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Friends, The word “terrorism” has bothered me since it came to occupy the centre of our attention on September 11. Some time ago, I worked my way through the OED definition. For whatever reason this did not entirely satisfy me and I also did not circulate this OED definition as I have often circulated others in the past. What follows below is the “terrorism” entry in the Ox. Companion to Politics ed. By Joe Krieger. Sometime soon I hope to write a commentary based on selected excerpts from this essay. In the meantime, I thought it important to share an essay that had been written in the tranquility of the time before a “War on Terrorism” and which includes a broad historical and global survey. Although this article appears to be basically sound, I would be remiss if I failed to point out some features of its Eurocentric bias. The reference to “medieval Islam” is an imposition of a European based time frame – medieval – on a society centred outside of Europe and a society which was, in many respect, far more advanced than medieval Europe. Likewise, the reference to the Zealots in “Palestine” constitutes a tacit recognition of the Roman conquest which the Jewish partisans were engaged in resisting. I do not mean to suggest that the author of the article is heavily committed to the Roman cause so much as he has unwittingly adopted conventional rhetoric for the purpose of a doubly unconventional story. At all events, the lack of wit on the part of a scholar is far more egregious than the presence of bias. Terms that are starred, “*”, are ones which have their own articles in the Ox. Companion to Politics, a most valuable encyclopedic work. I would welcome any response to this account of terrorism that anyone receiving this piece cares to offer. I am not in a position to give permission to circulate an article from the Ox. Comp. To Politics. I hope and trust that the circulation of this particular piece, with proper credit given, will be seen as an event that promotes the book as a whole. Enjoy, Michael Posluns. TERRORISM. The concept of terrorism has been a category of political discourse since the late eighteenth century. Its central meaning is the use of terror for the furthering of political ends, and it was originally meant to denote the use of terror by the French revolutionary government against its opponents. This is also the sense in which it was used, and on occasion justified, by the Bolsheviks after 1917. This usage of the term, to cover terror by governments, has now become less common though by no means irrelevant, and in most contemporary usage the term covers acts of terror by those opposed to governments. The range of activities which the term covers has been wide, but four main forms of action tend to be included. *assassination, bombings, seizures of individuals as hostages, and, more recently, the hijacking of planes, In the 1970s the term international terrorism_ began to be used to cover acts of violence committed by political group! outside the country in which they were primarily active. The other term that emerged at the same time, state terrorism~ referred to encouragement. or alleged encouragement~ by *states of such acts of violence. Taking terrorism in its second, anti-state, sense, there can be said to be three main phases of ha history. There is first a prehistory of terrorism, in the sense of acts which would today be called terrorist. The main form this trick were acts of acts of assassination for political and politico-religious ends: the tyrannicides of Greece and Rome, the Zealots of Palestine, the Hashssihin of medieval Islam. It is significant that many of these casts were often regarded as morally legitimate. The second phase of terrorism was the use of violence by political groups in the nineteenth century, especially by anarchists and some nationalists. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 were perhaps the most famous cases, bat there was widespread endorsement of bombing by anarchists in Europe and the United States, as “propaganda of the deed,” and a number of nationalist groups, notably the Irish and the Armenians, practiced assassination, bombing, and various forms of violent seizure and destruction of property. A third and more complex phase of terrorism dates from the end of World War II. in a range of nationalist conflictsin the *Third World— Israel, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Algeria -- officials and citizens of the colonial state were attacked as part of what in the end were successful campaigns for national independence, in other cases nationalist movements that did not succeed also used it — for example, in Palestine, the Basque region of Spain, and South Molucca. At the same time, political groups seeking various forms of revolutionary political and social change within their own countries also resorted to acts of terror: this was widespread with the urban guerrillas of Latin America—in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay -- and on a more spasmodic basis in some of the developed democracies —the Red Army Faction in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weathermen in the United States. Must of these revolutionary groups claimed affiliation with the political *Left: but in the 1970s and 1980s there were also major campaigns of terror by right-wing groups, notably in France and Italy. Terrorism in this specific sense generated widespread concern in the societies affected, and, as a result of the spread of so-called international terrorism , in the world as a whole. The publicity given to certain dramatic events, such as hijackings, and the administrative and financial costs of searching and monitoring international travel from the late 1960s onward underlined this. During the lace 1970s the