Terrorism​—A War Within

SINCE World War I mighty colonial empires have been shattered. New nations, formed out of the fragments, struggle for sovereignty. They are seething and churning within themselves, changing in political and social character from one extreme to another. Latin America is a caldron of internal strife. Compare a map of Africa of 1914 with a map of Africa today. Gone are the vast colonial empires. In their stead are more than 30 nations, many of them suffering from turmoil within.

As wars within nations grow more sinister, fear grows that nations may disintegrate into nihilism. At his trial in Israel, a Japanese Red Army terrorist told his prosecutors: “We know [that wars within nations] will become more severe than battles between nations.”

Terrorist or Freedom Fighter?

‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ Left-wing terrorists point to George Washington. Did he not lead revolutionary armies to throw off British rule? “George Washington was a terrorist,” declared a Red Army Faction defendant on trial for his life in a West German court. “To describe a man as a terrorist is a term of honor.”

To Americans, describing George Washington as a terrorist might sound revolting. Yet Americans once acclaimed Fidel Castro as a heroic freedom fighter. That was when, with a band of guerrillas, he brought down the army of dictator Batista. Later, due to the form of government he set up, Castro came to be viewed by the United States in the same light as the revolutionaries who bombed Czar Alexander II to death and set in motion the Russian Revolution.

Some see in terrorism a fury that society brings down upon itself. Others see it as a cancer in civilization​—gangs or movements, large or small, violently bent on restructuring this or that system of politics, economics, even religion.

Tactics of Terrorists

The modern terrorist robs, steals, burns, bombs, kidnaps and kills. To him his deeds are not crimes in the general sense. He sees himself doing what nations do to one another in war. His acts are acts of war. He wars against a social order.

As a rule, he joins himself to blood comrades. They operate in tiny cells. They hit and run. They are guerrilla fighters, skirmishers. Sometimes their forces grow into armies. Fear of them jars nations into wars, invasions, counteratrocities. How would the United Nations, for example, write a neutral history of modern Lebanon​—battleground of Palestinians, Syrians and Israelis? And, granting that all outside forces are moved outside of its borders, how does Lebanon unite its internal factions intermixed with Maronite Christians, Sunni, Shiite and Druze Muslims? Would violence by one faction against another be terrorism? The answer depends on the one you ask.

To recount what terrorism has done to shape the course of nations would call for a review of much of world history for the past 50 years. Storm signals of expanding terrorism, agitated and manipulated by opposing forces within and without, burn a fearful question into the minds of world leaders: How will the “wars within” figure in the fate of nations?

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‘We know that wars within nations will become more severe than battles between nations’

How Some of the Seeds Were Sown

DURING the 1940’s the Nazis occupied Europe. Underground resistance was organized. Movements were supported by Allied governments operating through Britain. The British Royal Air Force dropped illustrated pamphlets over Europe in numerous languages on how to prepare ambushes, sabotage railways, harass an army of occupation, kill informers. Underground groups were supplied machine guns, grenades and plastic bombs. The Nazis might have called them terrorists. Their compatriots respected and honored them. Their exploits became heroic deeds to the Western world.

This bit of flashback has been cited by some to illustrate how an insurgent spirit may be born out of what appear at the time to be lofty ideals and noble motives. But the cancer of terrorism is no respecter of victims. It devours the very ones who first champion it. West Germany, France and Italy today are hotbeds of terrorists of left, right and other persuasions. A generation of freedom fighters spawned offspring bent on the violent overthrow of the very social order that threw off Hitler’s rule.

Stirrings of Revolution

Fidel Castro ignited a revolutionary spirit that spread in left-wing circles throughout Latin America. During the early 1960’s insurgent movements proliferated through Brazil, Guatemala, Peru and other countries.

“I was born in Argentina, I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala,” wrote Che Guevara, a disciple of Castro. This Spanish-Irishman, a wandering missionary of revolution, was finally killed in 1967 in Bolivia. He gained a sort of “knightly aura” the world over as “a social reformer in arms who fought only with the support of the oppressed people.”

Frantz Fanon, a black doctor, was head of the psychiatric department of Blida Hospital in Algiers when the Arabs began fighting for liberation from the French in 1952. In writings, such as his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon helped crystallize the thinking of left-wing intellectuals. For too long, he contended, colonial powers had exploited the masses of Africa, Asia, Latin America or wherever, through deportations, massacres, forced labor and slavery. There was a terrible reckoning due. Violence, he preached, ‘frees the exploited one and restores his self-respect.’ Fanon’s dictums prompted a pattern of thought among intellectuals of this persuasion in the West.

As the anticolonist wars in several parts of the earth came to an end in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the concept of a Third World of poor and miserable countries evolved. It attracted the compassion of young intellectuals. Wealthier countries, they argued, should do more to help less fortunate peoples. Men like Castro, Che Guevara and Fanon became heroes in the universities. Students in Europe and America got caught up in the literature of subversion.

