Terrorism in the 20th Century

The popular concept of terrorism in the earliest years of the 20th century is often confined to acts of suicide bombings or other attacks on civilians perpetrated by enraged religious or political fanatics in the Middle East or in other locales in which these attacks receive extraordinary media coverage. However, terrorism as a political phenomenon is much older and much more diverse than the lead stories on the nightly television news might indicate.

The functional origins of terrorism have been lost to history, but it is known that terrorism was used to achieve either military or political ends as early as the Roman Empire. Terrorism by definition is the use of lethal martial force against civilians in the expectation of tactical or strategic victory. In its tactical use, terrorism achieves a specific short-term objective but in its strategic aspects also functions as a tool of psychological warfare that lingers at the fringes of human memory (especially for the victims) such that others choose not to become victims themselves.

Caleb Carr, in his book The Lessons of Terror, clearly illustrates how Roman soldiers frequently resorted to terrorist tactics in their battle philosophy of “relentless but disciplined ferocity.” When the Romans finally occupied the African city of Carthage, they laid it to waste, eliminated men, women, children, corps, livestock, and places of commerce and habitation, and on these ruins built their own city. In 9 A.D., Roman legions confronted Arminius in the Rhineland province (now Germany) and mercilessly repressed the “barbarian” invaders using terroristic total war wherein no person “despite age, gender or ability” was spared. The Germanic tribes responded in kind but ultimately lost to the numerically superior Romans. But the lesson was learned, the news of the viciousness of this battle spread throughout the empire, and the Romans never again waged any military campaign in northern Europe.

Centuries later, the Vikings used similar tactics in their pillage of Britain and the northern European sea coast. The brutality with which the Vikings pillaged struck resonant fear into nearly every coastal village, and the mere appearance of an approaching Viking ship terrorized many villagers into complete and abject submission. The Christian Crusades of the 11th to 14th centuries, while substantial military campaigns against the Muslims holding Palestine and Christian holy sites, were not above terrorizing civilians to achieve their putatively righteous objectives.

Carr notes that tracing terrorism back to, for example, an obscure source is misleading, in that it suggests that terrorism is outside mainstream political tactics. One such marginal group was the Muslin sect called hashshashin. This group of Shiites smoked hashish and worked themselves into drug-induced frenzies, after which they killed specifically targeted persons. The English word assassin comes from this term. Carr's point is that it distracts from accountability if we consider terrorism as lunatic acts of unstable persons or fanatical groups.

The modern use of the term terrorist seems to come from actions of the radicalized mob in the French Revolution of the late 18th century, whose use of violent ...