Современный терроризм: фанатизм и оружие массового уничтожения

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Государственное образовательное учреждение

высшего профессионального образования

Кубанский государственный университет

Отделение иностранных языков в профессиональной сфере

Допущена к защите:

Зав. отделением,

д.ф.н., профессор

З.И. Гурьева

Выпускная работа на тему:

«Современный терроризм: фанатизм и оружие массового уничтожения»

«The new terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass destruction»

Выполнила:

студентка

Арустамян Регина Арменовна

Научный руководитель:

Волошина Карина Сергеевна

Краснодар 2013 г

Table of Contents

I. Essay

II. ENGLISH TEXT

Introduction

ZEALOTS AND ASSASSINS

ORIGINS OF TERRORISM

MODERN TERRORISM

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

TERRORISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?

CHECHNYA

III. RUSSIAN TRANSLATION

Пролог

ФАНАТИКИ И УБИЙЦЫ

КОРНИ ТЕРРОРИЗМА

СОВРЕМЕННЫЙ ТЕРРОРИЗМ

ФИЛОСОФЫ МАССОВОГО УНИЧТОЖЕНИЯ

ТЕРРОРИЗМ В ДВАДЦАТОМ СТОЛЕТИИ

КАКОВЫ ПРАВИЛА ВЕДЕНИЯ БОЕВЫХ ДЕЙСТВИЙ?

ЧЕЧНЯ

IV. Linguistic Analysis of the Text

V. Bibliography

IV. Glossary

I. Essay

My graduation paper consists of several chapters from the book “The new terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass destruction” written by one of the foremost experts on terrorism and international strategic affairs Walter Laqueur.

The main reason why I have chosen this book for my translation is that being a student of Management and Psychology Department I am interest in political science. In addition terrorism is actual nowadays. It was very interesting to translate the book I was excited in. During the translation I've found out a lot of amazing facts about terrorism itself, about gangs and organized crime.

The book offers a thorough account of terrorism in all its past and current manifestations. It casts a sober eye to the future, when the inevitable marriage of technology and fanaticism will give us all something new to think about.

The author pays close attention to terrorism issue and and the ways of its interpretation.

Terrorism has been with us for centuries, but it has always been transformed in different forms. Originally it was a form of liberation of the people from tyranny and oppression. But nowadays the term is usually used with a negative connotation and refers to crime, that is not quite true.

While working with the original English text I was keen not only on its content but also the process of the translation itself. While translating the text I found a number of terms. Some of these terms are simple (belligerence - воинственность), others are compound (state-political - государственно-политический) or word-combinations (economic liberalism - экономический либерализм). To achieve the complete correspondence I had to use the following translation techniques as calque (extreme left - ультралевые,), transliteration and transcription (taqfir - такфир, retrospect - ретроспектива).

In the process of translation I employed such lexical transformation techniques as omission and addition. Omission is used when there is the so-called redundant and unnecessary information. Addition is used when a translator needs an explanation of meaning by using extra words.

I also resorted to some contextual replacements especially modulation to get the correct translation according to the original text.

The main difficulty for me was to translate overcrowded sentences, which are so typical of the specialized literature. To achieve the complete correspondence of the translation of such sentences to the norms of the Russian literary language I had to use a splitting technique in translating, dividing one English sentence into several Russian ones. But there were also sentences which didn't finish their idea. In these cases I used merging technique - joining two or more small sentences into one.

In the process of translation I acquired an experience of a translator. To my mind the detailed analysis of translating techniques is an efficient method for getting a thorough mastery of good professional English. This experience will be useful in my career. It also lets me estimate my level of the command of English. As any other language, English demands permanent training. Furthermore, such training as writing the graduate paper is very helpful for me. I am sure that knowledge of English is a strong competitive advantage in the modern world and being not knowledgable it gives you no chance to find a good job.

II. ENGLISH TEXT

Introduction

Four hundred twelve men, women, and children were hacked to death by terrorists on the night of December 29, 1997, in three isolated villages in Algeria's Elizane region. Four hundred perished when a group of the Shah's opponents burned a cinema in Abadan during the last phase of the monarchy in Iran. There were 328 victims when an Air India aircraft was exploded by Sikh terrorists in 1985, and 278 were killed in the Lockerbie disaster in Scotland in 1988 which was commissioned by Libya's Colonel Khadafi and carried out by terrorists. Two hundred forty-one U.S. marines lost their lives when their barracks were attacked by suicide bombers in Beirut in 1983, 171 were killed when Libyan emissaries put a bomb on a French UTA plane in 1985. The largest toll in human life on American soil was paid when 169 men, women, and children died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Terrorism has been with us for centuries, and it has always attracted inordinate attention because of its dramatic character and its sudden, often wholly unexpected, occurrence. It has been a tragedy for the victims, but seen in historical perspective it seldom has been more than a nuisance.

