Learning and Suffering in Vienna
They succeed in giving the impression that this is the only way to win peace and quiet, while they go on quietly, cautiously, but unerringly, conquering one position after another—now by quiet extortion, now by actual theft at moments when public attention is on other things, either unwilling to be interrupted or considering the affair too small for a great to-do which would provoke the angry foe anew.
These are tactics planned by exact calculation of every human weakness, whose result is almost mathematically sure success unless the other side can learn to fight poison gas with poison gas.
To weakly natures it can only be said that this is a simple question of survival or non-survival.
To me equally plain was the significance of physical terrorism toward the individual and toward the masses. Here too was exact calculation of psychological effect.
Terrorism on the job, in the factory, in the meeting-hall and at mass demonstrations will always be successful unless equal terrorism opposes it.
Then, indeed, the party screams bloody murder, and—old despiser of state authority that it is—yells for help from that quarter, in most cases, only to gain its end after all in the general confusion. That is to say, it finds some jackass of a high official who, in the silly hope of making the dreaded enemy perhaps more kindly disposed some day, helps to break down the adversary of this universal pestilence.
The impression of such a success on the great mass of both adherents and antagonists can be realized only by a man who knows the soul of a people not from books but from life. While its partisans regard it as a triumph of right for their cause, the beaten opponent usually despairs of success for any future resistance.
The better I learned to know the methods of physical terrorism in particular the more did I beg the pardon of the hundreds of thousands who succumbed to it.
That is the thing for which I am most profoundly grateful to that period of suffering: it alone gave me back my people, and I learned to distinguish the victims from the deceivers.
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