Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

A great motto. A thought venerable enough to live and die for. And yes, it was the most enduring thoughts on which the French Revolution was based on.

Yet, who would believe that the roots of the evil of terrorism would lie in that very reputable thought? Yes, believe it or not, terrorism was born of the French revolution!

The period immediately following the French revolution was a difficult one for France. The revolutionaries unleashed what was known as the “Reign of Terror”. Though this form of terror was quite different from what we understand as terrorism today, yet it was the first time that terror was used as a tool to advocate a particular political opinion. Thousands upon thousands of people were simply executed on the guillotines. Quite a few of these people were victims of the agenda of hate and personal vendetta of the revolutionaries. One of the leading figures of the French Revolution was Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was instrumental in sending the suspected opponents of the revolution to their deaths on guillotine. He eventually fell to the same machinery he had set afoot. Worried over his rising power and his tendency to ride roughshod over any form of opposition, he was arrested by the government in place. Later, in what can only be termed as a case of poetic justice, he was guillotined (with his face up).

The next notable terrorist act was the killing of Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne. Ferdinand was killed by a terrorist group, the Black Hand, while he was on a tour of Sarajevo, Bosnia. This incident sparked a chain of events that led to the First World War.

Terrorism began to acquire its modern form by the end of the Second World War. Again, in what may come as surprise to many people, it was started by a Jewish group, Irgun. One of its foremost leaders, Menachem Begin, later went on to become the Prime Minister of Israel and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Irgun launched hundreds of attacks against British installation based in Palestine, the most daring being the bombing of King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was also the headquarters of the British Administration. With the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, Irgun was disbanded. But the world had been introduced to modern terrorism. It had duly noted that terrorism can be used with telling effects against governments and regimes.

The next major incidence of using terror as a political weapon came with the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. This was rather an uprising of the Kenyan rebels against the British colonial regime. The timeline of this uprising ranged from 1952 to 1960. Though this uprising was not a classic terrorist operation, terror tactics were widely used by both the parties to the conflict. The casualties at the end of the uprising amounted to 32 British and approximately 20,000 Kenyans.

Terrorism acquired its modern face from a movement which had apparently no solid ground of opposition, or no perceived cause. It was with the advent of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, that terrorism acquired its modern shape of urban guerilla warfare tactics. The RAF was a leftist group, founded (mainly) by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. It is noteworthy that the Red Army Faction was mainly dissatisfied with the capitalism in society, and touted causes such as anti-imperialism and youth identity. The RAF engaged in many acts of terrorist violence such as kidnappings, murders, shootouts, bombings and arson. The RAF is also believed to have imparted guerilla warfare training to the PLA (Palestinian Liberation Army). Later, the RAF and PLA acted together to discover one of the most potent weapons of modern terrorism: Airplane Hijacking. The Lufthansa Flight 181 was hijacked on 13 October, 1977 by a group of four Arabs. The ransom demand was the release of a few imprisoned RAF members (who were the top leaders of the RAF at that time), two Palestinian prisoners in Turkey, and US $ 15 million. The aircraft was later flown to Somalia, where it was released in a German commando operation. All the hijackers were killed in the attack. Later, all the RAF prisoners who were to be released as a part of the ransom were also killed within the next couple of days in the prison itself. Official investigation concluded suicide as the cause of death.

The above paragraphs have only attempted to paraphrase the origins of terrorism, as we understand it in our time. What is noteworthy is that the face of terrorism originally was entirely different from what it is today, whereby it is overwhelmingly associated with “Islamic Terrorism”. It is also instructive that terrorism is often a sword which often turns upon its own masters. This has been repeatedly demonstrated. I hope to cover more on the topic of terrorism in my later hubs.