ue of terror, are of course naive, as the examples of Northern Ireland, Basque Country and Corsica suggest. Implicit hints are given to us every day that certain ethnic groups or religions would be inherently ‘terroristic’ in nature. Such implications, often offered by the propaganda of the very regimes that can themselves be defined as terror regimes, are dangerous and only feed xenophobia that damages our ability to observe the world clearly.In the matter of fact, terrorism is bound to the political environment. Apart from satellites of active and influential terror regimes – like the various communist groups, which the Soviet Union used to finance, and which in most cases have not been cut entirely short from their original sources of finance and weaponry – the true reasons of terrorism usually lie in the decadence and illegitimacy of the prevalent status quo. This means that remedy to the disease should be directed at a revision and development of the situation towards a more legitimate one, even if it means altering the status quo. Machiavelli’s world was far from static, and so is ours, where the lack of change, rather than change, is the source of violent instability and terror. The alternative for a constant search for higher legitimacy and virtue of the situation – coercion and conquest – usually just breeds more terror and instability, unless a whole oppressed population is simply wiped out. Of course even this option, usually named genocide, has not been unfamiliar for the present terror regimes.While individual terrorists and minor groups can be easily dealt with by normal police and justice system, state terror practised by what we defined as terror regimes, as well as the inevitable counter-terror that tyranny generates amongst the victims of state terror, form the real threat for peaceful states. Thus it is justified to refer to this kind of major violence, consisting of terror re...
