(X) TERROR AND PROGRESS: A SUMMARY
If terrorism is the use of terror as a political weapon, then, as we have tried to show in this work, world history can be told in terms of terrorism. This is not to say that terrorism determines the course of world history, but only, at most, that terrorism is ubiquitous in history and that it has on occasions meant the difference between political success and failure, not to mention triumph or defeat in warfare. Alexander could not have conquered Asia before having terrorized the Greeks into peaceful coexistence. The Roman and the Carolingian empires are unimaginable without terrorist policies. Jenghiz Kahn and Timur the Lame probably prevailed as often through the terror they inspired than by force of arms. The Spaniards could not subdue the Dutch but the repressive policies of the Duke of Alba were efficacious in Flanders, and during the terrorizing Thirty Years War Catholicism was restored in Bohemia and in the Rhineland. It is a question whether the revolutionary Reign of Terror was as necessary as Robespierre believed but there is no doubt that the French Third Republic was consolidated during the 1871 bloodbath in Paris. Terrorism knows no historical, cultural, or ideological boundaries. It was the same in Assyria as it is in Chechnya. It was as useful to the Mongols as to Europeans. It is as "proletarian" as it is "capitalist". As far back as the chapter on terrorism in Antiquity, we adumbrated that there are three types of terrorism: state terrorism, war terrorism, and outsider or underdog terrorism. Despite the great emphasis today on terrorism against established order, the one given in all of history, and in the history of the 20th century in particular, is state terrorism, which is usually applied by the holders of powers on those who want to resist their power. This may not sound right in a certain American context. Nevertheless, in strict legality or not, whatever open-society contrition has later occurred, constituted authority in the United States has applied terror inside and outside the nation's borders whenever it has been necessary to maintain order, to preserve a status quo, or to survive or win in war. America certainly has not engaged in the sort of massive terrorism that characterized totalitarian states like Germany or the USSR, but this is of little comfort to massacred Native Americans, to the dead victims of racial oppression, to the scapegoats of collective hysterias such as those executed after the Haymarket Riots (to cite an instance), to machine-gunned Korean refugees fleeing communist armies, to Vietnamese villagers in the crossfire between their own fighters and American soldiers, to the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, and so on.

The Assyrians did not invent state terrorism but they made it graphic to broadcast that they would apply it ruthlessly and systematically when necessary. The Romans were far greater terrorists than any other people in Antiquity but they did not present themselves as bringers of terror but as bringers of law and order. Christianity was first the victim of sporadic campaigns of Roman state terrorism and later, as the state religion of the former barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire in the west, it became the wielder of terror for the submission of unruly pagans. There is in general the Assyrian and the Roman traditions. A version of the latter is Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick". The Assyrian tradition re-surfaces in the Mongols and in the Turks. Nomadism is not incompatible with features of statehood such as territoriality, a political center, and strategic expansionism. Nomadism is unstable and nomadic states and empires are as quick to founder as they are difficult to put together, but while they last, precisely because of their fragility, they indulge liberally in terrorist practices. Even though he was not a nomad, Timur waged savage nomadic horse warfare and, like the Assyrians and the Mongols, he believed in the efficacy of fulsome demonstrations of savagery. With respect to sedentary societies, the Mongols and the Turks were, like all nomads, outsiders and outsiders are usually underdogs. This may sound antimonic considering the vast area of Eurasia on which Mongol terror fell, but the Mongol empire was a variable quantity, it disgregated quickly, and at its most powerful, in China, it lasted less than a century. And that was the height of nomadic power, after which it was gradually reduced to limited areas of the planet where nomads again became underdogs. The Arabs were underdogs until religion inspired them to become conquerors and founders of states. The Roman law-and-order tradition eventually infused the European use of state terrorism. But Frederick Hohenstauffen did not bother to dissimulate the smoldering stumps at Celano; Charles I was not acting out of character by hanging Spanish burghers, nor the Duke of Alba by executing Count Egmont in Brussels for advocating conciliation with the Dutch; during the Thirty Years War the areas of Germany that were worst hit by terrorism were those where Catholic and Protestants lived in such proximity that they could hardly conceal their barbarities from each other, even if, doubtfully, they had wanted to; revolutionary France made terror a legal institution and conservative France, inflamed with indignation and fury, chastised Communards with summary executions of a type that matched Jenghiz' or Timur's atrocities.
