WHEN VIOLENCE MASQUERADES AS VIRTUE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TERRORISM

Introduction

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, James Gartenberg, a real estate salesman with Julien Studley in New York City went to work at his offices on the 86th floor of the World Trade Center. It was to be his last day at work with the company – he had told friends and family that he planned to move to a new job with offices in midtown Manhattan.

That same morning, Mohamed Atta, a 33 year-old Egyptian national, boarded a commuter airline at Portland, Maine, headed to Boston. A former student of civil engineering at the Technical University in Hamburg University in Germany, Atta attracted little attention from security: It helped that he boarded his plane at an early hour in an out-of-the-way city. At Boston, Atta transferred to American Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. Since he had already passed through security at Portland, he found himself past the security perimeter at Boston. The plane pulled out of Boston Logan around 8 AM with 92 people on board. Minutes later, armed with box-cutters, Atta and a small group of others hijacked the plane. By 8:20, American Flight 11 was veering off course, turning toward Manhattan and ignoring instructions from flight controllers on the ground. Almost simultaneously around the country, other men like Atta boarded three other planes and hijacked them. Much remains unknown about what happened on these flights, but it is probable that the hijackers made a show of force early on by killing flight attendants. The crew and passengers on most of the hijacked planes likely decided to go along with the hijackers’ plans, which usually meant diverting the plane to a new destination and listening to political demands. The general assumption was that both hijackers and passengers wanted to live, and therefore shared a desire to get the planes on the ground. Once the planes were stationed at airports, rescuers could open negotiations. Police SWAT teams could be prepared for raids. But everything hinged on getting the planes landed. On the beautiful morning of Sept 11, with clear skies over much of the northeastern United States, no one knew Atta’s mind was fixed on death, not life. By ramming his plane into the tower where Gartenberg worked, even as the others crashed into the second tower, the Pentagon and in central Pennsylvania, the hijackers offered no room for negotiation, no compromise.

Some 3,000 people died that morning. Most were Americans, but the rest of the world was represented in large numbers. One fifth of the victims at the World Trade Center, for example, were foreign born, and represented 115 countries (Lipton, 2002). After Americans, the largest number of victims were from Britain, with 53 dead, and India, with 34 dead. Many Muslims were among the victims. James Gartenberg, trapped under a desk in the World Trade center was one of the thousands who died. For over 60 agonizing minutes, he spoke with colleagues, friends and family using his telephone and cellphone, asking them what had caused the massive fire in the building and when firefighters would come to free him. Elsewhere, hundreds of police officers and fire-fighters courageously stormed through the burning towers, and in the minutes before the buildings collapsed, broke open doors and freed thousands. The rescuers did not reach James Gartenberg.

I wrote a story for the Washington Post about Gartenberg and the harrowing series of conversations he had had with friends and family in the hour after Atta’s plane crashed into his building and before his tower fell (Vedantam, 2001). Perhaps the greatest sorrow for survivors and family members who lost loved ones in the attacks – some ten million Americans and countless thousands around the world are believed to have a personal connection with one of the victims or survivors – was the apparent senselessness of Atta’s action. The hijackers’ victims could just as well have been another American, another Indian or Englishwoman who worked in the towers or had happened to board the planes that day. Unlike crimes such as robbery or rape, where perpetrators want something from specific people and use force to obtain it, the hijackers used James Gartenberg as a prop. The thousands of victims were turned from individual human beings into symbols. “We treated those who kill our women and innocents with the same,” Ramzi Binalshibh, who was to be the 20th hijacker, later told Qatar-based Al Jazeera Television: “We kill their women and innocent until they stop” (Schmidt and Eggen, 2002, A01).

In the months that followed, pundits and the public struggled to explain what Atta and the other hijackers had done. In life and death, he offered little guidance. While inspired by militant Islam, Atta’s motivation for the attacks remained unclear. One reason may have been tactical: Any demands could have been linked to the shadowy figures behind Atta who masterminded the tragedy. Some commentators said that since Atta had made no demands, his intent was destruction, pure and simple. Atta’s actions, by this explanation, were no more meaningful than an act of war – the bombing of an enemy bridge, the shooting down of an enemy plane. But while Atta had chosen his victims indiscriminately, he had chosen his targets with care. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbols of American economic and military prestige, and many commentators said it would be foolish to think the hijackers were not trying to make a statement. Indeed, by not making an explicit statement, Atta perhaps encouraged many statements to be made in its stead. Many Americans saw the attacks as a challenge to war. Others pointed to demands that the United States withdraw its military from bases in Saudi Arabia and resolve the Israel-Palestinian crisis. Some militant Islamists saw the attacks as a strike for their various causes, linked to a series of other attacks at American symbols of power around the world. Some who grieved with Americans also whispered that the attacks were the consequence of misguided American foreign policies. By turning Gartenberg and the thousands of other victims into symbols, Atta obtained the power of symbols – they can mean different things to different people. This is what differentiates terrorism from other forms of violence. Terrorism is calculated political violence, premeditated to have the maximum effect on those untouched by the actual attacks. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert, put it simply: Terrorism is theater.

