History of terrorism
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The history of terrorism involves significant individuals, entities, and incidents associated with terrorism. Scholars often agree that terrorism is a disputed term, and very few of those who are labeled terrorists describe themselves as such; it is common for opponents in a violent conflict to describe the opposing side as terrorists or as practicing terrorism.[1]
Depending on how broadly the term is defined, the roots and practice of terrorism can be traced at least to the 1st-century AD Sicarii Zealots, though some dispute whether the group, which assassinated collaborators with Roman rule in the province of Judea, were in fact terrorists. The first use in English of the term 'terrorism' occurred during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, when the Jacobins, who ruled the revolutionary state, employed violence, including mass executions by guillotine, to compel obedience to the state and intimidate state enemies.[2] The association of the term only with state violence and intimidation lasted until the mid-19th century, when it began to be associated with non-governmental groups. Anarchism, often in league with rising nationalism and anti-monarchism, was the most prominent ideology linked with terrorism. Near the end of the 19th century, anarchist groups or individuals committed assassinations of a Russian Tsar and a U.S. president.
In the 20th century, terrorism continued to be associated with a vast array of anarchist, socialist, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them engaged in 'third world' independence struggles. Some scholars also labeled as terrorist the systematic internal violence and intimidation practiced by states such as the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.[3][4]
Definition
[edit]
There is no scholarly consensus over the definition of the term "terrorism."[5][6] This in part derives from the fact that the term is politically and emotionally charged, "a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally applied to one's enemies and opponents."[7]
The term "terrorist" is believed to have originated during the Reign of Terror (September 5, 1793 – July 28, 1794) in France. It was a period of eleven months during the French Revolution when the ruling Jacobins employed violence, including mass executions by guillotine, in order to intimidate the regime's enemies and compel obedience to the state.[8] The Jacobins, most famously Robespierre, sometimes referred to themselves as "terrorists".[2] Some modern scholars, however, do not consider the Reign of Terror a form of terrorism, in part because it was carried out by the French state.[9][10] French historian Sophie Wahnich distinguishes between the revolutionary terror of the French Revolution and the terrorists of the September 11 attacks:
Revolutionary terror is not terrorism. To make a moral equivalence between the Revolution's year II and September 2001 is historical and philosophical nonsense ... The violence exercised on 11 September 2001 aimed neither at equality nor liberty. Nor did the preventive war announced by the president of the United States.[11][12]
The French Revolution also influenced conceptions of non-state terrorism in the 19th century. Although the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars ended with the victory of autocracies opposed to France and with the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, European conservative rulers feared revolutionaries who would overthrow their governments or carry out similar forms of psychological violence. The late 18th and early 19th centuries did see the growth of secret societies dedicated to beginning similar liberal revolutions to the French Revolution, causing conservative autocratic governments to become paranoid of radical terrorist conspiracies.[13]
Early terrorism
[edit]Scholars disagree about whether the roots of terrorism date back to the 1st century and the Sicarii Zealots, to the 11th century and the Hashshashin, to the 19th century and the Fenian Brotherhood and Narodnaya Volya, or other eras.[14][15] The Sicarii and the Hashshashin are described below, while the Fenian Brotherhood and Narodnaya Volya are discussed in a later section. John Calvin's rule of Geneva has been described as a reign of terror.[16][17][18] Other historical events sometimes associated with terrorism include the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to destroy the English Parliament in 1605.[19]
During the 1st century AD, the Jewish Zealots in Judaea Province rebelled against the Roman Empire, killing prominent collaborators such as the Sadducees running the Second Temple and the Hasmonean dynasty.[20][14][21][22] In 6 AD, according to contemporary historian Josephus, Judas of Galilee formed a small and more extreme offshoot of the Zealots, the Sicarii ("dagger men").[23] Their efforts were also directed against Jewish "collaborators," including temple priests, Sadducees, Herodians, and other wealthy elites.[24] According to Josephus, the Sicarii would hide short daggers under their cloaks, mingle with crowds at large festivals, murder their victims, and then disappear into the panicked crowds. Their most successful assassination was of the High Priest of Israel Jonathan.[23]
