Terrorism has long exercised a great fascination, especially at a safe distance, but it is not an easy topic for discussion and explanation. The fascination it exerts (Shelley’s “tempestuous loveliness of ter ror”) and the difficulty of interpreting it have the same roots: its unexpected, shocking and outrageous character. War, even civil war, is predictable in many ways; it occurs in the light of day and there is no mystery about the identity of the participants. Even in civil war there are certain rules, whereas the characteristic features of terrorism are anonymity and the violation of established norms.
Terrorism has always engendered violent emotions and greatly divergent opinions and images of it. The popular image of the terror ist some eighty years ago was that of a bomb-throwing alien anar chist, disheveled, with a black beard and a satanic (or idiotic) smile, fanatic, immoral, sinister and ridiculous at the same time. Dostoevsky and Conrad provided more sophisticated but essentially similar de scriptions. His present-day image has been streamlined but not nec essarily improved; it certainly has not been explained by political scientists or psychiatrists called in for rapid consultation. Terrorists have found admirers and publicity agents in all ages. No words of praise are fulsome enough for these latter-day saints and martyrs, The terrorist (we are told) is the only one who really cares; he is a totally committed fighter for freedom and justice, a gentle human being forced by cruel circumstances and an indifferent majority to play heroic yet tragic roles: the good Samaritan distributing poison, St. Francis with the bomb. Such a beatification of the terrorist is grotesque, but terrorism cannot be unconditionally rejected except on the basis of a total commitment to nonviolence and nonresistance to evil. Killing, as Colonel Sexby pointed out some three hundred years ago, is not always murder and armed resistance cannot always proceed in open battle according to some chevalresque code: “Nein, eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht . . . zum letzten Mittel, wenn kein anderes mehr verfangen will, ist ihm das Schwert gegeben” (No, tyranny does have a limit, and as a last resort, one has the sword if nothing else avails). Schiller’s famous statement of the ultima ratio of free men facing intolerable persecution has been invoked by gen erations of rebels against tyranny. But for every Wilhelm Tell there have been many self-appointed saviors of freedom and justice, impa tient men, fanatics and madmen invoking the right of self-defense in vain, using the sword not as the last refuge but as a panacea for all evils, real or imaginary. Patriotism has been the last refuge of many a scoundrel, and so has been the struggle for freedom. Horse thieves in Latin America used to claim political motives for their actions as a safeguard against being hanged. The study of terrorism is not made any easier by the fact that most terrorists have been neither popular heroes in the mold of Wilhelm Tell nor plain horse thieves but both these as well as many other things. It is a moot point whether Burke was right when he said that one only had to scratch an ideologue to find a terrorist, but it is certainly not true that scratching a terrorist will necessarily reveal an ideologue.
The interpretation of terrorism is difficult for yet other reasons. Even over the last century the character of terrorism has changed greatly. This goes not only for its methods but also for the aims of the struggle and the character of the people that were and are involved in it. Only two generations divide Sofia Perovskaya and Emma Gold man from Ulrike Meinhof and Patty Hearst, yet morally and intellec tually the distance between them is to be measured in light years. The other difficulty is equally fundamental: unlike Marxism, terrorism is not an ideology but an insurrectional strategy that can be used by people of very different political convictions.
Yet terrorism is not merely a technique. Those practising it have certain basic beliefs in common. They may belong to the left or the right; they may be nationalists or, less frequently, internationalists, but in some essential respects their mental makeup is similar. They are often closer to each other than they know or would like to admit to themselves or others. And as the technology of terrorism can be mastered by people of all creeds, so does its philosophy transcend the traditional dividing lines between political doctrine. It is truly all-purpose and value-free.
Terrorism is not, as is frequently believed, a subspecies of guerrilla (or “revolutionary”) warfare and its political function today is also altogether different. “Urban guerrilla” is indeed urban, but it is not “guerrilla” in any meaningful sense of the term; the difference be tween guerrilla and terrorism is not one of semantics but of quality. This study grew out of a dissatisfaction with many of the current attempts to explain and interpret political terrorism, both on the popular and academic level.* According to widespread belief, the main features of contemporary terrorism are, very briefly, as follows:
1. Terrorism is a new, unprecedented phenomenon. For this reason its antecedents (if any) are of little interest.
2. Terrorism is one of the most important and dangerous problems facing mankind today.
3. Terrorism is a response to injustice; if there were political and social justice, there would be no terrorism.
4. The only known means of reducing the likelihood of terrorism is a reduction of the grievances, stresses and frustration underlying it.
