CPM-A Terrorist Organization with a facade of democratic party 

Terrorism is now a worldwide epidemic and presently it is almost connoted with Radical Islamist movements.

But the term Terrorism owes its derivation of modern political definition not to religious extremism but the Leftist political movements.

The genesis of Terror as Political dialogue is traced to the French revolution and its ‘Revolutionary regime’- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes how the ‘Revolutionaries’ of Left invented unabashed Terrorism as a legitimate tool of social change.   

“When it first entered public discourse in the West, the word “terrorism” meant the reign of terror the Jacobins imposed in France from the fall of 1793 to the summer of 1794. Its ultimate aim was the reshaping of both society and human nature. That was to be achieved by destroying the old regime, suppressing all enemies of the revolutionary government, and inculcating and enforcing civic virtue. A central role in attaining these objectives was accorded to revolutionary tribunals which had wide authority, were constrained by very few rules of procedure, and saw their task as carrying out revolutionary policy rather than meting out legal justice of the more conventional sort. They went after “enemies of the people”, actual or potential, proven or suspected; the law on the basis of which they were operating “enumerated just who the enemies of the people might be in terms so ambiguous as to exclude no one” (Carter 1989: 142)

The CPM- Communist Party of Marxists resort to this demonizing of its Political rivals and competition as ‘ enemies of the people” and likewise ‘enumerate such enemies in no less ambiguous terms so as to exclude no one’ but usually directed against Right wing movements as ‘Fascists’ ( RSS, BJP in Kerala and West Bengal) and bourgeoisie competition (TMC etc).

The Jacobins’ reign of Terror acquired its sharpness regarding both its Target categories and identities with Ultra Leftist Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists of Left.

Lenin considered the Jacobin use of terror as a needed virtue and accepted the label Jacobin for his Bolsheviks.[13

The acts of Terror against perceived and projected enemies based on its own dogmatism became ‘Deeds’ that spoke better than mere ‘words’- a propaganda by the deeds’.

Few even know that the term Direct Action Day that Jinnah used to terrorize the Indian Leaders to obtain his Pakistan was actually a political idea and term of Leftist Anarchists.

PROPAGANDA OF DEED- CPM’s POLITICS OF MURDERS

“This was “propaganda by the deed”, and the deed was for the most part assassination of royalty or highly placed government officials. Unlike the Jacobins’ reign of terror, which operated in a virtually indiscriminate way, this type of terrorism—as both advocates and critics called it—was largely employed in a highly discriminate manner. This was especially true of Russian revolutionary organizations such as People’s Will or Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR): they held that it was morally justified to assassinate a government official only if his complicity in the oppressive regime was significant enough for him to deserve to die, and the assassination would make an important contribution to the struggle.”

Such convictions in Terrorism as legitimate political process inevitably lead to its institutionalization in Communist Revolution and Soviet Union.

“The government set up in Russia by the victorious Bolsheviks was totalitarian. So was the Nazi rule in Germany. Both sought to impose total political control on society. Such a radical aim could only be pursued by a similarly radical method: by terrorism directed by an extremely powerful political police at an atomized and defenseless population. Its success was due largely to its arbitrary character—to the unpredictability of its choice of victims. In both countries, the regime first suppressed all opposition; when it no longer had any opposition to speak of, political police took to persecuting “potential” and “objective opponents”. In the Soviet Union, it was eventually unleashed on victims chosen at random. Totalitarian terrorism is the most extreme and sustained type of state terrorism. As Hannah Arendt put it, “terror is the essence of totalitarian domination”, and the concentration camp is “the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power” (Arendt 1958: 464, 438

We must note how the Bolsheviks ‘first suppressed all opposition’ by means of this device of Political terror.

While these ‘Class enemies’ meant rival movements and organizations in the democratic political space for Communists who formed professed democratic parties, for the factions of Communists who rejected democracy it becomes the Democratic state itself and the public utilities as its ransom. This perfectly explains the lacing of Terrorism in both varieties of Communist movements.     

The CPM imbibes such Terrorist ideas from its romantic obsession with the Bolshevik revolution.  

 Marxist-Leninist, Karl Kautsky, has this to say of those Bolshevik leaders whose thoughts and deeds drive the CPM-

 “among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, Terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all”.

“Some organizations driven by extreme ideologies, in particular on the left, took to terrorism. It shoots at people, or blows them up by planting bombs, in office buildings, MARKETS, cafes, cinemas, places of religious worship, on buses or planes, as the way of trying to destroy what they considered an unjust, oppressive economic, social and political system. This type of terrorism is, by and large, indiscriminate in its choice of target: it attacks men and women of whatever political (or apolitical) views, social class, and walk of life; young and old, adults and childrenor in other vulnerable public places. It also takes people hostage, by hijacking planes and in other ways.”