Even the bloodiest terrorist incidents in the past, such as those just recounted, affected only a relatively few people. This is no longer true today, and may be even less so in the future. Yesterday's nuisance has become one of the gravest dangers facing mankind. For the first time in history, weapons of enormous destructive power are both readily acquired and harder to track. In this new age, even the cost of hundreds of lives may appear small in retrospect. Science and technology have made enormous progress, but human nature, alas, has not changed. There is as much fanaticism and madness as there ever was, and there are now very powerful weapons of mass destruction available to the terrorist. A hundred years ago a leading interpreter of international law, T. J. Lawrence, wrote that attempts made to ``prevent the use of instruments that cause destruction on a large scale are doomed to failure. Man has always improved his weaponry, and always will as long as he has need for them.'' What Lawrence said then about warfare is a fortiori true with regard to terrorism.

In the near future it will be technologically possible to kill thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, not to mention the toll the panic that is likely to ensue may take. In brief, there has been a radical transformation, if not a revolution, in the character of terrorism, a fact we are still reluctant to accept. Even though Algerian terrorists never made a secret of their operations, there was disbelief in Europe that such atrocities as the Algerians committed were possible, and many thought some mysterious force was responsible for the mass slaughter.

There is public reluctance to accept the possibility that a few individuals could make use of the tremendous destructive power developed recently. It is the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus all over again: Prometheus tricked Zeus into giving him fire. But Zeus got his revenge; he sent to Epimetheus, Prometheus' less clever brother, Pandora's box, which he opened despite instructions not to do so under any circumstances .Out fluttered a host of calamities which have afflicted humankind ever since.

I do not suggest that most terrorist groups will use weapons of mass destruction in the near future; most of them probably will not. It is also quite possible that access to and the use of these weapons will not take a year or two but ten or fifteen. The technical difficulties standing in the way of effective use of the arms of mass destruction are still considerable. But the danger is so great, the consequences so incalculable, that even the occurrence of a few such attacks may have devastating consequences.

The traditional, ``nuisance'' terrorism will continue. But fanaticism inspired by all kinds of religious-sectarian-nationalist convictions is now taking on a millenarian and apocalyptic tone. We are confronting the emergence of new kinds of terrorist violence, some based on ecological and quasireligious concerns, others basically criminal in character, and still others mixtures of these and other influences. We also are witnessing the rise of small sectarian groups that lack clear political or social agendas other than destroying civilization, and in some cases humankind. There was once a relatively clear dividing line between terrorists and guerrillas, between political terrorists and criminal gangs, and between genuine homegrown terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. Today these lines have become blurred, and the situation is even more confused than it used to be.

While the traditional terrorist movements historically consisted of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of members, the new terrorist groups can be very small, consisting of a few people or sometimes even one individual. The smaller the group, the more radical it is likely to be, the more divorced from rational thought, and the more difficult to detect. A sizable terrorist movement can be infiltrated by informers, but it is nearly impossible to infiltrate a small, closely knit group, perhaps composed of members of the same family or clan, let alone a single human being.

Some believe it is unlikely that extremists or fanatics possess the technological know-how and the resources to make use of weapons of mass destruction. But the technological skill, as will be shown, is not that complex, and the resources needed, not that rare or expensive. It is also possible that rogue governments, which may themselves not use these weapons for fear of retaliation, can readily supply the raw materials or the finished product to terrorists either by political design or for commercial gain.

Some believe that the horrific consequences of using weapons of mass destruction will deter even fanatics from using them. But this underrates the element of blind aggression, of rage, of suicidal impulses, of sheer madness, which unfortunately has always been part of human nature. Emperor Caligula reportedly said that he wished the Roman people had but one neck, so that it could be easily cut. Caligula was not a unique case, merely the best known of a kind that will be examined in this book.

Can terrorism be defined? And is it not possible that in certain circumstances terrorism might be a legitimate form of resistance against tyranny? More than a hundred definitions have been offered (including a few of my own) for the phenomenon, and over the past three decades, a great deal of thought has been invested in the latter question. One of the better definitions of terrorism was provided by the U.S. Department of Defense, which in 1990 described terrorism as ``the unlawful use of, or threatened use, of force or violence against individuals or property to coerce and intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives.'' But even this working definition has not found acceptance among those studying the subject. Perhaps the only characteristic generally agreed upon is that terrorism always involves violence or the threat of violence. Students of terrorism have received advice from philosophers and theologians, psychologists and even economists, on how to gain deeper insights into the subject. Some have suggested that we include every possible kind of violence and motivation in our analysis, from rape to income tax. Still others have insisted that unless Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot be considered terrorists, and feudalism, imperialism, repression, and slavery looked at as causes, our analysis of terrorism is bound to be shallow.

