Twentieth-Century Cases

The key role of historic memory in the success of Type II terror acts becomes immediately clear when we consider the particular part of modern historic memory that refers to actual traumatic happenings which disrupted the familiar environment of human life.  The chief example that comes to mind is of course the release over Hiroshima and Nagasaki of artificial, man-made suns that rained down heat, gamma rays, and radioactive fallout — an injection of a new, essentially cosmological object into the ecology of human experience.  Secretary of War  Stimson accurately observed to the members of his scientific panel advising on the use of the bomb on 31 May 1945, prior to its first test over Alamogordo, that they should consider the atomic bomb not "as a new weapon merely but as creating a revolutionary change in the relation of man to the universe."[4]  More than even most of the scientists present, Stimson seems to have realized early that the weapon was outside the normal frame of causality, not only of the intended victims but also of the victors.

The use of the atomic bomb is a classic case of successful traumatization by Type II terrorism.  But the historic memory contains other examples that share some of the same parameters, even if not the same scale or duration of effect.  Thus in some quarters, the impact of the injection in October 1957 of a new artificial moon, Sputnik, was near-hysteria, the more so as the object had been made in a country thought to be threatening, and (as far as the public was concerned) was made in secret.  A more relevant case was that of the replacement of natural air by a deadly gas produced by the Germans in World War I.  The Allies were initially terrified, but they soon absorbed the weapon into their own war plans.  Thus, as noted by Gilbert F. Wittemore, Jr., by March of 1918 the United States research group had developed a simple and efficient process for the production of the large supplies of mustard gas that had been ordered by the United States military in September 1917.  "By the time of the armistice, the Edgewood plant was producing 30 tons of mustard gas a day.  Chemists later pointed with pride to this accomplishment, noting that it was not their fault that these vast quantities of gas had not been fired in American shells.  The gas had been ready and waiting: the army had failed to provide the artillery shells.[5]

The case, and the condition of non-use in Western society since, illustrate a maxim that state-controlled terror weapons lead to proliferation, just as do other weapons, but that there may then ensue a balance of terror — that peculiar state in which each side exhibits the behavior of both terrorizer and victim.

The historic consciousness of our time contains also another case that future historians may put on the list of developments that uniquely characterize the twentieth century.  I refer to the discovery by the civilized world, at the end of World War II, of the existence of the Nazi camps for genocide — or, more properly, of final proof that bore out the evidence long available to those who cared to know.  The process by which these concentration camps were used systematically to destroy specially selected and identified groups of the population under German domination was calculated to serve a triple purpose.

Not only were the camps designed to eliminate people.  They also were factories to "harvest" them methodically, rapidly, and on a huge scale.  Nothing in the exhibit area of Auschwitz has been more shattering than the carefully sorted, huge piles of eye glasses, shaving brushes, trusses, children's wear, human hair, and so forth, the last of such shipments to the German homeland, abandoned when the camp was liberated.  (It is a small part of the evidence of the involvement of large numbers of people in the transport and other aspects of the undertaking.)

But it is generally overlooked that a third purpose of the camps was precisely that they would act also as a terror weapon.  Certainly, at least the segment of the population that was the target of these camps was sufficiently aware of their existence, and consequently was traumatized by the threat to such an extent that the vast operation in which millions were killed could be carried on with considerable efficiency in terms of manpower needs.[6] The existence of the Gulag in the Soviet Union was more generally known within the country; the disappearance of millions forced into those camps also had a paralyzing effect on the psyche of most in the population at large — although with splendid exceptions.

The use of systematic state terror in what became the Soviet Union has been most authoritatively described by Richard Pipes in his book, The Russian Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).  Chapter 18, "The Red Terror," traces its early stages to Lenin's writings, as in an essay of 1908, where he first used the concept of "extermination" of class enemies.  Once in power, the Bolshevik dictatorship made terror part of its state policy.  Lenin's Commissar of Justice wrote in 1920:  "Terror is a system...a legalized plan of the regime for the purpose of mass intimidation, mass compulsion, mass extermination," all directed to segments of the state's own population.  Eventually, the Soviet security police were given a free hand to end the lives of millions of citizens that it regarded as "enemies."  Concentration camps, called by that name, had been first ordered to be set up by Trotzky and Lenin in August 1918, as part of the "Red Terror."  By 1923, there were 315 such camps.  In the Stalinist U.S.S.R., they grew ever larger and more numerous.

This is not the place to pursue this particular legacy of that tragic century to world history.  But in the absence of any agreements, incentives, or other forces that would tend to discourage continued development and use of terror of both types, we may expect the tacit taboo on this particular Type II terror weapon to be overcome also.  The campaigns of "ethnic cleansing," e.g., in Serbia and  Rwanda, came close to this model in recent years.

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