Most of the previous cullings of state terrorism involve civil or inter-state warfare. To what extent, if at all, is war terrorism different from state terrorism? We argued that World War I was a kind of historical climax of war terrorism because of the huge escalation of casualties in relation to all previous wars and because of the well-known cases of soldiers on both side refusing combat. French troops mutinied during the imbecilic Chemin des Dames offensive-even if it had succeeded all it would have gained the French would have been a spectacular view of mud-and if Germany was stabbed in the back at the end of World War I it was not by Jews or by politicians but by her own soldiers and sailors in the rearguard. When Germany went to war again, it did so with all terrorizing means at its disposal to prevent the sort of stalemate it could not overcome before. The famous Stuka dive-bomber was designed heavy and with a banshee-like wail. Its terror-inspiring features worked in Poland and in Russia but over Britain they made it a sitting duck. The British were past masters at terrorism. Ireland was periodically subjected to terror. Spaniards rued the day their galleons smashed against the rocky shore of the western world. In India, the Sepoy rebellion ended in terrorizing executions and civil unrest was later scotched at Amritsar with volleys more deadly than those on Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg. During World War II, the British would no more have tolerated sabotage than the Germans did guerrillas. A further and greater instance of war terrorism as distinct from combat on the ground were the atomic bombings that finally broke the Japanese will to fight, which constituted an intensification of terrorizing air attacks such as, memorably, those on Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. Were these strictly actions of war or sheer, gloves-off terrorism in war?
Clausewitz devised his theory of war to make some sense of the constant European recourse to arms to settle issues that could not be resolved by diplomatic or other means. It did not do much to explain, for example, Prussian king Frederick the Great's gratuitous grab of Silesia from Habsburg Austria. To start with, it is not even clear what Clausewitz meant by "policy", which implies some constructive even necessary social end, and land-grabbing for its own sake, or for preposterous reasons such as Nazis alleged, is only policy in an oblique even arbitrary manner. Like Hegel, Clausewitz tended to see the European-type state as the greatest accomplishment of civilization. Terrorism was at the opposite extreme of what the state stood for. To a striking degree, 19th century European international wars fit the Clausewitz norm of war as an extension of policy. Yet aggression without sufficient justification was always more the rule than the exception in the history of European warfare. And no one could make the carnage during World War I and its meager, unstable results conform to any rational pattern whatsoever. World War II was if anything about the state gone berserk. The history of the first half of the 20th century demonstrated that war had nothing to do with rational objectives but was a nightmarish extension of state terrorism. Unarguably, it was Nazi Germany that provoked World War II. Japan struck at Pearl Harbor. These were cases of unmitigated aggression. But guilt is not so easily apportioned in the countless wars that Europe engaged in over the previous centuries. No doubt slavery was intolerable in democratic America, but slaves were only emancipated, not enfranchised, and politics, as Lincoln saw clearly, was more important than the institution over which the Civil War ostensibly fought. Armed conflict is one of the fibers of history. The 20th century world wars were so devastating as to seem qualitatively different from their predecessors. But there is no way it can be argued they were anomalies and not part of one continuous historical process. They showed not only that the European-type state was fundamentally terrorist but that it was impossible to distinguish war from terrorism. That the frightening "Third World War" never took place tends to make the post-World War II epoch seem less war-prone than previous periods in world history, but in fact there were more and deadlier conflicts in the context of the Cold War than there had been during the half century before World War I and the inter-war period put together. The post-Cold War so far is shaping out as even more murderous that the previous decades.
We first perceived outsider or underdog terrorism in the assaults of barbarians on Near Eastern civilizations and in the rebellion of slaves against Roman authority. The Gutians were underdogs and remained outsiders to Mesopotamian civilization. The rebellious gladiators too failed to gain freedom from their Roman masters. But the Kassites were successful underdogs. They couldn't have lasted as long as they did in Babylon without a liberal use of state terrorism. Underdog terrorism can also be characterized as a struggle between the holders of power and those who want to take it from them. Islam surged to empire from desert sheikhdoms against large empires already established in the Middle East, namely the Roman Empire in the east and the Persian Sasanid Empire. That this religious onslaught was at first barbaric, hence terroristic, can be gathered from a story told in Arab sources. At the time of the Muslim conquest, Alexandria still possessed a large ancient collection of Greek works that were housed in the temple of Serapis, a syncretic Egyptian god with a large following in the Roman Empire. The Arab commander who took Alexandria consulted Umar, the second Caliph in the Sunni tradition, as to what he was to do with the scrolls and codexes that had fallen into his hands and the answer he got was: "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed". According to Lionel Casson, it took six months for them to be consumed as fuel for furnaces. The Crusades are another example of outsiders bringing terrorism to established societies. The Christian invasion of the Levant began not long after the Fatimid conquest of Egypt and the Seljuk invasion of the Middle East, but these outsiders-the Fatimids were originally from the Maghreb and the Seljuks were Turks from the central Asian steppes-had been Muslims long before they conquered lands that had been Islamic for centuries. Culturally, the Crusaders were outsiders even if they were invading territories where sovereignties were either in decadence or still in the process of stabilization. They did not represent any state in particular. They came from kingdoms and semi-kingdoms in western Europe and tried to create states of their own in the Levant. To do this the Crusaders were openly terroristic. The problem for them was that they came up against peoples, especially the Turks, for whom terrorism and war were synonymous. The principal Crusader kingdom, Jerusalem, did not last a century. The other Crusader states were equally short-lived. Antioch, the most durable of all, existed towards the end only at the sufferance of neighboring Seljuk emirates. The Crusaders represented underdog terrorism, yet they created states of their own, however briefly, which subsisted mostly through terrorist means.
