Epilogue

Conspiratorial sub-state terrorism petered out in the 1920s and virtually disappeared by the 1930s. One observer wrote in the 1933 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that terrorism had become something ‘irrelevant and unnecessary’.^[950] Indeed, after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, anarchist vio­lence precipitously declined.

But sub-state terrorism itself had not gone away; it had merely gone dormant. It re-emerged in its classic guises in the decades after World War II, at first principally as part of larger insurrectionary strategies by ethno­nationalist groups seeking independence from European imperial powers. In Palestine, two Zionist organisations - Irgun and LEHI - successfully spear­headed the expulsion of the United Kingdom via a two-pronged effort that highlighted the vulnerabilities of modern democracies. First, Irgun and LEHI attacks undermined support among a war-weary British public to the point that by 1947 newspapers back home began to call for British withdrawal from the region. Second, these groups rallied support among the international community, in part by demanding that Western powers live up to their principles of promoting democracy and national self-determination as pro­claimed in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the United Nations Charter of 1945.

Algeria's struggle to free itself from France provides more insight into how terrorism spread in the twentieth century at the paradoxical juncture of state power and individual entitlement, particularly within the context of postwar democracy. In 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) began its war of independence against France, but its efforts to force Paris to the negotiating table via a semi-conventional military campaign in the Algerian hinterland made little headway. In a desperate but calculated bid to force Algerians inside Algeria to choose sides and to garner attention beyond the territory's borders, the FLN launched a terror campaign in the colonial capital of Algiers, attacking civilians, police and symbolic targets. This succeeded in provoking the French military and settlers into disproportionate, reactive violence, which turned the moral strength of liberal democratic France against itself, since constitutional­ism appeared hypocritical in the light of the violence committed by French counterterrorist forces when rooting out enemies who hid amidst the local population. While FLN violence - against both French and Algerians - was gruesome and widespread, the list of French human rights abuses was even more appalling: massive cordon and arrest operations, the wholesale suspen­sion of habeas corpus, the extensive use of torture, and perhaps 3,000 extra­judicial executions.^[951] By i960, the FLN was leading a mass movement that could support a semi-conventional army in the countryside and enormous popular demonstrations in the cities. In response, settlers demanded a hard line in Algeria, which precipitated a constitutional crisis in metropolitan France and to French departure from Algeria in 1962.

The Algerian conflict also produced an influential argument in favour of terroristic violence. The psychiatrist-turned-anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon argued that European colonialism had turned the colonised of Africa, Asia and Latin America into self-loathing peoples who - in a twentieth-century twist on Kropotkin - had become enablers of their own enslavement.

Ethno-national separatists and liberation groups embraced terrorism as the great equaliser, one that they believed could bridge the gulf between vastly powerful modern states and oppressed, marginalised peoples.

In fact, the FLN's strategy became a model for others. In Northern Ireland, Palestine and the Basque region of Spain, independence movements sought to use terrorism as the springboards from which to mount broader cam­paigns with mass participation. While, respectively, the Provisional Irish Republic Army, the various factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Basque Homeland and Liberty (known as ETA from its name in Basque) occasionally gained significant support, none succeeded in mounting widespread insurgencies. Not surprisingly, none of these move­ments achieved full independence, although several gained partial autonomy and increased rights for their peoples. In the case of Malaya in the 1950s, the Malayan Communist Party fought against the local authorities and the British Empire to achieve national independence under the guise of Marxism. But the communist insurgency - which made liberal use of terrorism - failed at least in part because it remained rooted in ethno-nationalist grievances that appealed only to a small ethnically Chinese base.

During the second half of the Cold War, Marxist radicals in Europe, the United States and Latin America used terrorism in an attempt to spur class­based revolutions.

Since the 1980s, terrorism has been most associated with the rise of jihadism and radical Islamism. Their origins stretch back to the formation in Egypt in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to create a parallel, insulated society in which devout Muslims could seek spiritual, social and cultural rejuvenation. Although the movement was mostly peace­ful, occasional government crackdowns provoked violent responses and halting efforts to create a secret organisation capable of exacting revenge.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan opened up a new front and new possibilities. Radical Islamists who had not found success at home travelled to Afghanistan to fight in defence of Islam. The most famous of these Islamists, Osama bin Laden, created the precursor to al-Qaeda in 1986 to recruit and train Muslims from across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia to fight against Soviet troops and the Soviet-backed Afghan government. The Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1988-9, and the Soviet-backed Afghan government was defeated several years later. With no more reason to exist, al-Qaeda nearly broke up in the mid 1990s, but bin Laden reimagined the group, transforming al-Qaeda from an organisation devoted to local radical Islamist insurgency to global jihadist terrorism.

The concept of Lesser Jihad - the defence of an Islamic community so as to insure its ability to live under sharia - underpins radical Islamism. Groups that embrace it essentially substitute Islam for other ideological organising principles. But in jihadism, jihad became, in the words of Reza Aslan, the basis of a ‘cosmic war'.^[953] Jihadism is characterised by a transnational effort to recreate the Caliphate and a global understanding of the moral and cultural fault line between Islam and the other, between good and evil.

Bin Laden committed al-Qaeda to fighting against the United States, the ‘far enemy' that some radical Islamists had long identified as the great power that propped up the Middle East's authoritarian regimes as well as the Jewish state of Israel. Al-Qaeda's escalating campaign of terrorist violence culmi­nated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 civilians in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The USA and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, which changed jihadist violence again. Al-Qaeda evolved from a centralised conspiratorial organisation that planned and carried out terrorist operations to an isolated band of leaders that sought to influence global jihad by promoting a brand and backing what have been called ‘franchises' by many observers. In this manner, al-Qaeda eventually endorsed local insurgent and/or terrorist operations in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Northern Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - a rival that emerged from the chaos of the Syrian Civil War and the United States' decision to withdraw from Iraq in 2011 - used slickly produced pamphlets, extensive social media and gruesome videos to appeal directly to disaffected, marginalised Muslims in Europe and the United States. Some travelled to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria or Iraq to take part in insurgencies against local authoritarian regimes or Western interveners, but others - variously referred to as ‘self-radicalised' or ‘lone wolves’ - remained at home where they carried out jihadist attacks against soft targets. Examples of attacks that were inspired but not directed by al-Qaeda or ISIS include the Fort Hood, Texas, mass shooting (November 2009), the Boston Marathon bombing (April 2013), an attack on several Parisian sites including the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo (January 2015), the San Bernadino massacre (December 2015), the Nice, France, truck attack (July 2016) and the London Bridge attacks (June 2017). While the motivation in each of these terrorist attacks was ostensibly jihad­ism, the pattern has been strikingly similar to the anarchist attacks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: terrorist attacks carried out by individuals or small cells that are personally unaware of each other but that are drawn together into a widely dispersed movement via propaganda.

These recent developments have brought us full circle. What we see in the decades since the 1950s are refinements of tactics and strategies pioneered from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. As it developed across the nineteenth century, terrorism emerged as a strategy of symbolic violence used against the few in order to influence the many. This was true when used from above, as it was by French revolutionaries and later Bolsheviks, Nazis and Italian Fascists, and from below, as by Russian populists, European and American anarchists, and, in the USA, white supremacists.

As described in this chapter, modern terrorism took on its particular forms in large part because of a peculiarly modern paradox: the side-by-side devel­opment of powerful states and entitled individuals. This paradox remains at the core of both democracy and terrorism, linking two facets of the modern world in ways that continue to surprise and befuddle. Within this context, the truism that one man's terrorist is another’s freedom fighter takes on new and startling meaning.