State Terrorism - History

History

Aristotle wrote critically of terror employed by tyrants against their subjects. The earliest use of the word terrorism identified by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1795 reference to tyrannical state behavior, the "reign of terrorism" in France. In that same year, Edmund Burke famously decried the "thousands of those hell-hounds called terrorists" who he believed threatened Europe. During the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin government and other factions of the French Revolution used the apparatus of the state to execute and intimidate political opponents, and the Oxford English Dictionary includes as one definition of terrorism "Government by intimidation carried out by the party in power in France between 1789-1794". The original general meaning of terrorism was of terrorism by the state, as reflected in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire of the Académie française, which described terrorism as systeme, regime de la terreur. Dr Myra Williamson wrote: "The meaning of “terrorism” has undergone a transformation. During the reign of terror a regime or system of terrorism was used as an instrument of governance, wielded by a recently established revolutionary state against the enemies of the people. Now the term “terrorism" is commonly used to describe terrorist acts committed by non-state or subnational entities against a state. (italics in original)

Later examples of state terrorism were the police state measures employed by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1920s, and by Germany's Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Igor Primoratz, "Both sought to impose total political control on society. Such a radical aim could only be pursued by a similarly radical method: by terrorism directed by an extremely powerful political police at an atomized and defenseless population. Its success was due largely to its arbitrary character — to the unpredictability of its choice of victims. In both countries, the regime first suppressed all opposition; when it no longer had any opposition to speak of, political police took to persecuting “potential” and “objective opponents”. In the Soviet Union, it was eventually unleashed on victims chosen at random." The bombing of Guernica has been called an act of terrorism, and other examples of state terrorism may include the World War II bombings of London, Dresden and Hiroshima.

Sometimes regarded as an act of terrorism, was the peace-time sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior, a yacht owned by Greenpeace, which occurred while in port at Auckland, New Zealand on July 10, 1985. The bomb detonation killed Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese photographer. The organisation who committed the attack, the DGSE, is a branch of France's intelligence services. Ironically, France and New Zealand had been allies since French missionaries settled in Akaroa, in 1835. The agents responsible pled guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea deal and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but secretly released early to France under an agreement between the two countries' governments.