ Here lies the cardinal difference between the Marxist and terrorist approach to violence. Terrorist violence is an artificial act unwarranted by objective social processes. For this reason, for the masses it becomes violence in a spirit of "revolutionary Messianism". This is why no matter how hard Italian and other terrorists try to use for their own ends the ideas of anti-fascist resistance and commit themselves to the armed strug-
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 163.
~^^2^^ Ibid.
~^^3^^ V. I. Lonin, Collected Works, Vol. 12, pp. 111-12.
~^^4^^ Ibid., Vol. 42. p. 101.
gle waged by the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America for liberation, they have no right to identify their criminal and essentially anti-popular acts with these mass democratic movements.
What is more, in the majority of cases it is terrorist violence that preserves and stabilises the existing order despite its ultra-revolutionary demagogy-
``.. .And indeed, violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is more the weapon of reform than of revolution," writes Hannah Arendt.J
Contrary to their own declarations, terrorists do not oppose capitalist society with their actions and, what is more, do not offer an alternative political mechanism. They are desperately trying to force government and elected bodies to serve their interests. Despite terrorist rhetoric to the effect that "the creation of conditions for alternative power is a deliberate and forcible process", life shows that terrorists' political violence helps to consolidate the existing structures and power of the ruling classes.
Let us recall the relevant ideas of Vera Zasulich, a famous Russian terrorist who subsequently broke with the terrorist movement. She said: "We are against terror precisely because it is non-- revolutionary." According to her, terror as a method of struggle erects "psychological barriers" to the free development of public activity, impedes the revolutionary process, and keeps the masses and broad segments of society in positions of passive onlookers. "Transfer of the struggle for liberation to a handful of heroes . . . not only does no harm to autocracy, but is in itself a corollary of ideas and sentiments inherited from autocracy.''
British researcher Norman F. Cantor, author of The Age of Protest, attempted to write typical,
~^^1^^ H. Arendt, Op. cit., p. 79.
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73though grotesque, "Guidelines for Successful Confrontation Protest", drawing on the analysis of different extremist methods of struggle. This is what he has to offer: "Force is an inevitable technique. Choose your means---strikes, sit-ins, occupation of buildings, and so on---so as to achieve maximum publicity with minimum offence to middle-class shibboleths [italics mine---A.G.].
``Seek by rudeness, violence, and escalating demands to force the establishment to respond with repression (preferably imprisonment or expulsion; a resort to the police is essential). Then claim that the authorities refused to negotiate or to listen to reason, that they misrepresented your position and resorted to police brutality. Denounce the establishment as fascists, pigs, and so on. At this point you are ready to use extreme violence (riot, assassination, and the like).''^^1^^
This rather sketchy description of terrorist methods reveals at least two indispensable features of modern terrorism: (1) solicitude of the middle class from which reinforcements are obtained and (2) maximum publicity.
Walter Laqueur, a renowned analyst and historian of terrorism, wrote that a terrorist act in itself means nothing unless there is publicity.~^^2^^ The New York Times was of the similar opinion saying that terrorism was a sort of a theatrical, perfectly rehearsed act when the mass media are used to undermine the government and generate a general feeling of fear.
It is publicity which brings small clandestine groups to national or international attention. This is becoming more and more the principal aim of
terrorists. It is no wonder, since frequently publicity is the only chance for these groups to prove their existence.
Terrorists deliberately direct their attacks against newspapers and magazines and include demands to the press in their ultimatums. This was the case in Aldo Moro's and Giovanni d'Urso's kidnappings. With the evident hope for widespread publicity, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patricia Hearst, the daughter of the news magnate. Their hopes were fulfilled. Terrorists are particularly cruel towards journalists who expose their true nature.
It should be noted that the sensation-seeking bourgeois press is willing to flatter terrorists, exaggerating their "heroic deeds" and publicising them. The press sometimes even obediently meets terrorists' demands, thus helping them to coordinate their actions and prepare new crimes.
Terrorism causes the death of innocent people. material damage, and acute political problems. And it spiritually cripples hundreds of people whose participation in terrorist acts turns them into cruel and cynical fanatics hopelessly trapped in the distorted world they have created.
Terrorist ideology and practice have created a cult of ``omnipotence'' for a handful of ``heroes'', which in reality turns them into dangerous maniacs who are ready to drown the world in blood in a bid to "make it happy''.
The entire history of terrorism and crimes committed by its adherents convincingly prove the correctness of Marx's statement that a noble revolutionary goal is incompatible with base and criminal means used to achieve it. The goal terrorists set for themselves---in essence, not in words---is as anti-democratic, reactionary and immoral as the methods of violence and coercion they use, Indeed,
~^^1^^ Norman P. Cantor, The Age of Protest, London, 1970 p. 327.
~^^8^^ L'Express, January 31, 1981.
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75they use terrorism to establish the most cruel, reactionary and tyrannical dictatorship.
