Dutch van der Linde: Outlaw or First-Wave Terrorist?

Red Dead Redemption 2's Dutch van der Linde is one of gaming's most multifaceted characters. Introduced in the first Red Dead Redemption as a bitter, vicious shell of a man who spends his time offering Native Americans hurt by American policy the means and organization to lash out against the United States, Dutch started out as the leader of a small outlaw gang of the type seen in both the real and the dramatized West. It is easy to assign Dutch the full weight of the romantic West and characterize him as, well, a classic outlaw gang leader, but if we pull back the camera and consider his historical context:

Would Dutch van der Linde be remembered not as an "outlaw," but as a "terrorist?"

The question is always a little murky. Scholars don't agree on a single definition of terrorism. Some make carveouts for state violence entirely, others require specific weapons or tactics (or at least classes of weapons and tactics), some require the acts to be part of specific generations of political movement. Others outline terrorism as simply a tactic and trying to define 'terrorist' – as opposed to 'agent,' 'freedom fighter,' 'rebel,' 'civilizer' – is a fruitless endeavor. So to make any headway, we're going to have to set some ground rules.

The definition of terrorism we'll be using today requires three factors:

• the use of violence as a political tactic,
• to force concessions by a government or work toward a utopian social reality,
• without the sanction of the state.

We're also going to add one more wrinkle, though, and that's whether Dutch fits the historical context of terror – that is, if a student of history or counterterrorism were looking at his actions in 1899, 1907, and 1911 today, would that person see old Dutchie as part of the 'terrorist' movements of his day?

We'll start by looking at what "terrorism" meant in the period Dutch was operating.

First-Wave Anarchist Terror

In the early 2000s, David Rapoport outlined a theory commonly called "wave theory of terrorism." In wave theory, modern terrorists have generations spanning between 20 and 40 years or so, each having a unique character and ideological slant. Terror organizations can overlap waves, but those that overlap waves often have elements of each wave, with elements that match the current wave often coming to the fore. An organization that started during the second wave, anticolonial terrorism, but persists into the present day's "religious terrorism" wave, might have second-wave anticolonial goals, third-wave New Left methodologies, and fourth-wave religious aesthetics.

The first wave of terror, beginning in the 1870s and extending into World War I, birthed our modern understanding of the term. Originating in Russia but rapidly becoming a global movement and shift in tactics, the first wave eschewed pamphlet-distributing, army-making revolution in favor of isolated acts of violence designed to shift public sentiment. This strategy, called "propaganda by the deed" by early anarchist Peter Kropotkin, relied on the terrorist's willingness to take risks and actions that show both bravado and commitment. Dynamite users were just as much at risk of serious disfigurement or death as the government agents and strikebreakers they attacked, and for that reason it became a symbol of the early terrorist – someone not out to merely advance his personal fortune, but make change for everyone's sake.

During the 1890s, part of the first wave of terror also earned the name "The Golden Age of Assassination." Attackers surgically removed major figures – monarchs, prime ministers, magnates, territorial governors, oligarchs, presidents – and fled amid the chaos.

How do Dutch's Boys – and the later van der Linde gang – stack up?

Actions and Tactics

Dutch's Boys, his original gang from ~1879 to 1899, probably doesn't qualify. While they have some degree of legitimate "Robin Hood"-like enterprise, especially earlier in their years of operation, they are substantially exactly what they look like: an outlaw gang. Sure, there's occasional use of dynamite and Molotov cocktails, but strictly for the functional reason of needing to blow up things you blow up with dynamite or burn down, like train tracks and plantation houses – using dynamite, well, like criminals. They operate on local levels.

1899, however – specifically Red Dead Redemption 2's final chapter – marks the turning point for Dutch van der Linde himself. While Dutch clings to the trappings of outlawry, of being a simple Robin Hood extortionist, his priorities begin to shift. The side of Dutch that reads the universe's thinly-veiled Thoreau pastiche Evelyn Miller and comes to see cities and industrialization as dehumanizing political systems starts to intermingle with the side of Dutch that robs stagecoaches and burns plantation houses over inter-gang warfare. When he kills Leviticus Cornwall – a railroad, kerosene, and freight magnate whose name and history are clearly designed to evoke real-world railway tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt – he admits that while he'd have accepted a large sum of money and a boat for the gang to run away with, he prefers to kill him.

If Dutch van der Linde and Leviticus Cornwall were real, they'd doubtlessly be discussed right alongside Leon Czolgosz and William McKinley – turn-of-the-century assassinations of major American figures by men heavily influenced by proto-anarchist writers.

The van der Linde Gang of 1911 – a gang assembled primarily from dispossessed Native Americans desperate for a way to extract blood from the American government for the abuses of American Indian Wars and residential schools, using the anti-government radicalization practices Dutch started to develop after his assassination of Cornwall – behaves much more like a terrorist cell. They strike out at anyone seen as complicit in government oppression; Dutch is confirmed to be in his old stomping grounds again when he's linked to the murder of farmers. Dutch and his men are perfectly willing to kill police officers, random troops, bank tellers – anyone they see as part of the system. They strike at centers of finance and government with dynamite, stolen government weaponry, and whatever they can cobble together from wreckage of Civil War and American Indian War battles.

On this metric, Dutch would certainly qualify.

Ideology and Context

No less important, however, is the context in which they fought. First-wave terrorists believed that large swaths of society operated under false moral conventions that constrained their seething resentment for the capitalist system – something oppressive, exploitative, and corrosive to the spirit. Their contemporaries saw them as, to quote General Carl Schurz, "human being(s) who (are) in a general way the enemy of all that exists." They were often intermingled with other relevant movements in their eras and countries, such as the labor movement, free love, and the women's rights movement.

