Propaganda by the Deed, Fourth Generation Warfare and the Decline of the State

This essay is included in the recently released National-Anarchism: Methodology and Application, edited by Troy Southgate and available from Black Front Press.


From: Attack the system


An Examination of the History of the Decline of the State’s Monopoly on Violence and Warmaking.

By Keith Preston

Introduction
          World events of recent years have called to the forefront of public attention and intellectual debate the matter of what is commonly called “terrorism”. Efforts at merely defining this provocative term have proven difficult, and no consensus exists among scholars as to what “terrorism” actually is. The standardized cliche’ that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” appears to have some actual basis in fact given the ideologically charged nature of many efforts at summarizing the core characteristics of terrorism. Can all individuals or organizations who engage in extra-legal violence for political purposes be objectively classified as “terrorist”? Or do such actors need to engage in a narrower set of behaviors, such as inflicting injury or death upon persons not directly involved in whatever “cause” or “struggle” the alleged “terrorists” may be motivated by, in order to validly earn the “terrorist” label? Is the term “terrorism” itself appropriate when describing non-state actors who engage in political violence? Does this label signify any characteristics at all that are unique to those to whom it is being applied, or is the “terrorist” label merely a subjective ideological construct?(1)

          Of course, the use of physical threats and raw violence towards the achievement of political ends by rulers and the ruled alike has been commonplace since time immemorial. Political history is to a large degree the story of  palace coups, massacres, purges, insurrections and other incidents of violence occurring outside the context of any formalized legal infrastructure. However, “terrorism” as it is commonly perceived of by contemporary Westerners certainly carries with it the imagery of particular kinds of actions such as bombings, assassinations, hijackings and deliberate destruction of physical infrastructure carried out by persons devoted to the achievement of some political program through the use of such tactics and doing so in a manner that is frequently indistinguishable from that of common criminals so far as established legal norms are concerned. An examination of the history and evolution of modern Western “terrorism” would indicate that this lay perspective is indeed rooted in fact. However, it is inappropriate to associate extra-legal political violence with ordinary criminality. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to first understand the relationship between “terrorism” and the modern institution of the state as it has evolved in the Western nations and subsequently been exported to other parts of the world.
     As will be shown below, political governance underwent a major transformation in the Western world in the eras between the early Renaissance period and the rise of modern nationalism in the nineteenth century. The foremost characteristic of this transformation was the emergence of government as a corporative as opposed to personalized conception. Parallel to the development of this impersonalized, bureaucratized manifestation of government was the decline of the older polycentric order of Europe whereby powers that were previously shared by a variety of institutions (including warmaking powers) were now concentrated into the hands of the corporative state. The state then claimed for itself an exclusive monopoly on the use of political violence. Over time, the state evolved from its role as a means to an end (the maintenance of order) to an end unto itself. This latter process transpired from the time of the French Revolution to the explosions of the “total wars” of the twentieth century.

          Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the state’s monopoly on political violence and warmaking began to meet challenges from contending ideological currents and organizational forces. One of the earliest manifestations of this trend was the advent of so-called “propaganda by the deed”, a term given to the tactics of the classical Anarchists, an ideological tendency that ironically denied not only the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence but the legitimacy of the state in its entireity. Though the classical Anarchists of the “propaganda by the deed” period effectively died out as a political or ideological force following their defeat in the Spanish Civil War and the eclipsing of radical labor movements by the Second World War, their tactics were appropriated and utilized by a wide variety of dissident political currents in Europe and the Americas during the postwar period. Such currents originated from all over the geographical and intellectual spectrum. Some were “far Left”, others “far Right”. Some were religious in nature, others avowedly secular. Some consisted of indigenous Europeans or Americans, others originated from the Third World.  Some killed or bombed indiscriminately, others were more selective. Indeed, the only common denominator to be found among postwar Western “terrorist” groups is their resolute opposition to one or another of the manifestions of modern liberalism and its foundations: bourgeoise commercialism, neocolonialism and liberal imperialism, relative cosmopolitanism, rapid technological expansion and parliamentary forms of government.

          Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Western liberal model has achieved unprecedented hegemony and taken root in an expanded number of nations. The elimination of the Soviet Union as a constraint on liberal imperialism has been accompanied by a predictable rise in militarism on the part of Western liberalism.(2) Furthermore, the universalist presumptions and economic determinism of liberalism, combined with the ongoing process of the globalization of capital, have propelled the liberal powers, particularly the United States, towards the pursuit of unprecedented and unchallenged global hegemony. That this state of affairs should meet with resistance from many of the world’s peoples is no surprise, particularly those peoples whose cultural foundations are the most antithetical to liberalism, i.e., those of the Islamic world. Interestingly, pockets of resistance to liberal global hegemony have arisen within the First World as well, including the United States.

          Much of conventional opinion regards the practice of modern “terrorism” as originating from ordinary criminal motivations, ideological extremism, mental illness or moral deficiency on the part of its practicioners. Accusations of this type are frequently selective, uninformed and heavily ideologically-intoned. In this paper a dissenting point of view will be presented, that of “terrorists” as non-state political and military actors engaged in the rational application of ordinary principles of realpolitik and in the process mounting a challenge to the state’s claimed monopoly on political violence, and in ways that are not fundamentally different ideologically, morally or psychologically from those of state actors. Instead, the kinds of “terrorist” groupings to be examined will be shown to be representatives of a new stage in the evolution of modern war (so-called “fourth generation war”). Additionally, an examination of modern military history, contemporary military theory and the dramatic expansion of both the scale and success of so-called “terrorist” entities will demonstrate both the rise of such entities as major political contenders and the decline of the state as a monopolist of political violence.

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