Stopping short of nothing, present-day terrorists try to make the bourgeois state recognise them as fullfledged partners. For them, the way to achieve this lies through a "civil war" against the state. They expect it to recognise them as ``belligerents'' and treat arrested terrorists as "prisoners of war''.
Following Trotsky's famous statement that "war is the mother of revolution", modern extremists consider violence and armed acts as the only means to fight for social progress and the peoples' interests on an international scene. They assail the policy of peaceful coexistence and the peaceful foreign policy of socialist states. They allege that this policy is ``counter-revolutionary'', as it reflects the socialist countries' aspiration to avoid by all means the ``risk'' of a socialist revolution in capitalist countries.
Responding to attacks against the peaceful policy of socialist countries, Leonid Brezhnev said: "As for the ultra-leftist assertions that peaceful coexistence is the next thing to 'helping capitalism' and 'freezing the socio-political status quo', our reply is this: every revolution is above all a natural result of the given society's internal development. What is more, life itself has refuted the inventions about the 'freezing of the status quo'." l
The fact that terrorists today spearhead their attacks primarily against the Communist parties with the aim of "militarily destroying" them proves that they are well aware of what a bastion of democracy the Communists are.
``Against the terrorism that has ferociously struck down so many innocent victims, the Com-
munists have demonstrated themselves to be the stronger force," said Gian Carlo Pajetta, a member of the leadership of the Italian Communist Party, speaking at the 26th CPSU Congress.^^1^^ L'Unita wrote that "we defend everyone's freedom, including that of the desperate youth who exclude themselves from the democratic system only to fall the first victims of vicious politics that turns into a crime and precipitates authoritarian and reactionary decisions".~^^2^^
By disowning their past of anti-capitalist protest terrorists no longer have the right to use the term ``left'', ``red'' or ``revolutionaries'', since they have sided with the reactionaries.
Now they worship other ``gods''. The romantically cherished Che Guevara and his fellow-fighters are supplanted by criminals like Charles Manson3 who is regarded as a hero and a "symbol of rebellion" by American Weathermen.^^4^^
Terrorists rarely make political demands to the authorities; they abandon them in their programmes, too. If their fellow-terrorists are in prison, those at liberty seek to free them or to improve their prison conditions.
Thus, by the 1980s, the ``left''-extremist terrorist groups had hit rock bottom politically. By severing their links with the mass democratic, anti-- monopolistic and anti-imperialist movements of the working people, they have degenerated into the enemies of the working class and the reserve and
~^^1^^ The Words of Friends ..., p. 184.
2 L'Unita, April 13, 1979.
~^^3^^ Charles Manson---leader of the sect which committed murders in California.
~^^4^^ A terrorist group whose members formerly belonged to a ``left''-wing radical student organisation,
~^^1^^ Documents and Resolutions. XXVth Congress of the CPSU, pp. 39-40.
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77strike force of rabid reaction and anti-communism. Terrorists have become the enemies of the working people, their political parties and those who fight against fascism.
By reducing the class struggle to armed violence and politics to criminal acts, by declaring war the only means of international struggle, by frenzily assailing the policy of peaceful coexistence and the peaceable course of the socialist countries, terrorists today are causing tremendous damage to the cause of social emancipation, progress and peace.
3. BLACK-RED IDOL
Reactionaries have no qualms about groups of young people turning to terrorism. Imperialist agents infiltrate extremist groups and, in some cases, they advocate violence, whatever the cost, or revolution in any place and at any moment. By encouraging the youths to commit violent acts, the reactionaries use them as a scarecrow for the man in the street and as a pretext for repression. Any form of terrorism allows the reactionaries to speak about "unchecked violence", the need for order, and to resort to truly uncontrolled violence against the forces of democracy, especially Communists.
Alberto Moravia once said: "What is provocation? For the leftists, it is a form of action that seems revolutionary but is in reality meant to justify repressive measures." *
The basic political goals of the extremists, whether right or ``left'', coincide: to destabilise society, undermine state institutions, discredit political parties and split the front of the democratic forces. And if the terrorists of the ``left'' thus plan to "overthrow the imperialist state of multinational
~^^1^^ See C, Sterling, Op, cit., p. 26.
monopolies" and carry out a ``revolution'', the rightists openly declare that social violence is the most direct way of establishing "strong power", that is fascist dictatorship.
Even the methods used by ``black'' and ``red'' terrorists are similar---political assassinations and murders, burglaries, kidnappings and blackmail, with no differentiation between political and other crimes.
If one refuses to listen to the demagogy and the furious alterations between the ``left'' and right extremists and focuses instead on the political aftermaths of their activities, it becomes obvious that quite often their deeds are interconnected or complementary. In a sense, right and ``left'' terrorism fit hand-in-glove and feed on each other, since each type of terrorism justifies its own crimes by those committed by the other. Their affinity is not reflected by outward coincidence, but reveals a common unity of principle. Both kinds of terrorism thrive on profound social crises. Their socio-- economic base is made up primarily of the "crazy with fear" petty bourgeoisie, intellectuals, social, racial and other minorities who have false complexes, notions and prejudices. Having erected different gods, they still offer the same sacrifice.
