History and Terrorism

Jeffrey Kaplan

Jeffrey Kaplan is professor of religion and director of the Institute for the Study of Religion, Violence, and Memory at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. I would like to thank Edward Linenthal for inviting me to take part in this project; Beverly Gage for a fascinating meditation on the value of interdisciplinary approaches to the understanding of terrorism; and Kevin Marsh for a superior job of copyediting. Readers may contact Kaplan at [email protected]. 1   Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 98 (June 2011), 73–94.

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar112 © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

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I must admit to some trepidation when the Journal of American History editor Ed Linenthal first mentioned this project. In the last several years, I have served as a reader for a number of journals focused on terrorism to which historians submitted pieces—with John Brown a recurring theme—that showed little or no understanding of the processes of terrorism. Each manuscript was returned with heavy red marks, suggestions, and a basic bibliography of sources through which the historian might at least briefly acquaint himself or herself with what terrorism scholars have been writing for more than four decades. True, the attacks of September 11, 2001, inflated this corpus beyond all reasonable bounds, but a good rule of thumb is that a respected scholar of terrorism studies before 9/11 is a respected scholar after 9/11. Thus it was with considerable pleasure that I read Beverly Gage’s nuanced and multidisciplinary essay.1 John Brown does make an appearance, but he does so in a multifaceted way. There is an engagement, rare for a historian, that tries to make the discipline more than a passing spectator of events. Historians are, as Gage notes, observers, not doers. My own professors in the history of culture at the University of Chicago insisted the same. When I had the temerity to suggest that my dissertation on millenarian revolution might have in it the seeds of a possible predictive instrument, I was silenced by our department chair with the classic rejoinder: “I wouldn’t know, I AM A HISTORIAN.” In my heart of hearts, so am I, though I have strayed rather far from the reservation over the years. In short, Gage’s essay is as fine a piece of analytical work on terrorism as I have read in recent years stemming from any discipline. I do take issue with some relatively minor points and will focus on these later in the essay. In her deeply considered meditation on terrorism, Gage does a magnificent job of distinguishing terrorism from other forms of political or religious violence. Would that terrorism scholars were always so careful. In so doing, she runs into the same methodological brick wall with which we all come in contact when we write of terrorism: there is no single accepted definition of “terrorism.” Gage wisely goes to the sacred Ur text of political terrorism, Alex Peter Schmid, Albert J. Longman, and Michael Stohl’s Political

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2   Alex Peter Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, and Michael Stohl, Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature (New York, 1988), 1–60. A new, completely revised edition of this book will be published in late 2011. For a more helpful definitional essay, see Boaz Ganor, “Defining Terrorism—Is One Man’s Terrorist Another Man’s Freedom Fighter?,” International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, http://www.ict. org.il/ResearchPublications/tabid/64/Articlsid/432/currentpage/1/Default.aspx. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston, 1977). Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York, 2006), 33–34. 3   Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 1–42. David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, ed. Audrey Kurth Cronin and James M. Ludes (Washington, 2004), 58. Ehud Sprinzak, “The Great Superterrorism Scare,” Foreign Policy, 112 (Autumn 1998), 110–24. Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York, 1999). Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia, 2008); Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia, 2004). Swedish speakers should also search out a copy of Mattias Gardell’s book, for which he received more than a little criticism, Mattias Gardell, Bin Ladin i våra hjärtan: Globaliseringen och framväxten av politisk Islam (Bin Laden in our hearts: Globalization and the emergence of political Islam) (Stockholm, 2005).