During the Taiping rebellion in 19th-century China, the Qing dynasty was not overthrown but the rebels held Nanjing for eleven years. The Taiping were suppressed with western help at an estimated cost of millions of lives. They were underdogs who for a time possessed means to wage state terrorism in the full sense of the term. During the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks controlled Moscow and central Russia firmly but in the rest of the former Russian Empire their enemies formed or attempted to form states with claims on institutional legitimacy and constitutions and policies of their own. These aborted states would have received recognition from the western powers if they had shown some military competence or had consolidated a base of popular support. They did not and consumed themselves, especially in southern Russia, in pyres of senseless terrorism. In respect to the Bolshevik state terrorist control of the heartland of Russia, the counterrevolutionary Russian states at Omsk and Krasnodar were briefly both state and underdog terrorists that failed. By the time of the Russian Revolution outsider terrorism had largely disappeared and underdog terrorism appeared to be obsolescent. The Russian provisional government was a continuation of Tsarist war policy. When it was overthrown the Bolsheviks already held the reins of power. Underdog and outsider terrorism became impotent and obsolescent as the efficacy of war-making increased with the advance of techniques. States' acquired the means to police their territories more efficiently and nomadic hordes that once roamed the immense spaces of Central Asia were gradually reduced like wild animals to preserves, tolerated but not allowed to be self-assertive, somewhat like the Aral Sea was reduced to a fraction of its former area, possibly heading towards total desiccation. Yet if we had to single out the most successful example of underdog terrorism, it would have to be modern Israel. If ever there were underdogs in history, it had to be the Jewish minority in Palestine before World War II. For Jabotinsky, the Jews would only obtain statehood if they expelled the Arabs and kept Palestine for themselves. Those who followed his reasoning carried it to its rational conclusion: that Jews had to use terrorist methods against terror-wielding British authority and against Arabs. More moderate Jews pressed their claim through the state-like Jewish Agency. They knew that the British, themselves engaged in a war of survival against Germany, were not going to tolerate insurrection in Palestine and would stifle it as surely and harshly as Germans did resistance in occupied Europe. But once Israel obtained international recognition, the moderates of the Jewish Agency, fighting in various fronts against Arab invaders, did not hesitate to use force to deport entire Arab communities, as they did in the crucial Tel Aviv perimeter. From paradigmatic underdog terrorists, the Jews of Israel transitted without as much as a blink to state terrorism. Yitzhak Rabin, who as minister of defense crushed the First Intifada by unbridling the Israeli army, was assassinated when he became an advocate of negotiations with the PLO. His murder jolted Israeli society, but when voters had to choose between pro-negotiations Peres and the hard-liner Netanyahu they chose the latter. As a general historical rule, made patent in Israel, when it succeeds, underdog terrorism is a precursor of state terrorism. Hence, when it is effective, it is state or war terrorism, themselves hard to keep separate, struggling to come out into the open. The difficulty in stabilizing these categories is that terrorism is founded on terror and terror is a basic human experience. Terror is existential and intimate and terrorism is effective because it is based on the experience of individuals.
