Reading about it in the Italian context, of which I’ll admit I know very little, makes me speculate if some of the novelty of the idea (the counterintuitivity of leftists and rightest using the same strategy for the same medium term goal) comes from the very Western notion that all political activity is oriented on the acquisition of state power. In the West, or where the state is developed enough to make it the logical instrument of political control, de-legitimizing the state by contesting its monopoly on violence might be an awkward way of getting control of it. On the other hand, in contexts where the state is manifestly *not* the most powerful actor in society–I’m thinking of the recent violence in Kenya, for example–a variety of sides in a political conflict can be in long term opposition to each other, but also share the same medium term goal of delegitimizing the government. During the Iranian revolution, too, I’m told that all sorts of opposition parties (both the communists and the educated liberals, for example) shared with Khomeini and his people the medium term goal of delegitimizing the Shah’s regime, despite having massively different long term goals, which had a lot to do with how things went down.

Thinking out loud. Not that a strategy of tension couldn’t be a way of bolstering state power, too; the GWOT seems a good example of that, with its color coded terrorism alerts and so forth.

Not that both approaches aren’t appropriate at particular times, I suppose. But I think it’s worth thinking about *why* it’s so difficult to talk about this kind of thing clearly; these sorts of distinctions and questions *should* be vexed. It seems to me that it’s exactly when we think they’re simple (me good, they bad) that people become dangerous and do terrible things.

Put this way, of course, the bombing campaigns of WWII do look like terrorism (no surprise).