The Freedom We Have Lost"

British Author Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange, Beard's Roman Women), a longtime student of Italian affairs and sometime resident of Italy, offers his observations on the meaning of today 's terrorism and its implications for tomorrow:

When I was a soldier, I was taught: "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, whitewash it." Today's militant, if unsoldierly extremists have a simpler philosophy: whether it moves or not, kidnap it. We have seen the kidnaping of a Goya, a Fellini film, the corpse of a great comedian, an Italian political leader. We are shocked, but perhaps some of the shock comes from awareness that we are not shocked enough. We have already imagined most conceivable outrages against law and decency, or had them imagined for us in drugstore bestsellers or films. We are more than ready for the kidnaping of the Pope. Our emotional response to the reality will be a mere carbon copy of what we felt when contemplating the idea or the fiction. We are overprepared, as we were for the moon landings.

Still, I am certain that if Aldo Moro had been shot outright, like the members of his bodyguard, our outrage would have been, even fainter. Since the assassinations of the Kennedys, we seem to have no more shock to register about 'the killing of a public man. Besides, there is a sense in which an assassination is less of an affront to morality than a kidnaping. The great man is knifed. Revenge is accomplished or unholy ambition thwarted. This is only a rerun of Julius Caesar, without the blank verse. Long live, for a time, Brutus. With kidnaping, however, you have torment direct and referred -the waiting, the humiliation, the delivery of an earlobe, the blackmail that tempts us all to wish to compromise with justice and make a fool of the law. "Free those undoubted, or figurative, criminals or we kill this figurative, or undoubted, one." But once we give in, the law is finished forever.

Our present temptation is to think only of Italy as the place where the pseudo anarchists strike with bolder and bolder feats or abductions. We have a vague notion that Italy has the monopoly on banditry -bandit being of Italian origin -and that kidnaping is as much part of the Italian scene as opera bouffe. (The great master of English opera bouffe, W.S. Gilbert, was kidnaped as a baby in Naples -an event both Neapolitan and Gilbertian.) And it is true that it has traditionally been hard to think of Italy as tranquil, law-abiding, prepared to solve its problems through calm discussion and the slow process of democracy. Italy is a very new democracy, and its citizens distrust democracy as they have always distrusted more autocratic forms of government. Sicilians came to America with a sage or naive disbelief in Jeffersonian democracy. You cannot trust government; you have to get things done by yourself, with violence, naturally. And the Italians have been right not to trust their democratic representatives who, unlike Washington and Jefferson, have been brought up on corruption and self-seeking as a way of life. Italians still lack a tradition of honest government. They will never get it so long as the electorate goes on thinking in terms of traditional tyranny. The Italian people must start believing that there are honest men prepared to represent them.

In the meantime we have to assume that the blackmail of the state, and not only the Italian state through the kidnaping of political leaders, is a technique that we have to live with, and our leaders sometimes die with, to make willingness to be a sacrifice to the law a condition of rising to greatness. There is a price to be paid for the luxury of ambition. The brutality of this view (here is suffering flesh and blood, the law is only an abstraction) is, however, less reprehensible than the assumption we have all started to make, and not just because of kidnapings: that law and order are already at an end. This belief, which we are often too scared to articulate, makes us at one with the kidnapers, rapists, torturers, vandals and murderers.

We all look back to a golden past when there was no kidnaping, skyjacking, mugging, raping, gratuitous street murder. Such a past never perhaps existed, but there was a time when New Yorkers could, on hot nights, sleep safely in Central Park; when citizens of all cities regarded it as a right to be able to walk the streets of an evening; when air travelers were not searched for weapons; when the safety of the great, and even the generality, did not shakily depend on bodyguards, armed janitors, closed-circuit television.