History and Aims

The uses of terrorism down history have been manifold; indeed, to recount a history of terrorism is to first demand what we mean by terrorism. As we will see in a later section, defining terrorism has long been a source of contention, with numerous commentators offering differing definitions and sometimes changing the ground rules to include groups they wish to brand as terrorists, or to exclude others whose violence they believe was justified. Few statesmen – or states – have consistent definitions and most, either implicitly or explicitly, have chosen the technique that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to define pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Most definitions therefore invite the criticism that they benefit existing systems of power, both within nations and in an international context since they allow those who represent the status quo to decide when violence is terrorism. As we will see, the only consistent aspect across all definitions of terrorism is that it is framed in the notion of the pejorative – defining a violent act as terrorism, Jenkins argued, is a way to cast it as immoral and to persuade observers to adopt the definer’s point of view.

Keeping in mind this difficulty with definitions, no account of the history of terrorism can be comprehensive or universally agreed upon. Still, both the word and the concept have been widely applied to certain movements – and many groups have embraced the terms for themselves. Various movements have explicitly called for terrorism. These self-described terrorists, some of whom fought feudal, colonial or racist regimes, pose the questions that have most vexed organizations like the United Nations, which has struggled for years to define terrorism: Is calculated, premeditated violence justified against systems of great injustice? If it is, the floodgates of violence would open, for examples of such injustice are very numerous and most violent acts are based on elaborate accounts of victimization. If it is not, we brand as terrorism the 1859 slave revolt of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, which sought to overthrow slavery, or even the 1943 uprising by Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto who fought their Nazi tormentors with Molotov cocktails and pistols. In his seminal work calling for systematic violence against French settlers of Algeria, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon inspired anti-racist militants throughout the world, including Nelson Mandela’s largely nonviolent struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the Black Panthers in America (Parry, 1976). Fanon was the chief voice of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, he wrote, “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (Fanon, 1963, 61). Calling violent strikes against French settlers “a cleansing force” (Fanon, 1963, 94), he added, “the colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” (Fanon, 1963, 86). As we ponder Fanon, and consider the myriad applications of such a philosophy, consider one of the more striking features of terrorism: It always lays claim to virtue. Confronted with terrible violence, repression and cruelty, Fanon assumes those same techniques to destroy an unjust system. In a similar statement on his way to execution for his slave uprising – an uprising that would be characterized as terrorism by most current definitions – John Brown declared he was “now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without much bloodshed, it might be done.” Most independence movements in the world have called on similar arguments, and even those that have not called for systematic terror have often been branded as terrorists by the regimes they sought to overthrow. American hero Patrick Henry’s now famous “Give me liberty, or give me death speech” on March 23, 1775, for example, helped usher in the American revolution – and sounded eerily similar to Fanon’s words two centuries later. Listing a series of injustices by British colonizers, he thundered, “Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free ... we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight!” The claim of most modern terrorists to be freedom fighters has become something of a cliché, yet history shows there is no simple way to distinguish one from the other. As nations continue to be racked by separatist movements on every continent, as nations divide and re-divide, this cliché will haunt us more everyday.

Many commentators on terrorism begin their account of its modern history with the French revolution, and the brief but bloody reign of Maximilien Robespierre in the late 18th century. Robespierre’s Great Terror of 1793-94 popularized the term terrorism and, for the first time, recommended its systematic application in reaching the goals of a state. Violence was not discovered by Robespierre, of course, but there was an important difference in his choice. Where violence had principally been the means to conquest and plunder or escape and survival, Robespierre advocated the systematic application of terror in the service of virtue. Robespierre, in other words, insisted he was an idealist. The Great Terror was more than a struggle for independence. It was largely carried out after the revolutionaries had obtained the levers of power – an early example, perhaps, of state-sponsored terrorism. Robespierre sought to rid feudal France of its wrong thinking, a much more ambitious goal than a change of rulers. Demonstrating how easily terror could be applied in the service of virtue, Robespierre declared, “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs” (Fordham University). Robespierre’s reign of terror sent thousands to their deaths, most by guillotine, in a matter of months. Starting with Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and expanding into ever widening circles of suspicion, new lists of traitors emerged, new enemies constantly found. The streets of Paris literally ran with human blood. The revolutionaries turned on factions among their own, and eventually Robespierre himself was swept up in the mayhem and sent to the guillotine.

Those who would easily categorize terrorism as evil, or the product of derangement, would do well to remember that Robespierre’s terror was an extension of the birth of democracy. The French Revolution helped inspire the emergence of popular rule against feudal structures around the world: Countries worldwide still celebrate Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, when a revolutionary mob in Paris stormed the Bastille Prison and started the French Revolution. Robespierre’s notion of the terrorist-as-idealist is echoed in the very recent words of Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation who has interviewed recent terrorists. In his masterful 1998 book, Inside Terrorism, Hoffman says, “rather than the wild-eyed fanatics or crazed killers that we have been conditioned to expect, many (terrorists) are in fact highly articulate and thoughtful individuals for whom terrorism is (or was) an entirely rational choice, often reluctantly embraced and then only after considerable reflection and debate” (Hoffman, 1998, 7).