U.S. Congress and government made concern with terrorism a major part of its foreign policy and compiled a list of those countries that were deemed to he supporting is. Special units were set up to cover antiterrorism, that is, measures to prevent terrorist acts, and counterrerrorism, that is measures to respond to, and where deemed appropriate retaliate against, terrorism. Distinct as these phenomena appeared to be, there were, however, a number of ways in which the public and international concern of the 1970s and 1980s obscured the issues involved. First, the scale of the phenomenon was distorted by the focus on international terrorism. Acts of this kind certainly occurred and were likely to continue. But the numbers of people affected were small -- most plane hijackings ended without bloodshed. The far more important and costly phenomenon was nor international terrorism but terrorism within communal situations, largely in Third World countries. This involved situations where people of different ethnic or religious character, who had often lived side by side for centuries, came to he locked in situations of violence and retribution, often involving massacres, mass kidnappings, forcible displacements, and so forth. Cases of this were in the conflicts between Christian and Muslim in Lebanon, between Tamil and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, between Hindu and Sikh in Punjab. Despite its Third World focus, however, there were a number of cases in Europe as well — in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and, since the breakdown of Communist authority during the late l9SOs, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well. The most pervasive and, in the long term, dangerous aspect of terrorism was this spread of communal terrorism as a product of nodal and economic tensions in ethnically mixed societies, A second area of confusion concerned what were and were not acts of terrorism. Here those who opposed states and were victims of state violence were quick to revive the original 1790s definition of the term and to argue that most of the acts of terror for political ends committed in the contemporary world were carried out by states: the victims of Nazism and *Stalinism, and of many repressive regimes in the post-1945 period, were testimony enough of that. Those who analyzed forms of oppression and coercion outside the framework of state power also argued that terror played a part in establishing and maintaining these forms of domination: the use, actual acid threatened, of violence by men against women was an evident case. There was also considerable room for debate on the way in which the term terrorist was used to define, as distinct from merely qualify, specific political groups. Many of those involved in nationalist campaigns questioned the use of the term terrorist to disqualify not just specific acts but the overall *legitimacy and goals of their movements. Some revolutionary groups in developed countries appeared to have no other strategy than that of planting bombs and killing individuals, but this was not the case in the nationalist contexts where the goal, national independence, as distinct from the tactics used, of which terror was one but by no means the only one. That the Zionists, Algerians, and Palethnians used, among other tactics, terror as an instrument in independence struggles did not necessarily mean that their broader goals were illegitimate. Two further issues raised in discussions of terrorism ere those of cause and efficacy. The search for a cause of terrorism ranged from social and economic conditions to theories based on psychology, “the terrorist personality,” and religion. Given the variety of forms taken by terrorist phenomena and the diversity of conditions in which it originated, this was a fruitless exercise. The one characteristic common to terrorist acts against states was a belief, usually mistaken, that individual acts of violence could in some way accelerate change arid achieve goals that other, more conventional forms of political action could not. The association with individual religions, most recently Islam, does not survive historical comparison. Assessments of the efficacy of terrorism have tended to show that, beyond publicity, it usually achieved very little, unless the goals were very specific -- the release of particular prisoners, the appropriation of some money. Indeed the main result of terrorist acts was not to inflect governments in the directs the terrorists wanted but rather to harden them in the opposite direction — as Russia after 1881 and Argentina after1975, to name but two case~ demonstrated. (Sec also ANARCHY; DECOLONIZATION; INTERNATIONAL LAW; NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS; POLITICAL VIOLENCE; REVOLUTION; RIGHT) Walter Laquer and Yonah Alexander, The Terrorism Reader: A Historical Anthology (New York: 1987) Richard Rubenstein, Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World (London and New York, 1987). Walter Laquer, Terrorism 2d ed. (New York and London, 1988). -- If we knew where knowledge goes when it evaporates, perhaps we might learn to recover what we have lost and to reconstitute it as distilled wisdom. "How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality toward the wicked? Do justice to the poor and fatherless, deal righteously with the afflicted and destitute. Rescue the poor and needy; save them from the hand of the wicked." (A Psalm of Asaph, The Psalm for the Third Day.) How can we be sure that the unexamined life is not worth living? Michael W. Posluns, The Still Waters Group, First Nations Relations & Public Policy Daytime: 416 995-8613 Evening: 416 656-8613 Fax: 416 656-2715 36 Lauder Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M6H 3E3
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