5. Terrorists are fanatical believers driven to despair by intolerable conditions. They are poor and their inspiration is deeply ideological.
6. Terrorism can occur anywhere.
The intention of this study is not to refute misconceptions; for this purpose a mere juxtaposition of theories with the known facts about terrorism would be sufficient. My aim is to have a fresh look at the whole phenomenon. This presents certain difficulties of methodol ogy: some terrorist movements have been exceedingly well docu mented; for every member of the Baader-Meinhof group or the Symbionese Liberation Army there have been several books and articles. The same is true, incidentally, for an infinitely more impor tant movement, the Narodnaya Volya. On the other hand, many other terrorist groups have hardly attracted any attention at all; they have never become known outside the country in which they op erated or they have been forgotten. To write a “world history” or provide a “general theory” of political terrorism is a hopeless under taking; I have concentrated, therefore, on the main stages in the development of terrorism and terrorist doctrine and on its essential features and cardinal problems.
The terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” are of relatively recent date; the meaning of terrorism was given in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire of the Académie Française as systeme, regime de la terreur.1 According to a French dictionary published in 1796, the Jacobins had on occasion used the term when speaking and writing about themselves in a positive sense; after the 9th of Thermidor, “terrorist” became a term of abuse with criminal implications.2 It did not take long for the term to reach Britain; Burke, in a famous passage written in 1795, wrote about “thousands of those hell hounds called terrorists” who were let loose on the people. Terrorism at the time referred to the period in the French Revolution broadly speaking between March 1793 and July 1794 and it was more or less a synonym for “reign of terror.” Subsequently it acquired a wider meaning in the dictionaries as a system of terror. A terrorist was anyone who attempted to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation.3 Even more recently, the term “terrorism” (like “guer rilla”) has been used in so many different senses as to become almost meaningless, covering almost any, and not necessarily political, act of violence. According to one of the arguments frequently used against the study of political terrorism, many more people have been killed throughout history, and more havoc has been wrought, as the result of crimes committed by governments than by terrorism from below. This is not in dispute, but the present study is concerned not with political violence in general or with the inequities of tyranny but with a more specific phenomenon.
No definition of terrorism can possibly cover all the varieties of terrorism that have appeared throughout history: peasant wars and labor disputes and brigandage have been accompanied by systematic terror, and the same is true with regard to general wars, civil wars, revolutionary wars, wars of national liberation and resistance move ments against foreign occupiers. In most of these cases, however, terrorism was no more than one of several strategies, and usually a subordinate one. My concern in the present study is with movements that have used systematic terrorism as their main weapon; others will be mentioned only in passing. It is generally believed that systematic political terrorism is a recent phenomenon dating back to the last century. This is true in the sense that the “philosophy of the bomb” as a doctrine is indeed relatively new. Yet it hardly needs to be recalled that there have been many systematic assassinations of polit ical enemies throughout history. Like Moliere’s bourgeois, who had talked prose all along, there have been terrorists (and terrorist move ments) avant la lettre. Many countries have had their Sicilian Ves pers or St. Bartholomew’s nights; foes, real and imaginary, were eliminated by Roman emperors, Ottoman sultans, Russian tsars and many others.