Why is it so difficult to find a generally accepted definition? Nietzsche provided part of the clue when he wrote that only things which have no history can be defined; terrorism, needless to say, has had a very long history. Furthermore, there has not been a single form of terrorism, but many, often with few traits in common. What was true of one variety was not necessarily true of another. Today there are more varieties than existed thirty years ago, and many are so different from those of the past and from each other that the term terrorism no longer fits some of them. In the future, new terms will probably be found for the new varieties of terrorism.

What of the legitimacy of terrorism in certain conditions? Terrorism seldom appeared in brutal dictatorships such as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, for the simple reason that repression in these regimes made it impossible for the terrorists to organize. Even in less effective dictatorships, such as Franco's Spain, there was little terrorism; it reared its head only after the regime was replaced by a democratic one. There have been some exceptions to this rule, but not many. But this, too, is no guide to the future: brutal, totalitarian dictatorships could prevent terrorism in Germany and Russia, but it is doubtful that even totalitarianism could cope with the chaos that might come to exist in some of the megacities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the twenty-first century.

But if one could justify or at least find mitigating circumstances for certain terrorist acts in the past, how could anyone defend the kind of genocidal and indiscriminate murder that has taken place, for instance, in Algeria and, above all, justify the use of weapons of mass destruction? Even if the terrorists' goal is not without merit, it is increasingly likely that the amount of suffering and the number of victims they cause will be wholly out of proportion. When they meet at a tavern, novelist Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha that the happiness of all mankind is not worth the tears of a tortured child. But these days terrorists are willing to kill a great many children and their aim is by no means the happiness of mankind. Can there be any kind of ``just terrorism'' under these circumstances?

In an earlier work, I warned against overrating the danger of terrorism, which was neither a new phenomenon nor as politically effective as we are often led to believe. I argued that more often than not the political effect of terrorism was in inverse ratio to the publicity it received. This contrasts with the work of guerrillas, who in the twentieth century have been more successful. But guerrilla warfare has now become quite rare, and given the few current exceptions of Afghanistan and Chechnya, it has also become less effective. While I decried the idea that terrorism was steadily growing into a global threat, I also wrote that it could become one as the result of technological developments.

The ready availability of weapons of mass destruction has now come to pass, and much of what has been thought about terrorism, including some of our most basic assumptions, must be reconsidered. The character of terrorism is changing, any restraints that existed are disappearing, and, above all, the threat to human life has become infinitely greater than it was in the past.

Terrorism is violence, but not every form of violence is terrorism. It is vitally important to recognize that terrorism, although difficult to define precisely, as this brief historywill show, is not a synonym for civil war, banditry, or guerrilla warfare.

The term guerrilla often has a positive connotation in our language, whereas terrorism almost always has a negative meaning. British and French news media will take a dim view of those engaging in terrorist operations in London and Paris, and will not hesitate to call the perpetrators ``terrorists.'' But they are more reluctant to use such harsh terms with regard to those throwing bombs in distant countries, preferring more neutral terms such as ``gunmen,'' ``militants,'' Islamic or otherwise, or indeed ``urban guerrilla.'' In fact, the term urban guerrilla is a contradiction in terms. The strategy of guerrilla warfare is to liberate territory, to establish counterinstitutions and eventually a regular army, and this is possible in jungles, mountains, or other sparsely inhabited zones. The classic case of guerrilla warfare is China in the 1930s and 1940s; others, such as Vietnam's defeat of the French colonials and Castro's struggle in Cuba, are roughly similar. It is virtually impossible to establish free zones in a city, and for this reason the inaccurate and misleading term urban guerrilla is usually politically motivated or based on a simple misunderstanding of the difference between the guerrilla and the terrorist. What makes the situation even more complicated is the fact that quite often guerrillas engage in terrorist acts both in the countryside and in urban centers. Algeria in the 1990s is a dramatic example.

There are other misunderstandings concerning the motives and the character of terrorism. For a long time there has been resistance in some circles to the use of the term to apply to small groups of people who engage in futile violence against the political establishment or certain sections of society. It was argued that the term should be reserved for states. It is perfectly true that tyrannies have caused infinitely more harm in history than terrorists, but it is hardly a relevant argument; with equal justice one could claim that it is not worthwhile to look for a cure for AIDS because this disease kills fewer people than cancer or heart disease, or that teaching French should be discontinued because there are twenty times as many Chinese as French people in the world.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when most terrorism was vaguely left wing in inspiration, arguments were made that terrorism was a response to injustice. Hence, if there were more political, social, and economic justice, terrorism would more or less automatically vanish. Seen in this light, terrorists were fanatical believers in justice driven to despair by intolerable conditions. But in the 1980s and '90s, when most terrorism in Europe and America came from the extreme right and the victims were foreigners, national minorities, or arbitrarily chosen, those who had previously shown understanding or even approval of terrorism no longer used these arguments. They could no longer possibly explain, let alone justify, murder with reference to political, social, or economic injustice.