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Terrorism, in search of an answer. The 1988 version of the text gave more of an answer than was useful for any scholar—better than one hundred pages of discussion and a page-and-ahalf-long definition so ungainly as to be almost useless for classroom or government use. Walter Laqueur’s definition is one that may ultimately win the day, if so much were not at stake in crafting a legal system that could treat terrorist suspects with justice and bring other nations of the world into cooperation with the United States to combat terrorism. Laqueur echoes the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren in finding that terrorism is like pornography: we cannot precisely define it, but we sure know it when we see it. Simple, tempting, and yet ultimately inadequate. Gage digs deeper but does no better in finding a definition for terrorism.2 Gage is on much stronger ground, and ground that has seldom been trodden, in normalizing terrorism as a natural part of the American experience, not a product of 9/11. This is no easy task. External terror—and 9/11 was external despite its success in striking the homeland—is simply easier to track and talk about. There are fewer messy loose ends than in the John Brown “hero or terrorist” debate, which among historians is simply the equivalent of the “terrorist or freedom fighter” argument that has raged among terrorism scholars for decades. Frustrating as it is for many such scholars, the popular press in the 1960s opted out of the argument, increasingly eschewing the term “terrorist” for “freedom fighter” or “army of national liberation.” Gage wisely adopts much of David C. Rapoport’s four-waves theory—a cultural historian’s favorite because it is history based and takes history, and historical development, seriously. It offers remarkable parallels between waves and, with Gage’s contribution, suggests a book yet to be written by an enterprising historian: one comparing the anarchist wave’s “war on terror” with the current religious one. The latter, of course, is global, the other domestic, but on a deeper level there are remarkable commonalities. Like the earlier “war on terror,” a detached post-operational review of both events would suggest that much less was at stake than what met the eye and, in the process, set off national subversion panics. For its part, 9/11 turned out not to be the much dreaded onset of “Super Terrorism,” but rather was successful owing to the rare confluence of luck, competence, or as the other side would have it, simply “the will of God” in landing an unexpected and telling blow against the United States.3 What would make the scholarship suggested by Gage so engaging is that it would likely demonstrate that for all of our national ethos of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” Americans and their governments are rather more easily frightened than their often-amazed and frequently reluctant allies, the Western European states. These subversion panics in the United States date back to the dreaded Catholic-Masonic conspiracy (a mere two years after the American Revolution). A steady succession of national panics followed, the latest two being the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s and the

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4   Richard Orr Curry and Thomas M. Brown, Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York, 1972); George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics (Boston, 1983). 5   Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (New York, 2009). Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (New York, 2001). 6   Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 1–42. Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, 1997), 66. The Order, a.k.a. the Silent Brotherhood and the Brueders Schweigan, were a band of right-wing terrorists in the late 1980s. Their numbers included Christian Identity believers and Odinists, or racist followers of the pagan Norse/Germanic pantheon. See Jeffrey Kaplan, Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right (Walnut Creek, 2000); and Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground (New York, 1989). The American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell’s description of his own followers typifies even better this idea of a “revolutionary intellectual”: the American right wing, he has said, is filled with “cowards, dopes, nuts, one-track minds, blabbermouths, boobs, incurable tight-wads and . . . hobbyists.” Ibid., 65. On the “clash of civilizations” and its many profitable spinoffs, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996). Just as there is no new terrorism, there is no new civilizational conflict, merely what the late, great, Lebanese leader Imam Musa al-Sadr, founder of Amal (hope), called the immemorial contest between the “Overdogs” and “Underdogs.” See Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa Al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca, 1986). For a grander, more secular account, see the 1950s-era analysis of the Iranian intellectual Jalal Al Ahmad who cursed the “chickenmilk” of the West, which was even then overwhelming Iranian culture, see Jalal Al Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Weststruckness), trans. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh (Lexington, Ky., 1982). Beverly Gage offers us such an intellectual in Noam Chomsky, who is quoted as politicizing the word “terrorism”—always a rebel form of violence if it is to have meaning in the face of the overweening power of the state. See Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 98 (June 2011), 78. If one doubts Chomsky’s truism, one is invited to find and interview a surviving senior member of the Tamil Tigers (a rebel Sri Lankan group that fought the government beginning in the 1980s) for the pros and cons of what even a relatively undeveloped state can do to a territorially bound terrorist movement, no matter how dedicated or proficient they might be. Bruce Hoffman insists sensibly on separating the concepts of rebel “terrorism” and “terror” as practiced by the state. One needs only to follow the trajectory of the Khmer Rouge, the ruling regime in Cambodia from the mid- to late 1970s, for chapter and verse. On state terror/ terrorism, see Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 13–44.

