REFLECTIONS
ON MODERN TERRORISM [*]
By Gerald Holton
There
has been an historic transition in which Type I terrorism
and Type II terrorism are being combined. Type I terrorism consists of acts by individuals or small groups
that aim to impose terror on other individuals and groups,
and through them indirectly on their governments.
Type II terrorism is the imposition by a government
on groups of local or foreign populations. The new type of
terrorism — Type III — is carried out by a substantially
larger group of individuals, is aimed directly at a national
population, and has all the components for success. The article deals with how this new terrorism,
at very little psychic cost on the perpetrators, disrupts
personal and historic memory through large-scale catastrophe
organized for that purpose. Type III terrorism is made easier
by the ready availability of high-level technology. Target nations will not have open to them
the conventional responses, and will have to devise new, preventive
measures.
Most
20th-century discussions on terrorism seem to me
to have missed the point that, short of an unlikely act of
international will, we have passed irreversibly through an
historic transition.
Terrorism
is a method of coercion of a population or its leadership
or both, through fear or traumatization.
What usually has caught our attention was an act that
attempts to impose terror, by individuals or small groups,
on other individuals or groups, and through them indirectly
on their governments.
I will call this Type I terrorism.
The record shows that such acts, from the bombing of
buildings to skyjacking, in virtually every case have had
three characteristics. They have been carried out with conventional, i.e., paleotechnic
means. They become
part of a long and numbing series of such acts (one study
reported 2400 attacks by foreign terrorists on the U.S. between
1983 and 1998). But above all, while they usually gain
their fundamental aims of attracting worldwide attention for
a time, of perhaps scoring a victory over a rival gang, and
of satisfying a lust for blood by assassinating innocent people
at relatively low risk, they have in most cases been failures
— failures with respect to the long-range objective of
coercing fundamental government policies.
One recalls here the dismissive remark in a letter
of September 1870 from F. Engels to K. Marx: "Terror
is for the most part useless cruelties committed by frightened
people to reassure themselves." The
situation is completely asymmetrical when we turn to Type
II terrorism, namely the imposition of terror by governments
on individuals or on groups of local or foreign populations. Although less frequent than Type I, such
acts have claimed in the 20th century a far larger number
of victims. Above all, they have largely succeeded
in their avowed aim, from Mussolini's bombing of the Abyssinians
and the killing of all men in the town of Lidice in reprisal
for the killing of one man, down to the "Christmas bombing"
of Hanoi in 1972. (There are only a few cases of failure,
e.g., the German Blitz
raids on England, and the coercive acts of French military
groups and colons in Algeria.)
It
is my judgment that the asymmetries are now being dissolved. There will be a progressive fusion of Types I and II terrorism
that began with the process of governments co-opting and arming
terrorist groups for transnational purposes; the legitimization
of terrorism as part of so-called "national liberation"
actions; and, most ominously, the training, arming, and financing
by various countries of networks of international terrorists.
The last of these enables the two previously distinct
types of terrorist agencies — states with potentially
biblical scales of terror, and relatively independent small
groups with limited powers of devastation--to collaborate,
merge, or act, in secret or in more or less open collusion,
in the new, Type III terrorism.
To
understand the potential of this form, one must not stop with
a prognosis of likely technical means. The
new technological capabilities in the present context —
e.g., nuclear and other spectacularly destructive physical
means, or biological and chemical (binary) weapons —
form only one part of the context. Neotechnic means can vastly increase the
scale of damage, and through television can almost instantly
and repeatedly spread the news and imagery of the act; but
by themselves they need not coerce a determined people.
One should be equally concerned with the other components
that are essential to the successful act of terror.
For whether it is carried out by individuals, a group,
a state, or a coalition of these, terror succeeds or fails
on a "stage" that has four components, each of which
is subject, in our time, to the enlargements of opportunity
or scope:
