I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francisco Franco. His car blew up, killing only him and his chauffeur with a carefully planted charge, and not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco's rule was vaporized in the same instant. The dictator had to turn instead to Crown Prince Juan Carlos, who turned out to be the best Bourbon in history and who swiftly dismantled Franco's entire system. If this action was "terrorism," it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high.It's a sign of political daring in these times to express praise of any sort for the use of this kind of violence toward political ends. In this essay, André Glucksmann shows just how much he shares this trait with Hitchens.
VIEWPOINT
Anti-Terrorist Resistance in Grozny, by André Glucksmann
LE MONDE | 12.05.04 | 14h07
He who can do most can do least. On March 9, "Victory in Europe Day," and "Army Day." the Russian troops are parading and singing to their glory, when the official viewing platform, thought to be untouchable, explodes.
In this place — the best protected in Grozny — the Chechen resisters executed the head of the pro-Russian administration (among other brass hats), leader of the army of occupation, who are known for their savagery.
It would have been easier for them to practice blind and indiscriminate terrorism. It is easier to blow up explosives-crammed cars at random as in Baghdad, to blow oneself up in cafés or a buses as Hamas' human bombs do or to "bin-ladenize" by targeting trains and stations packed with travelers, or homes or even petroleum refineries and nuclear power plants, which are far more vulnerable in the West. They don't do that. And nobody wonders why?
It's not for lack of inspiration. Some among them sometimes give in to the temptation; witness the 700 civilians taken hostage in a Moscow theater, a spectacular and mysterious operation: a Grozny-Moscow journey by an armed convoy that went unnoticed over thousands of kilometers of highway; in the end, 130 hostages killed by the Federal police and, last but not least(*), no surviving terrorist left to talk.
It isn't for lack of audacity: four hundred years of resistance to the Russian occupation forged men and a weighty tradition that Russian writers did not fail to praise. O, Pushkin! O, Lermontov! O, Tolstoy!
It isn't for want of despair: ten years of the latest war hidden from view, forgotten to the world, rubbed out of consciences; the capital, cities and villages razed; more than a fifth of the population dead — how many wounded, tortured, maimed and how many widows and orphans and how many more to come? Human firewood blown apart with grenades, towns surrounded by tanks, roundups, a population taken hostage by men in uniform, a commerce of corpses...
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