Terrorism, Definition and History of

Historical Roots of Terrorism

The word terrorism is an artifact of the French Revolution. The régime de la terreur, which took place from 1793 to 1794, was a systematic attempt to unearth traitors and send them to the guillotine. At first the violence, or terror, had a positive connotation since it was used to punish subversives and other dissidents whom the new regime regarded as enemies of the people. But in time the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre was executed along with the 40,000 others who were guillotined during the régime de la terreur. Soon thereafter, the Englishman Edmund Burke, a vocal critic of the revolution, described the proponents of the revolution as terrorists.

Terrorism as a practice is thought to have begun in first-century Judea, where Jewish men would use a short dagger (sica) to slit the throats of occupying Romans and their collaborators in full view of the public. Sicarri, as these dagger-men were called, would also attack wealthy Jews and kidnap their servants for ransom. The Sicarri were part of a group known as Zealots, who sought to overthrow the Romans. The term Zealot is derived from the name of this movement. Later on in seventh-century India, members of the thuggee cult ritually strangled their victims in an apparent act of sacrifice to the Hindu goddess Kali. (The term thuggee and the modern term thug are derived from the Hindu thag, which referred to highwaymen who made their living by robbery.)

The philosophical antecedents of modern-day terrorism were also formed by the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin in the middle of the 19th century. In his Principles of Revolution (1869), Bakunin wrote that no other action except terrorism by individuals or small groups could cleanse the Russian soil. Later in 19th-century Russia, the anarchist organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or People's Will, launched a wave of bombings and assassinations. They targeted the czar, the royal family, and other government officials, whom they believed the embodiment of a corrupt regime.

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