At the other extreme, it has been proclaimed that all and every form of terrorism is morally wrong. But such a total condemnation of violence is hardly tenable in the light of history. Catholic theologians in the Middle Ages found arguments in favor of killing tyrants, and more recently, the attempted assassination of Hitler and the successful killing of Heydrich Hitler's man in Prague, among many other examples, can hardly be considered morally reprehensible. Terrorism might be the only feasible means of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship, the last resort of free men and women facing intolerable persecution. In such conditions, terrorism could be a moral imperative rather than a crime--the killing of a Hitler or a Stalin earlier on in his career would have saved the lives of millions of people.

The trouble with terrorism is not that it has always been indefensible but that it has been chosen more often than not as the prima ratio of self-appointed saviors of freedom and justice, of fanatics and madmen, not as the ultima ratio of rebels against real tyranny.

ZEALOTS AND ASSASSINS

Political murder appears in the earliest annals of mankind, including the Bible. The stories of Judith and Holofernes, of Jael and Sisara the Old Testament heroes and villains, have provided inspiration to painters as well as to theologians and moral philosophers for ages. Seneca wrote that no sacrifice was as pleasing to the gods as the blood of a tyrant, and Cicero notes that tyrants always attracted a violent end. Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who killed the tyrant Hipparchus, were executed, but a statue was erected in their honor soon after. The civic virtues of Brutus were praised by his fellow Romans, but history--and Shakespeare--were of two minds about whether the murderer of Caesar was an honorable man.

The murder of oppressive rulers continued throughout history. It played an important role in the history of the Roman Empire. The emperors Caligula and Domitian were assassinated, as were Comodius and Elagabal, sometimes by their families, sometimes by their praetorian guards, and sometimes by their enemies (probably a few others were poisoned). Similar events can be found in the history of Byzantium.

The assassination of individuals has its origins in the prehistory of modern terrorism, but it is of course not quite the same. Historical terrorism almost always involves more than a single assassin and the carrying out of more than one operation. An exception might be the assassination of King Henri IV by a fanatic who believed that he had carried out a mission imposed on him by God; it might have been part of a conspiracy, but this we shall never know, because his interrogators were not very eager to find out. Another famous example from the same century was certainly part of an intrigue: the murder of Wallenstein, the famous seventeenth century warlord. Historically, the favorite murder weapon has been the dagger, even though there were a few exceptions; William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was shot in Holland in 1584, when rifles and pistols were still new devices.

ORIGINS OF TERRORISM

There were also organized groups committed to systematic terrorism early in recorded human history. From Josephus Flavius's writings, a great deal is known about the sicari, an extreme Jewish faction, who were active after the Roman occupation of Palestine (they give us the word ``zealot''). They were also involved in the siege of and the collective suicide at Masada. These patriots (or ultrapatriots, as they would be called in a later age) attacked their enemies, mainly other Jews, by daylight, very often during the celebrations of holidays, using a short dagger (sica) hidden under their coats. It was reported that they killed one high priest, burned the house of another, and torched the archives and the palace of the Herodian dynasts. There seems to have been a social element as well: their attacks were also directed against moneylenders. Whereas the zealots engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Romans outside the cities, they apparently concentrated their terrorist activities in Jerusalem. When the revolt of the year 66 took place, the sicari were actively involved; one of them was the commander of the fortress Masada. Josephus called them brigands of a new type, and he considered them mainly responsible for the national catastrophe of the year 70, when the second Temple was destroyed and the Jewish state ceased to exist.

Another early example of terrorists is the Order of the Assassins in the eleventh century, an offshoot of the Ismailis, a Muslim sect. Hassan I Sabah, the founder of the order, was born in Qom, the Shiite center in northern Persia. Sabah adopted an extreme form of Ismaili doctrine that called for the seizure of several mountain fortresses; the first such fortress, Alamut, was seized in 1090. Years later the Assassins decided to transfer their activities from remote mountain regions to the main urban centers. Their first urban victim was the chief minister of the Sultan of Baghdad, Nazim alMulq, a Sunnite by religious persuasion and therefore an enemy. During the years that followed, Assassins were active in Persia, Syria, and Palestine, killing a great number of enemies, mainly Sunnis but also Christians, including Count Raymond II of Tripoli in Syria and Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, who ruled the kingdom of Jerusalem. There was a great deal of mystery about this movement and its master, owing to both the secrecy of its actions and the dissimulation used. Monferrat, for instance, was killed by a small group of emissaries who had disguised themselves as monks.

Seen in retrospect, the impact of the Assassins was small--they did not make many converts outside their mountain fortress, nor did they produce any significant changes in Muslim thought or practice. Alamut was occupied by Mongol invaders around 1270, but the Assassins had ceased to be a major force well before then. (Their main contribution was perhaps originating the strategy of the terrorist disguised--taqfir, or deception-- as a devout emissary but in fact on a suicide mission, in exchange for which he was guaranteed the joys of paradise.)

