The Modern Blood-Feud: Ruminations on Political Violence

Christopher L. Blakesley is professor of law at the Louisiana State University Law Center. His books include Terrorism, Drugs, International Law and the Protection of Human Liberty (Transnational, 1992).

The word “terrorism” is over-used today to include almost all acts of violence committed for political purposes by clandestine groups. Some experts see terrorism as occupying the nether end of the warfare spectrum, a form of low-intensity, unconventional aggression. Others, however, believe that referring to it as war rather than criminal activity lends dignity to terrorists and places their acts in the context of acceptable international behaviour. There is certainly some conduct even in war that is criminal (genocide, crimes against humanity). The analogue when there is no state of war is terrorism. War crimes and crimes against humanity are less poorly defined than terrorism, but suffer from some vagueness of definition, at least for purposes of basic criminal law. Certain types of violence are obviously legal. For example, some argue that violent humanitarian intervention is justified in the manner and nature of substantive criminal law’s defence of others (which is akin to self-defence).

 

Crimes against humanity and terrorism are crimes of the first order. They represent, along with genocide, the worst we mortals do to each other. They are political violence without restraint of international law or morality. One question for this paper is whether international criminal law and prosecution can provide a remedy. An important factor here is the perpetrator’s motive, namely, to do violence to innocents to achieve a political, military, religious or philosophical end, or to be rid of individuals or groups seen as enemies or as at least as obstructions to “the good life”. Sometimes the offences are bred of simple racial, religious, gender or ethnic hatred, created and manipulated by an evil leadership. The leadership usually exploits such hatred to gain or maintain power. The people against whom the crimes are committed are actually part of the essence of the crime.

 

This violence against innocents is condemned as criminal by every nation of the world. The conduct is criminal and immoral, no matter what its motivation. It is criminal whether it is ostensibly done in the name of sovereignty, democracy, national liberation, self-determination, God, or any other piety. It is criminal even when done in the name of “justice” or “rectifying wrongs”. The values one pretends to espouse in slaughtering innocent people are simple, evil vanity. The crimes are committed and, sadly, those against whom they are perpetrated react in kind. The vendetta rages.

 

The universal criminal nature of these offences is seen in the laws of each nation and customs of each group. When the act is perpetrated against “me” or “us”, it is criminal. When a group commits the act, it invariably tries to hide the fact and cover it up. This again indicates that the deed is acknowledged to be criminal. Cover-up even occurs when a group commits the offences to retaliate or to “obtain justice” for crimes committed against it. Violence against innocents is universally condemned as criminal.

Terror in French History

The theoreticians and technicians of punishment in the French Middle Ages used the symbol of the bourreau (executioner) to represent the king’s power.¹ Consider the playing-card king. A person condemned to be “expiated” for attempted regicide was the bottom half, the inverted figure of the king. This perfect opposite of the king simultaneously represented the powerlessness of the condemned and of the people. The alleged perpetrator was the mirror image, the exact opposite of the king. The perpetrator represented the people. So the king was omnipotent; the people had no power. Naturally, the omnipotent king had control of life and death over his subjects. Indeed, he had power over their very souls. Terror and power interrelated in a very significant and horrifically symbolic way.

 

One who would challenge that power, the traitor who had attempted regicide or even parricide, the analogue to regicide, must be shown to be absolutely without power or hope. He must be symbolised to the people in the most powerful way as the opposite of the sovereign. The sovereign must be seen as omnipotent, the regicide as utterly powerless. Indeed, he must be shown not even to have the power to die.

 

Thus, it followed that the traitor must die a thousand deaths. It would not do simply to execute him. The executioner was to take that person to the very edge of death by torture, but bring him back again. Then up to death and back again—up and back, up and back, a thousand times. The bourreau was “the man of a thousand deaths”. Finally, the individual was “allowed” to die when it suited the king.

 

It seems natural and right that people should revolt against such power, even if that power represented “law”. Revolution eventually ensued. The French revolutionaries applied tactics of terror learned from their former masters in the ancien régime. The people turned on their former masters with a vengeance, so to speak, and the Reign of Terror (1793–4) followed.

 

Violence is certainly justified in some circumstances: for example, in rebellion and revolution to escape oppression. As John Stuart Mill put it in his classic work of political theory, On Liberty (1859), “specific resistance, or general rebellion, was held to be justifiable” if rulers infringed “certain immunities, called political liberties or rights”. So-called modern revolutions and related violence may be seen as culminations of Enlightenment philosophy and have been considered justified, even noble. Violence and terror against innocents, however, are neither noble nor justified. When revolution takes that turn, it degenerates into a self-destructive reign of terror.

