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CHAPTER 1
THE HISTORY AND EMERGENCE OF MODERN TERRORISM
According to an old Latin saying, "Historia magistra vitae," history is the teacher of life. Historians know that each historical situation is unique. Just because something happens in one instance it does not mean that it will happen again — circumstances are never quite the same. Historians do not believe in historic laws. They are no more qualified to predict the future than other mortals. History remains important in understanding and assessing current affairs but only with the awareness of its limits as an instrument of understanding these events. This applies as much to understanding terrorism as any other political or cultural developments.
The origins of terrorism go further back than organized warfare, but attacks by small bands of individuals on other groups, large or small, go back to times immemorial. Terrorism has arrested the attention of generations. Yet it remains a challenge to explain and elusive to define. Both the captivation it exerts and the challenge it imposes on interpretation come from the same source: a sudden, shocking, and ostentatious character. While even the outcome of war is shaped by agreed-upon rules and institutions, terrorism uniquely exploits and actively violates established norms, often by evading attribution through anonymity.
Terrorism has also catalyzed violent emotions throughout history. It conjures strikingly opposed figures: the age-old caricature of the mustachioed menace with a snide smile, a fanatic without logic or reason; but also, on the flip side of the same coin, the freedom fighter compelled to play the reluctant hero. To many, the latter image is a wanton distortion. Yet, short of the unequivocal embrace of peaceful means, all political violence bares some hypocrisy.
Killing No Murder, observed Titus, Sexby, and Allen in 1657. Or put more simply, killing and murder are not the same. Similarly, the nature of combat does not predispose armed resistance to align with some gentleman's code. As Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell declared, "Nein, eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht": no, tyranny does have a limit. Wilhelm Tell's refrain continues: "if the oppressed cannot anywhere find reprieve, as a last remedy, if nothing else, the sword." His chilling declaration has been employed by many a freedom fighter, a justification to their resistant cause. Yet, many self-appointed Wilhelm Tells have impetuously invoked the sword, rhetorically clamoring for freedom from tyranny, but inwardly fanatical — they adorn their cause with the façade of self-defense while eagerly using the sword as though it were the answer to all problems of power.
For generations, many criminals have, as a last resort, attempted to advance their illicit activities by associating them with the ideal of patriotism — an attempt not unlike that of modern terrorists who route funds through charitable organizations to launder (or cleanse) money of its illicit origins. Thus, the struggle for freedom has found itself obfuscated by those who, like horse thieves, avoid the hangman's noose by fabricating a backstory to blur the line between what is illegal and what is political. The study of terrorism and political violence has been further obstructed by the fact that the actors who use political violence to advance their interests are rarely ever either simple patriots in the vein of Wilhelm Tell or opportunistic horse-thief criminals, but both at once.
Edmund Burke's over-two-hundred-year-old Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) was, by many accounts, responsible for introducing the word terrorist to the English language. Burke wrote, "Scratch any ideology and beneath it you will find a terrorist." Yet the relationship does not follow in the inverse — that is, simply scratching a terrorist will not always reveal an ideologue underneath.
Understanding terrorism remains a challenge for a variety of reasons. In the past hundred years alone, the character and purpose of terrorism itself has changed drastically. The actors who have elected to pursue terrorism, the means they have employed, the ends they have sought to achieve, have all in one way or another changed significantly over this period of time. Sofia Perovskaya and Emma Goldman are not as far removed from the likes of Ulrike Meinhof or Patty Hearst in years, but they could not be further apart when it comes to their moral and intellectual foundations. The difference in time serves us but little in anticipating and understanding the gulf in thinking. Another great challenge to understanding terrorism is structural. Terrorism is not an ideology like Marxism. Terrorism is a means. It is the instrument of the insurrectionist and the politician alike. Its employment is found across the political spectrum. Yet the employment of terrorism is not merely a tactic. Those who wield it have something in common. Whether they emerge from the extremes of the right or the left, whether they are nationalists or populists or even internationalists, they nonetheless have, as evidenced by their actions, reached the conclusion that, for them, an act of terror is the best idea they can think of to achieve their goals. Moreover, even if they have nothing else in common, terrorists are frequently more connected to other terrorists than they are willing or able to confess to themselves. Further, since terrorism and the decision to employ it can be conducted by anyone, its attraction supersedes the capacity of sovereign states to regulate thought, and thus transverses the borders of physical and political doctrines. It is, like Raymond Aron's "banal formula — the difference in quantity creates a difference in quality," a terrible ratio, an asymmetry of cost to consequence.