Despite the considerable violence in Europe during the Middle Ages and, even worse, during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which monarchs as well as religious leaders were killed, there were no sustained terrorist campaigns during this time.

In cultures such as China and India secret societies have flourished from time immemorial. Many of these societies practiced violence and had their ``enforcers.'' Their motivation was usually religious more than political, even though there was a pronounced element of xenophobia in both cases, such as the attacks against ``foreign devils'' culminating in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In India, the motivation of the thuggee (from which we get the word ``thug''), who strangled their victims, was apparently to make an act of sacrifice to the goddess Kali.

The Chinese gangs of three or four hundred years ago had their own subculture, which practiced alternative medicine and meditation coupled with belief in all kinds of magic formulas. But they were not ascetic millenarians, as the Assassins are believed to have been, and they had more in common with the Mafia than with modern political terrorism.

MODERN TERRORISM

The nineteenth century, a time of great national tension and social ferment, witnessed the emergence of both modern--what I will call ``traditional''-- terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare appeared first in the framework of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain and Russia, then continued in various parts of Asia and Africa, and reached its high tide after the Second World War with the disintegration of the European empires. Terrorism as we know it grew out of the secret societies of Italian and Irish patriots, but it also manifested itself in most Balkan countries, in Turkey and Egypt, and of course among the extreme Anarchists, who believed in the strategy of propaganda by deed. Last but not least were the Russian terrorists, who prior to the First World War were by far the most active and successful. Terrorism was widely discussed among the European far left, not because the use of violence as a political statement was a monopoly of the left but because the right was the political establishment, and prior to World War I the left was the agent of change, trying to over throw the party in power. However, most leaders of the left rejected terrorism for both philosophical and practical reasons. They favored collective action, such as strikes, demonstrations, perhaps even insurgency, but neither Marx nor the anti-Marxists of the left believed in the ``philosophy of the bomb.'' They gave political support to the Irish patriots and the Russian revolutionaries without necessarily embracing their tactics.

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

The two main exceptions to this aversion to terrorism were Karl Heinzen and Johann Most, German radicalswho pioneered the philosophy of using weapons of mass destruction and a more or less systematic doctrine of terrorism. Both believed that murder was a political necessity. Both left their native country and migrated to the United States, and both were theoreticians of terrorism--but, ironically, not practitioners of the activities they recommended in their writings.

Heinzen, a radical democrat, blamed the revolutionaries of 1848 for not having shown enough resolution and ruthlessness. The key to revolution, as he saw it, was in improved technology. He anticipated weapons of mass destruction such as rockets, poison gases, and land mines, that one day would destroy whole cities with 100,000 inhabitants, and he advocated prizes for research in fields such as the poisoning of food.Heinzen was firmly convinced that the cause of freedom, in which he fervently believed, would not prevail without the use of poison and explosives. But neither in Louisville, Kentucky, nor in Boston, where he later lived and is now buried, did he practice what he preached. The Sage of Roxbury (as he was called in radical circles in later years) became a staunch fighter for women's rights and one of the extreme spokesmen of abolitionism; he was a collaborator of William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, and Wendell Philips and a supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He attacked Marx, perhaps prophetically, since he believed communism would lead only to a new form of slavery. In a communist America, he wrote, he would not be permitted to travel from Boston to New York, to make a speech in favor of communism, without having official permission to do so. On his grave, in a cemetery in the Boston suburb of Forest Hill, there are two inscriptions, one in German to the effect that ``freedom inspired my spirit, truth rejuvenated my heart,'' and one in English: ``His life work--the elevation of mankind.''

Johann Most belongs to a younger generation. Having been a radical social democrat in his native country, he came to America in the early 1880s. His New York based newspaper, Freiheit, became the most influential Anarchist organ in the world. Most did not believe in patient organizational and propagandistic work; people were always ready for a revolution, he believed, and all that was needed was a small minority to show the lead. The present system was essentially barbaric and could be destroyed only by barbaric means.

For the masses to be free, as Most saw it, the rulers had to be killed. Dynamite and poison, fire and the sword, were much more telling than a thousand revolutionary speeches. Most did not rule out propaganda in principle, but it had to be propaganda by deed, sowing confusion among the rulers and mobilizing the masses.

Most fully appreciated the importance of the media, which he knew could publicize a terrorist action all over the globe. He pioneered the concept of the letter bomb, even though the technical difficulties in producing such bombs were still enormous at the time, and, although then a flight of fancy, he imagined aerial terrorist attacks. He predicted that it would be possible to throw bombs from the air on military parades attended by emperors and tsars. Like Heinzen, Most believed that science would give terrorists a great advantage over their enemies through the invention of new weapons. He also was one of the first to advocate indiscriminate bombing; the terrorist could not afford to be guided by considerations of chivalry against an oppressive and powerful enemy. Bombs had to be put wherever the enemy, defined as ``the upper ten thousand,'' meaning the aristocracy and the very rich, congregated, be it a church or a dance hall.

