Can Terrorism be Justified? by Groff Schroeder: January 2015
Submitted by ftcsadmin2 on Fri, 01/16/2015 - 08:25.
Assassination can be a particularly effective form of violent political or religious action, which is also known as terrorism. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy not only permanently eliminated some of the most youthful, powerful, productive, and successful leaders in history, but also put supporters and potential future leaders alike on notice - successful pursuit of certain policies in public service can be fatal. In early January 2015 in Paris, France, religious extremists murdered 17 people (and wounded 21 more) including journalists, innocent bystanders, and public servants. Apparently the murders - at least one of which might be considered an assassination - were committed in revenge for the publication of allegedly insulting cartoons, and ostensibly were meant to intimidate those who might consider similar courses of action.
In a radio address in 1986, Ronald Reagan rejected the idea that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." However, thanks to "20/20 hindsight" few would condemn the use of bombings and assassinations by the European "Resistance" during World War II. The Nazis routinely employed political violence including summary execution of political opponents and mass murders of innocent bystanders as reprisals in response to the Resistance (not to mention the attempted genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and gays). Who today would mourn the assassination of infamous Nazis such as Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector of what is today Czechoslovakia, a zealous soldier who helped plan Krystallnacht and was an important architect of Nazi Germany's “final solution?”
The victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks appear to have done little more than publish satirical cartoons allegedly insulting to a religious belief system. In contrast to industrialized mass murder of selected racial and societal groups, insult is in the eye of the insulted. Claims of insults to governments, nations, political parties, political leaders, and religions provide convenient excuses for countless forms of repression in totalitarian regimes throughout history, and all over the world today.
In this context, let us compare the Charlie Hebdo attacks to the Reinhard Heydrich assassination. Was the use of violence justified?
France is a democratic society, so terrorism is not the only option. Czechoslovakia was suffering violent and repressive military occupation by the Nazis in general and Reinhard Heydrich in particular. The targets of the attack in Paris was not a single infamous local enforcer of a repressive totalitarian regime, but satirists and journalists publishing a small weekly newspaper (and others). The reason for the attack upon Charlie Hebdo was not self-defense, but fundamentalist religious ideology. Most of the people killed in France were not the perpetrators of well (even proudly) publicized terrorist acts of an occupying totalitarian army, but innocent bystanders and public servants. In Czechoslovakia in 1942, Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich (a rank of SS general second only to Heinrich Himmler) was the only person killed during the attack.
Members of the Resistance opposing Hitler's occupying armies appear to have had a valid reason to employ political violence (terrorism), and applied their attack directly to an offending party, and to that offending party alone. The religious violence of the Charlie Hebdo attacks can make no similar ethical claims.
Can Terrorism be Justified? by Groff Schroeder
Published January 13, 2015 with the quotation below.
"All people have the right not to be murdered; nobody has the right not to be offended." Michael Potemra, National Review