Terrorism

A History

Randall D. Law

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745690933
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Paix et développement mondial

We live in an era dominated by terrorism but struggle to understand its meaning and the real nature of the threat. In this new edition of his widely acclaimed survey of the topic, Randall Law makes sense of the history of terrorism by examining it within its broad political, religious and social contexts and tracing its development from the ancient world to the 21st century. In Terrorism: A History, Law reveals how the very definition of the word has changed, how the tactics and strategies of terrorism have evolved, and how those who have used it adapted to revolutions in technology, communications, and political ideologies. Terrorism: A History extensively covers such topics as jihadist violence, state terror, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Northern Ireland, anarcho-terrorism, and the Ku Klux Klan, plus lesser known movements in Uruguay and Algeria, as well as the pre-modern uses of terror in ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and the French Revolution. This thoroughly revised edition features up-to-date analysis of:
· Al-Qaeda's affiliates and the "franchising" of jihadism
· "Lone wolf" violence in the United States and Europe
· Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamil Tigers Other features include updated and expanded bibliographies in each chapter, more scholarly citations, and a new conclusion, making Terrorism: A History the go-to book for those wishing to understand the real nature and importance of this ubiquitous phenomenon.

1
Terror and Tyrannicide in the Ancient World

There are few examples of terrorism in the ancient world that would warrant inclusion in a history of the subject if we were limited by most of the modern definitions of the phenomenon. As soon as we begin to speak of terrorism as symbolic violence intended to achieve its users’ aims indirectly through fear or intimidation, however, then we can begin to see many pre-modern antecedents to what otherwise seems to be a purely modern phenomenon. And if we acknowledge that the term “terrorism” is often used by a society’s dominant political and cultural authorities to condemn forms of violence regarded as fundamentally illegitimate, then we can discern even more proto-terrorism in the pre-modern world. Finally, if one is keen to trace the emergence of many common traits associated with terrorism, then one might well be surprised at how much continuity exists between the ancient and modern worlds. In other words, if “terrorism” as we know it did not exist for the ancients, surely many of its characteristics would have seemed awfully familiar.

The Assyrians

The Assyrians were perhaps the ancient world’s fiercest and most violent people. Their empire in the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE was the largest of its day and the most highly militarized society yet seen in the world. Faced with a dearth of resources, the Assyrians conquered those with material assets and large populations and then ruled their far-flung and diverse empire through systematic terror. The military was organized to terrify its enemies, using large formations of chariots and cavalry designed to awe as much as to destroy. The king employed his personal bodyguard to police the bureaucracy; disloyal government agents were recalled and executed; and when the Assyrians’ enemies and their leaders resisted or revolted, they were cruelly tortured and killed.

For the first time in recorded history, these acts were publicized in order to warn potential enemies; in fact, the Assyrians are often cited as the earliest practitioners of psychological warfare. The Emperor Assurnasirpal II bragged of how he skinned alive, impaled, burned, mutilated, blinded, and decapitated the leaders and many of the citizens of the rebellious city of Susa. “All the other survivors I left to die of thirst in the desert,” he wrote.¹ This brutal treatment was meted out with such regularity that the word “Assyrian” became synonymous with cruelty to one’s neighbors. The Assyrians were eventually undone by their own methods in the seventh century BCE, when the burden of living under them became so great that their native auxiliary troops revolted. Assyria’s neighbors seized the opportunity and toppled the empire.

Warfare in ancient Greece

Elsewhere, cultures differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence, a precursor to later societies’ efforts to differentiate between terror – a normal weapon of war – and terrorism – an illegitimate weapon used by immoral agents. In Greece, war was fought according to commonly accepted rules and then celebrated in myth, literature, and history. The Greeks recognized a code of conduct marked by an emphasis on arête (manliness, bravery, and skill) and heroic hand-to-hand combat. This usually meant that city-states sent phalanxes of heavy infantry to grind it out against each other until one broke and fled the field. Wars were decided by short, vicious, and decisive battles in which both sides committed all their troops. They were to be fought during the summer on wide open plains, and certain targets – such as the Olympics and civilians, priests, heralds, and holy sites – were off-limits. Unorthodox tactics that we might today call guerrilla warfare or even terrorism were frowned upon and worse, punished by history and the gods. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, Achilles’ desecration of the body of the vanquished Hector tarnishes his reputation and leads to his downfall. After all, a Greek warrior was to fight honorably with every drop of energy, skill, and resolve but recognize defeat and submit to the benevolent victor.

Yet the Greeks violated their own norms when it served their political and military purposes, so that, despite cultural taboos, terror like the Assyrians’ was not alien to tthem. One of the most disturbing examples is Alexander the Great’s response to the Theban revolt of 335 BCE: he sold nearly all the citizens into slavery and razed the city to the ground, sparing only the priests, their temples, and the descendants of the ancient poet Pindar. The lesson was not lost on the city of Athens, which was also in revolt. It immediately sent a delegation to Alexander begging for peace. Practicality thus trumped morality when it came to warfare and violence.

