THE victims of Beslan are certainly not the first of Mother Russia’s children to die in agony at the hands of fanatics. In Michael Burleigh’s masterly history of the Third Reich he retells the story of an event in Ukraine in August 1941. The story is the more striking for being typical of its time.

German troops near Kiev were dealing systematically with civilian prisoners. Among those they processed were 90 children. They were rounded up, imprisoned in the baking heat, and then denied food or water while officers discussed their fate. The children had to eat mortar prised from the brickwork to avoid starving. Eventually, after checking that their actions were in compliance with Wehrmacht orders, the children were taken into the woods and shot.

The murder of children was not just accepted as a legitimate tactic, it was required by Nazi ideology. The enemy was bestial, it had to be extirpated lest it take revenge and that meant, in Himmler’s chilling words, “even the brood in the cradle must be crushed like a puffed-up toad. We are living in an iron time and must sweep with iron brooms”.

When we contemplate the horror of Beslan, we should realise that there is nothing specifically Muslim, Chechen or “other” about the deliberate mass murder of children. In the lifetime of our parents, in the heart of the Christian West, men who had been brought up to enjoy the fruits of European civilization killed infants as casually as a gardener dispatching greenfly.

The enormity of what happened in Beslan last week, like the actions of Nazi Germany, still defies understanding. How can anyone, whatever the provocation, plot the killing of children in cold blood, or bayonet a young boy whose only crime is to ask for water? There is a temptation, looking at the tangled map of the Caucasus, where Ingush run up against Abkhaz and Ossetians against Georgians, to see these killings as a contemporary eruption of ancient clan banditry, the feuding of mountain peoples permanently beyond the pale of civilization. But the history of Europe in the past century reminds us that it is only a short distance from Beslan to Belsen. The motivation in both cases was not ancient antipathy but modern ideology.

One doesn’t need to believe the allegation made by Vladimir Putin’s state-controlled media that some of the Beslan killers were Arabs to recognise nevertheless that they were operating to an al-Qaeda template. Not only did they practise the ruthlessness authorised by Osama bin Laden, they also acted in accordance with recent, terrible, Chechen atrocities. Although the Chechens have a long history of fierce resistance towards those they consider enemies, the nature of modern Chechen terror has far more in common with contemporary fundamentalist practice than historic Caucasian resistance.

Many commentators who have offered President Putin advice at a safe distance have encouraged him to find a way of granting Chechnya the independence its people have fought for. But to believe that current Chechen terrorism is simply a fight for national self-determination, which can be ended by granting proper autonomy, is to ignore blindly the nature of what happened in Beslan. The people responsible for the atrocity are no more likely to settle for national independence than the Nazis were ever going to accept the Sudetenland as the last of their territorial demands. The indiscrimate means used by the Nazis and the Beslan terrorists are so incommensurate with their professed political ends as to place them in a realm apart from those groups with which any democracy can negotiate. In both cases, the world has to deal with people whose national aspirations form only one part of a totalitarian ideology which finds its fullest satisfaction in slaughter.

When Russia did grant Chechnya greater autonomy in the 1990s, it was only to find that territory become a launchpad for fundamentalist groups intent on exporting slaughter well beyond their borders. In the circumstances, the Russians could no more accept the requirement to respect self-determination than you or I could accept the need to respect property rights when our neighbour’s house has become a crack den. When others abuse their freedom to threaten your safety, there is a need to act.

But the nature of the Russian response under Mr Putin has been tragically inappropriate. Not because force was used — a measure of force will always be necessary when dealing with terrorism, as we know from the experience of successful counter-insurgency operations from Malaysia to Northern Ireland. But force is ultimately effective only when it is governed by the restraints and warning lights that exist in democracies.

Because Mr Putin’s Russia has no effective political opposition to hold the executive to account, because it has no functioning free press to raise the alarm when mistakes are made on matters as diverse as airline security and military corruption, because it has no effective rule of law to guide the security apparatus, the state’s response is inevitably crude, clumsy and ineffectual.

As the development economist Amartya Sen has pointed out, democracies deal much more effectively with natural disasters than autocracies because free institutions keep governments efficient. The same principles apply to dealing with man-made threats such as terrorism. It is no coincidence that both President Putin and the House of Saud should have had to endure an upsurge of terror on their territory this year. The need to spread democracy to counter terror and tyranny, far from being a neoconservative dream that died in the sands of Iraq, remains not just the most important lesson of the 20th century, but the single most important challenge of our time.

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