Derek Cohen is a professor of English at York University in Toronto. His most recent book is Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority.

 The circumstances or personality that might push a person to terrorism seem unfathomable to most of us. But in the midst of the War on Terror, it has become altogether too convenient to dismiss the terrorists as natural born killers instead of corrupted and mislead individuals. This article, written by a Jewish one-time resistance fighter against the South African apartheid regime, illustrates how an activist resisting what he feels to be an oppressive power might, almost accidentally, find himself part of a terrorist network. The author captures poignantly how terrorists often justify their actions, and what separates terrorism from legitimate resistance struggles. Terrorists differentiate themselves by killing innocent civilians, an action they justify by saying civilians who benefit from an oppressive regime and do not oppose it are no different than enemy combatants. Obviously such a perspective is uninformed of the hauntingly familiar scenarios presented in Orwell’s

 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, where rulers are prepared to go to great lengths to brainwash civilian populations. As South Africa’s own Stephen Biko once said, "The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed." By attacking the civilian members of a perceived oppressive regime, terrorism thus victimizes the very people whom every legitimate freedom fighter should have as one of his goals to liberate. Since civilians are often doubly victimized by warring parties and their own rulers, it is no wonder that the Prophet Muhammad went to such great lengths to urge their protection.

Derek Cohen

 My political radicalism was a by-product of growing up in South Africa… South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was a strange and terrible place. Young white people like me lived in a world of privilege, wealth, and advantage. The extent of our advantage was most evident in the disadvantage of the non-white South African people (Black Africans, Coloureds, and Indians), who vastly outnumbered and surrounded us in every aspect of our daily lives. Our homes had servants who lived in servant quarters in the backyards. Some homes had one servant, some had three and four. Few white homes had none. Servants prepared our food, made our beds each morning, polished our shoes each day, and tended our parents’ gardens. In affluent homes, they served us our meals, and we could, as teenagers returned from school, call to one or another of the servants to bring our lunch or a cup of tea …

 My family lifestyle was typical of that of liberal, decent, well-meaning people. My parents were relatively well-off even by white standards. We had three servants, who lived in rooms in the back of our house—rooms that by law were not permitted to be physically joined to the main house (but they were near enough that the servants were within calling distance). My mother and father were kind to their servants: they paid them somewhat better than did their friends and neighbors; they treated them with respect and felt some kind of obligation to look after them. This attitude was widely called liberal guilt, and probably to some extent was just that. I know that the same could probably be said for some slave owners in the nineteenth century, so I don’t romanticize this attitude. I merely record it. Despite the real affection that existed between our family and the servants, I give my parents credit for never describing any of them as "members of the family." They knew the difference and regarded that kind of cozy liberalism as repulsive and dishonest. Few white South Africans ever saw one of these so-called "members of the family" actually sit down with the family at a meal …

 I was at this time an undergraduate student in a small university in Grahamstown in the Cape Province. I was involved, though never in a central way, in liberal politics in the town. I would attend anti-apartheid demonstrations and, with my university student colleagues, was subjected to abuse and small acts of violence by local youths who loathed us because we were students—members of what they correctly perceived as an elite—and also because we spoke out against the apartheid system that sustained them. To the working-class, poorer white South Africans, apartheid gave a style of living that uneducated and disadvantaged people could not hope to possess anywhere else in the world. It granted them literal social superiority, encoded in the laws of the land and supported by the organized religious communities with only a few notable and honorable exceptions. And it was this advantage that our opponents believed (correctly) that we, the privileged and the educated, were fighting to take away from them. They truly hated us.

 My political activities continued in this way for my first year at university. In the meantime, apartheid became more and more deeply entrenched. The police powers of persecution, arrest, detention, torture, and spying seemed only to increase. Laws fortifying an apparently omnipotent ruling party became more draconian and cruel. The Liberal Party was finally banned, not because it broke any laws, but simply because it stood against the system of racial separation. Liberalism, in that context of violent oppression, seemed to me a hopeless remedy for what ailed South Africa, and I came to the conclusion that to fight apartheid with reason and argument was futile. Now it seemed obvious to me that my father had always been right; that the fight against this system of violent suppression required violence. How could you stop a machine like the South African Police Force, which was possessed of almost unlimited physical and political power? The police were virtually a law unto themselves and were permitted to continue to suppress dissent and oppositional politics with the support and connivance of the nation’s legislature. In everyday life, their arrogance was most vividly expressed in the way in which they treated black South Africans. You had to be willfully oblivious to avoid seeing the casual brutality—the random, easy contempt and physical violence—with which black people were treated on a daily basis…

 Violence, in other words, was everywhere; it was real to all South Africans no matter what their color. They all saw it, they all knew about it, and they almost all went along with it, having little choice in the matter. To be white was to collaborate with apartheid; to be white was to have privilege forced upon you; and few people had the strength to resist its blandishments. Of course, it was the black people who endured the violence and the white people who watched it. Some thought about the possibility of change—all black people did, and some white people. How to bring that change about was the problem. Liberal-minded white people were motivated in their desire for change largely by a sense of fairness and a hatred of racial doctrines. The more radical-minded leftists were motivated by a sense that this was a class rather than a racial conflict and that it was an international struggle for a new world order.

 One day during term, I was sitting on the library steps, enjoying the sunshine. A graduate student I knew slightly came over to me, interrupting my reverie with a friendly kick to my shoe. He was only slightly older than I, but much wiser, smarter, better read, and brilliantly articulate. He was well known around the campus as possessing radical, left-wing views and being well able to defend them.