Warfare in ancient India

Only in the case of ancient India, however, were tactics such as assassination openly accepted as legitimate forms of warfare, as evinced in the Arthashastra (best translated as The Science of Wealth). Its author was Kautilya (aka Chanakya), kingmaker and counselor to Chandragupta, who ruled late in the fourth century BCE and rid India of the Greeks in the years after the death of Alexander the Great. Unlike other ancient Indian texts, which are primarily religious and ethical in orientation, the Arthashastra is largely secular and practical. In it, Kautilya described four categories of conflict resolution. The first three are diplomacy; “open war,” or conventional combat similar to that of the Greek phalanxes; and “concealed war,” which is dependent on maneuver, surprise, and deception and resembles modern guerrilla war.

Kautilya’s fourth category is “silent” or “clandestine war,” that is, covert operations and assassination. Although he regarded open battle as more “righteous,” Kautilya favored clandestine war, for it allowed for larger victories at smaller costs. “A single assassin can achieve, with weapons, fire or poison, more than a fully mobilized army,” he noted. Kautilya wrote at length about the assassination of rulers and high officials, but also sketched a few scenarios involving terror against the broader population. One script instructed secret agents to assassinate community leaders and rob wealthy citizens while spreading rumors that these were punishments exacted by a regent or an ambitious viceroy. Another called for agents to set fire to palaces, city gates, and granaries and kill guards while planting rumors of courtly intrigue, thus “rousing the people” against the ruler’s underlings. In the most extraordinary scenario, Kautilya spins out a remarkable plan for defeating a besieged city. Agents costumed as demon-serpents and flesh-eating were-tigers should terrorize civilians to lure the enemy king outside the city walls to perform rites of appeasement, whereupon he could be ambushed and killed.²

The meaning of Kautilya’s text was not lost on his benefactor, the Emperor Chandragupta, who used guerrilla warfare in the early stages of forging his empire. In his war against Alexander the Great’s successors, Chandragupta reputedly had Greek officials assassinated; fearing that he was also the target of such attempts, he is said never to have slept in the same bed on consecutive nights.³

Tyrannicide

The emperor’s dilemma – a ruler cannot assassinate his enemies without expecting to become a target himself – was recognized by contemporary authors in many civilizations. Ancient civilized societies were strongly hierarchical in organization, with nobles, priests, and warriors superior to commoners and slaves in quantifiable ways. King Hammurabi of Babylon, for instance, made this a cornerstone of his famous code, which only levied a fine if a person killed someone of a lower rank. An intact hierarchy was the glue that held ancient societies together, guaranteeing prosperity and social stability. Killing a ruler was therefore the most serious of crimes, because it set a dangerous precedent by reminding everyone that rulers were mortal and – even worse – vulnerable. The rate of political assassination that defied hierarchy could thus serve as a barometer of the health of a body politic. Rome, for example, witnessed few political murders until the assassination of the Gracchus brothers in the late second century BCE, killings that serve as a convenient marker for the beginning of the Republic’s descent into blood-soaked political in-fighting.

Ancient history nonetheless abounds with examples of regicide, real and mythical. Sometimes killing a ruler was regarded as necessary, even good and moral. Ancient apologists for the murder of an illegitimate ruler would deem it a “tyrannicide” – that is, the murder of a tyrant. Though the introduction of the word “terrorism” was still centuries away, we can see the modern rhetorical dynamic at work, at least in regard to the phenomenon of assassination. The two terms approach the same issue from opposite sides. In the last century, the word “terrorism” has become a slur, damning certain sorts of unconventional political violence deemed illegitimate; while in the ancient world, the word “tyrannicide” was praise, blessing those acts of unconventional political violence designated as legitimate. Over the last two centuries, these terms have formed two sides of the same coin: proponents of what society deems terrorism justify their acts with the rhetoric and ethical arguments of tyrannicide.

The ancient Hebrews

Kautilya did not define the moral circumstances that permitted regicide and other assassinations – utility was his main yardstick. Others were keen to contextualize political murder, whether through suggestion or strict guidelines. Some of the oldest descriptions of justifiable assassination come to us through Hebraic scripture. In fact, one can find few stretches of literature with more blood-stained pages.

The most famous stories come from the time when the Hebrews were ruled not by kings who drew their legitimacy from genealogy, but by men known as judges, who received their mandate from Yahweh, as God was known to the Hebrews. Though celebrated as the people responsible for the concept of monotheism, the Hebrews frequently ran afoul of their Lord by engaging in idolatry, worshiping rival gods, or lapsing into other unseemly behavior. Yahweh’s punishment, as recorded in scripture, was often to send a foreign tyrant to conquer and enslave the Hebrews, who – after the sufficient return of piety, obedience, and humility – would eventually be rewarded with a hero to deliver them from the tyrant. As the medieval scholar John of Salisbury wrote, “penitence annihilates, drives out and kills those tyrants whom sins obtain, introduce and encourage.”⁴ The “deliverer” Ehud committed the first Hebraic tyrannicide against Eglon, king of Moab, initiating his act with the startling words, “I have a message from God for you.”⁵

The most extraordinary...