Robespierre’s Great Terror was indirectly tied to the American Revolution that had just preceded it, for the weakened French monarchy had nearly bankrupted itself bankrolling the American independence movement against the British, even as the French revolutionaries were inspired by their American counterparts. After Robespierre was executed and his Great Terror ended, the search for order to replace his chaos prompted the rise of the dictator, Napoleon. Terrorism often has strange roots and unintended consequences.

The nineteenth century saw other advocates of systematic political violence, although some fail Jenkins’ terrorism is theater test. One name stands out, however. Although he is little remembered today, Sergei Nechayev deserves a mention in any history of terrorism. Born in 1847 in Ivanovo, a small town a hundred miles from Moscow, Nechayev sought to overthrow the Russian monarchy. Like Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who would follow him, Nechayev believed unjust laws must be disobeyed – the difference was that Nechayev embraced absolute violence toward his ends. His specific target was Tsar Alexander II, his tactic was the systematic application of terror. As a result, although he commanded only a small band of followers when he was arrested and brought to trial in 1873, he was so feared that the tsar believed he had a following of millions of armed terrorists. Nechayev epitomized the ability of terrorists to seem more powerful than they are (Payne, 1964). In his highly influential booklet, Catechism of the Revolutionary, Nechayev laid out a set of rules that could be the mission statement of many terrorists to come. Nechayev declared the true revolutionary, “is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name ... he has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire cultivated world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions and its ethical rules ... he knows of only one science, the science of destruction.” Despising public opinion and social ethics, Nechayev told his followers, “everything is moral which assists in the triumph of the revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything that stands in its way.” Kinship, friendship, love and gratitude were only sentimental impediments in the path of the true revolutionary, declared Nechayev, for there was “only one delight, one consolation, one reward and one gratification - the success of the revolution.” Those who stood amazed at the purposefulness of the hijackers on Sept 11 – who wondered how 19 men could have lived among Americans for months or years and still carried the burning power of hatred within them – would do well to remember that Nechayev’s pamphlet was written in 1869. In 1881, the group that followed him, the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), assassinated Tsar Alexander II. While the group was hunted into obscurity following the killing, its ideas and ideals were to inspire another revolutionary a few decades later – one who saw considerably greater success: Vladimir Lenin frequently paid homage to the path shown him by Nechayev. Repressing terrorism often has unintended consequences, too.

Other terrorists would chart paths similar to Nechayev’s, and embrace the ideas of terrorists as killing machines, the glory of martyrdom, the fixation on death. In 1903, V.D. Savarkar, a nationalist in India’s independence struggle against British colonial rule, told one his followers who asked to be dispatched to kill a senior British official: “When a martyr is determined and ready, that fact by itself generally implies that the time for martyrdom must have come” (Payne, 1969). Savarkar’s ideas inform Hindu nationalists who eventually came to rule India, proving that, like Israel and the United States, the list of modern governments with roots to violent revolutionaries is exceedingly long. Many of these governments in turn, have faced violent revolutionaries themselves – and dubbed them terrorists.