Extremism, right or ``left'', equally serves the purposes of reactionaries, monopolies and the ruling bourgeoisie.
The rationale of the political adventurism pursued by the leftist terrorists or right-wing extremists is tragically odd. More than once both the ``left'' and the neo-fascists claim responsibility for the same crime, with each side coming up with a different explanation as to why it was committed. There have also been cases where a group would
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79employ the methods of another organisation and try to implicate their political opponents in the crime.
Italy is a country where it is often practically impossible to draw a line of demarcation between the actions of the rightist or leftist terrorists. The leftists from the Red Brigades butchered Aldo Moro, but the crime proved to be advantageous to Italian reactionaries and, internationally, to US imperialists. When Rome procurator Occorsio was killed, the leftist terrorists were glad to claim responsibility, but a leaflet of the Ordine Nuovo, a neo-fascist organisation, was found in a car in the street where the crime was committed.
The news media has more than once reported on the contacts maintained by ultra-leftist leaders with neo-fascists. The Italian neo-fascists even boasted that they had managed to plant their people in terrorist ``red'' organisations taking part in the 1977 student riots.
Recently, terrorists have been switching from one extreme to another, from the right to the extreme ``left''.
The similarity between ideological principles, the most important of which are total lack of principles and the unscrupulousiioss of means, and the rationale of using violence to attain political goals, inevitably draw the right and ``left'' terrorists to the underworld, actually turning them into an integral part of organised crime.
It is not surprising therefore that recently some ultra-left and neo-fascist leaders intimated that their organisations pursued common rather than different goals.
The press reports that mixed groups of ``red'' and ``black'' terrorists already exist in Italy. These assumptions of the press and the democratic public were reinforced by the evidence of Italian neo-
fascist Marco Affatigato. He said that the Red Brigades and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei were operating in conjunction. In his interview to the Italian press Affatigato claimed that he spoke on behalf of the ultra-right Ordine Nuovo and the ``left'' Red Brigades. He also said that these organisations joined efforts to kidnap and kill Aldo Moro.
A large number of leftist organisations and groups are infiltrated with police agents, stool pigeons and paid provocateurs. "Every recent arrest on a terrorist charge," wrote Gil Green, an American researcher, "has uncovered at least one government agent who led in the wild talk and the formulation of fantastic plans. .. ." *
The ruling circles in the capitalist world consider it their primary task to reduce the class struggle to terror, i.e., criminal activities, which can then be checked by police and administrative measures.
``Fiat management goes out of its way to prove that terrorism is nothing else but the continuation and manifestation of a labour conflict and the workers' inclination to make conflict situations an undesirable but inevitable part of the trade union struggle.''^^2^^ Bourgeois ideologists admit that they rely on leftist terrorists to combat Marxism, since they are well aware of the fact that in this struggle their only hope is to slander Marxism by identifying it with terrorism.
Verbal attacks against terrorism by bourgeois ideologists and politicians are actually directed against Marxism. Their denunciations of extremists ring with anti-communist rhetoric.
Flaminio Piccoli, Secretary of the Italian Chris-
~^^1^^ Gil Green The New Radicalism: Anarchist or Marxist?, New York', 1971, p. 99.
~^^2^^ L'Unita, October 8, 1979.
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81tian Democratic Party, wrote that the ideological "matrix of terrorism is boundless Marxism that uses the tenets oi' Leninism". *•
Morganti, a sociologist sympathetic to the GDP, says that ''terrorism is a final and complete expression of a revolutionary hypothesis". Replying to this totally irresponsible statement, Glaudio Petruccioli, Editor-in-Chief of L'Unita, wrote that "to equate revolution with terrorism is to do the utmost service to the terrorists".^^2^^
Terrorism always opposed the genuine revolutionary struggle of the exploited and toiling masses. Bruno Trentini, National Secretary of the Italian General Confederation of Labour, believes that individual or group violence is the opposite side of bourgeois violence. It aims to split the workers' ranks and rob them of their most precious and effective tool---their unity. "Terrorism is reactionary, as well as criminal.''~^^3^^
The participants of the seminar on terrorism, held at the Turin Fiat plant, branded terrorism as a phenomenon alien to the struggle waged by the working class. They said that "terrorism, despite the words borrowed from the workers' ideology, is the product of a rupture with all the traditions of the workers' movement".^^4^^ And, we might add, with the revolutionary traditions of Marxist-Leninists as well.
Marxist-Leninist theory flatly refutes terror as a means of attaining political goals. Lenin noted that individual assassinations were an untenable means of political struggle. He advocated actions which were "calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that
participation".^^1^^ Leiiiii regarded terror as vengeance against individuals and the plot of intellectuals. In his opinion, terror in no way reflected the sentiments of the masses or trained leadership. According to Lenin, ''without the working people all bombs are powerless, patently powerless".^^2^^
The truth of this statement is confirmed by the senseless violence resorted to by terrorists today--- violence which is increasingly used against the working people. In full conformity with Lenin's warning, terrorists' actions undermine "the forces not of the government but of the revolution"~^^3^^ and play into the hands of reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries.
