Essay Sample on Terrorism and Political Violence

Introduction

September 11 is the most important and unprecedented day in the long bloody history of terrorism. No other attack used passenger planes as bombs, produced such staggering casualties figures, created such enormous universal outrage, and galvanized such a wide international response, one which may reshape the character of the international world. But even this act of terror should be studied in the context of the history of terrorism, a history known to only a few specialists. That history demonstrates how deeply implanted terrorism has become in modern culture during the last two centuries, and suggests how and why its face changes.

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Historical Features: Concept and Wave Pattern

Terrorism has a very long significant history in various religious traditions. But the concept as distinguished from the phenomena is a recent development, a feature of the French Revolution. When the term entered our language in 1795, terrorism was seen as the indispensable tool to establish a democratic order. When Robespierre proclaimed either "virtue or the terror", he meant that "true" democratic dispositions required this new instrument of government.

The practices of the Revolutionary Tribunals exemplified the purpose and method. Ordinary courts assessed behavior of defendants, but the Revolutionary Tribunals examined 'hearts' of suspects and found it necessary to scrap the ordinary rules of evidence as impediments to accomplishing the new task. Conventional notions of guilt and innocence became irrelevant. Justice was not the issue; the problem was how to publicize a prisoner's fate to serve as a didactic lesson by identifying appropriate and inappropriate civic character traits.

A century later Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will) the first terror rebel movement emerged (1879), and its successors haunted Russia for nearly four decades seeking a radical transformation of society. They understood terrorism as a temporary necessity to "raise the consciousness of the masses", and selected victims for symbolic reasons, that is for the political and/or emotional effects the deaths would produce. Their objectives were never achieved, but their influence endured and it generated a "culture of terror" for successors to inherit and improve. The uniqueness of Narodnaya Volya should be emphasized. It did have successful predecessors; the Sons of Liberty in the American struggle for independence tarred and feathered loyalists forcing many to leave the country, and the KKK ended the Reconstruction Period by forcing federal troops to withdraw. But neither group gave others a strategy to ponder; they did their dirty work in secret and kept their mouths shut afterwards.

The doctrine of Russian rebel terror involved extra-normal violence acts or acts designed to violate conventions that regulate violence, namely rules of war which enable one to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant. The Russians called themselves terrorists rather than guerrillas, precisely because guerrilla targets were military and theirs were not. A new form of publicity was necessary because spontaneous mass uprisings had become impossible, and revolutionaries were known as 'idle word-spillers'. Terror would command the masses' attention, arouse latent political tensions, and provoke government to respond indiscriminately undermining in the process its own credibility and legitimacy. Successful terror entailed learning how to fight and how to die, and the most admirable death occurred as the result of a court trial where one accepted responsibility and used the occasion to indict the regime. The terrorist Stepniak wrote, " is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating uniting the two sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero."

Since the 1880s four successive overlapping major waves of terror have washed over the international world, each with its own special character, purposes, and tactics. The first three lasted approximately a generation each; and the fourth, beginning in 1979 is still in process. Sometimes, organizations created in one wave survived when the wave bringing it ebbed. The IRA, for example, began in the anti-colonial wave in the 20's.

Major unexpected political turning points exposing new government vulnerabilities precipitated each wave. Hope was excited, and hope is always an indispensable lubricant of rebel activity, making the discontented active and the transfer of legitimacy away from government possible.

Ironically, the first wave was stimulated by massive reforms introduced by Tsar. Alexander II Hopes were aroused but could not be fulfilled quickly enough; and in the wake of inevitable disappointment, systematic assassination campaigns against prominent officials began, culminating in the death of Alexander II himself. Dynamite, a recent invention, was the weapon of choice, and the bomb the terrorist threw distinguished him from the ordinary criminal because it usually killed the terrorist too, a point more effectively dramatized in a period that had just developed mass daily newspapers.

An Armenian movement developed and the Balkans exploded, as many (i.e. Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, Young Bosnia, and the Serbian Black Hand) found the boundaries of states recently torn out of the Ottoman Empire unsatisfactory. In the West revolutionary Anarchists mounted assassination campaigns to frustrate drives towards universal suffrage, a reform they thought would make existing political systems invulnerable. But the first wave dried up largely when the Austrian Archduke's assassination precipitated World War I.

The second began in the 1920s and culminated in the 1960s. Its principal stimulus oddly enough was a major war aim of the victorious allies in both World Wars, national self-determination. The ambivalence of colonial powers about their own legitimacy made them ideal targets for a politics of atrocity. A variety of new states, i.e. Ireland, Israel, Cyprus, Yemen, Algeria, etc. emerged, and the wave receded largely as colonial powers disappeared.

