apability to bring about any virtuous ends seems to be typical for empires in decay – empires at their dusk. Therefore falling empires – or empires that were already unsuccessful and illegitimate in the very first place – often appear as the type of polity that is most expectable to be possessed by what we described as a ‘terror regime’.Failing to provide any liberty, stability or prosperity at home, the empires of dusk turn into mere terrorist regimes that direct their aggression and terror against both internal and external scapegoats – often and paradoxically, moreover, blaming them for ‘terror’. Late Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were good examples of such decayed empires that have degenerated into mere terror regimes, and we can easily see the same features in certain failing empires of our own time. Even Machiavelli would hardly have found much virt in their actions, and even much less the Italian Renaissance theorists, whose main point was the defence of Republican liberty and the virtuous ‘uomo universale’. Instead, they would perhaps have found the defence of Estonian, Slovenian, Croatian, Georgian, Chechen or Kosovar liberty against the obviously non-virtuous terror regimes most justified and virtuous.Of course there are, and there will always be, individuals and groups that will use terror as their weapon. Such actors are especially generated in places where there is a constant state of war, and prevalent illegitimacy of the status quo. Supporters of some newly fashionable ‘civilizational’ theories on geopolitics may assume that terror and terrorism are somehow connected to cultural or even genetic inheritance of ‘eastern’ cultures, and should be excluded from Europe and the West by simply sacrificing the nations lying, for their misfortune, beyond the imagined boundaries of our Western civilization. Such theories, when it comes to the iss...