Our ideal leaves no place for individual violence, said Lenin, since the genuine revolutionary struggle of liberation implies the use of violence as a form of popular resistance to the violence of exploiters, aggressors and colonialists.
The history of the 20th century, including its closing decades, has produced convincing proof of this massive armed struggle by progressive forces, working people and entire nations; a struggle that has nothing to do with the violence of modern terrorists.
The capitalists' quest for domination nowadays is revealed in attempts to curtail and emasculate the rights and freedoms of the working people under the pretext of fighting terrorism and " subversive activities". For instance, in many Western countries the police are waging a real war against democratic forces similar to the one terrorists would like to unleash.
Le Monde reported that on the Western horizon "one can clearly detect the outlines of a 'policed
' V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 193.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 189.
~^^3^^ Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 19.
6-0246
~^^1^^ L'Unita, April 27, 1980.
~^^2^^ Ibid.
~^^3^^ L'Humanlte, February 13, 1978.
~^^4^^ L'Unita, April 24, 1980.
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Europe' which the ministers of the interior are trying to put in place, using as a pretext the menace posed by terrorism to these states".^^4^^ The threat of strengthening totalitarian trends in the social life of the major countries of the West is assuming clear-cut dimensions. Der Spiegel wrote in October 1977 that terrorists' actions helped the reactionaries mount a ``witch-hunt'' of progressives by enabling them to list all opponents of the so-called emergency laws as "terrorist sympathisers''.
A huge police machine exists in West Germany. It subjects to its unrelentless control the social and private life of millions of citizens. There is a special branch of computer-equipped criminal police, and telephone bugging and the opening of private letters are common. Various forms of police inspection are widely practised at plants, and agents infiltrate student organisations. This set of police measures was dubbed "transparent man''.
The West German police believe that each citizen should be on record, or become ``transparent''. The police in Wiesbaden are now setting up a giant card index which will allow them to check the identity of any suspect in seconds.
The shameful berufsverbot (forbidden to work) regulations have turned into a veritable `` witchhunt''. Human rights have been violated and, under the pretext of "persecuting radicals", they have pounced on left-wing organisations, particularly the Communists.
The 1972 regulations "forbidden to work" are now widely practised in West Germany. According to them, anyone accused of a "hostile attitude towards the Constitution" will lose his job at a state agency. Professors, civil servants, blue- and whitecollar workers can be fired on the basis of an in-
former's report or merely on suspicion. The `` witchhunt'' is in full swing. The Federal Department for Safeguarding the Constitution is now investigating the cases of 500,000 people. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs. This number is inaccurate, since those who have been fired will do anything to conceal the fact. Anyone admitting it in West Germany today seals his fate. He must conceal the fact if he is to have any hope of finding employment elsewhere, in the private sector, for instance. This repression is breeding a climate of paranoia. Thousands of people have been flatly refused governmental employment.
In the USA, the sinister spirit of McCarthyism is rising once again against the backdrop of the present Administration's vociferous campaign to "fight terrorism". Democratically-minded citizens are increasingly concerned with the ultra-rightists' designs to reinstigate the shameful ``witch-hunt''. The press indicates that the Reagan Administration and the Senate are probably cultivating the soil for a new inquisition, this time under the banner of "fighting international terrorism". The Senate has already set up a Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism headed by Jeremiah Denton.
The US public views the new presidential directive which cancels some of the restrictions on CIA activities imposed in the 1970s as a serious menace to democracy. The new directive gives the CIA the power to shadow American citizens---to conduct unauthorised searches, bug telephones, open mail, and plant agents and provocateurs into political and social organisations. In this way the police and repressive bodies of the bourgeois state strengthen the real, not the imagined, terror, turning it still more frequently against society.
``Kill one and you scare ten thousand," an ancient Chinese proverb says. Following this primi-
6*
Le Monde, September 23, 1980.
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tive advice, the extremists and terrorists of all types and persuasions are accommodating monopolycapital, aiding it to strengthen its hold and supplementing economic exploitation and compulsion with open violence.
American sociologists, authors of the collection entitled Beyond Left <&. Right. Radical Thought for Our Times, wrote with alarm: "We continue to drift into a worse society: we then propose that the way to arrest this drift is through measures which must necessarily be categorised as movements toward a centralised authoritarian state." *
The two-faced Janus of the ``black-red'' terrorism faithfully serves the interests of the ruling classes in today's capitalist society. Sometimes he is a caricature of "blood-thirsty revolutionaries"; sometimes a bugaboo who frightens the ordinary citizen, causing him to submit to new infringements on his rights and to mounting totalitarian pressure.
