The Routledge History of Terrorism

Randall D. Law, Randall D. Law

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317514862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Though the history of terrorism stretches back to the ancient world, today it is often understood as a recent development. Comprehensive enough to serve as a survey for students or newcomers to the field, yet with enough depth to engage the specialist, The Routledge History of Terrorism is the first single-volume authoritative reference text to place terrorism firmly into its historical context.

Terrorism is a transnational phenomenon with a convoluted history that defies easy periodization and narrative treatment. Over the course of 32 chapters, experts in the field analyze its historical significance and explore how and why terrorism emerged as a set of distinct strategies, tactics, and mindsets across time and space. Chapters address not only familiar topics such as the Northern Irish Troubles, the Palestine Liberation Organization, international terrorism, and the rise of al-Qaeda, but also lesser-explored issues such as:

• American racial terrorism
• state terror and terrorism in the Middle Ages
• tyrannicide from Ancient Greece and Rome to the seventeenth century
• the roots of Islamist violence
• the urban guerrilla, terrorism, and state terror in Latin America
• literary treatments of terrorism.

With an introduction by the editor explaining the book's rationale and organization, as well as a guide to the definition of terrorism, an historiographical chapter analysing the historical approach to terrorism studies, and an eight-chapter section that explores critical themes in the history of terrorism, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the past, present, and future of terrorism.

1

INTRODUCTION

Randall D. Law

The history of terrorism is old – as this volume demonstrates – but the study of it and its defining features is relatively young. In this volume, we will look at actors and events stretching back more than 2,000 years and across five continents. We will explore examples of terrorism used in pursuit of secular and religious aims, by states and conspiratorial groups, against humans and property, and against specific targets and randomly chosen ones. Indeed, there are many ways of defining the phenomenon, most of them shaped by our present circumstances. I ask that as you begin to read you set aside your current understanding so that you might gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of terrorism, as it exists now and through history.

One of the great questions is when “modern terrorism” – that is, terrorism as we know it – began. Russia in the 1860s and 1870s is often cited as its birthplace. One of the most articulate commentators on Russian revolutionary terrorism during this era was Sergei Kravchinsky who had himself been a participant in the campaign of targeted assassination against the tsar and his henchmen. In 1878, Kravchinsky stabbed to death General Nikolai Mezentsev, the head of Tsar Alexander II’s political police; soon after, he fled to London, where he continued to promote Russian revolutionary terrorism under the nom de plume Stepniak. He admitted that “terrorists cannot overthrow the government” but was adamant that they could “render its position untenable” by forcing the authorities to act out of fear. Moreover, terrorism could produce martyrs and heroes – “proud as Satan rebelling against God” – who could rouse the people against the state, “to render them the arbiters of their own destinies.”¹

Around this time in the United States, terrorism was also being practiced by conspiratorial groups but on a far grander scale, with mass, indiscriminate violence. This was the era of the Ku Klux Klan after the American Civil War, and it constituted a sustained campaign against black emancipation and empowerment in the South. Angry, disenfranchised former Confederates and other white supremacists burned, maimed, and killed African Americans, often under cover of night but sometimes in front of crowds. As an Alabama newspaper reported about one attack (a castration), such violence “has had a salutary influence over [other blacks]. They now feel their inferiority, in every particular, to the white men.”²

States can and should be understood to be users of terrorism as well. Certainly Stepniak-Kravchinsky and Reconstruction-era Klansmen would have been quick to agree that it was the state that was illegitimate, brutally violent, and ultimately terroristic. Indeed, the term “terrorist” was first used in English to describe state terror when in 1795 Edmund Burke denounced the French revolutionaries of 1793–4 as “those hell-hounds called Terrorists.”³ He got the term “terror” from the Jacobins themselves who used it – positively at the time – to describe the violence used not only against actual enemies who schemed against the revolution but also against those who, given their backgrounds and worldviews, might merely contemplate it. Shortly after the Jacobins were driven from power, one of the organizers of their fall, Jean-Lambert Tallien, gave a speech in which he adroitly identified the key feature of state terrorism. Unlike a legitimate government that “may limit itself to keeping watch over improper actions, threatening and punishing them with appropriate penalties, … if the government of terror pursues a few citizens for their presumed intentions, it will frighten all citizens.”⁴

