Versus Terrorism ..
Most terrorism experts would probably agree that
terrorism is an ideologically non-specific tactic, used to achieve
political change, and in play since
prehistoric times. It is non-specific (neutral), although not necessarily acceptable, in that it has been used by
militants embracing
most political ideologies – except for pacifism – and by
authoritarian as well as
liberal states such as Great Britain, France and the USA.
Although no universally accepted definition exists, there is agreement about its main elements. Terrorism is the
threat or use of violence, it is
politically or ideologically motivated and the violence is used to communicate a message of political change and
intimidation to individuals or groups beyond its immediate victims. In short, terrorism is best understood as
violence used as a form of
political communication manipulation.
...
Although
modern terrorism followed the emergence of
modern mass politics and
mass media, terrorist violence has probably been used as a political tactic since time immemorial. The
Jewish Zealots and the
Islamic Assassins were ancient terrorists. They used violence to communicate messages of freedom from opposition and resistance to submission.
...
Terrorism’s modern meaning and use to label an intentional political tactic came with the
French Revolution. During The Terror, Robespierre
described it as a virtuous form of violence, to be used by the new revolutionary democratic state against its domestic enemies.
Following this, the labels of terrorism and terrorists were used by
19th century newspapers to describe
intimidation and violence by states against their subjects, such as “
the terrorism practiced by the police” in Russia and the “
oppressive system of military terrorism” in Poland.
Modern terrorism, which implies the
systematic use of violence against the state, rather than by it, emerged in
Europe in the
1870s. The person
generally recognised as the first terrorist was the 26-year-old social revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878 to protest the
Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest....
The new violent political practice was soon institutionalised with the emergence of organised terrorist groups. First came Narodnaya Volya (
The People’s Will), a group of Russian social revolutionaries and self-proclaimed terrorists, who in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II with a dynamite bomb.
--
Britain's first bomb disposal expert: Colonel Vivian Majendie and the original ‘war on terror’.
On the last day of February
1884, the then home secretary Sir William Harcourt rose in the UK parliament to
answer a question about a series of
bomb attacks on two of London’s major railway stations. He read out details of an initial investigation of two bombs, one which had detonated at
Victoria Station and another which had been discovered,
unexploded, at
Charing Cross.
The bombs, which had been deposited in the stations’ left luggage offices, were of a similar design, and resembled the remains of bombs that had detonated, Harcourt said, in
Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere in
London. The unexploded device, discovered by a vigilant ticket clerk at Charing Cross, and the remains of the bomb that had detonated at Victoria were rushed to the Woolwich Arsenal.
--
It is almost impossible to pinpoint the very first act of terrorism carried out within
British territory. The most famous incident in early modern history is probably the
gunpowder plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords. And although he is the best remembered (on November 5), Fawkes did not act alone. He was part of a larger network of 13 conspirators who sought to destroy parliament and trigger a popular uprising.
In the second half of the 19th century, European anarchism introduced the idea of “
propaganda by deed” as a tactic of anti-government resistance. This consisted of the assassination of government officials and bomb attacks in public places such as cafes and theatres.
Although anarchist attacks were actually more common in continental Europe,
England was an important hub for
anarchist thought. The
less restrictive laws of the United Kingdom made it a
haven for radicals fleeing political repression in their own countries.
In the same period, the heavy death toll of the Great Famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1852 prompted calls for Irish home rule and resulted in the formation of networks of radical revolutionaries,
the Fenians.
Although the largest Fenian campaigns were waged in Canada and in Ireland itself, attacks within England included the
bombing of Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867, in which 12 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The result was a severe backlash by British authorities and the public, which undermined the
political reforms that would have made future attacks less likely.
...
Recent acts of spectacular violence, such as the
mail bombs sent by a
tRUMP-supporter to American anti-tRUMP critics, or the mass killings by Canadian
“incel” misogynist Alek Minassian, demonstrate a widespread reluctance among media outlets, politicians and authorities to label some acts of ideologically motivated violence as “terrorism”. Such hesitations might give the faulty impression that “terrorism” is reserved purely for anti-Western or Islamist political violence. That is a wrong and dangerous conception.
The first examples of people being labelled “terrorists” were almost exclusively reserved for acts of non-Western terrorism. When
terrorist tactics were used
against governments and civilians in Western Europe or the USA – by Fenians and anarchists or anti-colonial separatists in British India, for example – "
terrorism" was generally
not mentioned. Instead, such violence was more often described in terms of "
outrage" or
"assassination".
This is despite the fact that these groups used the same
terrorist tactics and
technologies as the Russian terrorists. The new terminology was apparently reserved for the Russian revolutionary cause. It was
only after WW1 that these other forms of
terrorism in and against Western governments started to more generally be
labelled as "terrorism".