1. US Global Terrorism
In his interview with the ABC George Bush, US Vice-President, pondered on what was happening in the world. In his opinion, it is senseless and tragic. Contrary to claims made by others, he said, such violence does not occur only in the USA; this disease affects the entire world; international terrorism raging in the world is a kind of madness. When the journalists asked him what could be done, Bush replied that he had no answer; he did not know.
The US Vice-President's statement would hardly deceive anyone. It is too obvious that it is the United States which is largely responsible for the violence engulfing the world, and it is the USA which is attempting to internationalise what has long been a typical feature of its domestic life.
During one of his first interviews, the former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig was asked to explain what was the actual meaning of the term "terrorist government". Haig stated that it applies to any government which instigates, perpetrates or is involved in terrorist acts.
Let us take this definition and, with respect to it, analyse some aspects of the US government's activities in the world.
In the USA, central governmental agencies plan and supervise subversive activities. A special interdepartmental body is engaged in deciding the di-
~^^1^^ Beyond Left & Right. Radical Thought for Our Times, Ed. by R. Kostelanetz, New York, 1968, p. 66.
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8rection of subversive activities, coordinating and sanctioning major operations. This body is headed by a presidential assistant for national security. It includes the Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and the CIA Director. The activities of this body are covered up by interchangeable code names---the Committee of 40, the Committee of 303, Group 5412, etc.
The use of terror is not new to the history of US foreign policy. The US has long been resorted to terror in order to attain its global foreign policy goals. "For the last 35 years, the US government has made regular use of terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy," said John Marks, an associate of the Center for National Security Studies. ^^1^^
Immediately after the Second World War the United States assumed the role of world policeman. In 1946, it took an active part in suppressing the rebellion in the Philippines; in 1947, it crushed the popular uprising in Paraguay; in 1948, it staged an intervention by its mercenaries in Costa Rica; in 1950, it cruelly dealt with the liberation movement in Puerto Rico; and from 1950 to 1953, it waged a barbaric war in Korea.
In response to the American diplomats being taken hostage in Teheran in 1979, an act totally inadmissible by international law, the USA employed all means of pressure and blackmail against Iran, ranging from a total economic blockade to an attempted armed intervention. However, it is appropriate to recall that the Iranian-American conflict did not originate after the Shah's overthrow in 1979: it dates back to 1953 when the Shah was reinstalled on the throne as a result of a coup d'etat engineered by the CIA. Some $20 million were set
aside to attain this goal. Most of the money was spent to hire six thousand mercenaries, some of whom were anti-government elements in Iran itself. The former chief of the CIA Middle East Station, Kermit Roosevelt (the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), later admitted that it was one of the first clandestine CIA operations against foreign governments.
Iran was followed by Guatemala, Thailand, Laos, the Congo, Panama, the Dominican Republic and many other countries where the CIA or its hirelings overthrew legitimate governments, exterminated the leaders unacceptable to the USA and set up terrorist dictatorships. The US unleashed a genocidal war in Indochina, staged a mercenaries' landing in Playa Hiron (Cuba) and toppled down the Popular Unity Government in Chile.
The Brookings Institution, a US research establishment, estimates that from 1945 to 1975 the United States used military force or the threat of force to reach its foreign policy aims in 215 instances.
The US perfectly fits Haig's definition of a terrorist government. Its deeds of terrorism practised on a global scale are all the more criminal because they are backed up by the formidable military power and widespread subversive activities of the largest capitalist state.
But perhaps these activities are part of the past? Let us turn to recent events. In evaluating the intentions of Reagan's Administration that came to power in January 1981, Le Monde diplomatique wondered "whether the US would once again resort to the `big-stick' policy in Central America and the Caribbean that had traditionally been used since Theodore Roosevelt's Administration; whether the ardent anti-Castro commandos in Florida would receive the approval to rush to the Cuban
International Herald Tribune, June 30, 1977.
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89shores; whether it would encourage Somoza's former guards who were fleeing to Honduras and increasingly making raids on Nicaragua after Reagan's victory; whether it would like to restore the status quo in Central America, the order of the day for decades imposed for the sake of crude anticommunism and exclusively benefitting the archaic and brutal military dictatorships; whether it would like to turn the Caribbean strategic triangle into what it was at the time of unchallenged US supremacy---an American sea.
``All these questions are to be affirmatively answered. They deserve an unequivocal and frank `yes', based at least on the statements of Reagan's advisers and on the explanations of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the new US representative at the UN."J
The US does not limit its interventionist policies to the Western hemisphere. This is confirmed by statements made by the most influential people in Reagan's cabinet. Alexander Haig intimated that "the escalating setbacks of our interests abroad, increasing lawlessness and terrorism, and the socalled wars of liberation are putting in jeopardy our ability to influence world events constructively and assure access to raw materials".^^2^^ Its interference in the affairs of other states Washington tries to justify by the need to protect US "vital interests''.