 

Terror was terror under the ancien régime and during the Reign of Terror, no matter how it was rhetorically glorified at the time or afterwards. In Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities (1859), Madame Defarge is an interesting literary symbol of this truth. She certainly has good reason to wish to avenge herself and the French people. In her knitting, she registers all who will be executed to avenge and “free” the people. Once the wave of violence and concomitant power gathers momentum, it engulfs her as she embodies it. Similarly, in Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif (1912), Évariste Gamelin, a sensitive artist seeking to rectify injustice, becomes a paranoid monster as he is consumed with the need and desire to execute all who might have been connected with the ancien régime.

 

When violence explodes with its ferocious and relentless intensity against those who represent or symbolise the enemy, it devours those who wield it as well. Righting wrongs in the cases of Madame Defarge and Gamelin destroys not only the original oppressors (who had first wielded violence), but also those who use it subsequently to avenge the initial evil. Violence always consumes its own.

 

Whenever violence moves from being applied to combatants or their leaders to being used to strike down innocents, it is murder, even if rhetorically glorified. Violence against innocents for whatever end, however excused, is immoral and criminal. The oppression and terror of the ancien régime were overcome by revolution, which evolved into the Directory (1795–9), a regime worse than the one it replaced. A balance and relative end to the violence eventually developed as a result of the rule of law. Today, the rules of life are no different. Violence is immoral and criminal when perpetrated against innocents. The excuses given are meaningless.

Becoming What We Hate

Governments and leaders of smaller groups often react to harm or threats of harm in a self-destructive way. They abuse their peoples’ fears to accomplish selfish international or domestic ends. This tactic crystallised for American policy early in the Cold War. US Army General James H. Doolittle, commissioned by President Eisenhower to investigate the nation’s intelligence capabilities, argued that the United States was justified in abandoning all ethical constraints in its struggle against the Soviet Union:

 

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.²

 

In the face of terrorism or crimes against humanity, we may allow our fright to become rage and we may seek vengeance. This often happens, because fear is easily manipulated into rage. If we succumb, we participate in what Albert Camus called an ugly, destructive and self-destructive “death-dance”, an “infernal dialectic”. Leaders blind their adherents to any humanity on the other side. People are made to believe that they are fighting the devil himself. Law and morality are perverted. Unrestrained violence may ensue. The rule of law is replaced by brute power.

 

A weird and paradoxical symbiotic relationship may develop between leaders of enemy groups. An enemy is required to conceal or take the blame for the leadership’s incompetence, corruption or other internal problems. A people’s sense of losing security is exacerbated by its leaders. Wrongs purportedly done to a people are invoked by leaders to rationalise the claimed “necessity” to commit crimes against humanity. Leaders often cite law to elicit public support for the use of force. Those against whom the force is applied must be associated with evil. Media and many commentators fall into the trap laid by leaders, using the label “genocidalist” or “terrorist” or other villainous epithets to justify their own side’s crimes against humanity.

An Infernal Dialectic

Both sides of most conflicts rationalise their own worst conduct as “legal” even though, if they were on the receiving end, they would consider it criminal. We thus see how easy it is to fall into the infernal dialectic identified by Camus in which

 

whatever kills one side kills the other too, each blaming the other and justifying his violence by the opponent’s violence. The eternal question as to who was first responsible loses all meaning then … [Can’t we] at least … refrain from what makes it unforgivable … the murder of the innocent?³

 

I trust Camus was right when he wrote that humanity generally does not want to be either victim or executioner, but is often manipulated by its leaders into becoming both.⁴ When we accept the role of executioner, however, no matter how lofty the claimed end, we simply become oppressors or slaughterers of innocents. We must strive to overcome, by rectifying past or present wrongs, the tendency to allow inertia or momentum to make executioners or victims of us all.

 

Unfortunately, we are all caught up in this infernal dialectic, this horrible death-dance this “plague” which is a propensity to pestilence and destruction that we try to hide. Thomas Merton, analysing Camus’ The Plague, states the tendency beautifully:

 

It is the wilful negation of life that is built into life itself: the human instinct to dominate and to destroy … to seek one’s own happiness by destroying the happiness of others, to build one’s security on power and, by extension, to justify evil use of that power in terms of “history,” or “the common good,” or of “the revolution,” or even of “the justice of God.”⁵

 

All of our attempts to make oppression of others appear acceptable through obfuscation, secrecy and rhetoric in the end will be for naught. But virtually no one escapes the “miasma of evil” that consists in being deluded by the “self-assurance of those who know all the answers in advance and who are convinced of their own absolute and infallible correctness ... [setting] the stage for war, pestilence, famine, and other personages we prefer to leave unnoticed in the pages of an apocalypse”.⁶ This ignorance which Camus and Merton reject “prefers its own rightness to the values that are worth defending. Indeed, it sacrifices those values by its willingness to kill men in honor of its dogmatic self-idolatry”.⁷