Terrorism “from below” has emerged in many different forms and out of such various motivations as religious protest movements, political revolts and social uprisings. One of the earliest known examples of a terrorist movement is the sicarii, a highly organized religious sect consisting of men of lower orders active in the Zealot struggle in Palestine (A.D. 66–73). The sources telling of their activities are sparse and sometimes contradictory, but it is known from Josephus that the sicarii used unorthodox tactics such as attacking their ene mies by daylight, preferably on holidays when crowds congregated in Jerusalem. Their favorite weapon was a short sword (sica) hidden under their coats. In the words of the expert in De Quincey’s club considering murder as a fine art: “Justly considering that great crowds are in themselves a sort of darkness by means of the dense pressure, and the impossibility of finding out who it was that gave the blow, they mingled with crowds everywhere . . . and when it was asked, who was the murderer and where he was —why, then it was answered ‘Non est inventus’. “4 They destroyed the house of Ananias, the high priest, as well as the palaces of the Herodian dynasts; they burned the public archives, eager to annihilate the bonds of money lenders and to prevent the recovery of debts. They are also men tioned in Tacitus and in the rabbinical authorities as having burned granaries and sabotaged Jerusalem’s water supplies. They were the extremist, nationalist, anti-Roman party and their victims both in Palestine and the Egyptian diaspora were the moderates, the Jewish peace party. Some authorities claim that they had an elaborate doc trine, the so-called fourth philosophy, something in the nature of a Jewish protestantism according to whose tenets God alone was con sidered as the Lord; political allegiance was refused to any earthly power; and priests were rejected as intermediaries. Others regarded the sicarii, as a movement of social protest intent on inciting the poor to rise against the rich. Josephus doubted their idealistic motivation and claimed that they were listai, robbers, out for personal gain and manipulated by outside forces, with patriotism and the demand for freedom as a mere ideological cloak.5 But even Josephus admits that there was a frenzy of religious expectation among them, an inclina tion to regard martyrdom as something joyful and a totally irrational belief after the fall of Jerusalem that, as the sinful regime was no longer in authority, victory over the Romans was possible and also that God would reveal Himself to His people and deliver them. Such qualities were not that common among ordinary listai.
A similar mixture of messianic hope and political terrorism was the prominent feature of a much better known sect — the Assassins, an offshoot of the Ismailis who appeared in the eleventh century and were suppressed only by the Mongols in the thirteenth. The Assassins have fascinated Western authorities for a long time and this interest has grown in recent times, for some of the features of this movement remind one of contemporary terrorist movements. Based in Persia the Assassins spread to Syria, killing prefects, governors, caliphs and even Conrad of Montferrat, the Crusader King of Jerusalem. They tried twice to kill Saladin but failed. Their first leader, Hassan Sibai, seems to have realized early on that his group was too small to confront the enemy in open battle but that a planned, systematic, long-term campaign of terror carried out by a small, disciplined force could be a most effective political weapon.6 They always operated in complete secrecy; the terrorist fighters (fidaiin) were disguised as strangers or even Christians.7 The Assassins always used the dagger, never poison or missiles, and not just because the dagger was considered the safer weapon: murder was a sacramental act. Contemporary sources described the Assassins as an order of almost ascetic disci pline; they courted death and martyrdom and were firm believers in a new millennium. Seen in historical perspective, the terrorist strug gle of the Assassins was a fruitless attempt by a relatively small reli gious sect to defend its religious autonomy (and way of life) against the Seljuqs who wanted to suppress them. But the means they used were certainly effective for a while, and the legends about the Old Man from the Mountain deeply impressed contemporaries and sub sequent generations.
Secret societies of a different kind existed for centuries in India and the Far East. The Anglo-Indian authorities denied the existence of the Thugs until Captain (subsequently Major General) William Slee-man studied the subject and ultimately destroyed the sect. The Thugs strangled their victims with a silk tie; Europeans were hardly ever affected, but otherwise their choice of victims was quite indis criminate. Its devotees thought the origin of Thuggee was derived from an act of sacrifice to the goddess Kali. It had a fatal attraction. In the words of Feringea, a captured Thug: “Let any man taste of that goor [sugar] of the sacrifice, and he will be a Thug, though he knows all the trades and has all the wealth in the world. ... I have been in high office myself and became so great a favorite wherever I went that I was sure of promotion. Yet I was always miserable when away from my gang and obliged to return to Thuggee.”8 The Thugs had contempt for death. Their political aims, if any, were not easily dis cernible; nor did they want to terrorize the government or population.