In later years, beginning about 1890, Most mellowed inasmuch as he favored a dual strategy, putting somewhat greater emphasis on political action and propaganda. Killing enemy leaders was important, but obtaining large sums of money was even more essential; he who could somehow obtain $100 million to be used for agitation and propaganda could do mankind a greater service by doing so than by killing ten monarchs. Terrorist acts per se meant little unless they were carried out at the right time and the right place. He accepted that there had to be a division of labor between a political movement and its terrorist arm. Not every political revolutionary was born to be a terrorist; in fact, the less political leaders knew about terrorism, the better for everyone concerned.

In his younger years Most had worked for a while in an ammunition factory in Jersey City, and, based partly on his own experience with dynamite and partly on a book published by the Austrian General Staff, he wrote a little book on revolutionary warfare. This book became the inspiration for The Anarchist Cookbook, a book that was published by a faction of the American New Left in the 1960s and that remains a standard text in terrorist circles. (There have been similar texts issued by extremists in recent years, but all of them owe a debt of gratitude to Most.)

The New York atmosphere where Most lived in later years softened him. Gradually, his German group with its beer evenings, weekend excursions, and amateur theatricals came to resemble more a club, a Verein, than a terrorist action group. Most was not a practicing terrorist, and though he was a leading figure on the extreme left in the United States, the police did not regard him as a very dangerous man. They by and large left him alone and did not even ban his periodical and books.

The third great nineteenth-century theoretician of terrorism, and the best known by far, was Michael Bakunin. He was active in Russia as well as in Germany (during the revolution of 1848), and in France and Switzerland. In his Principles of Revolution, published in 1869, Bakunin wrote that he and his friends recognized no other action except destruction-- through poison, knife, rope, etc. Their final aim was revolution: evil could be eradicated only by violence; Russian soil could be cleansed only by sword and fire.

Bakunin also published the Revolutionary Catechism, which presented the rules of conduct for terrorists. The terrorist, according to Bakunin, was a lost soul, without interests, belongings, or ties of family or friendship; he was nameless. (The idea of the anonymous terrorist was later taken up by other terrorist movements whose members were known by number rather than by name.) The terrorist had broken with society and its laws and conventions, and he was consumed by one passion: the revolution. Hard on himself, he had to be hard on others. Bakunin also provided tactical advice about infiltrating the old order byway of disguise and dissimulation, the Islamic taqfir in Russian style. The army, the bureaucracy, the world of business, and especially the church and the royal palace were all targets of infiltration.

He recommended that terrorists single out the most capable and intelligent enemies and kill them first, for such assassinations would inspire fear among society and the government. They should pretend to be friendly toward liberals and other well-wishers, even though these were dubious elements, only a few of whom would eventually become useful revolutionaries. A closing reference is made in this catechism to robbers and brigands, the only truly revolutionary element in society; if they would only unite and make common cause with the terrorists, they would become a terrible and invincible power. Seen in historical perspective Bakunin was, among many other things, also the ideological precursor of a tactical alliance between terrorists and crime syndicates, though it is doubtful he would have thought so highly of the revolutionary potential of the Mafia or the Cali drug syndicate.

The catechism stresses time and again the need for total destruction. Institutions, social structures, civilization, and morality are to be destroyed root and branch. Yet, in the last resort, Bakunin, like Heinzen and Most, lacked the stamina and the ruthlessness to carry out his own program. This was left to small groups of Russian terrorists. The duo of Nechaev and Ishutin are an example, but the groups they purported to lead, with grandiloquent names such as ``European Revolutionary Committee,''were largely a figment of their imagination. Although they would occasionally kill one of their own members whom they suspected of treason, they did not cause physical harm to anyone else. Ishutin's largely imaginary terrorist group, called ``Hell,'' was an interesting anticipation of the millennial sects of the next century.

Ironically, when the Russian terrorist movement of the late 1870s emerged, and culminated in the assassination of the tsar, its characteristics were very different from those described by Bakunin. Bakunin is remembered today mainly as one of the godfathers of modern anarchism, as a critic of Marx and Engels, and not as a terrorist.

TERRORISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of the First World War, terrorist attacks took place in many places all over the globe. They were widespread in the Ottoman Empire, then in its last phase of disintegration. Armenian terrorism against the Turks began in the 1890s but ended in disaster with the mass murder of Armenians in World War I. This terrorist tradition among the Armenians continued outside Turkey after the massacres of the First World War and was directed against individual Turkish military leaders. There was a third wave of Armenian terrorism in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Turkish ambassadors to Austria and France were killed.