 

It is worth considering whether the prosecution of perpetrators, especially of leaders, is helpful to escaping this cycle of death and destruction. International law may in fact be seen as fostering or promoting oppression and violence. Indeed, when the law is appropriated and abused it may do just that. Some oppressing nations justify their conduct by claiming that it is consistent with international law. Others simply suggest by their actions and cynical excuses that there is no international law. But the reality is that oppression violates international law, no matter what the excuse given and no matter if some nations “get away with it” for a time.

 

As a means of breaking the yoke of oppression and terror, victims sometimes opt for violence. This, of course, is perfectly legal, a form of self-defence. But violence against other innocents is not self-defence. Yet when the oppressed rise up, they often do so in a way that causes them to become what they hated in their oppressors. Lex talionis, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:24), calls on victims or their proxies to carry out the sanction against the victimisers. There are proper and improper sanctions. The history and true nature of lex talionis is interesting and may provide an important insight into the “modern” sensed “need” to retaliate.

 

Anciently, the tribe or group would require vengeance against those who were deemed to have wronged them. When harm occurred, society was required to purge itself of the crime’s taint, to avoid the wrath of the god or gods. Some metaphysical dangers could only be averted by spilling the blood of the perpetrator or his proxy. When a person escaped who had committed an act that put the group at this sort of metaphysical risk, the group had to seek that person’s return to expiate itself. If the person’s return was not possible, the group had to purge the taint by proxy, often through attack and wholesale slaughter of those who represented the fugitive (see, for example, 1 Kings 2:28–34).

 

Even today, oppression or perceived oppression by one group against another is the impetus for retaliation by the oppressed and then counter-retaliation by the original oppressors. Any member of the opposing group (call it the family, clan, tribe, people, nation-state) is legitimately subject to retaliation. The retaliator is not viewed by his or her own group as a criminal or terrorist because he or she is an instrument of the group’s need to avenge or expiate itself. Once retaliation occurs, the other group feels justified in a counter-reprisal, and the vendetta rages. Violence is no doubt justified in certain circumstances, but never when intentionally or recklessly applied to non-combatants or innocent civilians.

 

True, those who allow, affirm or acquiesce in the oppression of others and, of course, the slaughter of innocents, are truly on the side of the executioners. Similarly, as Thomas Merton and Camus suggest, revolution and “freedom fighting” are often used as facile justifications for mass murder. Sartre was wrong to claim that violence against non-combatants is justified. He believed that all those not actively engaged in fighting oppression were enemies and hence the equivalent of combatants and/or oppressors. Camus was right to reject this Sartrean ethic to the extent that it finds virtue in slaughtering innocents for a supposedly just cause. One can defend and protect the innocents of the world without killing other innocents.

 

In the end, this self-justification and self-delusion work only to allow so-called enemies to feel justified in their counter-vengeance. Oppression, crimes against humanity and counter-violence in kind merely perpetuate the frightening cycle. We participate in it when we passively allow our leaders to commit violence against innocents or to bolster regimes which commit such violence.

 

Sartre’s aphorism that a war of national liberation, once begun, is a war “that gives no quarter”, is correct but incomplete. Some conduct, even within war, and thus a fortiori during times of relative peace, is not justifiable or acceptable. A fight for survival or even to gain or retain power may cause people to do unspeakable things, but we must not justify or accommodate such deeds. Thus, even if killing innocents is deemed effective in promoting an end considered by the actors to be good, be it intimidating a government or dissident group, or rendering a population insecure, it is not morally justified or legal. Unfortunately, governments and revolutionaries alike, as well as most international law jurists and commentators, have forgotten essential and basic criminal law.

‘Modern’ Motivations

Can we claim to be any different from our ancient or medieval forebears as regards our attitudes towards violence against innocents? Today, in our so-called modern world, the killing or maiming of innocents is justified in much the same perniciously symbolic way as in previous eras. The violence is in fact used to obtain, maintain or destroy power. It is terrorism and a crime against humanity.

 

Sometimes the perpetrator is motivated by the fundamentalist vision: possession of the truth and the concomitant obligation to apply any means, including violence against innocents, to proclaim, establish and maintain it. This is a zealot’s vision of how to establish a world of “good order”.