The first group of people whose members were called terrorists in the Islamic world were the Kharijites, who declared that any Muslim, regardless of lineage or ethnicity, was eligible to serve as caliph as long as they were morally upright, and that Muslims had a duty to rebel against and overthrow sinful caliphs. They consequently rose up in revolt against both the legitimate rulers and the Muslim rulers who did not uphold Islamic law. The Kharijites were the first sect in Islamic history to practice takfir, allowing them to use it as a defence for killing people they deemed to be heretics; they believed that heretics were apostates who were worthy of punishment.[25] The sect bears similarity with later "takfiri" doctrines of Islamism.[26] In the late 11th century, the Hashshashin (a.k.a. the Assassins) arose, an offshoot of the Isma'ili sect of Shia Muslims.[27][28] Led by Hassan-i Sabbah and opposed to Fatimid and Seljuq rule, the Hashshashin militia seized Alamut and other fortress strongholds across Persia.[29] They briefly seized power in Isfahan before the populace revolted against their brutal rule.[30] Hashshashin forces were too small to challenge enemies militarily, so they assassinated city governors and military commanders in order to create alliances with militarily powerful neighbors. For example, they killed Janah al-Dawla, ruler of Homs, to please Ridwan of Aleppo, and assassinated Mawdud, Seljuk emir of Mosul, as a favor to the regent of Damascus.[31] The Hashshashin also carried out assassinations as retribution.[32] Under some definitions of terrorism, such assassinations do not qualify as terrorism, since killing a political leader does not intimidate political enemies or inspire revolt.[14][23][33] (see also List of assassinations by the Assassins)
The Sons of Liberty was a clandestine group that was formed in Boston and New York City in the 1770s. It had a political agenda of independence of Britain's American colonies. The groups engaged in several acts that could be considered terroristic and used the deeds for propaganda purposes.[34]
Gunpowder Plot
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After Queen Elizabeth I restored the Church of England as the state church after years of persecution of Protestants under her sister Mary I, Pope Pius V excommunicated her and called on English Catholics to depose her. His successor Sixtus V and King Philip II of Spain sponsored numerous plots against her, which continued after she was succeeded by her cousin James VI and I.[35]
On November 5, 1605, a group of conspirators led by Robert Catesby attempted to destroy the English Parliament on its State Opening by King James I. They planned in secret to detonate a large quantity of gunpowder placed beneath the Palace of Westminster. The gunpowder was procured and placed by Guy Fawkes. The group intended to enact a coup by killing King James I and the members of both houses of Parliament. The conspirators planned to start a rebellion in the English Midlands,[35] make one of the king's children a puppet monarch, and then restore the Catholic faith to England.
The conspirator leased a coal cellar beneath the House of Lords and began stockpiling gunpowder in 1604. As well as its primary targets, it would have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Londoners – the most devastating act of terrorism in Britain's history, plunging the nation into a religious war. English spymasters uncovered the plot and caught Guy Fawkes with the gunpowder beneath Parliament. The other conspirators fled to Holbeach in Staffordshire. A shoot out on November 8 with authorities led to the deaths of Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy and the brothers Christopher and John Wright. The rest were captured. Fawkes and seven others were tried and executed in January 1606.[36] The planned attack has become known as the Gunpowder Plot, and is commemorated in Britain every November 5, with fireworks displays and large bonfires where effigies of Guy Fawkes and the Pope are often burned. Comparisons are often drawn between the gunpowder plot and modern religious terrorism, such as the attacks in the US by Islamic terrorists on 9/11 2001.[37][38]
Emergence of modern terrorism
[edit]Terrorism was associated with state terror and the Reign of Terror in France,[39] until the mid-19th century when the term also began to be associated with non-governmental groups.[40] Early non-governmental terrorist groups include the nationalist Carbonari who sought to unite the Italian Peninsula under a liberal democratic government and the Luddites in Great Britain who sought to resist the Industrial Revolution by attacking mechanized textile plants. The term terrorism became increasingly used for acts of political violence from the 1840s onwards.[41] Anarchism, often in league with rising nationalism, was the most prominent ideology linked with terrorism.[42] Attacks by various anarchist groups led to the assassination of a Russian Tsar and a U.S. President.[43]
In the 19th century, powerful, stable, and affordable explosives were developed, global integration reached unprecedented levels and often radical political movements became widely influential.[40][44] The use of dynamite, in particular, inspired anarchists and was central to their strategic thinking.[45]
Ireland
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One of the earliest groups to utilize modern terrorist techniques was arguably the Fenian Brotherhood and its offshoot the Irish Republican Brotherhood.[46] They were both founded in 1858 as revolutionary, militant nationalist and Catholic groups, both in Ireland and amongst the émigré community in the United States.[47][48]
After centuries of continued British rule in Ireland, and being influenced most recently from the devastating effects of the 1840s Great Famine, these revolutionary fraternal organisations were founded with the aim of establishing an independent republic in Ireland, and began carrying out frequent acts of violence in metropolitan Britain to achieve their aims through intimidation.[49]
In 1867, members of the movement's leadership were arrested and convicted for organizing an armed uprising. While being transferred to prison, the police van in which they were being transported was intercepted and a police sergeant was shot in the rescue. A bolder rescue attempt of another Irish radical incarcerated in Clerkenwell Prison was made in the same year: an explosion to demolish the prison wall killed 12 people and caused many injuries. The bombing enraged the British public, causing a panic over the Fenian threat.