There are various ways of explaining the breakdown of order, but all seem to rest on the 20th century realization that repression of the atavistic in ourselves was not necessarily a good thing. With the removal of sex taboos, the way was open for the free expression of other, cognate, primitive urges. It is good to be sexually free; it is correspondingly good to be aggressive, intolerant, even murderous. Of course, certain inhibitions remain that move us to justify our atavistic urges in terms of myths or ideologies -Bakuninian anarchy, neo-Maoism, Palestinian liberation, what we will: they mostly add up to a mere vague blessing from the superego on the acts of the ego. We just want to have things our own way, and to hell with oppression, suppression, repression.

And yet men spent slow centuries learning how to build societies that would function peaceably and happily with the minimum of punitive sanctions. It took a long time to discover that democratic government was, if not perfect, the system of rule that best balanced the claim of the citizen to be free and happy and the need for the state to maintain order. Essentially, democracy depends not on law and the law-enforcing arm of the state but on the willingness of citizens to accept an unwritten contract, a contract between the rational and the atavistic in themselves. When democratic order has to depend on police repression of the antisocial aggressive, then democracy itself is impaired. The more draconian become the measures whereby kidnapers and skyjackers are kept down, the more the democratic world itself is moving toward an acceptance of the principles, or lack of them, that sustain crime.

The most conspicuous aspect of democratic order is the assumption that government, or certainly the making of laws, depends on the free dialectic of opposed political views. Britain, having learned in pain and effort the need for such dialectic, taught the principle to her colonies. Some colonies have been quick to unlearn it; their independence from the British yoke is marked by one-party rule enforced by police suppression of dissidence. The element of suppression has to exist in any state, but a democracy looks to a sophisticated citizenry that regards the suppression of intolerance as the duty of the individual soul.

The duty is, or should be, a thing taught at one's father's knee, and the structure of the family gently enforces it. But Freud taught that the son had to fight the father, that the family was not an emblem of bigger order but the cast of a Greek tragedy. Transposing the liberation of the psyche to the social level, we have killed our neuroses and now live in a permissive world. But permissiveness turns out to be very naive, and the world today is in danger of being taken over by the naive. Many newly liberated peoples are astonished at how easy it is to rule or be ruled: all that is needed is a single party and a brutal police force. But rule was never meant to be easy.

Two great powers -Russia and China -and the new states that are their satellites or apes provide, for the Red Brigades and other naive dissidents, a living witness to the validity of bloody revolution and subsequent one-party government. Shibboleths, half-baked doctrines based on Marx and Bakunin (who always contradicted each other), provide the pseudointellectual superstructure for such acts of aggression as the kidnaping of Moro. In a sense, we can do nothing about it except lessen the possibility -by the kind of antidemocratic surveillance of which all democrats are heartily tired -of its happening again. But we need more than armed guards, house-to-house searches and airport checks. What we all want is the freedom we have lost. We may not get it again for a long time, but we have to devise democratic means of getting it sooner or later. Otherwise we shall have to say to the Brigate Rosse, the Mafia, the neo-Bakuninians and the rest: You are justified in denying democratic order, since democratic order no longer exists.

We all have to be made more aware, through propaganda and education, of how flimsy the basis of democracy actually is: it rests on the free association of individual men and women who have learned how to suppress intolerance and aggression. It rests, ideally, on all members of society being intelligent or at least having a notion, however primitive, of what democracy means. To keep hammering home the lesson -the task of anybody who cares, the duty of those who are in charge of the media of mass communication -is not an act of oppression; it is the administering of a prophylactic against oppression. We may even have to learn how to live in a pre-Freudian society again.

I may seem to be offering a naive solution to the eruptions of violence that are the fruit of political naivete. But I can see no alternative to reiterated insistence that the way of tolerance is the only one acceptable to human societies. Unfortunately, tolerance seems to mean tolerance of the intolerable -like political kidnaping -but it is a price that for the moment has to be paid: we know the alternative. Our democratic systems may not be working very well -indeed, look at Italy -but they are still preferable to anything the Red Brigades wish to install. They will work better when the heads of the democratic families become more trustworthy fathers, not dithering uncles or bullying big brothers. And we ourselves must become better sons and daughters.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.