 

At other times the perpetrator is simply the wronged person or group looking to right wrongs. Or it is the nihilist looking to destroy the status quo with terror. Even the nihilist seems to have an almost metaphysical vision of the need to destroy. Perhaps these are pretend nihilists, using crimes against humanity as simply their way of gaining power and becoming statist functionaries, then using terror to maintain their power.

 

Another major contemporary source of legitimisation for ruthless violence is the doctrine of political realism. The so-called realist view that law is the command of the sovereign invokes the concept of “necessity” when the sovereign’s “rule of law” is challenged. Any amount of force and violence against any individual or group is legitimate to ensure protection of the sovereign. Ideology is used to garner support. Thus, the need is urged for massive violence to eliminate terrorism, or to “fight communism”, or to shore up the “legitimate” order. In reality, such “realism” has often led to depredation and the breakdown of any semblance of legal order based on protection of the individual and of human rights.

 

Realists come in many guises. In virtually all of this century’s conflicts, the opposing sides have been led by realists. The realist claims to disdain fundamentalist zeal, but will use terror, if “necessary”, against innocents. Consider the writings or conduct of any number of realists: Machiavelli, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Kennan, McNamara, Lenin, Stalin, Yeltsin, Lin Piao, Mao, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic and Albright. Of course, these are not all equals in intellect or in capacity for violence, but all are realists in that they accept unquestioningly that the end justifies the means and recognise no normative limits on violence. The only limits they acknowledge are “realist” limits: one must be sure that the end is achievable and that the means are necessary to the achievement of that end.

 

This form of realism promotes terrorism and crimes against humanity. The realist vision and “justification” of existence is actually a

 

derisory … repudiation of that existence. What society [reactionary or revolutionary] preaches as “the good life” is in fact a systematically organised way of death, not only because it is saturated with what psychologists call an unconscious death wish, but because it actually rests on death. It is built on the death of the nonconformist, the alien, the oddball, the enemy, the criminal. It is based on war, on imprisonment, on punitive methods which include not only mental and physical torture but, above all, the death penalty.⁸

Total War

Terrorism, crimes against humanity and total war are parallel concepts. They have parallel results. In total war, with innocent civilians being deliberately targeted to secure military victory, war becomes quintessentially criminal. Blanket or saturation bombing, the use of weapons designed to cause massive death or unnecessary suffering, is terrorism. The aim is to panic the population and to force the enemy leadership to surrender. Thus, it was considered legitimate to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering scores of thousands in a horrific way, in order to terrorise Japan’s leadership and population into surrendering. Innocent persons, not part of the war effort, in these undefended cities were targeted so that the shock would have maximum impact. How different is that from placing a bomb on a civilian flight or in a shopping mall?

 

Sadly, belief in the inevitability of total war has pervaded all political and military theory and practice. It pervades all of our relational thought processes, whether we are for the societal status quo or for changing it. Consider the fearsome view of the world held by much of the world. Each party to virtually every conflict is manipulated into believing that it has absolute right on its side. Each applies absolutist terminology and action. Each believes that its very existence is threatened by its enemies—that it may be annihilated unless it annihilates the opposition first. Each believes that absolute or total war is appropriate and necessary for it to survive. Thus, oppressed minorities see the state as absolute evil, against which absolute destructive power is legitimate. Governments likewise try to make their peoples see real or potential rebels as absolute evil. So each side justifies the use of absolute force. This is true in both the domestic and international contexts. Is it any wonder that terrorism and crimes against humanity are the mode of warfare and politics?

 

It is tragic that such a terroristic mindset seems to have permeated orthodox military strategy—or perhaps it grew naturally out of that strategy? Nearly every nation’s basic political and military strategic planning is based on this dangerously flawed vision. Given the current availability of absolute power to destroy, we had better figure out a different, less hostile, way of seeing the world and each other.

Invoking Self-Defence

The Reagan administration argued that it was “justifiable self-defence” to use military force to pre-empt anticipated terrorist activity and to retaliate against terrorists or states which harbour, finance or train terrorists. Abduction of “terrorists” or even common criminals from abroad was also argued to be “justifiable self-defence”. Thus, the bombing of Tripoli, including the targeting of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s family, was held to be in “self-defence”.

 

Moreover, it was argued that the only judge of a self-defence claim is the claimant. A decision to take such measures of “self-justified self-defence” thus becomes per se legal. No other branch of government and certainly no other nation or institution may question it.

 

One obvious practical danger of this attitude of self-justification is that other nations or groups may utilise it as well. Could Russia or China justify a pre-emptive strike against the United States or some other power? Can groups that consider themselves to be aggressed against by the United States justify similar conduct? Why not? If self-justification is elevated to the level of legality, there is no rule of law in any crucial context.