The twentieth century saw an explosion in the use of terrorism, possibly because the increasing sophistication of munitions made it possible for smaller and smaller groups to inflict large amounts of damage. Where Robespierre’s Great Terror could not have been executed without the apparatus of a rudimentary state – lists had to be prepared, targets apprehended and brought one by one to public execution by guillotine in a sort of retail version of murder – the twentieth century’s development of increasingly destructive technologies of war made it possible for individuals acting in small groups to inflict wholesale damage. An equally important development cited by numerous scholars is the growth of the technology of media in the last century, which made it possible for isolated incidents of terror to be broadcast to large groups of people, thus making them all feel attacked – the primary goal of the terrorist is terror, not destruction. While much early terrorism was modeled on Robespierre, with states inflicting the maximum terror, more recent terrorism reveals decreasingly smaller groups wielding the apparatus of mass violence. At least some of this might be attributed to the growth of television, culminating in the live broadcast of the Sept 11 attacks to all of America and substantial parts of the globe. Some critics of terrorism have blamed the media for encouraging terrorism by closely covering terrorist strikes (Hoffman, 1998). Scholars have noted the ugly symbiotic relationship between terrorists’ desire to get their message out and journalists’ desire to cover terrorism because it guarantees instant ratings. While the demand that journalists not cover great catastrophes is questionable, media restraint – at least in terms of being accurate – can probably reduce the aftershocks of terrorism. In any case, as nation states became more powerful in the latter half of the 20th century, constitutions, judiciaries and universal suffrage offered more peaceful ways to effect social change, and terrorism went from being largely a state-sponsored form of violence to being the favored technique of sub-national groups. Terrorism has therefore been widely described as “a strategy of the weak against the strong” (National Research Council, 2002, 29) – in that advanced nations with armies and air forces don’t need to resort to the systematic creation of fear to achieve their ends. There is obviously truth to that, but as we will see, trying to differentiate terrorists based on whether they are in charge of a state or not produces awkward, and sometimes ludicrous, results. Indeed, even as states have made the argument that their military actions cannot be equated with terrorism, in part because they generally do not target civilians and follow certain rules of war, convicted terrorists routinely argue that they are really soldiers: Timothy McVeigh, the architect of the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, for example, repeatedly equated his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with his service as an American soldier in the Gulf War, and called the bombing which killed 168 men, women and children, “a military action” (Romano & Claiborne, 2001, A01). In 1998, he wrote, “The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings. Yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb – saying they cannot be held responsible if children die. . . . Who are the true barbarians? (Broadway, 2001, B09).” McVeigh’s rationalization has brought cold comfort to the families of the 168 victims, but less violent voices have asked the same question in other contexts. If the killing of civilians by sub-state groups is terrorism, why is the killing of civilians by states merely collateral damage? In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, for example, Columbia University’s director of the Institute of African Studies, Mahmood Mamdani, wrote, “Official America harnessed, even cultivated, terrorism in the struggle against movements it saw as Soviet proxies … What official America today calls collateral damage was not an unfortunate byproduct of war; it was the very point of terrorism. (Mamdani, 2002, B03)”

The two starkest examples of the use of terror in the first half of the century belong to the proponents of radically opposing philosophies – the communist Joseph Stalin, and the Nazi, Adolph Hitler. What united them was a Robespierre-like belief in the perfectability of people through violence, both Stalin and Hitler wielded terror to mould vast swathes of humanity in the image of their respective utopias. The consequent horrors of the Nazi death camps and the long reign of terror of the Soviet secret police testify to the danger of utopias that are instituted at the point of a gun. While Nazi philosophy may be inextricable from terror and violence, it is perhaps instructive to note that socialist ideas have often been in the vanguard of campaigns against colonial, feudal and racist regimes. While such struggles have admittedly been responsible for much terrorism in the past centuries, only an absurdly narrow reading would fault the ideals of freedom and equality that have inspired many violent revolutionaries. The trouble with Robespierre was not his belief in democracy, but in his conviction that mass murder was the only way to achieve it.

The post World War II era similarly saw the emergence of a number of groups that used terror to win freedom from decaying colonial regimes. Hoffman cites Menachem Begin’s Zionist Irgun Z’Vai Le’uni (National Military Organization) as bring one of the first to systematically target Britain’s “oppressive rule of Palestine” (Hoffman, 1998, 50). Begin struck at symbols of British prestige, and convincingly demonstrated terrorism’s ability to psychologically undermine a much larger and powerful foe. Public opinion was the real battleground and Begin wrote with satisfaction, “the reports on our operations, under screaming headlines, covered the front pages of newspapers everywhere, particularly in the United States” (Hoffman, 1998, 53-54). In a grim reminder of the many ironies in the annals of terrorism – where those who have used terror to win freedom are later confronted by others who use terror to win freedom from them – Begin masterminded the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in July 1946, killing dozens of Arabs, Jews and Britons. As the headquarters of the British army in Jerusalem, the target exposed the vulnerability of the occupation force. Begin and other mid-century terrorism theorists (like Fanon) laid a framework of terrorism against governments that have been followed as a formula by groups that followed.

Step one is to strike at symbols of the government’s prestige – to demonstrate that it is vulnerable and to draw the cameras of the world’s media. As audiences are shocked by the violence and moved by the suffering of victims, they also note the plight of the oppressed group. Terrorists have learned to walk a thin line between causing enough damage to draw attention, but not so much as to alienate its audiences from the cause being highlighted. As terrorism has grown, however, terrorists have had to compete with each other for attention, resulting in a steady escalation of violence. Since the world’s most influential media outlets are headquartered in the United States and western Europe, terrorist groups that seek the intervention of the West have learned to strike at Western targets. Such attention is a double-edged sword in that it can also result in economic sanctions and frozen bank accounts. Some groups, like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, who reigned supreme through the 1980s and 90s as the deadliest practitioners of terror attacks through suicide bombing, made a tactical decision not to attack westerners – they feared western governments would “crack down on Tamil expatriates involved in fundraising activities abroad” (U.S. State Department, 1994). As a result, the extraordinary bloodshed in this island in the Indian Ocean has received comparatively little world attention. If terrorism is theater, these macabre playwrights plan their scenes depending on the audience they want to lure – or keep away – from the production.