Still, terrorism is not a subcategory of revolutionary warfare as some might suppose. The terrorist, despite what may appear to be similarities of circumstance, is not a guerrilla. While the "urban guerrilla" may reside in the heart of the modern metropolis, it is certainly not a "guerrilla." The distinction lies in character more than semantics.
Many, for example, subscribe to the notion that terrorism is altogether novel. Since their argument is limited to those cases of contemporary relevance, history has little if any useful lessons to inform their views. Likewise, many falsely conclude that terrorism is either the greatest existential threat to society or one of the most precarious challenges facing the world today. Such notions might be the result of availability bias, the tendency to believe whatever solution first springs to mind when evaluating a problem. Others see terrorism as the consequence of injustice or cruelty. Their argument presupposes that freedom from civil disorder would result in the absence of terrorism. Such conclusions can be as naïve as they are misdirected. Proponents of these arguments might determine, for example, that by resolving grievances and addressing what are perceived to be the underlying problems that caused a terrorist response, the incidents of terrorism would also decrease. Some mistakenly believe that terrorists are fanatics consumed by ideology and compelled by cruel circumstance. Another fallacy in this list of widely held but poorly founded notions about terrorism is the notion that terrorism can occur anywhere at any time. The purpose here is not to systematically reject common misconceptions but to stimulate a fresh view on the subject of terrorism.
Of course, some methodological challenges arise, prime among them the availability of data on terrorism. Some groups such as the Baader-Meinhof movement, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, or even the Narodnaya Volya, have been well documented. Interestingly, because of the fascination among the public these movements kindled (because they were able to attract a great deal of attention through their activities), they sparked the creation of books, articles, and nuanced studies on each. Other terrorist groups have meanwhile gone unnoticed, failing in their pursuits to exploit the public's attention. Some have never achieved notoriety outside of their region, while others still have long since been forgotten. A general theory on terrorism cannot exclude outliers. The focus here is on the main stages of the development of terrorism; its waves, its phases, and the essential characteristics of the doctrines that motivate terrorism; and its principal problems.
The term terrorism, as noted earlier, is fairly new. In 1796, the British Edmund Burke published his Letters on a Regicide Peace where he mentions the "object of terror," and just one year prior, in 1795, he described "thousands of those hellhounds called terrorists." While the "reign of terror" generally refers to the period between March 1793 and July 1794 during the French Revolution, by 1796, the Jacobins accustomed themselves to the self-referential title with pride. The definition of terrorism is first ascribed to a 1798 supplement to the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, where it was referenced as a "systeme, regime de la terreur." Not until after the ninth of Thermidor (i.e., the fall of Robespierre) did terrorist take on a derogatory meaning, and then typically with an association to crime.
After its wider circulation, a terrorist generally denoted those who advanced their ideology by coercion or intimidation. In most recent times, the term terrorism has been applied so widely and to such drastically different actors that its current circulation has nearly devolved into a meaningless label applicable to any arbitrary act of violence whether political or not. Some even argue against the study of terrorism and political violence, citing frequently the greater number of deaths due to violence from above (i.e., drone war, aerial bombing, misplaced artillery fire, and other atrocities committed by governments) than those killed by violence from below (i.e., as the result of actions taken by terrorists). The present study concerns itself with the specific phenomenon of terrorism as one of the many manifestations of political violence in the world. Further, even as narrow as that approach may be, nonetheless, a single unifying definition of terrorism addressing the nuance and variety of its occurrence remains as elusive as it is improbable.
Terrorism is constrained little by established institutions. Cases of terrorism can be found in a wide array of different situations: smaller disputes between the labor and management classes, wars of independence and revolution, civil wars and wars for national survival, resistance movements to counter foreign occupation — all can have terrorist components. Yet, in the majority of these cases, terrorism is a subordinate factor to the aggregate conflict. There are many cases where terrorism is simply one tactic among many others, selected for its momentary feasibility. The concern in the present study is with groups that have employed terrorism as their primary weapon and in a systematic way.
Many regard systematic political violence and terrorism as a novel phenomenon, or at least a recent one, emerging only in the past century. While the "philosophy of the bomb" appears new, it has been implemented since the earliest days of recorded history. The Russian tsars had foes real and imagined. The Roman emperors likewise. The Ottoman sultans eliminated foes only to seemingly clear the way for the next competitors hungry enough to seize a seat of power. Terrorism from "below" manifested itself in a variety of forms and fashions and with a broad range of motivations, from religious protests movements, to social uprisings and labor movements, to outright political revolts.
