CREATION OF AN URBAN GUERRILLA
Stuart Archer CohenWe all complain about politics, but have you ever wondered what makes a person pick up a gun and start violently resisting the government? That was one of the questions I wanted to answer when I started writing The Army of the Republic.
Thank you for spelling this out; this is great stuff. Your observations of the American Revolution in regards to #5 are apropos and often overlooked.
5) ARMED RESISTANCE IS A LEFT/LIBERAL PHENOMENA
Certainly that jibes with my comic-book understanding of history. A liberal minority of revolutionaries basically drug the Tories into a new confederation, separate and distinct from mother England.
That leads me to two questions regarding the outcome of your research:
1) Did you find any support for a hypothesis that the leftist phenomenon you describe is a virtualization of violent means to violent ends?
2) If so, does the degree of leftist influence correlate with the degree of violent means used?
I'm not sure I understand your first question, but in answer to the 2nd, I don't think the degree of violence correlates with the degree of Leftist influence. The Bolsheviks were extremely violent, as was Mao and the Kmer Rouge: all of them were pretty extreme Left. However, the ERP was also fairly extreme to the Left, but scrupulously avoided civilian casualties, and would never have done the kind of mass-casualty attacks so popular today. The Montoneros had the same policy, though for the people they did kill: police, industrialists, soldiers, generals-- I'm sure that policy didn't offer much comfort. I did meet one Montonero, Fernando Vaca Narvaja, who told me he was arrested and tortured because he didn't have the heart to shoot a policeman in cold blood after disarming him. I think that was probably the norm in those groups, though not a rule.
The most gratuitously violent Leftist group I've run across in Latin America is the Sendero Luminoso, of Peru, which would go into a village and line everybody up, then cut the throats or stone to death local officials of fairly insignificant rank. (On the other hand, the military itself was responsible for as much as 45% of the casualties of that insurgency, often masquerading as the Sendero).
In general, while all insurgent groups are violent to some degree, Latin American groups tended to focus their violence on their perceived enemies rather than to terrorize the general public. I think the level of violence has more to do with the temperament and mores of the leaders than how far to the Left they are.