A new strategy and tactics emerged in the second wave. Different and more useful targets were chosen. Martyrdom seemed less important and so prominent political figures were not targets. Instead, the police, a government's 'eyes and ears' were decimated, and their military replacements were too clumsy to cope without producing counter atrocities, which generated greater social support for the terrorists. If the process of atrocities and counter-atrocities were well planned, it worked nearly always to favor those perceived to be weak and without alternatives.

In cities the terrorists developed cellular structures almost impervious to police penetration. Major energies went into guerrilla like (hit and run) actions against troops, attacks that went beyond the rules of war however because weapons were concealed and the assailants had no identifying insignia. Some groups (i.e. Irgun and IRA) made efforts, however, to give warnings to limit damage to civilians.

Imperial territories were populated by different and mutually hostile ethnic elements. Terrorists came from one of those groups, and they struck civilians opposed to an independence rival elements would dominate, i.e. Cypriot Turks, Algerian Berbers, and European residents everywhere.

Partly because anti-colonial causes were more appealing to outsiders, definition problems became vexing. The term terrorist had accumulated so many abusive connotations that one identified as such had enormous political liabilities, and in this wave rebels stopped calling themselves terrorists. Lehi (the "Stern Gang") a Zionist revisionist group was the last group to describe its activity as terrorist. Menachem Begin's Irgun concentrating on purpose rather than means described themselves as "freedom fighters," fighting government terror, a description that all subsequent groups used. Governments returned the compliment, deeming every rebel using violence a terrorist. The media corrupted language further, refusing often to use terms consistently to avoid being seen as blatantly partisan. Some developed an extraordinary policy of describing the same individuals in the same account, alternatively as terrorists, guerrillas, and soldiers.

The Vietnam War precipitated the third wave, when the effectiveness of Vietcong terror against the American Goliath armed with modern technology kindled hopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable too. A revolutionary ethos emerged comparable to that in the initial wave. Many like the American Weather Underground, German RAF, Italian Red Brigades, and French Action Directe saw themselves as vanguards for the masses of the Third World, a view the Soviets encouraged covertly.

Occasionally, a revolutionary ethos and separatist purposes were linked, i.e. the Basque Nation and Liberty, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, the Peasant Front for the Liberation of Corsica, and the IRA. But separatism always has a larger potential constituency than revolution, and over time separatism dominated these groups.

The PLO taking up the fight emerging after three Arab armies collapsed in the 1967 Six-Day War became the heroic model when Vietnam War ended. There were other reasons for its central position. Its chief enemy, Israel, was an integral part of the West, it got Soviet support and was able to provide facilities in Lebanon to train terrorists from many countries.

The term "international terrorism" was used to describe the third wave for a variety of reasons. PLO training facilities were available. The revolutionary ethos created bonds between separate national groups, and targets chosen reflected international dimensions. Some groups conducted more assaults abroad than they did in indigenous territories; the PLO, for example, was more active in Europe than on the West Bank, and sometimes more active in Europe than European groups themselves were! On their own national soil, groups often struck targets with special international significance, especially Americans and their installations. Teams composed of different national groups cooperated in attacks in foreign countries, i.e. the Munich Olympics massacre 1972, the kidnapping of OPEC Ministers Vienna, 1975, the hijackings to Uganda, 1976, and Somalia. Finally, states (i.e. Libya, Iraq, and Syria) employed terrorists in other countries as foreign policy instruments.

Airline hijacking was the wave's most novel tactic; over a hundred occurred every year during the 1970s. They had an international character for foreign landing fields were more available than domestic ones. Hijacking also reflected an impulse for spectacular acts; a theme expressed in the first wave but abandoned in the second for more effective military-like strikes. Planes were taken to get hostages, and hostage crises dominated the period. The most memorable was the 1979 kidnapping of the Italian Prime Minister Moro who was then murdered when his government refused to negotiate his release. The Sandinistas took Nicaragua's Congress hostage (1978), an act so audacious that it sparked a popular insurrection and brought the Somoza regime down a year later. The Colombian M-19 tried but failed to duplicate the act by taking a foreign embassy (1980) but to no avail. It struck again soon seizing the Colombian Supreme Court and an enraged government killed over 100 people including 11 justices rather than yield. A recent example occurred when a Peruvian Marxist group, Tupac Amaru held 72 hostages in the Japanese Embassy for more than four months (1996-7) until a rescue operation killed all the terrorists.

The third wave began ebbing in the 1980s, as revolutionary terrorists were defeated in one country after another. Israel's i...