Haig reasons that the US must beef up its military presence in the Persian Gulf, expand cooperation between the allies in protecting oil-supply routes and be prepared to act even on its own to secure access to these vitally important resources. In certain situations Haig recommends a US army's invasion of the Persian Gulf area (from Haig's statement in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
~^^1^^ Le Monde diplomatique, January 1981.
~^^2^^ Time, March 16, 1981, p. 19,
The necessary arrangements have been made for this invasion. The US has gathered the largest navy and air-landing task force since the Second World War in the Persian Gulf area and the adjacent waters of the Indian Ocean. The grounds for their presence in this explosive region continually change: the seizure of American hostages in Teheran, the Iranian-Iraqi conflict, efforts to secure "safe transportation" of oil from the Persian Gulf, etc. Everything points to the fact that the US Navy intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, the Pentagon plans to equip the forces with new, modern weapons, particularly cruise missiles. The Wall Street Journal reported that these missiles could become a tremendous advantage in the Persian Gulf area for their ability to destroy any airfield or port with conventional warheads, thus saving the time spent for aircraft carriers to close in on the region.
What is this if not international terrorism and piracy elevated to state policy?
The US has already set up a punitive rapid deployment force (RDF), numbering about 200,000 army and navy personnel, and composed of three marine divisions with an air force attachment, three special-purpose groups of aircraft carriers, dozens of air squadrons of tactical aircraft, numerous headquarters, etc. The RDF is setting up a diversified network of bases in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. The strategic conception of these mobile forces implies the possibility of military intervention in cases of suspected "hostile actions" or local turmoil. Emergency plans for various scenarios in different parts of the world have been drawn up. In other words, the RDF can be dispatched to any region of the globe, if Washington believes that there is a threat to US "vital interests",
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91It is obvious that the United States uses the pretext of "fighting international terrorism" to launch its attack against the national liberation movements, particularly against the newly-free states which have opted for socialist orientation.
The CIA crimes include everything---political assassinations and undeclared wars to destabilising democratic regimes in other countries, plots, kidnappings, psychological wars, and ties with the mafia.
From the beginning, CIA directors have highlighted subversive activities aimed at socialist countries. James Engleton, former chief of the intelligence department, admitted that the Agency occupied itself with the creation and training of paramilitary forces and their subsequent infiltration of European socialist countries to provoke so-called national rebellions and overthrow the socialist system in these countries.
We shall limit ourselves to discussing one case of subversive activities which was sanctioned by top legislative and executive bodies and directed against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The annals of US legislation incorporate acts which provide for the allocating of government funds to recruit citizens of socialist countries and involve them in military-terrorist activities directed against their own country. For example, on October 10, 1951, a bill was passed, under which up to $100 million were appropriated "for any selected persons who are residing in or escaped from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania . . . either to form such persons into elements of the military forces supporting the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or for other purposes". *
Recently, Poland has been the subject of particular scrutiny by the CIA. The imperialist subversive services and their agents spare no effort in trying to destabilise the situation in the country.
2. The CIA: Terrorism as a Profession
Since its inception in 1947, the US Central Intelligence Agency has become the main US governmental body concerned with "dirty tricks": concocting and carrying out subversive actions against other countries, assassinating foreign leaders, fabricating frauds and disseminating pure lies. By such means the Agency fulfils the function of a professional terrorist employed by the White House.
The New York Times of November 22, 1975 reported that the CIA "was involved in activities which are inexcusable by any standards of international morality and diplomatic expediency''.
In 1975-1976, several committees, set up by US Congress under public pressure, investigated CIA activities. After a year-and-a-half study the Congressional committees produced voluminous reports. They contained evidence of only a fraction of the clandestine operations carried out by the CIA and other US intelligence services. However, after these facts were made public, The New York Times Magazine concluded in September 1976 that "there have been enough revelations about the Central Intelligence Agency over the past two years to keep diplomats, reporters and philosophers busy for entire careers. Three separate investigations not only stretched the imagination with show-biz material about cobra venom and deadly skindiving suits but twisted the lens on the American self-image in foreign affairs,"
~^^1^^ United State* Code, Supplement V, Vol. One, Washington, 1952, p. 1225,
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93West European countries, notably US allies, were not excluded. One of the CIA's favourite methods of provocation in these countries is to infiltrate extremist organisations and then manipulate them to exacerbate the socio-political situation, to discredit the Left and push them to the right. Usually, the groups infiltrated are right-extremist, fascist and neo-fascist organisations.
Italian journalists Paolo Berti and Corrado Incerti wrote in L'Europeo on November 12, 1976 that "the long chain of subversive actions which stain Italy with blood has only one point of departure--- NATO instructions, or the USA. The NATO instructions are essentially the following: each West European country must form organisations of people who are reliable, experienced and equipped to efficiently oppose 'a possible invasion'. Since the invasion could only come from the Communists in the East, the most reliable people to repulse them are the fascists.''