Another terrorist group was IMRO, the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which for almost three decades engaged not only in terror-ism but in political activity and in the preparation for a mass insurrection. The longevity of sustained Macedonian terrorism can be explained with reference to the support it received (in contrast to the Armenians) from governments protecting them, mainly the Bulgarians. The price the IMRO had to pay was high, because it became for all intents and purposes a tool of the Bulgarian government, and was used mainly against Yugoslavia as well as against domestic enemies. IMRO dependence on Sofia led eventually to internal splits and internecine warfare--more Macedonians were killed by IMRO than were enemies of Macedonian statehood. In the end Macedonia did not gain independence, except in part--and only very recently--after the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Terrorism also occurred in India and Japan. Two prime ministers were killed in Tokyo toward the end of the last century, another in 1932, not to mention a variety of other government ministers. There was even an attempted assassination of the emperor. In India political murders became frequent during the decade prior to World War I, but a Viceroy, Lord Mayo, had been killed as far back as 1872.

The most striking terrorist movement prior to World War I was that of the anarchists, whose deeds all over Europe preoccupied public opinion, police chiefs, psychologists, and writers, including Henry James and Joseph Conrad, for many years. The French anarchists Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, and Emile Henri created an enormous stir, giving the impression of a giant conspiracy, which, in fact, never existed. Ravachol was a bandit who would have robbed and killed even if anarchism had never existed; Vaillant was a bohemian; and Emile Henri was an excited and excitable young man. The three really did not have much in common. But as far as the general public was concerned, anarchists, socialists, and radicals were all birds of a feather. Governments and police chiefs probably knew better, although they saw no reason to correct this mistaken impression.

The panic was not entirely unjustified, inasmuch as there were a great many attempts on the life of leading statesmen between the 1880s and the first decade of the twentieth century. American presidents Garfield and McKinley were among those killed. There were several attempts to assassinate Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany. French president Carnot was killed in 1894; Antonio Canovas, the Spanish prime minister, in 1897; Empress Elizabeth (Zita) of Austria in 1898; and King Umberto of Italy in 1900. If one adds the sizable number of lesser figures and, of course, the Russian rulers and politicians, it should come as no surprise that a large public was fascinated and horrified by the mysterious character of these assassins and their motives. But closer examination of the phenomenon shows that although a few of the attackers were anarchists, they all acted on their own, without the knowledge and support of the groups to which they belonged. Terrorism was regarded as a wholly new phenomenon, and it was conveniently forgotten that political murder had a very long history. (In France, there had been countless attempts to murder Napoleon and Napoleon III in an age well before the rise of anarchism.) However psychologically interesting, this иre des attendants, as it was called, was of no great political consequence. By 1905, the wave of attacks and assassinations had abated, and though there were still a few isolated occurrences in Paris and London (for example the Bonnot gang and Peter the Painter), these were small criminal or semicriminal gangs. The era had come to an end.

During the years of World War I, few terrorist acts took place; one of the exceptions was the assassination of the Austrian chancellor Graf Stuergkh by a leading socialist, a dramatic form of protest against the war and against a not altogether appropriate target. By and large, individual terror seemed pointless at a time when millions of people were being killed on the battlefields. Under those circumstances the death of a politician, however prominent, would hardly attract much attention.

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?

Fanatical violence is found almost everywhere, among Hindus destroying an old mosque and slaughtering Muslims and Sikhs, among Israelis plot-ting to kill Arabs, and in Christian Europe and America. It may even increase in the future, as the result of the emergence of some new sects preaching their violent message or because of social or political upheavals. War has certainly become more brutal in many respects since the eighteenth century. Emmerich de Vattel, one of the fathers of international law, wrote in 1740: ``Let us never forget that our enemies are men.'' We cannot count how often that has been forgotten in the twentieth century.

Restraint in warfare goes back to ancient days. When the Greeks sent emissaries to Troy, Homer notes that they were treated ``in accordance to the laws which govern the intercourse between nations.'' The fighting between the two sides was to stop at nightfall, and the heroes would exchange presents, such as swords. (But it is also true that Diomedes and Odysseus on occasion did attack and kill sleeping enemies.) As for the civilian population, less humane standards prevailed; if they were lucky, they survived as slaves. In the age of chivalry, Orlando or Roland would never fight at night, and he and the Saracen nobleman with whom he had been engaged in a heroic duel would sleep peacefully side by side. There was no fighting during winter in those days, and there were other laws, written and unwritten, such as the obligation to help the shipwrecked, even of the enemy.

In 1139, the Second Lateran Council not only banned certain treacherous weapons such as the crossbow and siege machines but established the Treuga Dei, the Truce of God, according to which whole categories of people were protected: travelers, pilgrims, merchants, and peasants and their animals. Fighting, at least in theory, could take place only on certain days. These rules applied only to conflicts among Christians, and not to wars against infidels. The Saracens and the Turks behaved then, by and large, as the Christians did during the age of chivalry. Curiously, the IRA and some other terrorist groups retained something of this tradition in the age of terrorism by announcing truces over holiday periods. And longer truces were declared by the IRA, the ETA, and other terrorist groups while political negotiations went on with the authorities.