An important aspect – step two in the terrorists’ plan – is to draw retaliation. Indeed, if the strike does not produce a response, one of the central goals of terrorism has failed. Terrorism that is ignored usually leads to irrelevance for the terrorist movement or a more dramatic strike – a process of escalation that will trigger a response at some point. Confronted by an enemy that is unseen, that wears no uniforms and may number in the dozens or the hundreds or the thousands, government responses to sub-national terrorist movements have usually targeted large groups of people, inevitably including those who are not part of the terrorist network. The more brutal the initial terrorist attack, the greater the risk that the government’s response will be indiscriminate.

The immediate goals of the terrorist strike are thereby achieved: Often drawn from the far fringes of angry or humiliated groups, a primary audience of terrorism is the group to which the terrorists themselves belong. Once government retaliation follows the strike, moderate members of the group are likely to feel affiliated with the terrorists, since their immediate tormentors are not the terrorists but the survivors of the original attack. By provoking government crackdowns and inviting repression, terrorists try to communicate to passive supporters that neutrality is not an option. In this sense, both governments and terrorist masterminds are united – each wants everyone to choose sides. After the Sept 11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush famously declared, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

If repression causes passive supporters to join the terrorists, more attacks can be undertaken; more retaliation will follow, more bystanders affected, and more moderates on all sides will see violence as their only option. By this process of escalation, terrorism destroys the spectrum of opinion that is usually present in most societies. Terrorism often creates a victims’ society made in the image of the terrorist’s world – with the suppression of dissent, fear and a war mentality. Each escalating level of terrorism leaves survivors with no option but to band together against an unseen, unknown enemy. A primary casualty on all sides is moderation and nuance. In this way, fringe elements can, with sporadic bursts of violence, fragment the world into them and us. Among both the aggrieved group and the group being targeted by terrorism, fear unifies the sense of us and anger unifies how each group feels about them. In the case of Algerian terror against French settlers, for instance, the attacks drew a brutal response from the French army. Mass interrogations and torture, Hoffman notes, of even suspected terrorists became common. The crackdown was initially effective in suppressing terror, but Hoffman writes that “the brutality of the army’s campaign, however, completely alienated the native Algerian Muslim community. Hitherto mostly passive or apathetic, it was now driven into the arms of the FLN, swelling the organization’s ranks and increasing its popular support” (Hoffman, 1998, 63-64). Brutal government crackdowns also create fissures within civil society in democratic states, creating internal opposition to such repression. An August 2002 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded: “The policy of state repression has been as often counter-productive as it has been effective ... repression drives movements underground and tends to radicalize them. It may also drive movements out of the country to more hospitable environments ... imprisonment of leaders and others often leads to the prisons themselves as bases to breed radical ideas ... Repression also often radicalizes the repressive regime, which generalizes its fear of opposition to include more moderate forms, thus compromising the polity in an antidemocratic direction” (National Research Council, 2002, 28).

Is terrorism a specialty of sub-state organizations, as some commentators suggested after the attacks of Sept 11, 2002? As we will see, that may be a definition of convenience. In many cases described so far, but especially with the Nazis, terror was used as an instrument both to win state power and then to wield it. Throughout the 1920s, Hitler’s sub-state Sturmabteilung, or SA, carried out widespread acts of mayhem and terror against Jews, clergy and communists. In what can only be described as terrorism – for its goal was to inspire fear and submission to the Nazis’ political ends – the SA painted swastikas on Jewish owned stores and carried away numerous victims to torture, beatings and starvation. Changing faces once he was in power, Hitler eliminated the chaotic ranks of the SA with the more disciplined cadres of the SS, an armed paramilitary group originally conceived as his personal bodyguard. The SS then established a highly organized system of state-sponsored terror and extermination, which lasted through the fading days of World War II, killing millions. Some sub-state terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, once held close ties to the corridors of political power. In some cases, politicians and police officers donned the dreaded white mask and cape at night to terrorize black people, creating a seamless link between officials of the state and sub-state terrorists. In Haiti, “President for Life” Papa Doc Duvalier set up the dreaded Tom Tom Macoutes, a paramilitary organization that combined voodoo superstition with the latest techniques of torture to suppress all opponents, spread terror and strengthen his grip on power (Nash, 1998). In early 2002, Hindu fundamentalists in India – informally allied with the state and federal Hindu nationalist governments – killed between 800 and 2,000 Muslims in what has been widely termed as a pogrom: Various human rights groups charged that state officials were complicit in the terror, in that they did not intervene to stop the bloodshed. Like the links between the KKK and white segregationist politicians, the links between state officials and those who perpetrated the terror falls into a gray area which makes it impossible to separate one from the other. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tiger separatist movement has simultaneously conducted terrorist strikes in the south while playing administrator in northern areas under its control, where it has collected taxes and provided civic services. Along frontlines where neither side was fully in control, the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers have exchanged state power on a daily basis – some localities have been under government control during the day and under the control of the Tigers at night. The terror practised by the Tigers cannot be neatly described as sub-state or state-sponsored violence. More recently, several states have used terrorism and terrorists to strike at other nations in lieu of waging war – American support for holy Muslim warriors to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Taliban’s subsequent sponsorship of global terror networks around the world, and Pakistan’s widely reported support for terrorism in Kashmir being but a few examples (Hilton, 2002). Indeed, much to the pique of scholars like Hoffman, who seek to distinguish between military violence and terrorism, some commentators would argue that war between nation states can also be terrorism – since calculated acts of violence in wartime are designed to create a theater of intimidation and force political opponents into submission. That radical critique would entirely erase the distinctions between individual, sub-state and state-sponsored acts of calculated, premeditated violence. In Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 critique of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, the Civil Rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate said his opposition to the war grew, “out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years – especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

