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Three Questions on Terrorism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Paul Wilkinson
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WE LIVE IN A TERRORISTIC AGE. FEW, EVEN AMONG THE MOST favoured and secure, can fail to be haunted by the ugly sights and ghastly dreams of terroristic murder, massacre, and torture and the suffering of the innocents. Numerous international organizations and the mass media at least agree in characterizing our era as one ‘full of dismal terror’. There have been repeated calls for serious scientific study of the nature and causes of terrorism culminating in the recent decision of the UN General Assembly to establish a special committee for this purpose. Many students of politics will suspect that the creation of ‘study committees’ by such organizations as the UN and the Socialist International will simply serve to reflect the self-interest of the national participants, or that they will simply turn into propaganda exercises.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1973 , pp. 290 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1973

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References

1 For example the Socialist International set up in 1972 a special working party on international terrorism and its implications for social democrats. Pugwash, at its meeting in Oxford last September, discussed on the initiative of H. Alfven (Sweden), the question of scientific work on the combating of terrorism. And the subject was raised in the general section of the British Association Conference in the same week.

2 See, for example, the strongly worded leading article in The Times, 23 December 1972.

3 Proceedings of the General Assembly, 19 December 1972. The Study Committee proposal was incorporated in a resolution which also condemned ‘the continuation of repressive and terrorist acts by colonial racist and alien regimes in denying peoples their legitimate right to self‐determination and independence and other human rights and fundamental freedom’. The voting was seventy‐six in favour, thirty‐five against (including Britain and the USA), with seventeen abstentions.

4 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967, PP. 127 ff.Google Scholar

5 There are a number of sources for these data: David Wood in his Conflict in the Twentieth Century: Adelphi Paper No. 48, June 1968, estimates that in the period 1945–65 there were fifty‐five internal wars compared to twenty in the years 1919–39; McNamara's, Robert, The Essence of Security, Harper and Row, New York, 1968,Google Scholar asserts that only fifteen of the 164 major outbreaks of violence between 1958–66 constituted inter‐state conflicts. Nor is the increasing incidence confined to Third World countries. Robert Moss gives figures of 214 killed and over nine thousand injured as a result of acts of political terrorism in the USA in the years 1965–68. He cites the Scanlan's Magazine figures for the incidence of acts of sabotage and terrorism in the USA: 1965 – 16; 1968 – 236; 1970 – 546; viz. Moss, Robert, Urban Guerrillas, Temple Smith, London, 1972, pp. 67–74.Google Scholar

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21 Quoted in Levytsky, B., The Uses of Terror, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1971, PP. 38–9.Google Scholar

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31 Report in The Times, 30 November 1972.

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42 Excerpt from speech by Himmler to his SS Obergruppenführers at Posen, 4 October 1943, Documents in Evidence, Nuremberg, 1947–49, Document number 1, 919‐PS.

43 For example Frantz Fanon, op. cit., and Marighela, For the Liberation of Brazil, translated by John Butt and Rosemary Sheed, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971.

44 Blake, G., ‘The Wandering Arabs’, Geographical Magazine, Vol. XLV, No. 3, 12 1972, pp. 179–82.Google Scholar

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