FINAL REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF TERRORISM
This book is not exhaustive in discussing the history of terrorism. Left out of this history are the majority of twentieth-century terrorist events, including the rise of the anti-colonialism movement before and after World War II across Africa and Asia, the subsequent ethno-nationalist terrorism of the Basques in Spain and the IRA in Northern Ireland, the youthful utopianism of left-wing terrorists in Europe and Latin America, the rise of state-sponsored terrorism led by Qaddafi in Libya and Hezbollah with the patronage of Iran, and finally, the rise of religious terrorism in the form of Sunni extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Such full accounting of terrorist movements is useful, for it showcases the remarkable continuity in strategies and tactics pursued by the terrorists of the nineteenth and twentieth century. While it would be beneficial to give an accounting of all these movements, there is insufficient space in this book to permit a proper accounting of them. They emerged in the context of their times, with large overarching political ideologies governing their worldviews and technologies dictating how they executed their particular acts of terrorism. Nonetheless, their operational tempos, their strategic frameworks, and their goals were based on the idea that a small number of individuals with no access to high-tech weaponry could change the world.
Yet this early history of terrorism dating back to antiquity and stretching all the way into the early twentieth century conditioned and informed all subsequent terrorist movements. Not all the methods associated with terrorism today appeared in those days, such as vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide attackers on jetliners, or drones, but they provided the blueprints for the successful use of violence for the purposes of forcing change. If one focused exclusively on the recent history of terrorism, starting in the year that Osama bin Laden died, the myopic perspective would delimit activities by al-Qaeda and IS as exceptionally unique and unprecedented, which they are, but not for the reasons furnished typically by commentators. Notions about propaganda by the deed, the importance of complementing terrorism with correlative political organizations, the pedagogical purpose of terrorism, and the use of provocations to force a government to overreact were all part of the political programs discussed by the terrorists of this era. In other words, this introductory history gives a paradigm for evaluating the successes and failures of the movements that followed throughout time.
Indeed, there is something to be said about this worldview given what it accomplished. In the nineteenth century, terrorists of all stripes committed regicide or tyrannicide in one form or another, whether it was killing a tsar, a king, or a president. These violent movements never threatened the survival of a regime directly. This was both a function of the restraint displayed by these brave young men and women in seeking to use violence in a surgical fashion, along with the rudimentary tools at their disposal—antique pistols, poisons, knives, and dynamite—not to mention their limited numbers. Yet many were active participants in history, adding political pressure to recalcitrant regimes that were hesitant or unwilling to moderate, liberalize, and ultimately usher in the modern political liberal-democratic order in Europe and North America. It is remarkable how influential they were, given how little support terrorists had for much of the nineteenth century. They were the inspiration for many idealists who changed the world during the twentieth century as we knew it: Gavrilo Princip and the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Bolsheviks as acolytes of the Narodonaya Volya establishing the Soviet Union, Menachem Begin and the bombing of the King David Hotel, and Michael Collins in the struggle for Irish independence.
Of course, there is a dark side to all of this. Many terrorists killed innocent people unnecessarily. Others had starkly racist and cruel worldviews, committing untold and unrecorded atrocities against ethnic and religious minorities. Blacks in the United States, Jews across Europe, and other powerless individuals became victims of violence designed to enforce an antediluvian social order, one that sought to impede or reverse the changes wrought by industrialization and the rise of political liberalism in the West. For all the exuberance and romanticism of terrorism, which even Marx and Engels lauded, there was a side of unmitigated evil that deprived the world of valuable and innocent souls. This loss of opportunity needs to be weighed alongside the fruit of evil actions. Needless to say, the Reign of Terror and the various political pogroms enacted by the Nazis once they achieved power and set about conquering the world do not fall into this category.