There are several terrorist movements not discussed here; the continuing charges and counter charges about Palestinian suicide bombers against Israel; the bombings of U.S. embassies and bases around the world by militant Islamists; the Irish Republican Army’s separatist movement in Northern Ireland; the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany and Italy’s Red Brigades in the 1960s and 1970s; violent separatists in Quebec; and the assassinations of numerous heads of state, from U.S. President William McKinley in 1901, to John F. Kennedy in 1963 to Prime Ministers Anwar Sadat and Indira Gandhi in the 1980s, and Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Tribal and ethnic jingoism has produced other violent groups, as have anarachists and ideologues of every stripe. Bioterrorism is emerging as the latest tool in the arsenal of terrorist movements – the technique’s lethality, combined with the ease it offers perpetrators to cover their tracks, have prompted experts to warn that it will not be long before more terrorists turn to such agents. In short, the list of those who have chosen calculated, premeditated violence down history is extraordinarily long. In the aftermath of Sept 11, talk of terrorism has greatly increased around the world, with charges of terrorism often hurled by both sides in many conflicts. This is altering the use of the term and the responses to terrorism.

Definitions of Terrorism

No one chooses political violence without at least perfunctorily expressing reluctance to take up arms. Almost every act of violence has one side – usually the victims – crying terrorism; similarly each act is believed by its perpetrators to be the just response to evil. It is this Rashomon effect, where different points of view have different impressions of the use of violence, that creates much of the difficulty in defining terrorism.

Terrorism is not just the name of a phenomenon. While experts like Hoffman try to use the word with a measure of objectivity – drawing parallels between the FLN’s struggle against the French in Algeria, Menachem Begin’s campaign against the British and the stream of Palestinian suicide bombers that today strike Israel – the general use of the word terrorism is a term of pejoration. Terrorism is by definition bad, terrorists are by definition bad people. Assigning values to phenomena, of course, are the surest way to obtain divisions in definition. Most people who employ the value-laden description of terrorism would see a difference between, say, the violence used by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which combined violent and nonviolent techniques to overcome apartheid, and Hitler’s use of terror to intimidate Jews and minorities into submission. The difference is not just because of the amount of violence used in each instance. Mandela is honored because most people agree his cause was just; Hitler is widely considered a monster because his anti-semitic and racist ideas have been largely rejected. Mandela and Hitler are modern extremes of good and evil; things get more complicated in most instances. In the immediate aftermath of Sept 11, numerous nations have leaped on the terrorism bandwagon, and sought to identify the U.S. struggle against the perpetrators of Sept 11 with their own battles against separatist groups. Russia has long termed separatists in Chechnya as terrorists, China has done the same with the Uighurs, and India with Kashmiri separatists. Each of these battles over definition was hotly contested before Sept 11, with governments often clashing with human rights groups over their handling of the separatists. A classic example of the Rashomon effect in the definitions of terrorism was seen after Pakistan assisted the U.S. in demolishing the Taliban in 2001: Pakistan was simultaneously hailed by the U.S. as a leading nation in the war against terror at the same time that India was accusing it of being a leading state-sponsor of terrorism for assisting Kashmiri separatists. As Russia weighed whether to support a U.S. military intervention in Iraq in September 2002, its leaders hinted that such support could come in exchange for the U.S. recognizing that its fight against Chechen separatists in Georgia was part of the Bush Administration’s international war on terror (Baker, 2002). That same month, China gained U.S. support in terming Uighur separatists in Xinjiang as terrorists even as concerns were raised that such support was coming in exchange for Chinese support for America’s war plans against Iraq (De Young, 2002). Even as scholars have tried to set up clear guidelines about the difference between terrorism, insurgency, guerilla warfare and outright war, the rhetorical uses of terrorism have soared: At a December 2001 global conference in Yokohama aimed at halting the child sex trade, Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that “the commercial sexual exploitation and abuse of children is nothing less than a form of terrorism” (Reuters and CNN, 2001). In October 2002, as financial markets punished the Brazilian economy for electing a socialist to run the country, president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva termed the financial crisis, “economic terrorism” (Wilson, 2002, A13). And after widespread shenanigans were unearthed in corporate America in 2002 among such titans as Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, Dick Grasso, chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, declared, “we’ve got to wage a war against terrorism in the boardroom, against misleading investors” (NBC News, 2002). While some uses of the word terrorism are easily agreed upon – or easily dismissed – endless arguments continue across the world about which acts of violence are terrorism. These disputes speaks to the heart of the question of when systematic violence is called for, and is therefore justice or self-defense rather than terrorism. The most divisive arguments over terrorism occur when people disagree on when, whether and how much violence is justified by particular situations: Are Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel equivalent to the mass murderers of Sept 11? As Israeli tanks rolled into Palestinian towns and refugee camps in retaliation, locking down thousands of people and searching for terrorist cells, some commentators equated Israel’s actions with state terrorism. Endless arguments, charges and counter-charges followed. Arguing about terrorism as a proxy for arguing about when violence is called for usually leads to circular discussions.