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current war on terror.4 Indeed, the two wars on terror—the one after the 1886 Haymarket disaster and the other after 9/11—have much in common, as demonstrated through the use of Rapoport’s four-waves theory. The tactics are the same; so are the goals. Terrorism remains a performance art form in which a distant audience (a distance much shortened by the advent of the Internet) observes violent terrorist acts that compete for global attention. The New Terror? Religion as a motive for mass casualties? Perhaps. I would suggest, however, an alternate explanation that might appeal to historians perhaps more than political scientists. In an age of violent video games in which mass casualties become a global phenomenon (try the battle-a-minute World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto if you want a body count), observe cable television or Hollywood spectaculars crafted to pander to fans of mass casualties in living color. The brilliance of 9/11 is that it was big enough to tear Americans away from their entertainments and back to the now-passé cable news where they could see the second plane hitting the World Trade Center again and again and again. That is the old terrorism and nothing new—political shock theater designed to draw attention. No weapons of mass destruction nor space-age lasers—just an old-fashioned bomb, like the Haymarket disaster with an imaginative delivery system, or the 1920 Wall Street blast that Gage brilliantly depicts in her book, or the Oklahoma City bombing that Ed Linenthal eulogizes in his fine work on the subject.5 Religion does change things. It allows the terrorist to emerge from the grandiose isolation of what Bruce Hoffman calls a “Revolutionary Intellectual,” who fights in the name of a people with whom he or she has long since lost contact (and in truth despises— “sheeple” in the redolent term of the American terrorist Robert Mathews of the Silent Brotherhood, more popularly known as the Order). Religion has allowed the terrorist the opportunity, and the Internet the technical means, to connect with the center of an entire civilization (and no, there is no “clash of civilizations,” may God save us from intellectuals with a knack for quick, seemingly meaningful but ultimately vacuous sound bites).6

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Internationalism and the Radical Right

7   David C. Rapoport, “Before the Bombs There Were the Mobs: American Experiences with Terror,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (April 2008), 167–94. Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley, 1967); Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (New Haven, 2000). David C. Rapoport, “Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions,” American Political Science Review, 78 (Sept. 1984), 658–77; David C. Rapoport, “Messianic Sanctions for Terror,” Comparative Politics, 20 (Jan. 1988), 195–213. Josephus, history’s first paid political consultant, was a Romanized Jew whose unenviable task it was to explain the Jews to the puzzled Romans. His texts are all we have on the Siccari uprising, which David Rapoport finds to be the first recorded case of modern terror. See Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, 1987). Thomas Robbins, “Religious Movements and Violence: A Friendly Critique of the Interpretive Approach,” Nova Religio, 1 (Oct. 1997), 13–29; Jeffrey Kaplan, “Interpreting the Interpretive Approach: A Friendly Reply to Thomas Robbins,” ibid., 30–49.