As mentioned earlier, Dutch is a fond reader of Evelyn Miller, a fictional writer following in the stylistic footsteps of men like Henry David Thoreau and William Batchelder Greene. Miller views the American system... well, let's let Mr. Miller speak for himself –

"To be removed from humanity, to live as a prisoner in the marble gaol, to be isolated from humanity in such a manner, is so profoundly anti-American as to make the whole conception of this nation an absurdity even worse than our treatment of the negro. Manhattan at once depraves the poor and dehumanizes the rich. Its purpose is unhappiness. The nurturing and blooming of suffering."

Dutch mirrors this. He is well-understood as an individualist anarchist; he frequently talks about the American ideal of freedom and how his era has perverted it. He's well-read on mass movements; when one character asks if they're going to keep riding east all the way to Paris, he jokes about joining the Commune. Before killing Leviticus Cornwall, he tells the magnate:

"You kill, I kill. You rob, I rob... only difference I can see is I choose whom I kill and rob and you destroy everything in your path."

Dutch is always promising his followers some utopian vision or another – though he never outlines a direct path from their present circumstances thereto, he's quite insistent that the fights they pick will lead to some grand era of American individualism (or at least the extension of the era of American individualism in which he came up).

Here, too, Dutch is a near-match for the terrorists of his day... but only near. He might sympathize with the labor movement, but he doesn't especially share its goals; even when viewed through this lens, Dutch is a man the world is passing by. The anarcho-socialists and anarcho-syndicalists of his time might share some cause with him, but not all of it.

That said, would Dutch have thrown in with them, given the chance? Absolutely. Dutch choosing the allies he chooses has more to do with geography than anything else. Over the course of both games, Dutch operates in Lemoyne (fictionalized Louisiana), New Hanover (fictionalized mix of Great Plains states), Ambarino (fictionalized Colorado), West Elizabeth (a fictionalized state with a mix of traits taken from California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado), and New Austin (a fictionalized state that seems to result from chopping off part of Texas to be another state). These states – or, well, their real-world equivalents in the American South and Southwest – weren't as large of flashpoints in the turn-of-the-century labor movement, but the fallout of the American Indian Wars continued into the 1900s west of the Mississippi (and thus also west of the game's fictional stand-in, the Lannahechee River, which forms the eastern boundary of the playable zone). If Dutch had made it to New York as he briefly planned instead of having to head further southwest, he probably would have been stoking the fires of the labor movement into overt violence instead of spurring on events similar to the Padre Canyon Incident and the Last Massacre.

His contemporaries certainly don't really make the distinction between Dutch's ideology and that of other terrorists of the era. He's described as a "Robin Hood-Oedipus-communist" by an Ivy League professor involved in his pursuit. His former follower, John Marston, is asked if he's a socialist (though John denies such things about himself, John was never with Dutch for ideology's sake). History probably wouldn't have differentiated him much, even if someone riding with him might have quibbled about the percentages of his support for various causes in matching him up with other terrorists of the era.

What's the Plan, Dutch?

Dutch is a curious case. From our vantage with him and later against him, playing the game, he's an outlaw gang leader; to an external observer, however, left to evaluate him only by his most explosive actions, he looks much more like a first-wave terrorist.

This, of course, loops all the way back to our discussion of trans-wave terror. If we consider outlaw gangs and proto-anarchists as a sort of "zeroth wave" of terror, starting before the Civil War and running up to Reconstruction, a sort of dry run against a government only beginning to take on the scope necessary for us to see terrorists as terrorists, Dutch starts to take a much clearer shape: a man with the methodology, aesthetics, and manner of first-wave terrorists, but the ideology and planning style of that zeroth wave.

Even through this new lens, Dutch ends up underlining the game's thematic points. As he himself says:

"We can't always fight nature. We can't fight change, we can't fight gravity, we can't fight nothin'. My whole life, all I ever did was fight... [...] When I'm gone, they'll just find another monster. They have to, because they have to justify their wages."

Simply by riding his ideology into the next era rather than laying down the sword, Dutch morphs into a first-wave terrorist as his tactics and targets shift. By acting on that ideology, he justifies national investment in organizations like the Pinkertons and the ongoing counterterror efforts of the era – efforts which, once they exist, end up buying into the same meta-level understanding of the world Dutch himself had.

This issue occurs often between terrorists and counterterrorists. They come to agree on incompatibilities that exist, reinforcing each other's narratives. Both Dutch and the Pinkertons agree that the ways of the Old West – of small rail towns, sheriff-kings, outlaw gangs, and stagecoaches – are incompatible with an age of motorcars, industrialists, and national-level law enforcement.

Nice dichotomy; what undergirds it?

They agree that 'civilized' society and 'individualist' living are incompatible. They even agree on several positive principles; Dutch is certainly an enthusiastic believer in an end to racial animus, and attracts a wide range of ethnicities and creeds to his cause. (Like many terrorists, after all, Dutch is a utopian thinker.)

Pinkerton Agent Ross can only justify his wages and hefty retirement pension if Dutch exists; Dutch can only justify killing and robbing if Agent Ross is hot on his heels. Dutch's shifting alliances – with the Italian mafia in Saint Denis (fictionalized New Orleans), with the Native American tribal resistances of Ambarino and New Austin – are, to him, a means to create enough "noise and smoke" to escape the Pinkertons; the Pinkertons take these same alliances as signs that Dutch is an enemy of society writ large. Dutch's actions radicalize more people... and, just as he says, provide another new monster to justify their wages.

How could they ever fight gravity? They're busy fighting each other.