"So," he said, eschewing the niceties, "How do you think we can put an end to apartheid?"
"Only by violence," I replied.
"Come to my house at nine tonight." His voice was low, melodramatic, and conspiratorial. And that was how it began. He had found out something about my views from one or two of my political friends, and had decided to try me out. I remember feeling sudden excitement, flattered to be noticed by this leading campus intellectual. It was obvious to me that I was being recruited, and I immediately assumed that it was for the African National Congress (ANC), which had already embarked on a campaign of violent resistance …

 And that was the beginning of it all. As the year wore on, our little group [the African Resistance Movement-ARM] met frequently. "Actions," as they were called, were taking place in the large urban areas of Cape Town and Johannesburg … Some of us, not including me, participated in acts of sabotage in Johannesburg. But for the most part we were fairly isolated, and our largest achievement as a revolutionary group was the building of links with the local African community.

 Two or so years after this began, I left the university and found a job as a high-school teacher in Johannesburg. There I became more deeply involved in the affairs of the group. I was put in touch with a man who instructed me on the making of detonators and bombs, though the fact is that I’m technologically stupid, and it’s lucky that I was never called on to exercise this particular skill. I had an apartment in the city where I hid dynamite and other accoutrements of bomb-making, such as timing devices and detonators. I was given the job of purchasing some of the parts, most of which were innocent in themselves, but likely to arouse suspicion if purchased in bulk. So, one afternoon I disguised myself slightly by wearing a pair of glasses and changing my hairstyle. Armed with a story about buying goods for my father’s shop, I went off very nervously. Now it all seems silly, and I know that I looked ridiculous. I remember the conversation with the salesman who served me being awkward and implausible; still, if I had been suspected and reported, I would undoubtedly have been arrested.

 In truth, we were quite amateurish, though we tried not to be; revolutions are seldom started by professionals and experts. We were for the most part a group of incorrigibly bourgeois, overprotected, family-oriented, nonviolent young people who, on some level, understood the implications of what we were doing. But our experience of revolution was gleaned from books; it wasn’t, as with our black colleagues and friends, the real experience of continuous, violent physical oppression—although some in our group were to find out more about that later on. One day my contact, the bomb-making instructor, having spent the afternoon with me, accidentally left his wallet in my car. So, although he had been careful about concealing his real identity from me, it was suddenly in my possession. I called him that night at home to tell him that I had his wallet. He was a mathematics teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand who was later kidnapped by the South African police from his home in Zambia, drugged, and bundled back to South Africa where he was formally arrested. Only the intervention of Zambian prime minister Kenneth Kaunda secured his release …

 Soon after, something dramatic and terrifying happened. A bomb in a suitcase was placed near a bench in the white section of the Johannesburg railway station. When it exploded, a seventy-year-old woman was killed and one other person injured. Almost immediately the police arrested two men, both associated with the ARM. Although we knew that this kind of action was directly contrary to established policy, it was undeniable that the two belonged to our group. Those of us on the periphery wondered what had happened and what the connection to the ARM actually was. On the night of the bombing, my parents and I were in Johannesburg, taking my sister to catch the train back to university in Cape Town. The bomb had exploded a short while earlier, and though we were aware of the heavy police presence, and knew that a bomb had gone off in the station, we had made no connection to ourselves or anyone else we knew, assuming that it was the work of a radical African group.

 Walking toward the train, we were suddenly halted by a hurried procession of white policemen angrily making their way through the station. The police were surrounding two men, both of whom we recognized. They had been guests in our home and, while in Pretoria jail, fed by my mother. They were two of my colleagues in the ARM—one had been a university friend in Grahamstown. They were both handcuffed and being frogmarched toward the scene of the bombing. Both looked up and saw me, but knew enough not to show recognition on their faces, though I almost made the mistake of greeting them. They were pale and frightened looking, and I wondered why the police had brought them to the scene. After all, they were most definitely in jail at the time of the explosion. It later became clear that they had been brought by the indignant police to view their own—or ARM—handiwork, as an object lesson in the effects of "terrorism." Coming from police who had been involved in torture and possibly worse, the "lesson" was an ugly joke…

 Those were terrible times in South African history. Innocent people seemed not to exist. Those of us on the left believed that white South Africans had, by a huge majority, thrown in their lot with apartheid and were consciously turning a blind eye to the violence of the system. There seemed, with the recent crackdowns on the various resistance movements, little to be done. Law had failed utterly; and armed resistance, in which civilians were left unharmed, had failed too. What was the logical next step? This is how I might have talked myself into participating in the dreadful event. I now think that though Harris believed that the bombing was, somehow, an inevitable part of the evolution of resistance, he was wrong both historically and morally. Others I knew in the movement would have had no hesitation in refusing to take part in any action that endangered the innocent.

 I envy them their moral clarity and wish I had possessed it then. I now firmly believe that the taking of innocent human life is always unjustified. But I know too that I was lucky that Harris [who planted the bomb on the trane] did not know me then. I think I would have gone along with him and persuaded myself that it was a right and necessary action. And I am very glad that I did not, not only because of the physical torture that I would have had to endure when I was caught, but also because of the consequences to my soul. I could not now bear the knowledge that I had willfully killed an innocent person. Still, I can’t find it in myself to blame him. John Harris was another casualty of apartheid…

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http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=237