The most divisive arguments about defining terrorism at the United Nations have been between the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the more numerous countries from the developing world, many of whom have previously battled one of the Security Council’s members to win freedom from colonialism or apartheid. Numerous tableaus at the U.N. have explored when violent struggle is justified, and when it should be condemned. Not surprisingly, recently independent countries have been more sympathetic toward violent movements that are seen as anti-colonial; the powerful and rich countries have generally sought to condemn such movements as terrorism.

After Palestinian gunmen kidnapped nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, for example, a U.S.-sponsored draft resolution that condemned terrorism was rejected by countries from the Non-Aligned Movement, who affirmed the “inalienable right to self-determination,” supporting the “legitimacy” of national liberation “struggle,” and condemning “repressive and terrorist acts by colonial, racist and alien regimes” (Haffey, 1998, 1). The permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have accused the poorer countries of moral relativism, and pointed out that thugs and dictators frequently practise terrorism while claiming to be freedom fighters. Nations who suffer from terrorist attacks regularly criticize media depicitons of terrorists as militants or insurgents or separatists. Simultaneously, however, weaker countries at the U.N. have urged the world’s powerful nations to “condemn all acts of economic exploitation, political serfdom, the obnoxious policies of apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms and shapes” (Haffey, 1998, 9). Essentially making Fanon’s central argument, these countries have said, “identifying resistance to such terror with terrorism could only be construed as an attempt to defend obsolete international and social relations and to discredit and impede the just and legitimate struggle of oppressed people for freedom and independence ...” (Haffey, 1998, 9). Defining terrorism stakes out the moral high ground and establishes polarities of good and evil. Given the enormous benefits in persuading others to adopt their world-view, few nations ever acknowledge how intimately their definitions of terrorism are connected not with timeless ideals but their very immediate histories and needs.

What this increasingly means is that the world community agrees on terrorism largely by hindsight: As noted by Georgetown University law professor David Cole, during the 1990s, the U.S. State department included Nelson Mandela’s ANC as a terrorist group (Cole, 2002). The rest of the world mostly goes along with the definitions of powerful nations, but reluctantly. As we will see in the next section, where we discuss responses to terrorism, there is a price to be paid for such reluctant followers. The world might be a safer place if all nations – and all peoples – agree on when violence is called for. Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, recently wrote, “Terrorism is still to be defined collectively by the world community. Unless there is an agreement that terrorism knows no religion and no civilization, we could be on the precipice of a much more dangerous world … Without a shared security mechanism and a definition of terrorism, the world could actually find itself in a holy war between Islam and the West. It’s a war that no one wants – except the extremists” (Bhutto, 2002).

Responses to Terrorism

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks, numerous scholars and statesmen argued that the 19 hijackers responsible for the attack represented a completely new form of terrorism – one that made no demands and brooked no compromise. Terror in the name of jihad, said these scholars, was an extreme version of the anti-government 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the various anti-technology mail-bombs of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Unlike terrorists of yore, where kidnappings and hijackings were a means to force states to open negotiations – hijackers, for example, sought freedom for imprisoned allies in exchange for hostages – this new breed of terrorist saw violent strikes as ends in themselves. They did not seek to negotiate, they sought to destroy.

Yet far from being a radically new form of terrorism, the 19 hijackers may well have based themselves on Nechayev’s rules for a revolutionary – written in 1869. The Russian theorist organized his fanatically devoted followers into secret cells, each comprised of five or six-members and charged them with acting autonomously so as not to implicate each other if they were apprehended. The aim, Nechayev plainly declared, was “one that eradicates the entire state system and exterminates all state traditions of the regime and classes in Russia.” Nechayev’s 19th century doctrine, which indirectly led to the totalitarian apparatus of the Soviet state, Robespierre’s 18th century terror aimed at erasing all opponents of democracy, the Nazis’ 20th century genocides in the service of racial purity and the proponents of international jihad in the 21st century who glorify a return to a medieval Islamic state, have much more in common than initially appears from their radically differing philosophies: They are all violently utopian. The adherents of such movements believe so fervently that they are virtuous that they break with impunity every moral law of compassion in achieving their ends. Some experts have suggested that grappling with such terrorism must address the utopian philosophies that underlie them – and the belief that groups of people, clustered by ideology, religion or nationality, have all the answers for all humankind. Many of these commentators argue that a military-style war on terror may not be effective against terrorism. The August 2002 report, titled Discouraging Terrorism by the U.S. National Research Council said, “a longer term, more contextualized approach is necessary ... neither radical political groups nor extremist religious organizations are forever frozen in time as dangerous, destructive forces. To repress them as such – rather than recognizing that they have their own careers and are responsive to their political environments – does not remove them from the scene and may contribute to the very conditions in which they thrive” (National Research Council, 2002, 29).

