On Violence and Terror

I have recently been reading a number of academic studies on this subject and related themes—terrorism, guerrilla war, vigilantism, etc., and I have been struck by the clinical detachment of the tone of several of these studies. The writers appear to take a stand of something like neutrality between a democratic state and its armed internal enemies. It would be inappropriate on my part to affect such a detachment. I am committed, both by personal conviction and by responsibilities, which I share, to the concept that armed conspiracies against a democratic state threaten us with a reversion to barbarism, and that the democratic state has the duty of defending civilization against these conspiracies by all means short of those that would...