Although the Irish Republican Brotherhood condemned the Clerkenwell Outrage as a "dreadful and deplorable event", the organisation returned to bombings in Britain in 1881 to 1885, with the Fenian dynamite campaign, beginning one of the first modern terror campaigns.[50] Instead of earlier forms of terrorism based on political assassination, this campaign used modern, timed explosives with the express aim of sowing fear in the very heart of metropolitan Britain, in order to achieve political gains.[51] (Prime minister William Ewart Gladstone was partly influenced to disestablish the Anglican Church in Ireland as a gesture by the Clerkenwell bombing.) The campaign also took advantage of the greater global integration of the times, and the bombing was largely funded and organised by the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States.
The first police unit to combat terrorism was established in 1883 by the Metropolitan Police, initially as a small section of the Criminal Investigation Department. It was known as the Special Irish Branch, and was trained in counter terrorism techniques to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The unit's name was changed to Special Branch as the unit's remit steadily widened over the years.[52]
Russia
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From the 1860s onwards dissident elements of the Russian Empire's intelligentsia became increasingly open to the idea of using political violence and terrorism to overthrow the Tsarist autocracy of the Romanov dynasty. The Narodniks called for a violent revolution to redistribute land to the peasant communes. Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? proved influential among the Narodniks, and his character Rakhmetov became a role model for Russian dissidents who resorted to terrorism.[53]
The Narodniks drifted to anarchism or Marxism after the peasants failed to support the ideology.[53] The anarchists developed the concept of "propaganda of the deed" (or "propaganda by the deed," from the French propagande par le fait), advocating physical violence or other provocative public acts against political enemies in order to inspire mass rebellion or revolution. One of the first individuals associated with this concept, the Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacane (1818–1857), wrote in his "Political Testament" (1857) that "ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around." Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), in his "Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis" (1870) stated that "we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda."[54][55] The French anarchist Paul Brousse (1844–1912) popularized the phrase "propaganda of the deed;" in 1877 he cited as examples the 1871 Paris Commune and a workers' demonstration in Bern provocatively using the socialist red flag.[56] By the 1880s, the slogan had begun to be used to refer to bombings, regicides and tyrannicides. Reflecting this new understanding of the term, in 1895 Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta described "propaganda by the deed" (which he opposed the use of) as violent communal insurrections meant to ignite an imminent revolution.[57]
Founded in Russia in 1878, Narodnaya Volya (Народная Воля in Russian; People's Will in English) was a revolutionary anarchist group inspired by Sergei Nechayev and by "propaganda by the deed" theorist Pisacane.[14]=[58] The group developed ideas, such as targeted killing of the "leaders of oppression," that would become the hallmark of subsequent violence by small non-state groups, and they were convinced that the developing technologies of the age—such as the invention of dynamite, which they were the first anarchist group to make widespread use of[59]—enabled them to strike directly and with discrimination.[40] Attempting to spark a popular revolt against Russian Tsardom, the group killed prominent political figures by gun and bomb in Saint Petersburg. They used the trials of captured members such as Vera Zasulich and Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky as propaganda.[60] On March 13, 1881, the group succeeded in assassinating Russia's Tsar Alexander II.[14][58] The assassination, by a bomb that also killed the Tsar's attacker Ignacy Hryniewiecki, failed to spark the expected revolution, and an ensuing crackdown by the new Tsar Alexander III brought the group to an end.[61][62]
Spread to continental Europe
[edit]Individual Europeans also engaged in politically motivated violence. For example, in 1878 the Italian anarchist Giovanni Passannante wounded Umberto I of Italy and Prime Minister Benedetto Cairoli in a knife attack while other anarchists threw bombs at monarchist political rallies. That same year German anarchists Max Hödel and Karl Nobiling attempted to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I, giving Chancellor Otto von Bismarck a pretext to pass the Anti-Socialist Laws banning the Social Democratic Party.[63] Anarchism spread to the United States with working-class European immigrants. Although it ceased to be a truly influential movement after the Haymarket affair in 1886, public fears of it continued to play a role in U.S. politics and weakened the U.S. organized labor movement.[64] In 1893, Auguste Vaillant, a French anarchist, threw a bomb in the French Chamber of Deputies in which one person was injured.[65] In reaction to Vaillant's bombing and other bombings and assassination attempts, the French government restricted freedom of the press by passing a set of laws that became pejoratively known as the lois scélérates ("villainous laws"). In the years 1894 to 1896 anarchists killed President of France Marie Francois Carnot, Prime Minister of Spain Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, and the Empress of Austria-Hungary, Elisabeth of Bavaria.
