To see this point clearly, one must realize that the methods of terror of Type II, from the earliest historic period to our own, involved not merely inflicting horrid casualties, but succeeded when they produced a drastic modification of the traditional perception of society and nature within which human life had previously been thinkable.  It is through this modification that the victim is disoriented, robbed of integrity, and made manipulable.  That is the chief lesson of one of the primal examples of traumatization, namely, chapter 11 of Exodus: Not until the tenth plague, one that disrupted the whole familial and social fabric of Ancient Egypt, was the level of terror high enough to coerce the pharaoh's decision.  Another example is that of the Mayas, otherwise successful and valiant warriors, who are said to have been put to flight by the very appearance of Spaniards on horseback, who were thus representing a psychologically intolerable fusion of incommensurables.[1] The modern terrorist may well try to determine consciously where the most effective place is in the personal and historic memory of his or her intended victims, in order to insert the crowbar there.  Conversely, a group and its leadership that fears victimization by terrorists might examine both the weak spots in its society that could at least partially be protected, and also what may be the hate-producing elements in the potential attackers' worldview and grievances that might be ameliorated.

Precisely because this subject is so rarely considered in such discussion, a digression will be useful to elaborate on, and to distinguish between, personal and historic memory.  The former, at least on the surface, is characterized by the remnants of specific and individual joys and traumata.  On a deeper level, to which long, thin roots penetrate from the surface, there are the universalized aspects that form the subject of the search for lawfulness in modern psychological studies.

Historic memory, partly of factual and partly of mythic events, can be regarded as a subset located within deep personal memory.  A good part of its contents are the possibilities of moving, ominous, foreboding, uncanny, magical happenings that are expressed in creation myths and apocalyptic myths, and in the stories that transform common personal events such as birth, danger, escape, and death — the realm of storytellers about the events in ancient kingdoms, exploits of armies and leaders, or great natural catastrophes (such as the eighteenth-century earthquake that devastated Lisbon and so helped change the Western optimism of the century).  While these stories and myths may seem ethnocentric in a specific population, there are important invariants here too.  Thus, the Motive-Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson [2] contains a classification of narrative elements through an enormous range of cultures and time periods; but it is significant that the antithetical couple, "world calamities" and "establishment of natural order," is among the very first "mythological motives" listed.

The potential of using this psychological ground as part of a stage for political action has been known for some time.  Thus, in Réflexions sur la violence (1908), a manual long influential in terrorist movements, Georges Sorel counseled the revolutionaries of his time to take advantage of these "social myths," as he termed them.  He noted that

"...the framing of a future...may be very effective....This happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party, or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, man can reform the desires, passions, and mental activity."[3]

He argued that it made no sense to discuss how far such a myth can be taken literally in detail as future history:  "It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest insofar as they bring out the main idea."  He proceeded to show that this conception can be used both in its positive and its negative sense.  That is, not only can a social myth stabilize a social order, but its destruction and replacement by another myth can be, and indeed has to be, the condition for the radical transformation of a society.  This, in his view, was the function of "Proletarian violence" and "plainest brutality."  The aim of this violence is the institution of a counter-myth, in the specific case of interest to him, the myth of "the General Strike...the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised."  His whole essay, far from a call to violence for its own sake, had the grandiose aim to "confront man with a catastrophe" that would signify "absolute revolution."  While one might well doubt the details of Sorel's conceptions, the method of transformation through a large-scale catastrophe organized for the purpose is in our technologically more advanced era an even more powerful conception than it was in Sorel's time.

Another famous manual for using widespread terror in the service of an ideology is of course Leon Trotzky's book Terrorism and Communism (University of Michigan Press, 1961), written within two years of the Bolsheviks' victory in the Russian Revolution.  Thus, in his chapter titled simply "Terrorism," he writes with confidence passages such as these:  "The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the conqueror" (p.56)...."Are we expected to consider them [the measures] 'intolerable'?" (p.57)...."As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the 'sacredness of human life.'" (p.63)

_____

1 Conversely, the Mayas, being well advanced in the study of solar astronomy, are said to have been much less vulnerable than earlier European peoples to the appearance of solar eclipses.