The French revolutionaries’ vision was secular, but, as we all know today, acts of terrorism can also be motivated by religious extremism. One of the clearest examples of this came in 2006 during the United States’ occupation of Iraq when Samara’s al-Askari Shrine, one of the holiest sites for Shi‘a Muslims, was bombed. The perpetrators were almost certainly Sunni insurgents working through or in alliance with al-Qaeda in Iraq. The terrorists attacked early in the morning, causing no human casualties but almost completely destroying the shrine’s golden dome. Over the next few days, Shi‘ite militias retaliated, killing well over a thousand Sunnis and destroying scores of their mosques. Thus although the strike itself caused no fatalities, it spurred communal violence, strengthened the hands of militia leaders, and pushed Iraq closer to civil war.⁵

What do these examples tell us? They certainly make clear the difficulties associated with defining terrorism, but they also have one thing in common: the celebration of violent spectacle. These disparate acts of violence were meant to induce change by swaying the behavior of many by targeting the relatively few. Herein is the key to understanding terrorism, since we cannot grasp its significance by looking at only one dimension. Instead, the nature of spectacle – and thus terrorism – demands that we consider three dimensions: the perpetrator, the act against the few, and the reaction of the many. There, at the intersection of those three elements, lies terrorism.

This was long understood by many perpetrators, but overlooked by scholars. Both Tallien and Kravchinsky grasped it, as did the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Although the latter never fully embraced terrorism and actually came to denounce it late in life, he nonetheless provided one of the clearest articulations of its utility.⁶ In 1880, he wrote:

When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the streets or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through action that minorities succeed in awakening that feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity without which no revolution can come to a head.⁷

Kropotkin shied away from identifying what he meant by “action,” but elsewhere he implied that he was talking about work stoppages, posters, graffiti, minor acts of sabotage – perhaps closer to what we today might call civil disobedience. But some of his contemporaries understood that violence – arson, bombings, killings – would fit the bill quite nicely. Such violence became known as “propaganda of the deed,” and while historians debate who is to be reviled or credited with first coining the term, Kropotkin certainly captured the intent. An act could function primarily as a message, one intended to provoke responses from those who witnessed or heard about it, not necessarily – or even – those against whom it was specifically directed. This was the idea behind the “direct actions” or attentats (“attempts”) of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anarchist terrorists.⁸ These anarchists chose violent methods of carrying out their attacks – bombings of public venues, the targeting of vilified figures, the use of poisonous chemicals and various “infernal machines” – that promoted the appreciation of their acts as spectacle and insured that they were widely covered in newspapers, illustrated journals, and tabloids.

In the twentieth century, many terrorists explicitly articulated the power of the spectacle and the relationship between perpetrator, act, and response. Ramdane Abane, one of the principal architects of the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) campaign of terrorism against France in pursuit of Algerian independence in 1954–62, once asked rhetorically, “Is it preferable for our cause to kill ten enemies in a dry river bed [far from the cities] when no one will talk of it or a single man in Algiers which will be noted the next day by the American press?” As if that needed clarifying, he was fond of saying that “one corpse in a [civilian’s] jacket is always worth more than twenty in a uniform.”⁹ In other words, French military deaths in the hinterland made little difference for the FLN in its pursuit of military victory, but dead French civilians in urban areas could help achieve dramatic gains for the FLN in both the domestic and international courts of opinion.

