World: The City as a Battlefield: A Global Concern

(2 of 10)

Rubenstein of Chicago's Roosevelt University: "It might be easy in a mechanical way to screw up the system—forcing the airlines to spend millions on armed guards, or to mess up the electrical or telephone systems. But what's wrong with the new terror is that it is creating social chaos without at the same time preparing people for a new order." Implicitly, at least, the Maoists, the radical separatists in Quebec, the Naxalites in India, the Weathermen and Panthers in the U.S. all share the spirit of anarchism: its fascination with violence, its chaotic organization, its insistence on absolute freedom (an illusion that in the past has invariably led to tyranny). Often their cult is pseudo-religious, even monastic: it is consecrated to a dead or distant deity like Che Guevara or Mao Tse-tung; its communicants gather in intimate, almost confessional cells: and they observe a ritual secrecy that eventually cuts them off from society altogether. Their ideologies differ, but in general their rationale is that "the system" is incapable of real change and that the official violence of the government (police, prisons, armies) can only be countered by violence. The aim is ultimately to destroy what cannot be reformed. Thus, in essence, they subscribe to the dictum of the 19th century patron saint of anarchy, Mikhail Bakunin, that "the urge to destroy is really a creative urge."

The distinguishing feature of the urban guerrilla, says Rubenstein, is that he is "short-circuiting" the classic concept of revolution. Theorists from Locke to Marx to Herbert Marcuse have always discussed revolution in terms of mass movements. The very vulnerability of the modern industrial world allows the urban terrorist to skip the painstaking, step-by-step process of organizing a mass revolutionary movement and then taking disruptive action.

So far, the new terror has been relatively limited; as far as is known, no group has sought to plunge a city into chaos with simultaneous attacks, for example, on its power stations, water supply and main roads. But the degree of terror has increased notably with the cop-killing campaign in the U.S. and the murder of hostages in Canada, Argentina, Uruguay and Guatemala. Thus the urban guerrillas have revived the system of diplomatic ransom that flourished from the Dark Ages until the Renaissance, when kings and princes routinely used ambassadors as hostages. As Brandeis Sociologist Richard Sennett puts it: "The terrorism of today is the diplomacy of Henry the Eighth."

In the U.N. last week, Sweden's Premier Olof Palme called for some way "to counteract technology's multiplication of the power to destroy." British Prime Minister Edward Heath warned in the same forum: "It may be that in the decade ahead of us, civil war, not war between nations, will be the main danger we will face." During a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, Richard Nixon said that the ubiquitous terrorism was "an international disease."

So far, the disease has struck nowhere more dramatically than it has in Canada. Climaxing a long series of bombings and bank robberies, the French-Canadian separatist group known as the Front de Libération du Québec (F.L.Q.) kidnaped two high officials: James R. Cross, British trade commissioner in Montreal and, later, Quebec Labor Minister Pierre