While not explicitly articulated in this history, what is evident is that terrorism itself never caused historical events directly. There had to be a mass uprising like the Jacobins in France or the Russian revolutionaries who took part in the October Revolution. Violence was used to enact the will of a political subset—the terrorists—and governments found themselves overreacting and, with that, adding to the incipient social catastrophe of the day, leading to tragedies and ultimately their defeat, as in the case of World War I or the British and French withdrawals from numerous colonies between 1930 and 1970. This book has maintained that terrorism is not an existential threat to the existing order for the same reason that the terrorists of the nineteenth century were not an existentialist threat to Russia or to Britain. That said, it does provide a subtler and more pernicious problem—namely, it directly challenges the relationship between the individual and the state. By the criterion that Thomas Hobbes offered some four hundred years ago to evaluate the state, a government is legitimate if it can offer security to its people. Hobbes was writing during the bloody seventeenth century, focusing primarily on physical security, but his ideas also encompassed material and financial security. Terrorists challenge this relationship by making the state seem weak, impotent, and unable to respond to the seemingly randomness of terrorist-driven chaos. The breakdown of this relationship is what creates mass discontent, political uprisings, revolutions, and, at its worst, civil wars.
The normal tendency among states is to overreact or overcorrect for this deficiency, and their primary tool is generally the use of force, as terrorists threaten the body politic’s physical security. For liberal-democratic societies whose constitutions and firmaments are based off humanistic principles and the works of Enlightenment-age writers, such physical overreaction is repugnant and repulsive if it is not calibrated and proportional, especially since oftentimes it can erode into the very values that legitimize secular-democratic governments in the first place. This has happened many times throughout history. The extensive use of torture, the suspension of the constitution, limits on civil liberties, and targeted discrimination based on preconceived notions of race, religion, and ethnicity are all different results of the same mistake. While one could use the Russian monarchy’s response to terrorism or the British government’s use of torture against suspected members of the IRA during the troubles, there are much more recent examples. The very fact that terrorists can produce such an overreaction that states themselves are willing to self-immolate and destroy their values for the purpose of protecting those very values should give the public pause when considering whether or not terrorism is really deadly to the state it seeks to destroy. Aside from the victims, this overreaction causes the quality of life for much of society to suffer and can lead to complete turmoil.
This has been the approach perfected by both al-Qaeda and IS over the past three decades. These entities, either consciously or unconsciously, have internalized the lessons of the propaganda by the deed and have seen how relatively minor plots can cause governments to react so repugnantly that they end up directly undermining their goals. The United States was baited into an extreme counterterrorism program that saw it engage in systematic torture after denouncing the practice as being opposed to its very values for decades. The United Kingdom has increased its domestic surveillance, eroding the notion of the right to privacy. Both of these governments are by no means evil; they were simply trying to act in an expedient and efficient manner to physically protect their populations, without thinking of the moral and ethical costs of their activities. Elsewhere, Assad found himself confronting a mass uprising that he sought to quell by massive repression, which only generated more grievances and turned his country into the worst humanitarian disaster of the early twentieth century. At the time of this writing, Iraq finds itself engulfed in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign to uproot IS fighters who use car bombs against their position and have instituted a policy of systemic rape, torture, and execution against individuals they believe to be sinners.
The overreaction has given rise to bigger problems; terrorist groups no longer seek simplistic reforms and have instead moved to seize sovereignty over territory and to formulate their own taxation policy. What is important to remember, though, is that terrorism is born out of the existence of grievances and because people find a situation unjust and intolerable. This was evident in the groups covered in this section and will be evident in the following section that focuses on the events of the past three decades. Before a terrorist movement can form, there has to be some perceived inequity that can mobilize intelligent youth to take up arms to fix these problems. Terrorism is the result of bad governance and bad policy. In Russia, the government proved to be too repressive and unwilling to accommodate the liberals wanting freedom of expression and assembly. In the American South, the Ku Klux Klan emerged because the governments of the southern United States were complicit and thus unable to enforce the rule of law, which allowed these hooded men and women to terrorize minorities for generations. In Europe, the breakdown of government facilitated the rise of the Italian Fascists, who felt they could act with impunity. In other words, terrorism is not only the product of bad governance but also a manifestation of youthful idealism.
These two structural features of the world go a long way in explaining the terrorism that followed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In discussing these events, the book will reference and expand upon these ideas, giving concrete examples and demonstrating the intellectual continuity between the violent intellectuals of the past with those who have adopted the mantle of terrorism today.