Assassins and Skyjackers: History at Random

By Stefan Kanfer

THE scenario writes itself in blood and irony: guards scrutinize the passengers. No hostile eyes are present; only travel-stained faces stare back. Then hell erupts. In an Israeli airport, from a French plane, Japanese terrorists gun down Puerto Rican pilgrims (see THE WORLD). The mind is dizzied, repelled--and outraged. We were never promised a rose garden, but neither were we threatened with bedlam.

History has lurched from its orbit; Cassandra herself could not predict events today. Not merely state or moral statutes seem suspended, but the laws of probability and chance. The lethal tendency has been crystallizing for well over a decade. In 1960, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the high-profile white supremacist, had been ad dressing a crowd, surrounded by police. Like the Israeli guards, they searched the audience for danger, looking no doubt for the face of black rage. Verwoerd was shot by a mild white man who slipped through unsuspected. John and Robert Kennedy, whose enemies were supposed to be enlisted in a sophisticated right-wing conspiracy, were assassinated by naifs associated with Cuban and Arab causes. Of all the recent assassinations, in fact, only Martin Luther King's seems to have been committed by an expected enemy.

Malcolm X was killed by a black man. George Wallace was allegedly shot by a follower--though Arthur Bremer was evidently bird-dogging other candidates with aimless hostility. The list is endless: personal peril now climbs aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, hides in a locked apart ment--or in a suburban shopping center as it did recently when a janitor gunned down a handful of strollers in North Carolina. If the earth is unsafe the air bristles with danger. Skyjackings create such anxiety that last week, when four black men seized a Western Airlines jetliner, it was easy to believe the brief rumor that they were demanding custody of Angela Davis. The $500,000 ransom seemed almost a relief--as did a quiet and temporarily successful $200,000 holdup of a United jet in Reno. Today the most frequently--and falsely--coupled words are "senseless" and "violence." But violence is never senseless to the person who commits it. The absurdity occurs only to the victims and onlookers. Therein lies the deepest fear of modern times. War may be obscene; still, it obeys its own rules of tactics and strategy. Organized crime kills, yet it has a penetrable logic of venality and revenge. But contemporary "senseless violence" is opaque. No one can accurately fathom the mind of the deranged, no screen exists to separate the terrorist and his target.

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It will not do to invoke the past as antidote. Yes, the plagues and bandits of the Middle Ages killed without warning. Yes, the citizens of Paris in the Terror were marked by the long shadow of the guillotine. Yes, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia refined the theory and practice of hell. Yet the roots of those terrors could be analyzed, discussed, possibly guarded against in the future. Purges and pogroms, however insane, were crimes committed by the state; dis eases and scourges were supposed to come from God. Today, with the dissolution of state and moral authority, crime, like power, seems to have become the estate of the common man. In a sense, he has become the most feared figure of all time. It is distressing not to trust one's neighbor--to peer incessantly at every strange face at every terminal in every country. It is frustrating to find history still, as Edward Gibbon wrote two centuries ago, "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The notion that society is growing worse is intolerable. Yet the headlines seem to chart the descent. The Israeli airport tragedy provides a chilling example: first come death and terror, then follows the braggadocio of the killers, then the threat of reprisals. The inquiries of the streets echo in parliaments and executive sessions: What are we coming to? Where will it all end?

These are empty questions. The social destination is all too apparent--and all too close to nightmare. To avoid it may be the most difficult task facing any nation at any time in history. For it means walking a line that exists only in theory--the barrier between anarchy and totalitarianism, between meaningless freedom and total control.

Manifestly, the obscenities, the terrorism and madness have to be quelled. Surveillance at airports, on the campaign trail, in urban centers has already begun to be harsher and more demanding. But these measures are only a partial panacea. Without a doubt, gun control and psychiatric aid, better court systems and prisons will aid the search for physical LICHTENSTEIN safety. But these too are imperfect solutions. No matter how tight the security, how alert the bodyguards and police, some one will break through; some lunatic violence is bound to occur. When it happens, there will be the renewed cry for some thing more, something that will remove all the random elements from life.

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Here the deeper danger lies. To repeal the laws of chance, the dice have to be loaded, the deck stacked. To take the unpredictable from the human condition means, essentially, human conditioning -- the hypotheses of B.F. Skinner made extreme, official and permanent.

Elimination of the feebleminded, preventive detention of the criminally inclined, genetic improvements, behavioral engineering; all these can indeed restrict in dividual misdeeds. But in that event, crime will revert to the state. The individual will be bereft of his impulses, both criminal and decent. Even then, there will be no guarantee of full control.

But we need no projections of the 21st century to consider the insane alternative. Memories of the Third Reich and Russia in the '30s are too fresh; there crime was removed from the streets--and returned to the governments.

Those authorities lowered it to new levels. As Hannah Arendt observed, in the end, "what totalitarian ideologies aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself . . . The totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that every thing can be destroyed."

All this is not an invitation to moral softheadedness, a coddling of the malign. Justice Thurgood Marshall spoke for all time when he said, "Anarchy is anarchy, and it makes no difference who practices it. It is bad, it is punishable, and it should be punished." Yet that punishment must rise from rational response to irrational acts. Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, if it is to remain open, human society must assume certain risks. They need not include insanity, terrorism, murder. But they had better include the liberty of action. Total--in other words, totalitarian--security means, ultimately, the Astrodome made global. No weather, no shadows, no frustration, no delight, no true freedom. It is an Anthony Burgess vision made real, a film in which there is no fadeout. That vision is worth pondering the next time violence beckons in some chance and random spot.

--Stefan Kanfer

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