by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright November 2015
Terrorists, and their historical equivalents with different names, have scared people throughout history. The image of what a terrorist is evolves to match the "worry circumstances" of the contemporary culture and time. This evolution is interesting because it is a mix of instinctive thinking and current events.
What these images have in common (the instinctive thinking side) is:
o these people are sneaky and betraying the community in very dangerous ways
o they are not alone, they have lots of sneaky dangerous friends who haven't been uncovered yet
o they usually have sneaky, powerful friends who live outside the community and are also working to bring harm to the community
As a result, the community agrees that these are people whom the community must take great effort to discover and stop. The result of this thinking is the community agrees to trample on civil liberties and contemporary rule of law, and conduct witch hunting in various ways. (Note that there are community members of the time objecting to this, but they are overruled.)
Another other interesting thing is watching for which scary events which set the standard for what the arch-terrorist looks like for the next decade, or so. The ISIS atrocities of the 2010's created the image of the black mask wearing, black flag waving, enemy-beheading iconoclast. The 9-11 event of the 2000's created the image of the suicidal and clever Mid-east Islamic radical. A previous standard-setting event was the Haymarket Riots of 1886. This created the image of the bomb-throwing immigrant Anarchist radical.
Here are some examples of creating arch-terrorist images. I will be presenting these is the following format.
Time frame -- location -- incident -- organization -- image
Underlying stress and circumstance
2010's -- US and Europe -- video beheadings -- ISIS -- black mask, black flag, desert location, beheader
In the 2010's ISIS displaced Al-Qaeda as the high-profile Islamic terrorist group. They turned out to be much more photogenic and social media adroit. Because of their skills in these areas, my prediction is that by 2020 they will displace Nazis as the generic photogenic movie villains for Hollywood action movies.
The underlying stress was world-wide slow economic recovery from the 2007 crash and years of chaotic violence in the Iraq-Syria region of the Middle East.
2000's -- US -- 9-11 (2001) -- Al-Qaeda -- jet planes and skyscrapers
Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden burst on the terrorism scene with what is likely to be the most memorable terrorist act of the 21st century. Jet planes, skyscrapers and a cabal of suicide pilots is a hard act to follow. They have been memorable and responsible for some really big changes in US politics and policy of the 2000's.
The underlying stress was the US recovering from the Dot-com Crash on the economic side. Bush was trying to build a "soft landing" from that. In the Middle East there was still a lot of unresolved issues swirling around the futures of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
1890's -- Northern US -- Haymarket (1886) -- Anarchist -- bomb throwing immigrant
This was the Gilded Age, a time of rapid industrial growth and immigration in the Northern US. There was also a lot of heated disputing about how workers should be treated and how wealth should be spread around. A hot spot that had just erupted was at the McCormick Steelworks in Chicago. A memorable bomb got thrown at one of the demonstrations relating to that and the rest became history.
One interesting element here is that Anarchists prior to this incident were just another socialist-style group with some what-are-now-called Libertarian ideals mixed in. Following this incident they became the Al-Qaeda of their day.
1800's -- US -- French Revolution (1789) -- prompted Alien and Sedition acts
The newly-formed United States had a lot of issues to face, there was a lot of stress. Some of that stress was caused by the tension between England and France as the French went through their French Revolution. The arch-terrorist for this era became French Revolutionists bringing dangerous ideas to the US. The answer President John Adams came up with in 1798 was the Alien and Sedition Acts. The good news about this one is that American thinking quickly moved on to other issues and these acts were allowed to expire.
1930's -- Germany -- Reichstag Fire (1933) -- Communists -- infiltrating government
The Nazis and Communists were bitter rivals in Germany. Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor just a month earlier. A newly arrived immigrant Communist was found at the scene and admitted to starting the fire. This terrorist act let Hitler and the Nazis sweep the Communists out of the legislature which let him consolidate his power so he became a de facto dictator.
This happened during the desperate times of the Great Depression. These times were even scarier in Germany than they were in the US.
1950's -- US -- Rosenburgs and nuclear secrets (1953) -- Communist with pro-Russian sympathies -- infiltrating government
During the early 1940's the US and the Russians were allies fighting Nazi Germany. When the war ended in 1945 there was much uncertainty about what would come next in the US-Russia relation. Both were World War II winners, but they had such dramatic social differences!
Over the next few years they transformed, first into rivals, then into bitter rivals. And with the revelations about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg selling atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets, an arch-terrorist came on stage -- the closet Communist. This became what is now called the McCarthy Era after Senator Joe McCarthy made lots of points by declaring the government was infested with secret Communists.
Terrorist are a part of history. But what they are described as changes with time and location. Their description depends on what the community's local and current worries are.
The root emotion that terrorism plays off of is the worry about betrayal, and it resonates most strongly with betrayal that depends on sneaky activities.
Terroist acts vary enormously in their memorability and influence on the community. But if they happen in the right place and at the right time, they can become the catalyst for a big social change in the community. That social change will be responding to worry, which means it will include restricting civil rights in various ways, and conducting witch hunts of various sorts. Both of these activities can get quite memorable and quite expensive. The US response to the 9-11 Disaster being a textbook example of this happening.
-- The End --