> And then there are those pseudo-revolutionary sects that aped the military
> organisation of third world national liberation movements more as a cover
> for their own lack of support, than because they were responding to popular
> demands. I mean the Red Army Faction in Germany and Italy. In Italy, in
> particular, these claimed from war-time Partisan militias that had been
> isolated by the Italian Communist Party's constitutional politics. In
> Germany, the actual roots of the RAF in '68 failure was more apparent.
>
> These latter movements were more a psycho-social expression of the collapse
> of popular militancy than an expression of it.
>
> My argument is that the Al-Qaeda 'movement' has much more in common with the
> latter than with the national liberation movements. It is a loosely-based
> coalition of usually western-based or cosmopolitan intellectuals, who are
> characterised by their distance from popular struggle. Their actions are
> largely arbitrary, because they reflect isolation rather than movement.
> Their tactics are rightly called terroristic, because they relish killing
> people and commonly demonise the masses as corrupt and unworthy (somthing
> they have in common with the R.A.F. and Unabomber).
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Or they may be trying to kick-start a different social movement altogether -because the previous models have failed- which hasn't yet reached crucial tippings points. Such is the problem of viewing their actions retrospectively rather than prospectively. One can use the category of arbitrariness to re-narrate and re-describe lots of the contingencies of history[ies].