Reviewed by Tim Roberts

We live in an age when the mass media seems largely uninterested in offering a perspective on current affairs that contains any substantial links to the past. The issue of terrorism, for example, is treated by the major news outlets as if it is a recent, isolated phenomenon, launched for the first time in human history on an unsuspecting America. This vital anthology shows how, far from representing an unusual or unprecedented threat, terrorism has often been used by parties or individuals who wish to gain access to political power. It is an excellent antidote to the ‘news ticker’ view of the present, in which public comprehension of events operates according to the prerogatives of the 24-hour news cycle.

The most valuable aspect of Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism is its dual treatment of both state and small-scale terror, which the contributors largely see as being rooted in the same causes. Terrorism practiced against populations, the introduction claims, “capitalises on or exploits the human capacity to feel terror” (15). As such, it has been a perennially popular tactic among the power-seeking, and will doubtlessly continue to exert a powerful influence over national and international struggles in future.

The historical instances of terrorism featured here have been taken from a wide variety of periods, ranging from Jacobin Britain to Jihadist terrorism today. In attempting to identify common strands that run through these very different historical circumstances, the editors have necessarily been selective; however, there is a strong sense of continuity among the different historical periods chosen.

The article on Jacobin Britain asks the intriguing question: “Can the tyrannicide (or Regicide) really be distinguished from the terrorist assassin?” (58) Echoing the current cliché about the morality of terrorism, the writer notes, “one man’s tyrannicide is another’s regicide” (59). It is all too easy for us, when removed by centuries from a particular historical period, to forget the moral complexity of the events occurring within it; the English essay is a particularly good reminder that moral dilemmas centred around terrorism are as old as power struggles themselves.

Another of the book’s powerful assets is its willingness to bring out the complexities in instances of state-based or mass terrorism that seem monolithic from the outside. Two studies in particular – one focusing on the nuances, if that is the word, of the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror, the other on the notable exceptions to the Nazis’ reliance on terrorist tactics, are of particular value. The essay on the Nazis, for example, offers a more nuanced picture of the Nazis’ techniques of political oppression than the one depicted in demonological studies of the Reich. It begins by reminding us that the Nazis’ apparatus of State Terrorism was never homogenous and exclusively top-down, as it relied on the fact that “the regime could depend on society as a whole to police social behaviour” (206). Interestingly, the essay singles out important exceptions in Hitler’s endorsement of terror, noting that the selectivity with which Hitler chose his targets for terror—the Jews, the gypsies, the disadvantaged—made his murderous plan far more effective than it would otherwise have been. In order to more effectively control the populace, Hitler “restrained prominent anti-Christian leaders, including Himmler, from radical attempts at de-Christianisation from the mid-1930s onward”, and allowed “Germans en masse to feel safe from subjection to its formal system of terror if it followed the rules” (211). These and other observations demonstrate that states often carefully select their targets for terror in order to reinforce control.

The essay on the Bolsheviks, meanwhile, offers a chilling portrait of the speed with which high ideals of Bolshevism degenerated into thuggery and murder via terrorist ideals, which they justified by “constantly broadening the category of their ‘class enemies’” (164-5). By the winter of 1919—barely two years after the Revolution—Bolshevik policy had descended into “indiscriminate slaughter” (165), a terrifyingly brief descent from its initial ideals. Again, this was done through the careful selection and scapegoating of specific enemies, not through the indiscriminate and random use of violence.

The collection final contribution, 'Predicting Tomorrow’s Terrorists', is the most contentious. It notes, rightly, that “when we assume static qualities of the terrorist (a feature of profiles), we become blind to the factors and dynamics that shape and support the development of the terrorist” (286). John Horgan argues for a more dynamic idea of the terrorism that takes its originating factors into account—an approach that was distinctly absent from US policy in the retaliation to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Horgan goes further, claiming that we can form an idea about a specific group’s predisposition to commit acts of terror, based on a set of ‘risk factors’, e.g. “personal experiences of victimisation (which can be real or imagined” (287). Only if such causational factors are taken into account, Horgan claims, will governments be able to predict future attacks with any degree of accuracy. While this theory still seems to be swayed too far in favour of dominant groups—i.e. governments—who have the means and wherewithal to define their rivals as ‘terrorists’, it does at least promote a more potentially helpful definition of the meaning and causes of terrorism than the with-us-or-against-us mentality that is so cherished by those who profit from expanding the definition of ‘terrorism’ to encompass all of their real and imagined enemies.

Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism
(2008)

edited by Brett Bowden and Michael T Davis
University of Queensland Press
ISBN: 9780702235993
379pp AUD$45.00