In a survey of political terrorism the phenomenon rates no more than a footnote. The same applies to the more militant secret societies in China that existed among river pirates and the outlaws in the hills as well as among respectable city dwellers. Each society had its “enforcer,” usually a trained boxer. Some engaged in criminal extortion; there were hired killers among them, selling themselves to the highest bidder. The societies ran gambling houses and smuggled salt. Some of the more important societies also had distinct political aims: they were anti-Manchu and loathed foreigners.9 They were behind the Boxer Rebellion and helped Sun Yat-sen in the early days of his career. The “Red Spears” of the 1920s combined politics with exercises such as deep breathing and magic formulas, rather like the counterculture of the 1960s. But politics was only one of their many activities and in this respect they resemble more the Mafia than modern political terrorist movements.10
The interest of the Ku Klux Klan in politics was perhaps more pronounced, but it was still not in the mainstream of terrorist movements. It is not always remembered that there was not one Klan, but three, which did not have much in common with each other. The first Klan, a product of the Reconstruction period, was a secret, vio lent association, proscribing recently emancipated Negroes. The sec ond Klan (ca. 1915-1944) also stood for white supremacy, but at the same time it campaigned for a great many other causes such as patriotism and attacked bootleggers, crapshooters and even wife-beaters. With all the ritual mumbo-jumbo around the Great Wizard, it became very much part of establishment politics in the South, both on the local and state level. It also engaged in various business enter prises, such as dealing in emulsified asphalt for road construction. The second Klan was in fact an incorporated society, whose history ends in April 1944, not with a dramatic shoot-out with the police but with a federal suit for $685,000 in delinquent income tax. As a result its charter had to be surrendered and the Klan went out of business.11
Compared with the sicarii and Assassins, with Thugs, Red Spears and the Ku Klux Klan, contemporary terrorist groups seem to belong to another species altogether. For the starting point to the study of modern political terrorism one clearly has to look elsewhere and this takes one back to the Wilhelm Tell syndrome. Political assassinations of leading statesmen were relatively infrequent in the age of absolut ism, once the religious conflicts had lost some of their acuteness. There was solidarity between monarchs whatever their personal dif ferences or the clashes of interest between them; they would not normally have thought of killing one another. The idea of regicide also had temporarily gone out of fashion — with a few notable excep tions. This changed only after the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism in Europe. Outside Europe there were cases of political murder, as there had been since time immemorial, but these be longed, grosso modo, to the tradition of dynastic quarrels or clashes between rival groups fighting for power or of military coups or the actions of fanatics or madmen.
Systematic terrorism begins in the second half of the nineteenth century and there were several quite distinct categories of it from the very beginning. The Russian revolutionaries fought an autocratic government in 1878-1881 and again in the early years of the twen tieth century. Radical nationalist groups such as the Irish, Macedoni ans, Serbs or Armenians used terrorist methods in their struggle for autonomy or national independence. Lastly, there was the anarchist “propaganda by the deed,” mainly during the 1890s in France, Italy, Spain and the United States. The few assassinations in France and Italy attracted enormous publicity, but they were not really part of a general systematic strategy. The character of terrorism in the United States and Spain was again different inasmuch as it had the support of specific sections of the population. In the United States there was working-class terrorism such as practiced by the Molly Maguires and later by the Western Union of Mineworkers. In Spain there was both agrarian terrorism and industrial terrorism. Seen in historical perspective the various manifestations of terrorism, how ever different their aims and the political context, had a common origin: they were connected with the rise of democracy and national ism. All the grievances had existed well before: minorities had been oppressed, nations had been denied independence, autocratic gov ernment had been the rule. But as the ideas of the enlightenment spread and as the appeal of nationalism became increasingly power ful, conditions that had been accepted for centuries became intoler able. However, the movements of armed protest had a chance for success only if the ruling classes were willing to play according to the new rules and this precluded violent repression. In short, terrorist groups could hope to tackle only nonterrorist governments with any degree of confidence. This was the paradox facing modern terrorism, and what was true with regard to repression by old-fashioned author itarian regimes applied, a fortiori, to the new style totalitarian sys tems of the twentieth century.
Of all these movements the Narodnaya Volga was the most important by far, even though its operations lasted only from January 1878 to March 1881. The armed struggle began when Kovalski, one of its members, resisted arrest; it continued with Vera Zasulich’s shooting of the governor general of St. Petersburg and reached a first climax with the assassination of General Mezentsev, the head of the Third Section (the Tsarist political police) in August 1878. In September 1879 Alexander II was sentenced to death by the revolutionary tribu nal of the Narodnaya Volya. Even before, in April of that year, Solovev had tried to kill the tsar, but this had been a case of failed private initiative. Further attempts were no more successful; they included an attempt to blow up the train in which the tsar traveled and the explosion of a mine in the Winter Palace. Success came on 1 March 1881, paradoxically after most of the members of the group had already been apprehended by the police. This was the apogee of the terror and also its end for more than two decades.