Perhaps one of the earliest terrorist movements was the Sicarii. The Sicarii was a religiously zealous, well-organized male sect that participated in the early struggle for Palestine from AD 66 to AD 73. Much that is written about the Sicarii is unclear or contradictory, but some of the more consistent accounts, such as those written by first-century scholar Josephus, maintain that the Sicarii employed a mixture of unconventional and outright criminal tactics. They sometimes attacked on holidays or during the daytime. They would conceal a sica (i.e., a short sword) underneath their coats. They trashed public archives, ruined palaces, and destroyed bonds from moneylenders in an effort to prevent debt repayments. They would also avoid apprehension by hiding within densely populated urban areas. In David Morrell's historical novel Murder as a Fine Art, the expert in De Quincy's club describes this best, stating, "Just considering that the great crowds are in themselves a sort of darkness by means of the dense pressure, and the impossibility of finding out who it was that gave the blow, they mingled with crowds everywhere ... and when it was asked, who was the murderer and where he was — why, then it was answered 'Non est inventus.'" These Sicarii, mentioned by Tacitus as well, were vehemently anti-Roman nationalists whose targets included Palestinian and Egyptian moderates who aligned with the Jewish peace party, which was composed mainly of high priests, Pharisees, and followers of Herod.
The intellectual underpinning of the Sicarii was the Fourth Philosophy. This doctrine regarded God as the one and only Lord. In this movement, the "earthly power" of the clergy eschewed political involvement; priests could no longer be mediators between God and man. Critics viewed the Sicarii antics as a protest of the rich. Josephus portrayed them as bandits disguised by ideological patriotism. However, even he acknowledged the pressure to be always outwardly religious, even to the point of glorifying martyrdom. He was unable to accept their belief that the Romans would be delivered unto glory by God after the fall of Jerusalem.
Similarly, in the eleventh century, an Ismaili splinter called the Assassins formed their doctrine as a mixture of messianic message and political terror. Suppressed only by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the Assassins spread from Persia to Syria, targeting politicians, government officials, and caliphs. The leader of the Assassins, a man named Hassan Sibai, quickly realized their inability to succeed in open battle and elected to challenge others through a systematic, long-term campaign of terror consisting of the accumulation of small but decisive acts of violence by his disciplinedpolitical force. The Assassins always cloaked their behavior in secrecy, and fighters (fidaiin) even disguised themselves as Christians. Like the Sicarii, they used a small sacramental dagger, maintained ascetic discipline, and firmly believed in a new millennium in their preoccupation with martyrdom. Their primary aim was to defend their religious autonomy and way of life against Seljuk suppression. Yet while they initially garnered widespread notoriety (legends of the Old Man of the Mountain settled deeply into the popular imagination of generations), theirs was ultimately a fruitless attempt. The Assassins held beliefs akin to the Sicarii, enacting a blend of religious aspiration and political intervention. This branch of the Ismaili was extant for two centuries, overtaken in the thirteenth century by the Mongols.
Similar secret societies existed in India and even farther east for centuries. Secret societies in China typically had their own "enforcers," and while some only engaged in extortion, many were paid assassins who auctioned their services to the highest bidder. China's secret societies organized gambling houses and small smuggling rings. Many had political aspirations and shared a disdain for foreigners and Manchu. These were among those that helped Sun Yat-sen in the 1920s and early days of his Red Spears, who were behind the Boxer Rebellion. Not dissimilar to the counterculture of the 1960s, they combined politics with alternative practices like deep breathing exercises and magic formulas. They shared perhaps more characteristics with the modern Mafia than with contemporary political terrorist movements. Politics was but one of many of their preferred activities, which included illicit trade.
Secret societies were not exclusive to the Old World. The Ku Klux Klan is an example. The Ku Klux Klan's interest in politics was even deeper than either the Red Spears or the Assassins. Still, the KKK was not a mainstream terrorist movement. Many forget that there was not a single, consolidated Klan that persisted through the decades, but three or more. The first Klan was a secret society that emerged during the post–Civil War Reconstruction period and targeted emancipated black people, often employing rape, murder, and mutilation. The second Klan (1915–1944), preoccupied with ritualistic ceremony and the "great wizard," maintained the violent behavior and ideology of white supremacy as they permeated Southern politics at the state and local level and became a legal business, incorporating as a society and trading in emulsified asphalt for road construction. It was their business activities that ended the second era. In April 1944, a federal suit for over $685,000 in delinquent income tax resulted in the termination of their charter and their going out of business. The Klan rose from the grave for its third era, fighting civil rights and the liberalism of the 1960s.
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Excerpted from "The Future of Terrorism"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Walter Laqueur and Christopher Wall.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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