Terrorism Essay, Research Paper

Terrorism

JUNE 1914: a young man in Sarajevo steps up to a carriage and fires his pistol.

The Archduke Ferdinand dies. Within weeks, the first world war has begun. The

1940s: the French resistance kill occupying troops when and how they can. June

1944: at Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, German SS troops take revenge,

massacring 642 villagers. August 1945: the United States Air Force drops the

world’s first nuclear weapons. Some 190,000 Japanese die, nearly all of them

civilians. Within days the second world war has ended.

Which of these four events was an act of terrorism? Which achieved anything?

Which, if any, will history judge as justified? And whose history? Terrorism is

not the simple, sharp-edged, bad-guy phenomenon we all love to condemn. No clear

line marks off politics from the threat of force, threat from use, use from

covert or open war. Who is or is not a terrorist? The suicide bomber, the rebel

guerrilla, the liberation front, the armed forces of the state?

Terrorism is fundamentally a political act. Terrorists act to advance a cause

they mean to create tyranny, either directly or indirectly, so that the

political order that they prefer can take the place of the current one.

Terrorists can be either rebels seeking to overthrow a state or states seeking

to overthrow the international order or states seeking to maintain privilege for

rulers and stifle dissent among the people. In every case the motivation for

terrorism is explicitly without an exception, political.

Terrorism has a long, if tainted,. pedigree. Aristotle recognized it, even if it

had no name at the time, when he wrote that “the first aim and end of tyrants is

to break the spirit of their subjects.” What we know as terrorism can be traced

to the Russian nihilists and anarchists of the 19th century, who gave a name to

what would otherwise be considered “random acts of violence” that were performed

to advance their revolutionary cause. They elevated terrorism to a high moral

plane. One of them, Mikhail Bakunin, exclaimed: “The passion for destruction is

also a creative passion.”

British military analyst Brian Crozier wrote in his 1974 book, “Theory of

Conflict, that terrorists have several aims, falling into two categories.

Through “disruptive terrorism,” they try to,

(1) Gain publicity for their movement or arouse admiration .

(2) Secure funds and build up the movements, morale or prestige .

(3) Discredit and demoralize the authorities.

(4) Provoke the authorities

(5) To take excessively harsh repressive measures desired to

alienate citizens and force a large- scale opposition to

counter-terrorist measures.

“Coercive terrorism, ” is similar but complementary.

(1) It attempts to demoralize the civilian population

(2) Weaken its confidence in the government and instill fear of

the revolutionary terrorists.

(3)It also by making examples of well- publicized victims, tries to

enforce obedience to the terrorist movement leaders.

Until after World War II, most terrorists adhered to a set of rules for moral

behavior that excluded the killing, capture, or torture of civilians who were

not also government officials. In other words they respected the rights of non-

combatants as defined by various treaties that set the rules for armed conflict

(such as the Geneva and Hague Conventions). Since the with the rise of terrorist

groups and revolutionary guerrilla movements around the world, such rules have

been discarded.