The second major wave of terrorism was sponsored by the Social Revolutionary Party and opened with the assassination in 1902 of Sipyagin, the minister of the interior, by Balmashev. The year before, Karpovich, a young nobleman, had shot Bogolyepov, minister of education. The Social Revolutionaries carried out a mere three major attentats in 1903 (including the killing of the governors Obolenski and Bogdanovich) and two in 1904, but the number rose to fifty-four in 1905 (the year of the war with Japan), eighty-two in 1906 and seventy-one in 1907. After that the number dwindled rapidly — three in 1908, two in 1909, one in 1910.12 The most striking assassina tion was that of Plehve, minister of the interior and the strong man of the regime, in a Petersburg street in 1904. The next year Kalyayev killed the Grand Duke Serge Aleksandrovich. The last spectacular assassination, that of Stolypin in the Kiev Opera House in 1911, was again the act of an individual, probably a double agent; it took place after the fighting organization of the Social Revolutionaries had ceased to exist. Some minor sporadic incidents apart, there was no individual terror after 1911. There was a third, much smaller wave of political terror after the Bolshevik coup in November 1917; it was directed partly against Communist leaders — Uritski and Volodarski were killed and Lenin wounded — but also against German diplo mats and military commanders in an attempt to sabotage the peace negotiations between Russia and Germany. The Communist authori ties suppressed this challenge to their rule without great difficulty.
The achievements of Irish terrorism have been much less striking, but it has continued, on and off, for a much longer period. There have been countless ups and downs ever since the emergence, partly due to agrarian unrest, of the United Irishmen in 1791. The policy of open force in the 1860s was an unmitigated failure. The activities of the Dynamiters in the 1870s and 1880s resulted in one spectacular opera tion, the Phoenix Park murders. After that there followed several decades of calm, with new upsurges in 1916, 1919-1921, before the Second World War and then again in the 1970s.
Armenian terrorism against Turkish oppression began in the 1890s but was shortlived and ended in disaster because the Armenians faced an enemy less patient and good-natured than did the Irish. Further terrorism occurred in the 1890s and again after 1918 in the form of assassinations of some individual Turkish leaders who had been prominently involved in the massacres of the First World War. This terrorist tradition has continued sporadically to the present day; political leaders and church dignitaries have been killed by their opponents and in 1975 there was a new upsurge of terrorism with the murder of the Turkish ambassadors in Vienna and Paris and of the first secretary of the Turkish embassy in Beirut.
At the very time that the Armenian terrorists first launched their operations, another separatist organization directed against the Turks, the Macedonian IMRO led by Damian Gruev, came into being. First an underground, civilian propagandist society, it turned after a few years into a military movement, preparing both for sys tematic terror and a mass insurrection.13 The mass insurrection (Ilin Den) was a catastrophe, yet the Macedonians were more fortunate than the Armenians, inasmuch as they did have allies and as Mace donia was not part of the Turkish heartland. But Macedonia did not gain independence; in 1912-1913 it was redistributed between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. IMRO continued its struggle from the Petrich district in Bulgaria; some of its operations were directed against Yugoslavia but, in fact, it became a tool of successive Bul garian governments. In the decade between 1924 and 1934 the num ber of its own members (and Bulgarian oppositionists) who perished in internecine struggles considerably exceeded the casualties it in flicted on its enemies. By the time a new Bulgarian government suppressed IMRO in the mid-1930s, it had only the name in common with the organization founded four decades earlier.
Among other nationalist terrorist groups that appeared before the First World War were the Polish socialists and some Indian groups, particularly in Bengal.14 In both cases the terrorist tradition continued well after independence had been achieved. Nehru and oth ers had warned against terrorism and there is no doubt that the sectarian character of the terror, even though limited in scope, fur ther poisoned the relations between the communities and con tributed to the partition of India in 1947. In Poland organized terror continued for more than a decade after the First World War in the eastern territories among the Western Ukrainians, who turned against the Warsaw government when their demands for autonomy were ignored.
