War, Violence and Modernity (2): Revolutionary Violence and

Terrorism

Dr Chris Pearson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lKZqqSI9-s

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424

Questioning violence

• Violence provokes questions and judgements

• Are we living in a particularly violent age: compare Malesevic and Pinker

• Political and religious ideologies, economic injustice, new technologies; has violence taken on new forms in the modern age?

Lecture outline

• State-initiated violence and coercion:

Punishing criminals

Revolutionary violence (terror)• Violence against the state:

Crowds and ‘mobs’

Terrorism

Interpreting violence

• Are humans violent creatures?• Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755) –

humans naturally peaceful – society and property corrupt and makes them violent

• Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) – life in the state of nature is violent and short. A strong state is needed to ensure order

• Different interpretations of violence today

The State and Violence

‘We have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Punishing crime in the post-Enlightenment era

• Ancien régime France; severe punishments – public execution – frequently handed out

• Influence of Enlightenment thinking – Cesare Beccaria’s Of Crimes and Punishments (1764) and Jeremy Bentham

• Punishment should match the crime• Rational actors would obey the law to avoid

punishment• 1791 penal code put this principles in place

Foucault on Crime

• Discipline and Punish (1975)

• Move from public violence against the body (ancien régime) to “correction” of the criminal in prison (post-Enlightenment)

Criminal justice system less violent but more coercive?

• Criminologists and prison create the “criminal”

• Law-abiding members of working class distance themselves from the delinquents; the cost of committing crime becomes too great

• Prison/penal system a form of social control

• Criminal justice system less violent but coercion and social control remain

Source: www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

State-sponsored revolutionary terror

• Terror ‘organized violence by revolutionary groups or regimes that intimidates and terrifies the general population.’ (Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution [1994], p.11)

• Has characterized modern revolutions• Begun in revolutionary France

Background to the Terror

• Revolutionary wars going badly – la patrie en danger

• Armed uprising in the Vendée

• Revolts across France• Marat – hero of the

sans-culottes – assassinated in his bath

The reign of Terror (1793-94)

• Driven by Committee of Public Safety • Law of Suspects (17 September 1793)

empowered watch committees to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty.’

Execution of Marie-Antoinette, 17 October 1793

The Terror unfolds• Repression in the provinces – drownings

in Loire river at Nantes• Genocide in the Vendée?• All social classes affected• Republic of Virtue or the Great Terror –

law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) – high (or low) point of Terror legislation

• Terror winds down in late July/August 1794

Explaining the Terror

• Republican/socialist view- the terror a regrettable if necessary defence of the revolution against counter-revolution during a time of war – Mathiez, Soboul

• Conservative view from Burke onwards: revolution a time of mob rule and chaos

• Revisionists (Furet, Schama): the Terror inherent within revolution not an aberration

Robespierre on terror‘Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the homeland’s most pressing needs.’

The Bolshevik use of terror

• Destroy external and internal enemies of the Communist party

• Cheka created December 1917 – mass arrests and executions during Civil War

• Randomness increased feelings of terror• Revolutionaries treated terror as

essential to safeguarding revolution

Terror as class warfare

• Marxist twist to the terror; members of particular classes – kulak, capitalist etc – deemed counter-revolutionary (over-rode individual circumstances)

• Stalin: ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’• Soviet bureaucracy planned terror –

modern and “rational” state practices (Gregory, Terror by Quota, 2009)

Sergei Kirov

The purges of 1936-8

• Letter denouncing counter-revolutionaries of various stripes

• Opposition leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev convicted of murdering Kirov in first show trial

The Gulag

• Vast system of prison and labour camps

• Brought to world’s attention by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

• Gulag’s population grew massively between 1937 (0.5 million) and 1939 (1.3 million)

Interpreting Soviet Terror

• Totalitarian perspectives: see Terror as intrinsic to Communist ideology

• Conquest blames Stalin (a ‘monster’) and faith in absolute ideology

• Fitzpatrick – purges part of revolutionary terror

• Meyer – reaction to counter-revolutionary violence

Collective violence against the state

• Collective violence long been a part of Western societies

• Struggles over power – resisting, obtaining, defending power

• Urbanization shapes forms of collective violence and protest

• Modern protest – complex organization and centred on obtaining rights

• See Tilly, ‘Collective violence in European Perspective,’ (1979)

The Paris Commune (1871)

• An example of protest against the state• Protesters seize control of army canons

and town hall• Introduces political, social and economic

reforms• Lauded by Karl Marx• But brutally repressed by the French army

Ilya Repin, Meeting at the Mur des Fédérés (1883)

Conservative reactions to the Commune

• Fear of violent, politically active, and de-feminized women

• Fear of the irrational and violent crowd – Gustave LeBon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896)

The 9/11 attacks on New York

Defining terrorism

• ‘The pursuit of political goals through the systematic use of terror alone’ Townshend, Terrorism (2002)

• Fear that the terrorist act creates goes beyond physical damage caused

• Terrorism is (in part) ‘symbolic violence’ Law, Terrorism: A History (2009)

Histories of terrorism• Stretches back to ancient times - Sicarii

opposed Roman rule over Judea • But it has become ‘one of the defining

phenomena of the modern era’ (Law, Terrorism, 2009)

• Huge variety of terrorist groups in modern age – cut across political spectrum – KKK, Baader-Meinhof gang, al-Qaida

Andreas Baader: ‘The anti-imperialist struggle and sexual emancipation go hand in hand. Fucking and shooting are the same thing!’

Terrorism and modernity

• New causes to fight for and against – nationalism, colonialism, communism, fascism, anarchism

• Role of modern technologies and communication networks

• Attacks on Western modernity (although groups like al-Qaida use modern technologies)

Interpreting terrorism

• ‘One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’

• Michael Burleigh, Blood and Rage (2008): terrorists criminals, insane, ‘morally squalid’; stresses importance of counter-terrorism

• Law, Terrorism: A History (2009): terrorism ‘part of a process of rational and conscious decision-making within particular political and cultural contexts.’