I had to grow up with terrorism. I mean that information on the violent suppression of political adversaries left an emotional imprint on my childhood and later years. First there were isolated high-profile manifestations, and then came an interrupted chain of acts. I was terrified by the shooting of John Kennedy in Dallas and told in the classroom about the “exploits” of Gavrilo Princip, Dmitry Karakozov, Simon Ter-Petrossian nicknamed Kamo, and many other good and bad guys who were restoring justice and doing expropriations out of noble and base motives. At the time, studying the past and present terrorism contributed to one’s class self-identification. Whoever called Che Guevara or Yasser Arafat bandits obviously did not belong to our camp because it was considered in the socialist camp that bandits were people from the capitalist world. For example, their intelligence agents were called spies here. So, terrorism helped us distinguish friends from enemies. When the entire world was up in arms against Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who had created the Libyan Jamahiriya, Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin was the first to travel to Libya to take part in the “celebrations of freedom.” It was not because the USSR was the only evil empire but because this fitted in with the 20th century’s vision of the world. While the USSR patronized the terrorist Qaddafi, the US took the dictator Anastasio Somoza, a mirror reflection of Qaddafi in Nicaragua, under its wing. In other words, each of the two existing worlds and systems was directly or indirectly responsible for terrorism. When the IRA fought against Britain, it was, of course, supported by the Soviet Union. In any case, historians claim that IRA brigade commander Patrick Murray received 500,000 pounds from Stalin’s regime “for war.” Naturally, the US supported Afghan terrorists in their holy crusade against communists. Looking into the history of the last century’s notorious far left terrorist organizations (the Basque ETA, the Italian Red Brigades, the French Direct Action, the German RAF, and many others), we are sure to find traces that lead to communist internationals and capitals. Likewise, far right radicalism was linked to the secret services of the countries that defeated the USSR.
As a matter of fact, terrorism was orphaned after the victory over communist ideology. The left radicals were dying together with the idea, while there was no longer a need in the right ones. Therefore, fresh forces came onto the now vacant international market of intimidation (“terror” originally meant “fear, horror” in Latin). Free of ideological dogmas, these forces raised high the flag of religious persuasions. All the world’s religions are present in the classification system of the sphere we are studying. There is Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Sikh (in India’s Punjab) terrorism and many other varieties of this complicated phenomenon of today. Unfortunately, the world is unable to clearly define this trend. There is no semantic or legal definition of this notion, especially when it comes to a system of actions rather than isolated instances of violence. Those who blow up buildings, airplanes, and trains, shoot journalists at their editorial offices are, of course, true bandits and criminals. They are subject to criminal prosecution almost in every country. But how can one define violence in the name of political and religious persuasions? On the one hand, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Dzhokhar Dudayev are terrorists, but, on the other, they are heroes of their time, who changed the world. Our Revolution of Dignity, which drove away the unwise and bloody dictator Yanukovych, was not immediately recognized by the international public as an act of people’s struggle for freedom and independence.
In 1994 the UN General Assembly condemned terrorism in the following words: “Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.” Nevertheless, this characteristic is also far from being a precise definition of an incredibly large number of instances when force is used for political purposes. By this formula, the Nazis were quite right to execute the German anti-Nazi Johann Elser, who made an attempt on the life of Hitler and his inner circle at a Munich beer hall, because “violence is not justifiable.”
A remarkable American historian and writer, Walter Laqueur, who was the first to research terrorism as a world history phenomenon, has given more than 100 definitions of it, which include over 20 notional and contradictory meanings. But he has also lifted the veil of uncertainty over those who sow the seeds of fear. “The goals and methods of terrorism have not changed much in the past few decades,” the 90-year-old historian said in a recent interview. “In the 19th and the early 20th centuries, terrorists, such as Russian Socialist Revolutionaries or Western European anarchists, hunted for kings, ministers, and generals. The terrorists of today and practically of the whole second part of the 20th century have not so often been hitting the elite but they’ve been setting off explosions at marketplaces and other spots, where ordinary people, including children, fall victim to them. I would call this tendency ‘barbarization’ of terrorism. And this barbaric terrorism does not, of course, fall into the same category as armed struggle for national liberation or organization of attempts on the life of tyrannical rulers and their henchmen.” It would be a good idea if the UN took into account this tip for international law. For we judge about a phenomenon by the degree of civilizedness.
Barbarians, i.e., people of medieval persuasions and reflections, are shooting artists in Paris and children in Volnovakha today. There may be Orthodox and Muslim amulets hanging around their necks, but they cannot change the pagan nature of actions. They are not religious fanatics or fighters for an idea, although they sometimes quote politicians and cult books. Words are just a screen. It is an army of losers who have a limited choice of occupations and destinies. They are the material from which the vain emperors of the Orient are molding their terracotta armies. They will be buried side by side – the living disseminators of fears and the brainless clay soldiers who are indifferent to their own fate. This is inevitable. Terrorism has a long life story, but the life of terrorists is short. This fact of history has been confirmed in Paris and is going to materialize in the Donbas. And we will all perhaps learn soon how to explain this complicated phenomenon in simple words, for example, about the lost trust between states and people.