At the beginning of the 1970s, a series of rightwing coup attempts were made by Valerio Borghese, the "Black Prince", the Ordine Nuovo and La Rosa dei venti organisations, General Ugo Ricci and later by the head of counter-intelligence service Vito Miceli.
The Italian press reporting on these coup attempts emphasised that the plotters acted in collusion with NATO special services and the US Central Intelligence Agency which in turn was under orders from the White House. On February 17, 1976, the Panorama journal referred to information received from Remo Orlandini, an engineer and designer who was Borghese's right-hand man, and said that in the night of December 7, 1970, when conspirators occupied the arsenal of the Ministry of the Interior, Richard Nixon was eagerly awaiting the outcome.
Since the end of the 1960s, the CIA and oilier US subversive organisations have turned their attention to leftist terrorist groups.
At the end of 1978, the Madrid weekly Triunfo and L'Europeo made public secret Pentagon and CIA instructions to infiltrate various radical organisations. In the early 1970s, L'Europeo wrote, when the first leftist groups were going underground and establishing international links, the American special services decided to infiltrate these groups and try to push them into terrorist actions.
In his book Les vrais maitres du monde, a former CIA agent Gonzalez-Mata quotes an excerpt from the fourth chapter of The Manual for Secret Services Engaged in Operations to Destabilise Governments, edited by William Childs Westmoreland, an American general, and dealing with methods of infiltrating extremist movements. As the document states, "clandestine military services must be kept ready to carry out special operations in order to convince the governments and the public that there is a real menace and imperative need to eliminate it. For this purpose the secret services must use special agents to infiltrate subversive movements and form action groups composed of the most radical elements. These groups controlled by the secret services will instigate violence or other actions. The use of extreme-left organisations can secure the desirable goal." J
Commenting on this document Triunjo wrote that these instructions to American agents were particularly important in explaining certain events, crises and terrorist acts of recent years in various regions of the world.
Gonzalez-Mata writes that "if anything, the implementation of these directives are numerous 're-
L. M. Gonzalez-Mata, Op. cit., p. 142.
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volutionary' terrorist acts in Italy and France. In Spain the terrorist actions of 1975 coincided directly with the time when it was necessary to resume the military treaty with the USA." i
Former CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner stated in June 1978 that there existed just one opportunity of exploiting terrorism---an actual infiltration of terrorists' ranks. And this has heen practised by the US intelligence in many countries, allied or not. The Italian journal Studi cattolici stressed that the Americans were behind the actions of such extremist organisations as the Workers' Autonomy, Red Brigades and Armed Proletarian Nuclei.
The Giorni weekly reported that it was the CIA who instigated a three-day rebellion of the Workers' Autonomy in Bologna in 1977. Journalists from Giorni have managed to establish that the arms, money and recommendations were coming to the Autonomists through CIA channels. The aim of this provocation was to undermine the leftist ( Communists included) administration in the EmiliaRomagna province.
Recently, Panorama came to possess some interesting documents confiscated by the Italian police after arresting Maria Grazia Gelli, the daughter of Licio Gelli. L. Gelli was the founder and leader of secret Mason Lodge P-2. The Italian government was dissolved in May 1981 as a result of disclosures naming top government officials as masons. Describing the documents as ``explosive'', the magazine noted that they had been drawn up by senior officers of US special services issuing ``instructions'' for agents operating in West European countries.
Panorama writes that at issue are the countries which host American military bases. To keep in
check political developments in these countries, agents are instructed to maintain clandestine ties with terrorist organisations which can be manipulated, if need be, into destabilising the country's political situation or even provoking a civil war.
The instructions enumerate a list of measures for the agents to take in order to ``control'' the situation in the country, including: the formation of paramilitary subversive groups; the participation of armed provocateurs in demonstrations to incite disorder and clashes with the police; actions aimed at discrediting government and the police; the infiltration of the state apparatus; setting off blasts; and police murders.
Soon after the April 1974 revolution in Portugal which overthrew the oldest fascist regime in Europe, Washington set up a special force to plan and carry out subversive activities.
The Portugal Group included former CIA Directors William Colby and George Bush, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, US Ambassador to Portugal Frank Carlucci, retired US Admiral Walker, General Spinola, Portuguese naval intelligence officer Carlos da Motta, and Richard Allen who was President Reagan's ill-starred assistant on national security.l
Of all CIA terrorist activities, plots Lo assassinate foreign leaders unacceptable to the US are especially despicable. These operations were planned, coordinated and implemented with the approval of top officials in the American Administration. This side of the American spy agency was only partially revealed in the report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The report, published at the end of 1975, admits that the CIA often used
~^^1^^ Ibid., p. 143.
~^^1^^ Covert Action, No. 10, August-September 1980, p. 41.
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97the services of criminals, including the mafia. The report also noted that high-ranking "government officials discussed, and may have authorised, the establishment within the CIA of a generalised assassinalion capability".^^1^^
The Senate Committee report admits that the United States was involved in several assassination plots. The Committee limited its investigation to examining five of the more sensational cases of CIA terrorism in the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Chile, South Vietnam and Cuba. In actuality, the CIA's tracks of criminal interference in other countries' affairs can be traced over the entire political map of the world.