 

Unfortunately, self-justification is popular today. This concept of self-justifying self-defence allows all nations or groups to claim legality for any act they wish to commit in the name of “self-defence”. If one has the power to succeed, one is justified. It is fearsome that this is the current view of international law and self-defence held by many leaders around the world.

 

Another danger is what such a self-defining vision of self-defence might do to democratic constitutional order. It entails a pernicious perception of the separation of powers, tending towards executive branch absolutism. Acceptance in the United States of the abduction of criminals as a tool of law enforcement is a good example. It is worth noting that much of the abuse of the criminal justice system in the United States today is based on a “war on drugs” and a “war against crime”.

 

Self-justified self-defence is strikingly similar to the ancient Russian and ancient Germanic notions of “necessary defence”. The ancient German concept of das Recht (right) combined with that of Notwehr (necessary defence) and the Russian idea of the same notions (neobxodimaya oborona) provide that any right or defendable interest, from life to personal honour, receive the same degree of protection and privilege. The only question is whether a right or interest is threatened. If one is threatened, good social order is equally threatened, triggering necessary defence. Any force necessary to prevent the infringement of the right or interest, and the concomitant destruction of “good order”, is justified.

 

In both the German and Russian conceptualisation of necessary defence, the ideas of “legal order” and “social dangerousness” identify necessary defence with protection of the legal order itself in its entirety. Thus, the attacks on the Sudetenland, Poland, etc., at the beginning of the Second World War, as well as the attempted elimination of many perceived “threats” to the legal order, such as Jews, the Roma, “deviants”, the insane or otherwise “mentally deficient” and similar enemies of the Third Reich, were justified in the name of necessary defence. The same justification was invoked to legitimate atrocities in Stalinist Russia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Tibet, East Timor, Sierra Leone, the Congo and elsewhere.

 

Nationalistic solutions to crimes against humanity assume that such offences are committed only by “the enemy”. Therefore, the enemy is absolutely evil; the solution is to eliminate the enemy. Obviously, when the leaders of all sides to a conflict have this attitude and cause their people to share it, power is accepted as the only medium of international relations. Sadly, most nations and groups in conflict adopt this outlook.

Responsibility and Punishment

The conduct analysed in this essay and in of several of my other articles poses a vicious threat to peace and human dignity. I believe, however, that ordinary people may be capable of avoiding or overcoming the manipulation that incites them to participate in attacks on the innocent. I believe we have a common core of values that allows us to recognise these crimes and to condemn them. We do so easily when the crimes are committed against us. We need to acquire the vision and fortitude to recognise and resist when our leaders want to commit them.

 

Terrorism is criminal whether committed by states against their own citizens or extraterritorially. It is criminal when perpetrated by insurgents, even those struggling for independence or freedom from oppression. I am not arguing here for the punishment of states, nations or groups for the commission of terrorist offences, although this may sometimes be called for. My attention in this essay has been directed at the fact that individuals commit these offences and cause their people to commit them. Thus, individuals, even (or especially) when functioning in an official governmental capacity, are subject to law and may be punished for committing or aiding and abetting the criminal conduct analysed herein. Impunity must be eliminated.

 

If prosecution is to occur, the elements of the offences must be clearly established. Procedural and other human rights protections for victims and the accused must be clarified and vigorously upheld. To date, treaties have failed to do any of this satisfactorily. Perhaps customary and jus cogens principles as manifest in the domestic laws of virtually all nations can provide clarity and specificity. Care must be taken to ensure that international and domestic action to obtain justice and prosecute perpetrators does not fall into the same trap as that which ensnared those who committed the crimes. If we allow ourselves to descend to simple vengeance, we are lost.

 

Evidence of the universal condemnation of these offences is found in the complex of international treaties and domestic substantive criminal law. The excuses and justifications given by apologists for terror are in essence frighteningly similar, and were condemned by Milton more than three hundred years ago:

 

So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds.
                                                                        (Paradise Lost, book 4, lines 393–4)

 

Endnotes

1. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 11–13, 28–30.

 

2. Report of the Special Study Group on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (the “Doolittle Report”), 30 September 2024 (declassified 1 April 2024), pp. 6–7.

 

3. Albert Camus, “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria”, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Knopf, 1961), pp. 131, 135, 137.

 

4. Albert Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, in The Pacifist Conscience, ed. Peter Mayer (New York: Holt, 1966), p. 424.

 

5. Thomas Merton, “The Plague of Albert Camus”, in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1981), p. 181.

 

6. Ibid., p. 191.

 

7. Ibid., p. 195.

 

8. Merton, “The Plague of Albert Camus”, pp. 197–8.