The high tide of terrorism in Western Europe was the anarchist “propaganda of the deed” in the 1890s. The exploits of Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant and Emile Henry between 1892 and 1894 created an enormous stir, and because the bomb throwing by individuals coincided with a turn in anarchist propaganda favoring violence, the impression of a giant international conspiracy was created, which in actual fact never existed. Ravachol was in many ways an extraordi nary villain, a bandit who would have killed and robbed even if there had been no anarchist movement in France; Vaillant was a Bohe mian and Emile Henry an excited young man. An analysis of the statistics of urbanization in nineteenth-century France would not add much to the understanding of their motives. The public at large was fascinated by the secret and mysterious character of the anar chist groups; anarchists, socialists, nihilists and radicals were all be lieved to be birds of one feather. Governments and police forces who knew better saw no reason to correct this impression.
There were a great many attempts on the lives of leading statesmen in Europe and America between the 1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were among the victims; there were several unsuccessful attempts to kill Bismarck and the German emperor; French President Carnot was assassinated in 1894; Antonio Canovas, the Spanish prime minister, was murdered in 1897, Empress Elisabeth (Zita) of Austria in 1898 and King Umberto of Italy in 1900. But inasmuch as the assassins were anarchists — and quite a few were not — they all acted on their own initiative without the knowledge and support of the groups to which they belonged. It was conveniently forgotten at the time that there had been a long tradition of regicide, and attempted regicide, in Europe and that there had been countless attempts to kill Napoleon and Napoleon III. As a contemporary observer, who had little sympa thy for anarchism, noted: “It is difficult to assign to them [the anar chists] any participation in the various outrages, notably the assassi nation of rulers.”15
Psychologically interesting, the ere des attentats was of no great political significance. By 1905 the wave of attacks and assassinations outside Russia had abated; there were further spectacular happenings in Paris and London in the years just before the outbreak of World War I, such as the exploits of the Bonnot gang and of groups of Poles and Latvians (Peter the Painter) in London’s East End. But the motive of these groups was predominantly self-gain and the importance of the anarchist admixture, which did exist, was usually exaggerated. There were, to summarize, no systematic terrorist cam paigns in Central and Western Europe. They did exist on the fringes of Europe, in Russia, the Balkans and, in a different form, in Spain.
Labor disputes in the United States had been more violent than in Europe almost from the beginning. The story of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s is only one of several such historical episodes; the group was identified at the time, quite wrongly, with Communism.16 It was, of course, not a matter of Communism but of the traditional violence displayed by a group of Irishmen transplanted to a new continent and feeling itself discriminated against and exploited. But it fought not only mine owners but also fellow workers of Welsh and German extraction. There was also the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886 and many other bloody incidents involving factory police on the one hand and militant coal miners and steelworkers on the other. Again, the killing of Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho in 1905 was not an isolated incident; the IWW did not deny that it had been inspired by the “Russian struggle.” There was the bombing by the Mac-Namara brothers of the Los Angeles Times Building in 1910 and other such incidents now remembered only by historians specializing in the byways of the American labor movement. But terrorism in the United States was limited in scope and purpose; there was no inten tion of overthrowing the government, killing the political leadership or changing the political system.
Spain was the other country in which systematic terrorism was a factor of some political importance. Political violence had been rampant in Spain throughout the nineteenth century, notably during the Carlist wars. The emergence of the working class movement, very much under Bakuninist influence, was accompanied by a great deal of fighting; in the trade unions terrorism became endemic. There was also rural violence, especially in the provinces of southern Spain such as Andalusia. Like France, Spain had its ere des attentats in the 18905 but, unlike France, there was a resurgence in 1904-1909 and again during World War I and after. There were all sorts of anar chists, but the most militant group, the FAI, became the dominant force. Among its leaders, Buenaventura Durruti (1896-1936) was the most outstanding (“We are not afraid of ruins”).17 This terrorism was politically quite ineffective except that it caused a great deal of in ternecine struggle inside the left and that it contributed to the fatal events of 1936—1939. Catalonia was the main scene of terrorism up to and including the civil war. In the later stages of the Franco dictator ship the center of gravity shifted to the Basque region, but there separatism was the main driving force, sometimes, as in Ulster, ap pearing under a Marxist veneer. Terrorist anarchism radiated from Spain to Latin America, especially to Argentina; Barcelona had its tragic week in 1909 and Buenos Aires’ Semana Tragica took place a decade later.18 Durruti shot the Archbishop of Saragossa and the indefatigable Simon Radowitsky killed the Buenos Aires chief of police.