There is a long list of CIA victims: in Latin America---Che Guevara, President of Chile Salvador Allendc, Rene Schneider, Commander-- inChief of the Chilean Army, Chilean General Carlos Prats, Chilean former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, President of Bolivia General Juan Torres; in Africa---Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo, Amilcar Cabral, General Secretary of the African Party of Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, Eduardo Mondlane, leader of the liberation struggle of the Mozambique people; in Asia---Solomon Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The CIA also participated in the plots against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Indonesia Sukarno, and President of Cyprus Archbishop Makarios. Washington did not even spare its puppets: the CIA murdered the head of the pro-American regime in South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.
Twenty-four times CIA agents engineered plots to kill the leader of the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro. It is ironic that one of these plots was put into operation on November 22, 1903, the very day US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A CIA agent handed over a poisoned pen to another agent at the very time when President Kennedy's emissary met with Castro to ascertain the possibility of improving bilateral relations. It would be appropriate to recall that Kennedy's assassination was initially ascribed to "Cuban terrorists''.
Fortunately, the terrorists from Langley, CIA headquarters, have failed to fulfil their sinister designs on Castro despite the fact, as was noted in the above-mentioned report, that the suggested methods of assassination were of a most diverse nature, ranging from special rifles and poisoned tablets, to poisoned pens, a lethal bacteriological powder and other refined means. *
Speaking at the 6th conference of the heads of state and government of the non-alligned countries in 1979, Castro remarked: "It is a perfectly wellknown fact, officially admitted and reported in the United States, thai for years the authorities of that country persisted in attempts to plot assassinations of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution by using the most refined methods from their stock of plots and crimes. Despite the fact that related evidence was investigated and made public by the American Senate, the US Administration has so far not offered the slightest apology for these insidious and barbaric actions.''
And no wonder, the government would have to
~^^1^^ Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Washington, 1975, p. 5.
~^^1^^ Senate Select Committee Report. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 94th Congress, 1st Session, Washington, 1975, p. 13.
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ort
apologise for the decisions and actions of top US officials, including Presidents.
Most of the CIA's assassinations of, or attempts to assassinate developing countries' leaders were sanctioned by US Presidents.
The report of the Senate Committee says: "The evidence indicates that it is likely that President Eisenhower's expression of strong concern about Lumumba at a meeting of the National Security Council on August 18, 1960, was taken by Allen Dulles as authority to assassinate Lumumba.. ..
``The week after the August 18 NSC meeting, a presidential adviser reminded the Special Group of the 'necessity for very straight-forward action' against Lumumba and prompted a decision not to rule out consideration of 'any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba'. The following day, Dulles cabled a CIA Station Officer in Leopoldville, Republic of the Congo, that 'in high quarters', the `removal' of Lumumba was 'an urgent and prime objective'.
``Shortly thereafter the CIA's clandestine service formulated a plot to assassinate Lumumba. The plot proceeded to the point that lethal substances and instruments specifically intended for use in assassination were delivered by the CIA to the Congo Station." i
``In the summer of 1960, DDP Richard Bissell asked the Chief of the Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, to explore the feasibility of assassinating Patrice Lumumba. Bissell also asked a CIA scientist Joseph Scheider to make preparations to assassinate or incapacitate an unspecified 'African leader'. According to Scheider, Bissell said that the assignment had the 'highest authority'. Scheider pro-
cured toxic biological materials in response to Bissell's request, and was then ordered by Tweedy to take these materials to the Station Officer in Leopoldville. ...
``In late September, Scheider delivered the lethal substances to the Station Officer in Leopoldville and instructed him to assassinate Patrice Lumumba. The Station Officer testified that after requesting and receiving confirmation from CIA Headquarters that he was to carry out Scheider's instructions, he proceeded to take 'exploratory steps' in furtherance of the assassination plot. The Station Officer also testified that he was told by Scheider that President Eisenhower had ordered the assassination of Lumumba. .. .
``Scheider's mission to the Congo was preceded and followed by cables from Headquarters urging the `elimination' of Lumumba, transmitted through an extraordinarily restricted 'Eyes Only' channel--- including two messages bearing the personal signature of Allen Dulles.
``The toxic substances were never used. But there is no evidence that the assassination operation was terminated before Lumumba's death. . .." i
In other words, the last sentence means that the CIA was successful in its operation to ``eliminate'' Lumumba.
Despite the world indignation at CIA gangster practices, the organisation's activities, including outright terrorist operations, have never been curtailed. "The CIA's influence was not diminished when the 'cold war' began to subside. . . . The field of its activities rather expanded . . . turning into a grey zone of secret combats and undeclared wars," wrote Alain Guerin in his book published in Paris and entitled The People of the
~^^1^^ Senate Select Committee Report..., p. 13.
Senate Select Committee Report..., p. 19.
7*