I was browsing Instapundit and came across this: "Left-Wing Terrorism Surges In Europe, As Governments Dismantle Social Safety Net". (Instapundit (a Yanqui libertarian) is good for interesting links, but tends to offer soundbites rather than analysis, and I gather he doesn't do thorough fact-checking (though he often puts up corrections or rebuttals from readers who find fault).)
With European governments paring back the social safety net, and businesses blamed for creating a crisis, left-wing terrorism in Europe is on the march, according to a new report from EuroPol (the European Police Office)... As this chart shows, left-wing terrorism dwarfs right-wing terrorism in Europe -- perhaps surprising given the attention paid to Europe's far right. Islamist and Separatist terrorism, however, remain the largest categories.
It is indeed surprising. Consider the left-wing violence in Greece:
Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests. (Source)
A pregnant woman burning to death, barricaded in the building by a crowd that screams that she deserves it. Could have been a Jewish girl barricaded in by mediaeval peasants screaming about killing Christ and the usury of Jewish loan sharks. I'd almost say something about "in this day and age," but... human nature hasn't changed.
Regarding the Business Insider article, I can't help but note that the metric quoted is of the "Number of convictions/acquittals for terrorism charges in 2009" (I assume that means "number of charges total", as it doesn't give breakdowns into convictions and aquittals) - which reflects the number of people involved in terrorism, or at least the numbers that the State exerts itself to arrest. The breakdown of this metric goes like this:
* Right-wing terrorists: 0.2%
* Left-wing terrorists: 10%
* Islamist terrorists: 22%
* Separatist terrorists: 68%
These figures come from Figure 5 of the 2010 Europol terrorism report, which also contains (Figure 3) a breakdown of actual terrorist attacks in 2009 (whether successful, failed or prevented). This metric gives a slightly different impression:
* Right-wing violence: 1.4%
* Left-wing violence: 14%
* Islamist violence: 0.3%
* Separatist violence: 81%
* Single-issue/unattributed: 4%
Note that by this metric, the hard-lefties still make the extreme right look harmless; but the Islamist threat is tinier even than the extreme right. This is possibly because the Islamists are far less competent so never get any bomb plots in motion; possibly because Islamist violence has become a huge concern in the last decade and a lot of resources are spent on preventing it from happening; possibly also because, Islamist violence being such a huge and novel concern, the authorities are more thorough about trying to jail Jihadists than murderous communists or neo-nazis. In any case, Islamist violence in Europe is dwarfed by right-wing violence, which is dwarfed by left-wing violence, which is dwarfed by separatist violence (the media does not tend to give this impression); and there's a big discrepancy between the fraction of terror attacks due to Islamists (0.3%) and terrorists put on trial who are Islamists (22%).
This discrepancy is smaller, and the other way round, for right-wingers (1.4% of all terrorism, 0.2% of all accused terrorists), which could indicate that going after right-wing terrorists is a lower priority for the authorities. This would be worrying - Fascism and Nazism in their early days both benefitted from the authorities turning a blind eye to violence against socialists, Jews, &c.; though it's not the only possible explanation (the number of terrorists who get caught, and the ratio of violently-inclined terrorists to terrorists who actually commit violence, might vary from cause to cause). And I'm sympathetic to the tendency to lose all perspective when getting paranoid about far-right violence, because the last time that kind of thing happened it left Europe in ruins. But seeing the far-right as some unique danger has its problems: firstly, that greater dangers (murderous far-lefties, say) can be ignored, and secondly, that paranoia can lead to weird results. Germany has had problems with dealing with neo-nazis because of this: neo-nazi groups are heavily infiltrated by the German authorities, and infiltrators normally pose as the most extreme members of their groups in order to deflect suspicion... which resulted in one court case against a neo-nazi group being thrown out because most of that group's worst literature had been written by agents of the German authorities.
(A similar thing seems to have happened with Canadian neo-nazis, back in the 60's - some of the most competent and important neo-nazis were in fact spies from Jewish organisations. One of them helped organise the neo-nazis, acted as the leader's bodyguard and drove him to rallies; another acted as his PR man and helped him get publicity. This has spawned theories that the Canadian Jewish Congress was deliberately trying to make the neo-nazis more threatening in order to make themselves look more necessary and important. I suspect this is a case of "never alledge conspiracy when folly is sufficient explanation" - if you read the report by one of the spies, he clearly didn't see himself as part of a cynical CJC ploy.)
(On the subject of far-right stuff: Swedish Voters React to Far-Right Gains, and it all sounds very familiar. The following would be just as true if you replaced "Sweden" with "Britain" and "Sweden Democrats" with "British National Party":
A lot of voters are dissatisfied with Sweden's immigration policy but the Sweden Democrats are the only party to address it. None of the other parties addressed it properly, for fear of being labelled as racist. You can get that label very easily in the Swedish media. Because no one has argued against the Sweden Democrats, I think that many of their supporters don't actually realise what they are voting for.
Good job suppressing debate out of existence, journalists!
...actually, I'd love it if we could exchange the BNP for the Sweden Democrats. No links with violent groups? No leaders with a track record of holocaust denial? Valuing assimilation rather than ethnic purity? Districts where they're fielding more immigrant candidates than any other party? This counts as far-right? Sweden, you are way too quick to get the vapours.) [EDIT: I consulted wikipedia for a brief overview of the SD, but the wiki article is not exhaustive: it didn't mention this rather dubious and bizarre TV advert.]
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