Up to the First World War terrorism was thought to be a left-wing phenomenon, even though the highly individualistic character of terrorism somehow did not quite fit the ideological pattern. But neither the Irish nor Macedonian freedom fighters, neither the Ar menian nor Bengali terrorists were socialist or anarchist in inspira tion. The “Black Hundred” was certainly a terrorist organization, but its main purpose was to fight the Russian revolution, engage in anti-Jewish pogroms and, generally speaking, to assassinate the leaders of the liberal-democratic opposition to Tsarism. The “Black Hundred” constituted the extreme right in Russian domestic politics and it was in fact founded with the support of the police. But as so often hap pened in the history of terrorist movements, the sorcerer’s appren tice developed an identity of his own. Soon demands for the redistri bution of land and the shortening of the working day were voiced and the members of an organization established to defend the mon archy were complaining that it would be preferable to have no government rather than the existing one. It was said that a few resolute officers, like those in Serbia, would do a world of good — a reference to Serbian regicides.
In the years after World War I terrorist operations were mainly sponsored by right-wing and nationalist-separatist groups. Some times these groups were both right-wing and separatist, as in the case of the Croatian Ustacha, which received most of its support from Fascist Italy and Hungary. The Croatians wanted independence and they had no compunction about accepting support from any quarter; like the Irish they have continued their struggle to the present day. Systematic terrorism was found in the 1920s mainly on the fringes of the budding Fascist movements or among their precursors such as the Freikorps in Germany, certain French Fascist groups, in Hun gary and, above all, among the Rumanian “Iron Guard.” But by and large there was comparatively little terror, for this was the age of mass parties both on the right and left; anarchism had long outgrown its terrorist phase. There were a few spectacular political assassina tions like those of Liebknecht and Luxemburg in 1919, of Rathenau in 1922 and of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Barthou in Mar seilles in April 1934. As this latter was clearly a case of international terrorism in which at least four governments were involved, the League of Nations intervened; resolutions were passed and commit tees were established with a view to combatting terrorism on an international basis.19 All these exercises were quite futile for the obvious reason that, although some governments were opposed to terror, others favored it as long as it served their purposes. Three decades later the United Nations faced a similar situation.
Outside Europe too, terrorist operations were as yet infrequent. The murder of the Egyptian prime minister, Boutros Pasha, in 1910 was the action of an individual. So was the assassination in 1924 of Sir Lee Stack, commander in chief of the Egyptian army. But in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s the Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme right-wing groups such as Young Egypt were converted to systematic terrorism and killed two prime ministers and a few other leading officials. In Mandatory Palestine, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) opted for individual terrorism. Irgun ceased its anti-British activities in 1939 but the more extreme LEHI continued its struggle; the murder of Lord Moyne was its most spectacular operation. Even in India, the country of nonviolence, the terrorist Bhagat Singh had, in Nehru’s words, a sudden and amazing popularity in the 1920s. Nehru was inclined to belittle terrorism: it represented the infancy of a revolutionary urge (he wrote); India had passed that stage and terrorism was about to die out.20 Yet Nehru’s prediction was premature; ten years later he again toured Bengal to denounce terrorism. Terrorism, he said, was the glamour of secret work and risk-taking attracting adventurous young men and women: “It is the call of the detective story.”21 But detec tive stories, for better or worse, have always found more readers than high literature. In Japan during the 1930s a group of junior army officers engaged in terror; their actions had a certain impact on the conduct of Japanese foreign policy.