You wake up in a cold-sweat funk. What you have just experienced is so frightening you have to put on a light and look at the ceiling until the fear subsides. This is terror. The idea of being buried alive is another frightener. Edgar Alan Poe, the master of the literature of fear, exploited it in one his most effective short stories, on a par with the one about the inmates taking over an insane asylum. Both motifs have been re-cycled many times in films. Yet nightmares are quite common events. Dreams are a form of awareness, but they always give way to awake awareness. The terror in nightmares soon fades and of course you haven't been hurt physically. It was terror anyway for a brief moment in its purest distillation. As to horror fiction, we indulge in it for transient thrills, but these are real too. When certain pre-Inca pyramidal temples were discovered in the Moche cultural area on the Peruvian coast, skeletal remains were found that presented evidence of violent death and were arranged in macabre ways that stumped their discoverers. An archaeologist who described the findings admitted that even with his scientific frame of mind they gave him the creeps. Cannibalism instills in us a primal fear, but it is not something the ordinary human being is likely to come across today anywhere in the world. Dog-eating vaguely reminds us of it, but it is a cultural trait that those who indulge in it defend as naturally as Jews and Muslims do their aversion to pork. Hominids and their human descendants must have lived in a state of permanent terror. In an existential sense, terror is as much with us as it was with the humans that first ventured out to people the earth from a cave on the coast of South Africa over 100,000 years ago, in a simplified scenario based on widely held views. Yet there is no question here of state terrorism or any of its varieties.
Abel Sanchez, the eponymous central character in a novel by the Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno, committed suicide out of fear of dying. Such a motivation is not as trivial as it sounds. Young Werther killed himself for no apparent cause and Goethe based his character on that of the talented English poet Thomas Chatterton, who took his own life at the age of seventeen because his poems were rejected as derivative. Unamuno's character died because he lived in terror of his own mortality. According to James Boswell, Samuel Johnson once said that he would go through the tortures of hell rather than give up the ghost if he had the slightest chance of keeping it. Gerard David caught the essence of terrorism in his painting of the judgement of Cambyses. Johnson presumably would have preferred some healthy flaying to dying. Flaying after all need not be fatal. Michelangelo painted himself into his Final Judgement mural in the apse of the Sistine Chapel in the skin of St. Bartholomew, who, according to the Golden Legend, had been martyred by flaying. Michelango identified with the saint because, in his absorption in his work, he went for weeks without removing his shoes and when he went to take them off some skin came off with them. Pain, in sum, can be terrorizing, but ultimately it is death that underlies terror. Such being the case, then terror and terrorism have no end. You can wage war on terror for as long as you want with all the means that technology puts at your disposal, but the war on terror will never be won, just as so-called closure can never be achieved because death lives on in a chasm within life that no investigation into the causes of fatal accidents and no tit-for-tat application of capital punishment can ever fill. Of more relevance to contemporary events, the futility of total war on terror lies in that, if Unamuno's "argument" on suicide has some validity, and if real-life Chatterton could overcome, for purely personal, almost frivolous reasons, the desire to live, then it is perfectly understandable why those who can expect death from a war on terror will not be deterred from using terrorism because of the fear of something that is not only inevitable but imminent. Terror, as we have seen time and again, tends to beget terror. Only the unremitting, day-after-day, minute-by-minute application of terror can ensure some control over terrorism, but there isn't in history a society that has managed such a feat or such a crime. This is not to say that state terrorism is not efficacious. It was efficacious in Antiquity, it became more efficacious as science advanced and technologies improved, and it is today more efficacious than it has ever been. America used the most sophisticated means of war terrorism to defeat the terrorist menace coming out of Afghan caves. The Taliban and al Qaida did not have a chance. Israel has broken two Intifadas, the second one climaxing in a macabre paroxysm of suicide bombings, and still maybe not fully under control. But the potential for al Qaida, or the same thing by another name, and for more Palestinian uprisings has not been extirpated by state and war terrorism. History is not about abstract ethical concepts but about inequalities. It is by assuming a hard-nosed attitude such as this, that it may be possible to augur some success for state terrorism, or to be less blunt, for the capacity of the strong to exert state authority to the fullest or to wage war with all the sophistication that modern technology affords. But death being the great equalizer, it is not likely that underdog terrorism will cease being inevitably part of history as a means of political action.
There is one sense in which state-inflicted terror can be said to be the ultimate historical arbiter. Progress is real. Science and technology go on despite terror. In fact, it seems on occasions as if progress and terror went hand in hand. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg claimed after World War II that he had sabotaged his country's effort to produce an atomic bomb. His mentor, the Danish physicist Nils Bohr, did not see it that way. He became convinced that Heisenberg was set on building a bomb for the government that had started the war and whose leader all but explicitly said that he wanted to kill people. Luckily, Heisenberg never made it. But Wernher von Braun certainly contributed in full consciousness of what he was doing to last-ditch Nazi terrorist warfare with his design and construction of the tactically effective but strategically useless V1 cruise missiles and V2 rocket bombs. After the war, von Braun surrendered to the Americans and told them he could do for them what he did for the Nazis. In part due to von Braun, the United States eventually outstripped Russia in space technology, not to mention making possible the MAD nuclear stalemate.