War in Europe in the Middle Ages, except for the wars of religion, were more of a game of kings; this was also true with regard to the Indian subcontinent. Then, during the seventeenth century, an international law of war developed, which was followed around the turn of the last century by various conventions that established rules for land and sea warfare. After the Second World War, the Geneva Conventions (1949) brought these rules up to date. In several subsequent international agreements, biological weapons were outlawed (London, 1972), as were the develop-ment, production, and stockpiling of chemical weapons (Paris, 1992). The use of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons was banned by resolutions of the General Assembly of the United Nations (1961-62).

Other conventions dealt specifically with terrorist attacks. One of these referred to crimes against diplomats, another to hostage taking, and a third to the hijacking of aircraft. These conventions were not universally welcomed. To justify the production and use of nonconventional weapons some radical Arab states, such as Iraq, argued that Europe and North America should not be allowed to keep at least some of their arsenal of unconventional weapons while Third World countries were forbidden to make and use them. The same spokesmen maintained that it was impossible to apply in the Middle East rules that had developed in Europe and America. For while war between two European countries was unthinkable except perhaps in the Balkans, the Middle East was far less stable and to defend themselves governments had to consider all kinds of weapons-- or, in the case of Iraq, to use in an attack. Earlier, in 1973,a United Nations resolution had declared that the struggle of people under colonial or alien domination and racist regimes for their self-determination and independence was in full accordance with the principles of international law. This referred specifically to guerrilla warfare and terrorism, and, because ``alien domination'' and ``racist regime'' could be claimed by almost any ethnic minority in the world, this legitimized a great deal of terrorism all over the globe.

Some of the international conventions listed have been observed, but most of them have not. Why this is the case is of considerable interest but is of little relevance in a discussion of terrorism, because terrorists have not been bound by international law and conventions. Terrorists might argue with some degree of justification that to accept humanist rules would condemn them to impotence, for their only chance to succeed is precisely through breaking established norms. There was a code of behavior among European terrorists before World War I, such as not deliberately killing innocent people. But nationalist terrorists seldom observed this rule, for the victims were likely to belong to the enemy ethnic group and for this reason were unworthy of special consideration. Before the turn of the century, one anarchist terrorist proclaimed that there were no innocents, the first argument justifying the killing of uninvolved bystanders.

The idea of finding an acceptable code of behavior for contemporary terrorists is a contradiction in terms. To rule out the indiscriminate violence of terrorism is to emasculate it, to defang it. Terrorist groups may refrain from using weapons of mass destruction, but only for pragmatic reasons--that is to say, for the same reasons that chemical weapons were not used on the battlefields of World War II.

To what extent will the stigma attached to the use of biological and chemical weapons influence terrorist groups? Various reasons have already been given for the fact that many terrorist groups will probably refrain from using weapons of mass destruction. It is also possible that the more radical elements will be restrained by their own comrades. But it would be unrealistic to build on this hope at a time when many governments are undertaking major efforts to acquire such weapons. Governments have obviously more to fear from using such weapons or even merely threatening to do so than do small, sometimes anonymous groups.

Even if nationalist passions and religious fanaticism should abate, there is not much ground for optimism, because the idea of a holy war that is a sacred duty and permits the use of all weapons and unlimited bloodshed may be put in service of nonreligious interests. The baby killers of Algeria are not pious Muslims, for according to Islam, Muslim women and children should not be killed or mutilated, even in the course of a jihad. In fact, most historians believe that the Islamic wars of conquest in the past were motivated more by secular than religious reasons. The sad truth is that the new terrorists may appear on the fringes of nearly any extremist movement. Even if radicals should become more moderate, there will be for the foreseeable future individuals firmly convinced that, in the words of Goethe's Mephisto, all that comes into being is worthy of destruction. Neither madness nor fanaticism will vanish from the world, even if the current terrorist frenzies give way to more sober trends. All that one can hope for is that the damage will be limited to one country or two and not cause a general conflagration, and that the punishment meted out to transgressors will be so devastating as to deter imitators. But the new terrorists do not seem to be skilled in balancing the liabilities and assets that accrue as consequences of their actions.

There has never been a ``just terrorism'' doctrine analogous to the idea of a ``just war,'' but some of the terrorist campaigns of the past were fought for a just cause, with self-imposed rules of engagement, against oppressors and tyrants. But this notion belongs to a period in which terrorist acts were directed against individuals who were considered personally guilty for one reason or another. Since then terrorism has proceeded from limited to total and indiscriminate warfare, certainly as far as the targets are concerned, quite often the aim is simply to kill or maim as many people as possible. For some terrorist groups, the campaigns have become total with regard to not only the acts but also the objectives: the Islamic radicals active in Algeria or Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East want not reform or a negotiated peace but the overthrow of the system, and those fighting against Israel want its annihilation. (There are exceptions: the objectives of other terrorist groups, such as the IRA and the ETA and the Tamil Tigers, have been more limited.)