Neil Smelser, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and the chairman of the panel that developed the report, said in an interview that America’s response to terrorism in the aftermath of Sept 11 “has been really somewhat monolithic (where) terrorism is understood as some kind of anti-American evil rather than a phenomenon that calls for understanding.” Instead of thinking in terms of the terrorists’ audience and trying to alienate passive supporters from radical elements – a strategy that would seek alliances with levers of public opinion in both friendly and unfriendly states, Smelser said, “there has been a kind of vigilante component to our response.”

Just as terrorist actions are aimed at winning audiences, the NRC report suggests that effective government interventions should aim to win over moderates and isolate radicals, thus draining the pool of new terrorist recruits. Making a similar argument, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, recently drew a distinction between the Arab street, those who belong to largely passive audiences, and the Arab basement, radical elements linked to terrorism. Friedman wrote: “The only sensible response is to defeat those in the Arab basement, who are beyond politics and diplomacy, while at the same time working to alleviate the grievances, unemployment and sense of humiliation that is felt on the Arab street, so that fewer young people will leave the street for the basement, or sympathize with those down there – as millions of Arabs do today” (Friedman, 2002, A23).

The NRC report noted that while conventional military action can discourage terrorism, true deterrence, as modeled on the American-Soviet Cold War standoff, is based on having opponents of comparable strength, and opposing sides who have something to lose. Perhaps most important, the Cold War was based on implicit agreements between the antagonists – something approaching trust – where actions were likely to be met with predictable consequences. Such conditions do not exist when it comes to dealing with terrorist groups and harboring states, who represent a vast range of ideologies, strengths and strategies. When it comes to Islamist terror against the West, mutual mistrust runs high, and it may be difficult for the West to communicate credible threats to groups that are deeply radicalized, disenfranchised and alienated within their own countries. The report said that while “it is tempting for the United States to assume mainly a threatening or punitive posture toward these states” a more realistic approach would utilize the leverage that harboring states have against terrorist groups (National Research Council, 2002, 14-15). More fundamentally, the report noted, finding ways to bring terrorist movements into the mainstream of political life – in the context of democracy – can address the underlying causes of terrorism and the supply of new terrorists: “The United States, in dealing with regimes in countries where terrorism has developed, ought to work as closely as it can with those regimes, but it should resist the temptation – strong as it is, because of the terrorist threat – simply to repress radical terrorist groups, because of the counter-productivity of simple and brutal repression” (National Research Council, 2002, 28).

Epilogue

In reporting and writing this history of terrorism and responses to the phenomenon, I revisited a speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made on Sept 18, 1963. Members of the Ku Klux Klan had just blown up a black church in Birmingham to protest the city’s recent move to desegregate its schools. The Klan, like most terrorist outfits described here, believed itself virtuous, and saw the bombing as part of a righteous struggle on behalf of white people. Four black children were killed, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair – varying in age from 11 to 14. By all accounts, the children were innocent victims, and the bombers were terrorists. In May 2002 – nearly four decades after the bombing – a 71 year-old Klansman, Bobby Frank Cherry, was brought to trial, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Survivors of the bombing called the trial and sentence too little, too late (Lindsay, 2002).

Three days after the bombing in 1963, however, with the tragedy of the young victims still raw, Rev. King retained the perspective to say, “we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers ... inspite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. We must not become bitter, nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided amongst them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”

Both King and his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, were politicians who sometimes appeared other-worldly, often more interested in matters of the spirit than matters of state. While they are frequently dismissed as impractical idealists – both spent much of their public lives battling that charge from their closest allies – few critics pause to consider that the enormous success of the Civil Rights Movement and the Indian struggle for independence was largely because of their nonviolent nature. (At a pre-Independence population of some 330 million people, the Indian freedom struggle remains the largest successful anti-colonial independence movement in history.) Entirely apart from its moral dimensions, nonviolence made it possible for many white Americans to see the Civil Rights movement as their struggle, too, and for many British patriots to oppose colonialism. Violent struggles, on the other hand, including those that fought slavery or colonialism, invariably forced moderates on different sides into warring camps. Successful violent movements have often produced more bloodshed afterwards: Guns used to win freedom are rarely abandoned once freedom is achieved. Justice may have come too slowly to Bobby Frank Cherry, but the swiftness of retaliation might have been worse: “Through violence,” King said, “you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.”

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© Shankar Vedantam, 2002

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