"'Unbounded' morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in
terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of
diminishing returns applies to morality."
Thomas Sowell
There's a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-
rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as
he saw a mob assembling outside.
"I must see which way the crowd is headed," he is reputed to have
said: "For I am their leader."
http://www.salon.com/tech/books/1999/11/04/new_optimism/
People who exercise violence in the pursuit of what they hold to be
just causes are alternately known as "terrorists" or "freedom
fighters".
They all share a few common characteristics:
1. A hard core of idealists adopt a cause (in most cases, the
freedom of a group of people). They base their claims on
history - real or hastily concocted, on a common heritage, on a
language shared by the members of the group and, most
important, on hate and contempt directed at an "enemy". The
latter is, almost invariably, the physical or cultural occupier
of space the idealists claim as their own.
2. The loyalties and alliances of these people shift effortlessly
as ever escalating means justify an ever shrinking cause. The
initial burst of grandiosity inherent in every such undertaking
gives way to cynical and bitter pragmatism as both enemy and
people tire of the conflict.
3. An inevitable result of the realpolitik of terrorism is the
collaboration with the less savoury elements of society.
Relegated to the fringes by the inexorable march of common
sense, the freedom fighters naturally gravitate towards like
minded non-conformists and outcasts. The organization is
criminalized. Drug dealing, bank robbing and other manner of
organized and contumacious criminality become integral
extensions of the struggle. A criminal corporatism emerges,
structured but volatile and given to internecine donnybrooks.
4. Very often an un-holy co-dependence develops between the
organization and its prey. It is the interest of the freedom
fighters to have a contemptible and tyrannical regime as their
opponent. If not prone to suppression and convulsive massacres
by nature - acts of terror will deliberately provoke even the
most benign rule to abhorrent ebullition.
5. The terrorist organization will tend to emulate the very
characteristics of its enemy it fulminates against the most.
Thus, all such groups are rebarbatively authoritarian,
execrably violent, devoid of human empathy or emotions,
suppressive, ostentatious, trenchant and often murderous.
6. It is often the freedom fighters who compromise their freedom
and the freedom of their people in the most egregious manner.
This is usually done either by collaborating with the derided
enemy against another, competing set of freedom fighters - or
by inviting a foreign power to arbiter. Thus, they often
catalyse the replacement of one regime of oppressive horror
with another, more terrible and entrenched.
7. Most freedom fighters are assimilated and digested by the very
establishment they fought against or as the founders of new,
privileged nomenklaturas. It is then that their true nature is
exposed, mired in gulosity and superciliousness as they become.
Inveterate violators of basic human rights, they often
transform into the very demons they helped to exorcise.
Most freedom fighters are disgruntled members of the middle classes
or the intelligentsia. They bring to their affairs the merciless
ruthlessness of sheltered lives. Mistaking compassion for weakness,
they show none as they unscrupulously pursue their self-
aggrandizement, the ego trip of sending others to their death. They
are the stuff martyrs are made of. Borne on the crests of
circumstantial waves, they lever their unbalanced personalities and
project them to great effect. They are the footnotes of history that
assume the role of text. And they rarely enjoy the unmitigated
support of the very people they proffer to liberate. Even the most
harangued and subjugated people find it hard to follow or accept the
vicissitudinal behaviour of their self-appointed liberators, their
shifting friendships and enmities and their pasilaly of violence.
In this series of articles, I will attempt to study four such groups
which operated in the tortured region of the Balkans. I will start
with the IMRO (VMRO) in Macedonia and Bulgaria, proceed to Serbia
and its union with death ("Union or Death", aka the Black Hand),
study the Ustasha in detail and end with the current mutation of
Balkan spasms, the KLA (UCK).