Terror

In Europe, terror was employed as a tool by the church and state, often to suppress dissent and maintain the status quo. Campaigns like the Albigensian Crusade, in which the soldiers of Pope Innocent tortured, burned, and butchered the heretical sect of the Cathars, are examples of the extremes to which a religious body was prepared to go in order to maintain its authority, and the same might be said of the witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition. Many philosophers and statesmen have viewed such brutalities in terms of the degeneration of a cause. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1794) considered the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution (April 1793 to July 1794) as a crisis of the human spirit: a vast abstract notion of freedom had arisen that annulled all moral and humanitarian considerations. Others saw it as a brutal mob avenging themselves on their enemies. During this period around seventeen thousand people were put to death, and the republican leader Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794) observed "in times of peace the springs of popular government are in virtue, but in times of revolution, they are both in virtue and terror."

Under ruthless regimes, people tend to adopt a docile attitude toward those in authority. It is not uncommon for families, neighbors, and friends to betray each other. Trust and the communal patterns of daily life inevitably suffer—during Stalin's pogroms, for instance, hundreds of thousands of children were orphaned and left to roam the country, living rough, often starving, and many of these eventually became soldiers who were notably brutal and insensitive. In order to pursue his policies—particularly the collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the removal of all rival left-wing factions—Stalin institutionalized terror, creating government mechanisms that were extensions of his will, oiled by bureaucrats and fueled by propaganda. So many thousands were put to death on a daily basis that the appalling became indistinguishable from the ordinary.

From a despot's point of view, the advantage gained from terror tactics is that he has under him a cowed, servile population; the disadvantage is that, having dispatched so many to camps or firing squads, he may start to anticipate revenge from every quarter and extend his field of killing until his situation becomes more isolated and absurd.