Terrorism is inherent in Totalitarian Ideologies and belief systems, but Leftists tried to argue Moral Relativism by justifying it as legitimate in any asymmetric political struggle by positing a ‘State Terrorism’, and an underdog ‘insurgency” that seeks removal of ‘oppression’.

But world has moved on since then, shocked at the vicious cycles of insurgencies and liberation movements and the Religious Extremist movements that overtook them plunging into epic scales of violence.

Terrorism now has a near universal Disapproval in unambiguous terms of Igor Primoratz- “  The deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating some other people into a course of action they otherwise would not take (Primoratz 2013: 24).

MARXIST PARTY IS A TERRORIST ORGANISATION

Valentino Menjamin observes about Marxists-“Communist leaders used the idea that terror could serve as the force which Marx said was the “midwife of revolution”,[19] 

John Molyneux spells out this  Marxists’ hypocrisy in his seeming assertion that Communists reject Terrorism-

“The Russian Marxists made a distinction between their attitude to terrorism and their attitude to the terrorists. The former they rejected uncompromisingly, while the latter had all their sympathy, and their personal courage was always acknowledged”.

In other words, they talk as if they reject and condemn the Terrorism of Political assassinations by their cadres but the rank “had all their sympathy  and their personal courage was always acknowledged”.

This must explain why political Propaganda by Deeds of Marxist Communists keeps going.

The sympathy gets extended also to Islamist as seen in CPM’s closeness with Kerala’s Jihadis.

In the Socialist Review Molyneux shows us the rationale of Marxist sympathies to Islamist Radicals-

“Sometimes, and the Palestinian intifada is the best example of this, terrorist tactics do more or less merge with the mass resistances of the people, and this certainly affects or should affect the language and tone of our critique. We on the left should not, I suggest, ‘condemn’ Palestinian suicide bombers or attacks by the Iraqi resistance.”

“The injustice or oppression at issue need not be real; it may be merely alleged (by the terrorists). Being responsible for a merely alleged great injustice or oppression is enough for losing one’s immunity against violence, as far as the type of immunity and innocence relevant to defining terrorism is concerned. According to mainstream just war theory one does not lose immunity against acts of war only by fighting in an unjust war, but by fighting in any war (Walzer 2000: 36–41).

This sophistry of equivalence of Terrorism and its self chosen targets is also now morally defunct, such as Kashmiri insurgent groups Ethnic Cleansing of minorities and attacks on State security forces.

“Another, more recent example, is provided by Osama Bin Laden. In an interview in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001 he said:
The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government and that they voted for their president. Their government makes weapons and provides them to Israel, which they use to kill Palestinian Muslims. Given that the American Congress is a committee that represents the people, the fact that it agrees with the actions of the American government proves that America in its entirety is responsible for the atrocities that it is committing against Muslims (Bin Laden 2005: 140–141).

“This, too, is a preposterous understanding of responsibility and liability. For it claims that all Americans are eligible to be killed or maimed: some for devising and implementing America’s policies, others for participating in the political process, still others for paying taxes. Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant Bin Laden’s severe condemnation of those policies, not every type and degree of involvement with them can justify the use of lethal violence. Surely voting in elections or paying taxes is not enough to make one fair game.”

“If some types of terrorism are justifiable under certain circumstances, such circumstances will be extremely rare. Terrorists and their apologists do not perform the requisite calculations properly. One problem is the “higher good” to be promoted by terrorism: more often than not, it is defined in ideological terms, rather than derived from settled preferences or interests of actual people. But for the most part Fotion discusses the issue of means. If a terrorist act or campaign is to be justified instrumentally, it must be shown (1) that the end sought is good enough to justify the means, (2) that the end will indeed be achieved by means of terrorism, and (3) that the end cannot be achieved in any other way that is morally and otherwise less costly. Terrorists not only, as a matter of fact, fail to discharge this burden; Fotion argues that, with regard to terrorism that victimizes innocent people, it cannot be discharged. All direct victims of terrorism are treated as objects to be used—indeed, used up—by the terrorist”.

“One can be a terrorist and a freedom fighter; terrorism is not the monopoly of enemies of freedom. One can hold high government or militaryoffice and design or implement a terrorist campaign; terrorism is not the preserve of insurgents” notes Walzer.

By extension of that logic, one can be a Democratic Party and still be a Terrorist Organization.

The CPM professing to be Democratic party and its Party men perpetrating acts of terror as a tool of political intimidation where it has to deal with its political rivals therefore satisfies the definition of being terrorists.

Ref-

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/terrorism/#TerFreRevEar21sCen

 http://socialistreview.org.uk/284/marxism-terrorism

 

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