United States
[edit]Prior to the American Civil War, abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) advocated and practiced armed opposition to slavery, launching several attacks between 1856 and 1859, his most famous attack was launched against the armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Local forces soon recaptured the fort and Brown was tried and executed for treason.[66] A biographer of Brown has written that Brown's purpose was "to force the nation into a new political pattern by creating terror."[67] In 2009, the 150th anniversary of Brown's death, prominent news publications debated over whether or not Brown should be considered a terrorist.[68][69][70]
During the Civil War, pro-Confederate Bushwhackers and pro-Union Jayhawkers in Missouri and Kansas respectively engaged in cross border raids, committed acts of violence against civilians and soldiers, stole goods and burned down farms. The most infamous event occurred in Lawrence, Kansas on August 21, 1863, when Quantrill's Raiders led by William Quantrill ransacked the town and murdered about 190 civilians because of the town's anti-slavery sentiment.[71]
On December 7, 1863, pro-Confederate British subjects from the Maritime Provinces hijacked the American steamer Chesapeake off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, killing a crew member and wounding three others in the ensuing gunfight. The intent of this hijacking was to use the ship as a blockade runner for the Confederacy under the belief that they had an official Confederate letter of marque. The perpetrators had planned to re-coal at Saint John, New Brunswick, and head south to Wilmington, North Carolina.[72] Instead, the captors had difficulties at Saint John; so they sailed further east and re-coaled in Halifax, Nova Scotia. U.S. forces responded to the attack by trying to arrest the captors in Nova Scotian waters. All of the Chesapeake hijackers were able to escape extradition through the assistance of William Johnston Almon, a prominent Nova Scotian and Confederate sympathizer.
On October 19, 1864, Confederate agents operating from Canada raided the border town of St. Albans, Vermont, robbing $208,000 from three banks, holding hostages, killing a civilian and wounding two others, attempting to burn the entire town with Greek fire, then escaping back to Canada.[73] The raiders were then arrested by British authorities under an extradition request from the U.S. government, but were later freed by a Canadian court on the grounds that they were considered combatants rather than criminals.[74][75]
After the Civil War, on December 24, 1865, six Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).[76] The KKK used violence, lynching, murder and acts of intimidation to oppress African Americans in particular, and it created a sensation with its masked forays' dramatic nature.[77][78] Under President Ulysses Grant the federal government suppressed the Klan in the early 1870s, and it disappeared by the mid-1870s.[79]
The Second KKK of the 1920s was an entirely new organization that used the old costumes and keywords. It added cross burning as a ritual. The group's politics were white supremacist, anti-Semitic, racist, anti-Catholic, and nativist.[77] A KKK founder boasted that it was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that it could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days' notice, but as a secret or "invisible" group with no membership rosters, it was difficult to judge the Klan's actual size. It was politically powerful at times, especially in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, Alabama and South Carolina.[80][81]
The Ottoman Empire
[edit]Several nationalist groups used violence against an Ottoman Empire in apparent decline. One was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (in Armenian Dashnaktsuthium, or "The Federation"), an Armenian nationalist revolutionary movement founded in Tiflis (Russian Transcaucasia) in 1890 by Christapor Mikaelian. Many members had been part of Narodnaya Volya or the Hunchakian Revolutionary Party.[82] The group published newsletters, smuggled arms, and hijacked buildings as it sought to bring in European intervention that would force the Ottoman Empire to surrender control of its Armenian territories.[83] On August 24, 1896, 17-year-old Babken Suni led twenty-six members in capturing the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople. The group demanded European intervention in order to stop the Hamidian massacres and the creation of an Armenian state, but backed down on a threat to blow up the bank. An ensuing security crackdown destroyed the group.[84]
Also inspired by Narodnaya Volya, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was a Macedonian nationalist revolutionary movement founded in 1893 by Hristo Tatarchev in the Ottoman-controlled Macedonian territories.[85][86][87] Through assassinations and by provoking uprisings, the group sought to coerce the Ottoman government into creating a Macedonian nation.[88] On July 20, 1903, the group incited the Ilinden uprising in the Ottoman Manastir vilayet. The IMRO declared the town's independence and sent demands to the European Powers that all of Macedonia be freed.[89] The demands were ignored and Ottoman Army troops crushed the 27,000 rebels in the town two months later.[90]
Early 20th century
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