Posted on 02/10/2011 2:27:15 AM PST by struwwelpeter
The word ‘terror’ in Latin means ‘fear’ and ‘horror’. The word ‘terrorism’ is derived from it, and must be understood as a means of inducing fear. Mass murder does not always strike fear into everyone. The elimination of six million Jews did not. Neither did the destruction of two million Africans in Darfur, nor the deportation of hundreds of thousands from the Caucasus. These acts struck fear into no one other than the doomed. All that reigned was indifference. Terrorism, however, scares everyone, and while I of course condemn terrorism, I believe it is time to figure out why fear is being spread, and who is doing it. Terrorism is only a means, one that is always criminal and always without justification, but it is simply a means. There is no ‘terrorism’ political movement.
After Domodedovo they explained that we are in a war, and some even pronounced it to be a civil war. But in a war, and all the more so in a civil war, we do not summon detectives to determine with whom we are at war. A terrorist hides, or dies, but in any case he lets you know in whose name he is doing the killing so that you know who is not to be spared. Domodedovo was different, just as the apartment house bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk were different. The terrorists kept silent, and instilled a nameless fear of every shadow. In a civil war it is candid: these are the Whites, and those are the Reds.
The 1918-1920 civil war has been forgotten, but today’s terrorism stems from it. Some say that Abramovich and Berezovsky started the war against the peaceful, accomplished Bolshevik revolution, but they were not around back then. The Tsar would never have give Abramovich or Berezovsky any businesses to manage. Back then the Ryabushinskys and Putilovs were amassing all the wealth, and they were not guilty of the civil war, either. Of course, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd almost peacefully, and made all those wonderful promises that the Tsars never would make: the Land Decree and the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. Most importantly, they held elections to the Constituent Assembly, which the Provisional Government found necessary to delay since only a quarter of the electorate would vote for the Bolsheviks. So, they dispersed the Assembly, and because of the civil war no legitimate government ever appeared in Russia after the revolution.
To Russia’s great misfortune, the Assembly members were mostly civilians who could not stand up to the well-armed Bolsheviks. Deninin resisted, as did Yudenich and Kolchak, but they were not considered members of the Constituent Assembly. The civil war was between a dictatorship waving the flag of democracy, and the Tsarist system, and between the two, the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist rump, Russia was consumed.
Along with the war, however, terror began. It was not a Tsarist officer who shot Vladimir Lenin, and others: they were killed by other revolutionaries, by members of Peasant Party, which also used terrorism against the Tsarist government. The Peasant Party, by the way, received most of the popular vote in the Assembly. The Bolsheviks had been trying to introduce a grain surplus appropriation system in the villages, and declared attacks by the peasants to be the work of the Whites, and responded with the Red Terror. The Bolsheviks, betrayers of everyone, feared that the peasants would turn against them, and so they agreed to a compromise: the New Economic Policy (NEP). For a time, terror died down.
By 1922 Lenin was saying: “We retreated for a year. Enough.” A punitive system was invented, ready to transform the peasantry into the agricultural worker class, and in 1927 the Soviet state began practicing mass repression in grain procurement, and became a terrorist state. The exile of millions of peasants from their homelands frightened tens of millions into abandoning farm work. Mutual terror ended, and one-sided terror began. In 1929 the NEP compromise could be abandoned.
But the terrorist state, while frightening the entire world and keeping its populace in constant fear, was hobbled by its own violence, and in 1991 finally collapsed. Had Russia been left alone, she could have turned out different, but her owners, themselves products of the communist system, updated a few details of their former system and also began to coerce everyone to live their way, and forbad the populace from deciding for itself.
Resistance to this coercion began under the banner of national independence. Chechnya was refused genuine autonomy, and against the self-proclaimed republic, which did not even have an army, was thrown the force of a strong military power. Grozny was bombed in order to intimidate the Chechens. Our army became terrorist. The Chechens also responded with terror, and terrorism was once again made mutual by Basayev and Budanov (Basayev was a Chechen militant renowned for his brutality, while Budanov was a Russian officer convicted of war crimes – ed).
Coercion grew, even outside Chechnya and the Caucasus. With the transition from popular elections of district governors by their regions, territories, and autonomous republics, to designation by the Kremlin, the populace ceased to be subjects of a Russian federation, and Russia once again was a unified state fighting her own people, just as the USSR was before her. The terror machine, however, no longer risks repressing everyone at the same time. It does not have the strength it had in the Soviet days, when it could do it all and then some. Nowadays any response to coercion and repression is considered terrorism, while coercion and repression are not. Now the ‘Struggle against Terrorism’ has been reduced to a desire to stop responses to our terrorism, and make terrorism once again unilateral.
Our government believes it can control terrorism not with policies, but with improved enforcement agencies and equipment. They found positive examples for their ‘Struggle against Terrorism’ in the U.S. and Israel. The Americans and Israelis, however, have quite a different sort of terrorism. They are in wars against an external opponent that uses terror. These days there is no other way to fight the United States. Seven Arab countries attacked a newborn Israel to no avail, and since the usual means were useless, they started to use terror. The U.S. and Israel are engaged in wars where terrorism is used against them, while we are in a civil war, in which both sides use terrorism.
In this article, you will not find out whether the U.S. and Israel can come to peace with their adversaries, or any other controversial issues unrelated to Domodedovo. Ending our civil war is much easier for us, than ending those external wars is for the U.S. and Israel, because it is our own ruling class that abuses the populace of its own country. Our central government has no reason for its absolutism other than its desire to keep the populace docile. They proved this during the transition to the NEP in 1921, when in one fell swoop they changed the state of the nation. The dictatorship and its denial of the peasant’s private property and production never went away - it masqueraded for a time as a peaceful economic system, and in so doing led the peasants to slaughter.
