2 - The Psychology of Post-War Revolutionary Terrorism in Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem and Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist

Summary

Introduction

In the 1980s, the waning of communism led to sub-state terrorism becoming ‘public enemy number one’ in the Western world (Said 1988, 149). The early postwar idealism that had fostered social welfare vanished in the wake of decolonisation struggles, Cold War polarisation and economic decline, leading individuals to feel alienated from political institutions and incapable of shaping historical events (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 17–19). In this context, a generation of mostly middle-class, educated young people embraced left-wing activism such as the civil rights, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in search for ‘a meaningful cause’ which, paired with a willingness to use violence for the achievement of their political ends, gave rise to a new revolutionary terrorist tradition (Zulaika and Douglass 1996, 19–20). Inspired by the late nineteenth-century anarchist principle of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which adopted violence as the most effective weapon to encourage workers to revolt, many post-war revolutionary movements such as the Red Brigades (Italy) and the Angry Brigades (Britain) exhibited a similar disenchantment with the power of words to bring about socio-political change and turned to a reliance on acts of terrorism to communicate their views. Influenced by the rise of mass communications, the decline of conventional warfare and the spread of modern liberal democratic values such as freedom and self-determination, post-war revolutionary terrorists discarded mere propaganda as futile, adopting instead the shock of violent action to manipulate public opinion and coerce states into accepting their demands (Ganor 2004, 34–5).

Terrorism can be defined as ‘the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change’ (Hoffman 2006, 40). Terrorism does not primarily seek material damage and human fatalities; instead, a ‘physical act affecting a limited group of immediate victims serves the greater aim of producing psychological reactions among a larger audience, namely fear’, which is exploited to achieve the ‘political aim’ of ‘exercis[ing] pressure on power holders, who must respond to the disruptive and destabilising effects of the violence’ (Frank 2015, 92). To accomplish this goal, terrorists often employ the methods of state-sanctioned psychological warfare, which seeks ‘to influence attitudes and behaviour affecting the achievement of political or military objectives’ (Taylor 1999, xii).