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Terrorism

Terrorism. Weapon of desperation used by the weak Rarely achieves its goals except: To encourage repression – IRA 1970s; ‘Al Qaeda’ Assassination (not ‘terror’ as such) Exerts an influence way beyond its reality – political effects Threatened states infringe their own civil liberties

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Terrorism

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  1. Terrorism Weapon of desperation used by the weak Rarely achieves its goals except: • To encourage repression – IRA 1970s; ‘Al Qaeda’ • Assassination (not ‘terror’ as such) Exerts an influence way beyond its reality – political effects • Threatened states infringe their own civil liberties • Tends to strengthen the threatened state (cf Tsarist Russia

  2. Terrorism Deaths Worldwide since 1992

  3. Road Deaths USA – selected years since 1945 Currently 1 death per 10,000 population per year

  4. Road deaths UK since 1925 2010 = 1 death per 25,000 of population

  5. Future Terrorism Hollywood nightmares nuclear weapon (e.g. Disguised as freight container or even ‘suitcase bomb’) chemical agents – anthrax; botulism; sarin gas contaminating water Most of them either need state-level involvement (leads to fear of ‘rogue state’) or threaten own aims and objectives States are the most effective terrorists

  6. WEEK 13 – WAR,VIOLENCE AND MODERNITY (2): CIVIL VIOLENCE Lecture One Civil and Revolutionary Violence 1789-1921 [i.e. not state vs state violence -war]

  7. State violence (‘Legitimate’) • capital punishment • corporal punishment • imprisonment, exile, transportation • police/judges/law • terror

  8. 2. Anti-state or intra-state violence • civil war • revolutionary violence • ‘illegitimate’ • terrorism • racial/ethnic violence • criminal (personal) violence (gangs, bandits, muggers, hooligans, etc.) [struggles of this type often more heated than regular war]

  9. Not pursued in these lectures 3. Violence of nature (‘acts of God’) • wild animals (bears, lions, tigers, snakes, wolves, insects) note also violence against these creatures • climatic hazards (drought, flood, storm) • geological hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes, mud slides, tsunami) Note that exposure to these conditions is socially conditioned as is -

  10. 4. ‘Economic’ violence • famine • death by interest rate / ‘laws’ of competition / economic structures • death by product (tobacco; baby milk; untested drugs) • ‘accidents’ • disease

  11. Revolutionary Violence • French Revolution • Fall of Bastille (parading De Launay’s head: parading head and heart of other victims) • September Massacres (1789) - 2000 prisoners of all categories killed by insurgents • Jacobin Terror (16,600 executions nationwide including c. 2,500 in Paris) (cf. c. 4m. dead in Napoleonic Wars)

  12. Russian Revolution • Civil War (10 million deaths) • - mostly from cholera, typhus, influenza and starvation • - extensive atrocities (looting in Petrograd December 1917; armed grain requisition; peasant retribution) • - social dislocation e.g. urban depopulation (Petrograd 2.5 m. to 750,000); • - White anti-semitism - at least 50,000, perhaps 200,000 deaths

  13. Interpreting Violence 1. Traditional Hostile View • Burke (1790s)- ‘cruel ruffians and assassins reeking with....blood’ • HippolyteTaine (mid 19th.c) ‘vagabonds, beggars, fugitives from justice’‘the mob’ ‘riff-raff’ ‘bandits’ ‘brigands’ • Thomas Carlyle - admires fight for freedom but fears anarchic mass. • [Note French rev in British tradition usually seen in negative light as terror and tyranny- Scarlet Pimpernel, Dickens ‘Tale of Two Cities’, Hornblower- very few sympathetic reflections]

  14. 2. Making Sense of Violence • Albert Soboul (1964) • - strategic significance • of the revolutionary ‘journées’ (days) • Bastille - saves Paris • September massacres fuelled • by fear of invasion • Terror - strengthens war effort -weakens counterrevolution

  15. Edward Thomson (1963)- ‘rescue [lower classes] from the enormous condescension of posterity….Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience’ Moral economy of the masses. [cf Clifford Geertz (1970)- ‘thick description’ in anthropology & Subaltern Studies – revolution in understanding peasants (Vietnam war)] George Rudé (1959)- the crowd Eric Hobsbawn Bandits (1969)(‘social’ banditry or criminality?

  16. 3. Revolutionary Violence as Response to State Violence • [Foucault (1960s - 70s)- state ‘invents’ forms of criminality -esp. over property - and forms of madness in order to lock up and repress the poor and rebellious in prisons and asylums] • Peter Linebaugh The London Hanged (1991)- capital punishment as instrument of class war Rise of capitalism achieved by mass violence of state - Highland clearances: enclosures; repression of resistance (Anti-Combination Acts; transportation) in ‘The Many-Headed Hydra’ (2001) Linebaugh and Rediker include slavery and slave trade - mythologizes joint resistance of victims - slaves; seamen; maroons etc.

  17. Arno Meyer The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (2000) - ‘The Furies of revolution are fuelled primarily by the inevitable and unexceptional resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it’ ‘the hecatombs of the foreign wars of the French and Russian revolutions exceed those of their civil wars, and yet the former are glorified and mythologized, the latter execrated.’

  18. Note also: Return of tendency to stress revolutionary violence Bicentennial of French Rev. Francois Furet & Mona Ozouf Simon Schama - ‘Citizens’ (1989) Russian Rev OrlandoFiges - ‘A People’s Tragedy’ (1996)

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