On the whole, there is a world-wide consensus about the desirability of democracy and economic development. These have nothing to do with "social justice". At best, history can be construed, in a vague way, as a process for fulfilling fundamental aspirations of mankind, like the right to work and making a good living or having access to judicial redress. For the generality of mankind, these objectives today are far, very far, in the future. But they are there and the general movement of history would seem to be headed in that direction. More than by personalities (the heroic-figure theory of history) or by crucial events (the for-lack-of-a-nail school), history is shaped by "forces". This concept only seems vague and abstract because it is not possible to express it with the clarity and in terms of the predictabilities of natural-history "laws", a concept which is itself a transposition from controversial statements about the best way to run societies. But what can be more impulsive than hunger or the fear of being persecuted? When asked to define a happy man, an Asian ruler once answered: "I don't know him and he doesn't know me". Through various means and initiatives, individual aspirations become the forces that direct the course of events. Historical leaders are always, in one way or another, the expression of those forces. States are part of the process and since states are terroristic, then terrorism is, if not a fundamental historical force, at least a crucial instrument within the historical process. This is so incontrovertible that instead of diminishing with the progress of science and technology, hence with what should have been the advance of civilization in a wide sense as distinct from the spread of Western Civilization, terrorism scaled summits that Timur himself, for centuries the model of wanton terrorism, couldn't even have imagined. Progress in sum is inseparable from terrorism, which may be the reason why progress is still a pariah concept when history is debated. But the facts are there: if science and technology are progressive, then history, so pervaded by them, is progressive, and if the history of terrorism has a claim on a important place in world history, then progress is partially a result of terror and terrorism.
Strong and weak have been valid categories since life began. In world history as the history of the relations between cultures, for a long time strong and weak were relative, but after Western Civilization outstripped all other cultures in economic development, knowledge, and military power, history definitively became about the strong dominating the weak, which often were also the ignorant and the backward. Since mankind survived Nazism and nuclear holocaust and since scientific and technological progress are unmistakable, arguably history has been on the whole for the better. Unfortunately, history is also about immense inequalities and violent upheavals. The USSR came into being because Russian society was so unequal and so unfair that it could not stand the stress that war at the cutting edge of progress put on it. The inequalities that strong Europe had exploited to build huge colonial empires were not sufficient after World War II to maintain those empires. But they were real enough to keep the world divided between rich and poor nations, in part of course because the rich were strong but also because the poor were weak in crucial respects, one of them being that they refused, and generally are still refusing, to recognize in what respects they are deficient. When the capitalist West was master of the world, it had a monopoly on war-making capability. This changed when communism for a time, a relatively brief time, actually became the credible military rival of capitalism. When the strong tried to outdo themselves, as the Americans did in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan, the weak, if the means were right and they were resolute enough, could actually defeat the strong. The twilight of Marxism in its great bastions, tropic-quick and disorienting as in Russia and glacier-slow as in China, has made the world less rather than more stable. The real threat of nuclear war might have diminished (and this could be an illusion) but the fear is still there. The Middle East is a potential Chernobyl, and 9/11, despite Bush's bravado and the "war on terror", has not made America stronger but paranoid and vulnerable, a condition that is not made any better by America's strong, pro-Israeli stance. Terror defeats terror, it is true, but terror also breeds terror. Despite the Israeli repression of the Second Intifada, all the signs point to more instability and more terror. Terror is ubiquitous. It is consubstantial with history, but history also tells us that there can be more terror and less terror. "War on terror" could be a working proposition, but for this it must be tempered by the knowledge that it can only succeed as limited war towards certain specific ends and only if it recognizes, however indirectly, that even these limited ends will only be attained if supplemented by means other than those that involve war or state terrorism. Without these provisos state terrorism and war terrorism will only go on producing more terror. Terrorism has never stood in the way of progress, but unequal progress and the might of states will never by themselves put an end to terrorism. In brief, terror engenders terror. It is part of the historical process and possibly even one of the forces that makes progress inevitable. As terror begets terror, something other than terror is needed to break the vicious circle of terror.