Terrorism the inescapable answer
The calibre of the reaction of our western civilisation to organised violence has yet to be fully tested. Until the spate of outrages last week — from the renewal of terrorism in the Middle East to the bombs in Dublin and at Heathrow — it could well be argued that ours was a pussy-footing reaction, one based essentially on the upholding of long outworn and long outmoded liberal reactions to such events. What seemed to run all too strongly through comments and reactions to atrocity after atrocity was a tendency to equate victim and victimiser: fashionable voices were raised on every side after every murder or act of terrorism to explain and thus in some manner to justify evil through an account of its background.
The Spectator has long stood out against such demeaning, inadequate and irresponsible (not so say criminal) frivolities: but we have been on the whole a lone voice. Now there has occurred a notable breach in the serried rank of fashion. For, last Sunday, the Sunday Times, albeit in a tortuous, uncertain, diffident and self-crucifying way, came to consider, in a leading article, the case for the capital punishment of hijackers; and the editor did not altogether rule it out. Thus does reason slowly ,,gw10%Its way through even the most blinkered 1007,..fttitages. Veg/vi lA Not mow is there a case for executing hijackers NC3 I" — all dl them, and everywhere they are found — jvjt there is a case for punishing in exactly 1.:1):0110,41101111#-Same way every terrorist who drives a motor car loaded with bombs into a city street and leaves it there. The desire for individual revenge on a guilty individual is by no means ignoble: it forms a part, but by no means the whole part, of the justification of condign punishment. But perhaps the most pragmatic and most practical argument for the execution of terrorists lies in the removal of temptation for their fellows. Were every member of the IRA held in a British gaol, every Palestinian in an Israeli gaol (and it is worth remarking how forbearing the Israelis are in the matter of punishing the thugs they capture), and every hijacker in a European gaol taken out and disposed of, their companions would no doubt continue to some extent at least their depredations. But since the desire of rescuing — or forcing weak governments to release — their colleagues in evil forms a considerable part of at least the tactical justification for a Majority of terroristic acts, it cannot be denied that the justification would cease to exist if the prisoners had also ceased to exist.
Rut there is a higher reasoning behind the case for capital punishment for terrorism. Organised political violence flourishes when even a, part of the society — national or international — against which it is aimed shows even the slightest weakness in its face. This point is so simple that we would have believed that even politicians would see it. Not so: the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic have Publicly announced their inability to understand how it is that the perpetrators of violence have come to believe that their ends can be achieved by violence. The evidence is all around them for, in Northern Ireland alone, almost every change in recent years has been .change in a direction favourable to the killers, and a change produced by killing. Violence, in a word, has worked. Unless society becomes implacable, unless there is no truck with terrorism, unless the only reward the terrorist can expect to receive is the reward of death, terrorism will continue.
