TERRORISM

Terrorism

Terrorism

The concept of terrorism has a history of being deployed to support political causes. In the late 20th century, anarchists used the term “terrorists” as a positive appellation to distinguish themselves from mere murderers. President Ronald Reagan also implied that terrorists were not uniformly malignant when he declared that “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter” in reference to the Nicaraguan con-tras fighting to remove the Sandinistas from power in Nicaragua. In contrast, in the current political context, terrorism is overwhelmingly deployed by U.S. politicians and seen by U.S. citizens as uniformly pernicious and, thus, as something worth fighting. Some ...