Current controversies are not limited to national conflicts. The Primorye Partisans (a group of anti-corruption vigilantes - ed) reminded us of this, as does the growth of Russian nationalism, in both democratic and fascist forms: no matter how different their ideals, both demonstrate dissatisfaction with a coerced, meager life, and a lack of freedom that which is no different from no freedom at all.
The incongruity in development that has bedeviled Russia since she ended feudalism is not unique - other Western nations had to resolve this. The Tsars and Bolsheviks, in hoping to use non-economic methods, delayed development here. In order to peacefully resolve problems that have accumulated over the centuries, even honest elections of government officials at every level are insufficient. We need to ensure freedom of action and freedom of expression of non-governmental organizations, so that we can ensure that even honestly elected officials never stray beyond the limits within which a State is authorized to act, and not disregard to the safety of its citizens.
The Soviet autocracy, which developed in the Tsarist tradition, never wanted to know of such limits, and with a baleful eye it treasured the security of its special Soviet system and its rulers. Enforcement bodies repressed the populace, not just in not providing them with security, but also in actively putting them at risk. In 1991, the leadership announced that our social system was no longer special, but the enforcement agencies, as always, continued to repress the populace. What can I say? The USSR’s candid display to the populace, that the people are not first in their own homes, bore fruit: the Union, which was not a union, did not survive. The historically autonomous regions of Russia, however, still suffer the neglect that anywhere that is not Moscow suffers.
The government wants to prevent terrorist responses to their terrorism, holding onto to what it cannot grasp and saying that Russia cannot stand, other than on top of bayonets. This, they say, is our national characteristic. They assert that, without state terror, they cannot survive, so too bad for any private individual, group, or local populace. It is not our government that cannot remain standing other than on bayonets, however. The Russian Commonwealth is stronger than it may seem to Putin, so let us abandon coercing states to remain within this commonwealth. Whether as full subjects of a federation, or as members of a confederation, it would have been no worse than the British Commonwealth, and few would have left completely.
The main slogan of the opposition is: “Russia without Putin!” But what is the difference - Putin or Not-Putin or whomever? The KGB school attracts an excess of new tradesmen and never fires them. Another shift is always ready for shift change, while the opposition is all about the person and not about the system that is unchanged since Ivan the Terrible, a system that beats heads with truncheons.
Change for our nation could be better expressed by the slogans: “Russia without fear” and “Russia without state terrorism!” If a legitimate government appears in Russia, a government that knows the country is not its personnel property and that the populace does not simply work for the government; if a compromise is not considered a defeat, but a victory, and recognized as a victory is the Lebed-Maskhadov treaty, which Yeltsin stomped on and in so doing left behind a war that drags on into its second decade; if Russians and non-Russians can prove themselves through deeds and not through murder and suicide, only then will the civil war and the terror cease. But not before.
If we do not end up living once again as we did under Stalin, with all that entails for everyone.
“If a legitimate government appears in Russia, a government that knows the country is not its personnel property and that the populace does not simply work for the government...if Russians and non-Russians can prove themselves through deeds and not through murder and suicide, only then will the civil war and the terror cease. But not before.”
I cannot but agree with this statement. What is there not to like?
Writing on terrorism as a counter-reaction to so-called government terrorism is just one step beyond enabling terrorism.
Right now, the reasons behind a terrorism in Russia are no different than in US, Europe and ME.
I mean a religion of peace and it’s Saudi preachers.
If you are just disagree with a government you don’t blow innocents.
I'm reading this editorial, and I'm thinking, "This editorial is an accusation of terrorism laid against Putin. Putin might actually be guilty as charged. If so, the editorialist and the publication which publicizes this editorial must be in peril, which is the logical implication of speaking truth to power which actually is power.Compare with The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves , a piece in The New York Times in which EASON JORDAN confessed to having maintained CNN's Bagdad bureau at the cost of performing as a propaganda organ for Saddam Hussein. Of course he wants to think otherwise of his action, but that is what he had done.
Do you mena like how the KGB admitted to killing 42 million of their own people?
Yet no one went to jail or faced justice?
Or like Litvivenko who said that the FSB killed hundreds of their own people to put Putin into power I would tell you to give him a call, but he was poisoned and died 16 months after he said that he himself trained Al Zawahiri and that 911 was planned in his country Russia.
From National Review article written by defector Ion Pacepa.
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.
According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Do you mean like how the KGB admitted to killing 42 million of their own people?
Yet no one went to jail or faced justice?
Or like Litvivenko who said that the FSB killed hundreds of their own people to put Putin into power I would tell you to give him a call, but he was poisoned and died 16 months after he said that he himself trained Al Zawahiri and that 911 was planned in his country Russia.
From National Review article written by defector Ion Pacepa.
In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.
According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.
Red communist terror is pretty well documented and admitted by Soviets since 1956. Later socialist Soviet crap is condemned by Russians since 1991 as well.
As for Pacepa and Litvinenko I couldn’t get their comments without any criticism. No matter how bad a regime they betrayed was their moral qualities are questionable to say the least. If they could betray their friends why couldn’t they lie to prove they are not useless?
I haven’t heard any interviews from both Andropov or Putin advocating terrorism. And I have no evidence on that from any credible source.
As for Litvinenko he was not a KGB spy as advertized but a crooked cop who was in charge for countering ethnic gangs in Moscow back to an earlier 90s. He was also a hired gun for Berezovski, a Soros agent and one of the most vocal Putin’s opponent right now. Berezovski is famous of using Chechen gangs overlooked by Litvinenko as a tool to deal with Berezovski business adversaries. Berezovski is also known to be a sponsor for an Islamic uprising in Chechnya.
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