Some officials charged with countering terrorism have proven adept at analyzing the phenomenon as well, but this was rare before the mid-twentieth century. As Richard Bach Jensen, Thai Jones, and Beatrice de Graaf observe in this volume (Chapters 8, 9, and 27, respectively), during the heyday of anarchist terrorism, state officials rarely showed an interest in describing the essential nature of terrorism. On the contrary, they were interested in describing terrorism as nothing more than a set of destabilizing tactics such as assassination, public violence, or incitement to riot; the pure expression of a single ideology, anarchism; or simply the natural condition of deranged, dirty immigrants or margin-dwellers. Surprisingly little effort seems to have been expended at the international conferences called to combat terrorism around the turn of the century to move beyond these limited – albeit politically useful – descriptions of terrorism. What terrorism fundamentally was still seemed a question of little importance to counter-terrorists of this era.

Likewise for academics. To the pioneering Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (d. 1909), terrorism was the product of innate personal defects – he championed the pseudo-science of phrenology, after all – and the weakening hold of the conservative elite on the masses. Most academics and casual observers tended not to see the difference between revolutionary motivations and terroristic practices. And in time, even that sort of interest waned. For instance, an article on terrorism in the 1933 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences claimed that it had become “outmoded as a revolutionary method,” something “irrelevant and unnecessary.”¹⁰

This was not so with authors, playwrights, and poets of the fin de siècle, who displayed a knack for understanding the nature of the terrorist spectacle – small surprise, given that communicating meaning to an audience via the use of provocative symbols is the bailiwick of literature every bit as much as for the terrorist. (For confirmation of this and an analysis of some of the literature of terrorism, see Chapter 31 by Lynn Patyk in this volume.) But, like academics, in time creative writers grew more interested in the size and consequences of great wars, great states, and great disasters.

After World War II, the recognition of terrorism’s import began to emerge among jurists and legal scholars but not among academics broadly. Those at the Nuremberg Trials appreciated its existence, as exercised by the Nazis both before and after their rise to power in Germany in 1933. But in keeping with the circumstances, the use of the term by Allied judges to describe Nazi violence reflected more of an interest in denouncing Nazi criminality than in devising an analytically useful category. At some points during the indictment and the guilty verdicts, judges described the Brownshirts’ street violence as part of an effort “to undermine and overthrow the German Government by ‘legal’ forms supported by terrorism.” Elsewhere in the proceedings, however, the word “terrorism” was used vaguely to describe the use of concentration camps or various brutal actions against civilians. The Soviet judge issued the broadest denunciation when he stated that Hitler’s entire regime was “terroristic.”¹¹ Alas, such generic uses of the word “terrorism” did not reveal an interest in exploring the various ways in which violent spectacle might be used by sub-state and state groups alike; rather, “terrorism” was simply a convenient way to condemn an enemy that everyone already agreed was beastly.

World War II and its aftermath helped lead to the emergence of de-colonization and the spread of ethno-nationalist movements waged by those who typically had passion but few resources – fertile ground for the adoption of terrorist tactics. Perpetrators of terroristic violence such as Menachem Begin and George Grivas, supporters of it such as Frantz Fanon and Ghassan Kanafani, and counter-insurgents/counter-terrorists such as Harold Briggs and Roger Trinquier all grasped that “terrorism” described a set of tactics to be used in pursuit of a range of ideological goals. While it overlapped with criminality or warfare, it constituted something different, something that hinged on spectacle and that could, alternately, intimidate or empower various audiences – and perhaps several simultaneously. Meanwhile, the few scholars who explored terrorism conceptually, such as Eugene Walter or the host of academics who studied the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, remained concerned with what is generally regarded as “state terror,” the use of terrorizing violence by a state against its own civilians.¹² Valuable, yes, but they failed to recognize the similarity with what is today widely recognized as terrorism.

By the 1970s, international bodies finally began to explore the nature of terrorism as a category of violence and not just as an epithet with which to impugn one’s enemies. In response to the advent of international terrorism, particularly the hijacking of airplanes and then the Munich Massacre, the United Nations (UN) began eff...