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Gage’s essay is so rich that a mere two thousand words of response seems inadequate. However, there is a section with which I found some disagreement and thought it would make for a handy conclusion. The author struggles bravely with the idea of internationalism in the context of American terrorism, on the one hand, and the nativist/radical Right with its claims to defending American exceptionalism, on the other. There are two issues here. First, terrorism really does not change significantly beyond technological innovation. Rapoport’s typology makes it easy enough to see the international roots, connections, and inspirations of anarchist terrorism. In many ways, it was a direct import from Russia and Eastern Europe. Labor violence (rarely in the form of terrorism, but rather mob violence) does not necessarily follow this pattern. Or maybe it does. Violence has accompanied social upheavals since the French Revolution. One could include the history of medieval heretical movements, the most effective of which were the dualist family of heresies that stretched from the Bogomils of Bulgaria to the Cathari and Albigensian sects, which, with the support of the minor nobility, managed to take over southern France and required a European-wide papal crusade to dislodge them. The Siccari of Second Temple Judaism were nobody’s sweethearts, but we know of no foreign connection in this case. David Rapoport points to the Sicarri (their name translates as “dagger” after their signature weapon) as the first recorded case of modern terrorism, which occurred in the time of Jesus. Although the Sicarri are too ancient and undocumented outside of Josephus’s sometimes-contradictory writings to have had any sort of foreign influence on their actions, all of the above movements had international models, and what’s more, they were aware of them. The Cathari and Albigensians had the Bulgarian Bogomils and the Czech Taborites, labor violence in the United States had a string of strikes, protests, riots, and revolutions in Europe to look to for inspiration and support. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about terrorists is that their antennae are always up, searching endlessly for ideas, inspiration, tactics, and allies. Dig deep enough and the connection is always there. You have but to put in the fieldwork. Simply go and ask. Too few scholars do this kind of fieldwork, however.7 In my years of researching the radical Right, the foreign connections of even the most seemingly isolated group or individual was brought home again and again. Indeed, I dedicated an entire book to that topic. In the post–World War II era, George Lincoln Rockwell came to prominence as a leader of the transatlantic radical Right, less because of his charisma than as a product of the European misapprehension of the First Amendment, which allowed Rockwell to publish and export outrageous anti-Semitic and racist

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8   Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, 1998). The last chapter of that text followed the adventures of a Swedish activist, Tommy Rydén, who looked specifically toward the American Ku Klux Klan for inspiration and companionship in that era when Sweden’s prosperity and apparent success as a model of “social democracy” in which the radical Right had no significant constituency at all. I have photocopies of the complete Rockwell correspondence with the colorful transnational cast of the abortive transnational National Socialist organization called World Union of National Socialists. On watchdog groups, see Kaplan, Radical Religion in America, 127–63. For a more dogmatic version of this line of criticism of these groups, see Laird Wilcox, “Who Watches the Watchman?,” in The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw (Lanham, 2002), 290–343. Both of these works are highly critical of the large sums of money raised for internal use by the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as the oftenslipshod research published by the organization. 9   Modesty as well as space precludes a complete list of fieldwork-based texts. The Ur text in this area is Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977 (Chicago, 1978). However, this book was funded by the Anti-Defamation League and could not be called scholarly. For my work, all fieldwork based, see Kaplan, Encyclopedia of White Power. See also Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, N.C., 2003). Martin Durham in England and George Michael in the United States continue this line of research. See George Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (Lawrence, 2010); and Margaret Power and Martin Durham, New Perspectives on the Transnational Right (New York, 2010).

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tracts. That these screeds could be published here and not in Europe, with its stringent hate-speech laws, allowed Rockwell to project the illusion that he enjoyed influence and power in the United States, and so it seemed to the downtrodden European and South African National Socialists. It amounted, however, to little beyond street theater (and street fights). It was not terrorism, but it was international. In terms of terrorism, homegrown groups such as the Order, the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, and many others in the 1980s had healthy connections with Europe and South Africa. This was no secret, nor was there a lack of texts documenting this fact. Watchdog groups such as the Anti-Defamation League increasingly focused on the right wing (they would be joined by Morris Dees and his highly profitable Southern Poverty Law Center), assuring that these groups were front and center in public attention.8 Gage is somewhat in error in thinking there is a dearth of literature on this topic. There is much material making the point that what we are seeing is nothing less than a full-blown, foreign-led, and foreign-financed conspiracy against all that is good and true. What was lacking, unfortunately, was the fieldwork needed to ascertain the truth of these publications and to uncover the actual degree of danger posed by what, in an age of globalization, are obvious and, indeed, ubiquitous international connections.9 In terrorism, nothing but the names, the causes, and the technology really changes.