James Ottavio Castagnera

In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman’s portrait of the world in the 20 years prior to WWI, the popular historian included a chapter on anarchism. She called it “The Word and the Deed.” Anarchist evangelists, such as Proudhon and Kropotkin, preached violence but seldom soiled their own hands. Fanatics, some perhaps quite mad, did the dirty deeds. She notes that some seven or eight heads of state, including President William McKinley in 1900, were assassinated by self-proclaimed anarchists during this era.

We see the same phenomenon at work in the anti-abortion movement today. Try as they might, the pro-lifers cannot absolve themselves of guilt for the murder of Dr. Teller. They are the Proudhons and Kropotkins of their cause. I cannot believe that they are not secretly applauding Teller’s assassination.

Is the pen mightier than the sword? That question qua cliché is probably unanswerable. What is certain is that the pen can unleash the sword. Another case in point may be the November 1963 assassination of JFK. Re-reading Norman Mailer’s brilliant 1995 book Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, I was struck by his several hypotheses about possible Mafia involvement. Mob Leader Santo Trafficante is known to have rhetorically inquired, referring to President Kennedy, “Can someone remove this stone from my shoe?” Mailer believes the Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa may have had a hit out on the president, though he concludes that Oswald was a lone gunman, not a gangland hit man.

Trafficante’s comment, in turn, evokes the more ancient inquiry of King Henry II concerning Thomas Becket: “Will no one rid me of this priest?” In contrast to the Kennedy mystery, history leaves no doubt that some of Henry’s henchmen acted on his rhetoric and murdered St. Thomas in his own cathedral.

Yet again, as I point out in a chapter of my new book Al Qaeda Goes to College (Praeger 2009), the rhetoric of the radical animal rights movement has led to attacks on research scientists, their labs, and lately even their homes, by fanatics willing to break the law and destroy human lives and property on behalf of laboratory animals.

The law wrestles constantly with the distinction between Constitutionally protected opinion and unprotected incitement. Supreme Court Justice Holmes a century ago famously remarked that a person has no right to shout fire in a crowded theater. Holmes’s comment is clear enough, but not very helpful here. From Al Qaeda to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, modern times are replete with examples of individuals and cells inspired by the exhortations of fanatics who neither exercise direct control over nor necessarily even know of those who will do the desired deeds.

My own view is that in our free and open society, the law neither can, nor should it, control the speech of such fanatics. To do so is to start down the slippery slope of censorship. Furthermore, in our Internet age, no law, no matter how draconian, can control the flow of information, no matter how inciting it is.

Having said this, I repeat that the anti-abortion crowd, no less than Al Qaeda or the militias who inspired McVeigh, must take the blame for the “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” (to borrow a phrase from the band AC/DC) by those who act on their behalf.