Individual terrorism played a subordinate role in the European resistance movement during the Second World War. Heydrich, the governor of the Czech protectorate, was killed; so was Wilhelm Kube, the Nazi governor of White Russia, and some minor French collaborators. A few bombs were placed in Parisian cinemas. Overall there is no evidence that the German war effort or the morale of the soldiers was affected by terrorist activity. For many years after the war urban terror was overshadowed by large-scale guerrilla wars such as in China. It was only in predominantly urban regions such as Mandatory Palestine and, later, Cyprus and Aden that the terrorist strategy prevailed. This is not to say that rural guerrillas would not on occasion ambush and kill enemy leaders; the assassination of Sir Henry Gurney, the British governor-general in Malaya, may have been an accident. The killing of thousands of South Vietnamese vil lage headmen in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on the other hand, was certainly a systematic operation of the North Vietnamese and part of their general strategy.
The urban terrorist, in contrast to the rural guerrilla, could not transform small assault groups into regiments or even divisions, and the establishment of liberated zones was ruled out — except in very rare conditions when government no longer functioned. The struggles for Tel Aviv (1945-1947), Nicosia (1955-1958) and Aden (1964-1967) lasted for three years. The attacks of Jewish and Greek Cypriot terrorists were directed against the British, but the presence of Arab and Turkish communities caused major complications. With the outbreak of the civil war in Palestine in late 1947 and the subsequent invasion of Arab armies, the terrorist groups were absorbed into the Israeli army. EOKA activities had led to communal riots as early as 1957 and there is little doubt that their terrorism contributed to the subsequent tragic events in Cyprus. Viewed in retrospect the num ber of victims and the damage caused by terrorist activities in Pales tine and Cyprus was very small indeed. But weakened as the result of the Second World War, Britain was about to dismantle its empire in any case and not much violence was needed to hasten the process. Aden was one of Britain’s last outposts but, after India had been lost, the Crown Colony was no longer of strategic importance. The strug gle for Aden began on a small scale in 1964 and culminated in the occupation of the Crater area, the oldest part of the town, in 1967. The British forces reoccupied it without much difficulty two weeks later, but the rebels had nevertheless scored a political victory which led to the British exodus in November of that year.22
A decade earlier the Algerian FLN had tried to seize and hold an urban area in a far bloodier battle. By mid-1956 the slums of Algiers (the Casbah section) were securely in their hands, but the moment antiterrorist actions were begun by the French army (January 1957) the fate of the insurgents was sealed. The FLN did not regain its position in the capital up to the very end of the war. But the tough methods used by General Massu’s Paras in combatting systematic terror with systematic torture provoked a worldwide outcry. The guerrilla war continued in the Algerian countryside; politically and economically it became too costly for France to combat and eventu ally the French forces had to withdraw.
These, then, were the major cases of urban terrorism during the two decades after the end of World War II. A great many guerrilla wars were going on at the time all over the world, but the main scene of action was in the countryside, as all the theoreticians from Mao to Castro and Guevara agreed it should be. Urban terrorism was regarded at best as a supplementary form of warfare, at worst as a dangerous aberration. Castro and Guevara were firmly convinced that the city was the “graveyard” of the revolutionary freedom fighter.23 It was only in the middle 1960s that urban terrorism came into its own — mainly as the result of the defeat of the rural guerrillas in Latin America but also following the emergence (or in some cases the reactivation) of urban terrorist groups in Europe, North America and Japan. Thus, it was only a little more than a decade ago that urban terror began to attract general attention. Seen in historical perspective it was no more than a revival of certain forms of political violence that had been used previously in many parts of the world. These methods had been widely described, analyzed and debated at the time from every possible angle. But given the frailty of human memory it was perhaps not surprising that the reemergence of ter rorism should have been regarded in recent years as an altogether novel phenomenon and that its causes and the ways to cope with it should have been discussed as if nothing of the kind had ever hap pened before.
*Elsewhere in this study I have commented on the difficulties involved in agreeing on a comprehensive definition of terrorism. Such a definition does not exist nor will it be found in the forseeable future. To argue that terrorism cannot be studied until such a definition exists is manifestly absurd. Even now, three decades after the end of the Fascist era the controversies about its character continue but the contemporaries had to confront Fascism anyway on both the theoretical and practical level. I have refrained, on the whole, from using the currently fashionable term “revolutionary terrorism”; many terrorist groups, past and present, were not at all revolutionary, including some which stressed their revolutionary orientation.