Berlin-born Herbert Marcuse, professor of political thought at the University of California, in concord with intellectuals at Free University in West Berlin, Trento University in northern Italy and other centers of the new thinking, nurtured a trend in revolution. It transferred the insurgency of Latin America, Africa and other Third World areas to the well-to-do countries. There, students disgusted with ‘comfortable consumerism and ostentatious wealth,’ saw reason to revolt, to overthrow the established order.

The Revolution Spreads

“In West Germany most of the early supporters were found in the ranks of clergymen, doctors, professors and journalists,” according to Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne. In their comprehensive study, The Terrorists, these journalists trace the revolutionary development (in West Germany) among middle- and upper-class men and women. (Half the 28 most-wanted urban guerrillas on the police list in 1979 were women.)

Freed from the burden of military expenditures, following World War II West Germans enjoyed a flush of prosperity while most of the world suffered from want. Some young, idealistic Germans protested loudly. The spirit caught flame in other countries. In Paris, French students marched under the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchy. Students won some reforms in the “overcrowded and archaic universities” of France and Germany. But when they called on workers to march the streets and barricade factories, the great crusade to overthrow capitalism fizzled.

Revolt, however, was fueled by other fires. In 1967 the Shah of Iran visited West Germany. Demonstrators marched in protest, and a policeman killed Benno Ohnesorg, a mild-mannered student from Hannover. In 1970 students at Kent State University in Ohio protested American invasion of Cambodia. National Guardsmen opened fire. Four students were killed and 10 wounded. Everywhere, radical students saw established authorities as violent oppressors.

Reactionaries struck back when German radicals set fire to a Frankfurt department store​—“to show the comfortable burghers what the horrors of war in Vietnam were really like.” To defend themselves they acquired weapons. To pay for weapons they robbed banks. From bank robbing the very momentum carried them headlong into more violence. It was a process that earned young students a fearsome label: terrorists.

It led some to a life-style of communal living, mate swapping, marijuana smoking, sensual pleasures. Mixed and mingled in it all was an illusion of upholding high-minded ideals. Sense-drowning incitements attracted recruits even from among young women of aristocratic backgrounds. But the lure of excitement and rewards also attracted some who were common criminals with little more idealism than a brute.

Do Terrorists Mirror Bad Governments?

Historian Henry Steel Commager blamed the ‘crisis of violence’ rising in America during the 1970’s on the bad example of government. The United States, he said, was dropping nine times as many bombs on Indochina as had been dropped in all the South Pacific during World War II. “Of what use is it for the President to authorize and perpetuate this violence in his capacity as commander in chief,” questioned Commager, “and then to deplore violence on the campus in his capacity as President?”

Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the National Commission on Violence issued a study of worldwide civil strife. Out of every 1,000 Americans it found that 11 took part in civil strife between 1963 and 1968. Americans ranked first among 17 Western democracies and 24th among the 114 larger nations and colonies of the world. Yet for all their antigovernment demonstrations and race riots, Americans have yet to organize for violence along the lines of hard-core terrorist groups that operate in Western Europe. Not that this can’t happen, the study concluded, because “Americans have always been a violent people.”

What Do They Say for Themselves?

Underground or aboveground, there are movements organized to wage guerrilla warfare in any way they can, each for its own cause. For the Palestinians the cause is nationalism​—they want a homeland of their own. ETA (The Basque Homeland Party) seeks an independent state composed of four predominantly Basque provinces in Spain and three in France. The Irish Republican Army fights to throw off British rule and establish a form of Irish independence.

Left-wing terrorists in Italy want to reorder Italian society along lines more extreme than the “soft” communist mold. Right-wing groups want to turn Italy back to fascism.

West German and Japanese terrorists advocate all-out world revolution in favor of a radically new order. Others, like Muslim insurgents in the Philippines and the Warriors of Christ the King in Spain, fight for religious emancipation. Others appear to have goals fused of politics and religion. The soldiers who shouted “Glory for Egypt, attack!” as their gunfire mowed down President Anwar Sadat in Cairo, were executed as part of a terrorist cell of religious zealots accused of wanting to create a fundamentalist Islamic state in Egypt. Then there are those labeled terrorists whose motives appear to rise no higher than the profit they reap from crime.

But, for the most part, those viewed and feared by others as terrorists see themselves as idealists, visionaries, revolutionaries. “Let us be clear about one thing. We will export our revolution everywhere, to every country that opposes us.” That declaration is attributed to Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi. In Western eyes he is viewed as a fundamentalist Muslim who calls for a “holy war” against Zionism and dreams of uniting the world’s 160 million Arabs under his leadership. With billions of dollars of oil money at his command, Colonel Qaddafi is taken seriously by United States political leaders. They believe that he is capable of infiltrating a country with trained revolutionaries. But Qaddafi does not see himself as a terrorist. The terrorists, he says, are elsewhere. “Israel is terrorizing the Arabs with its nuclear program. The West German people are terrorized because the United States is putting missiles there. We in Libya are terrorized by the presence of the American fleet in the Mediterranean. This is real terrorism.”

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‘Of what use is it for the President to perpetuate violence in Indochina and deplore violence on the campus?’

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‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’

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An increasing number of women take part

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Some claim that World War II sowed the seeds of present-day terrorism

When Will the Terror Cease?

IN COUNTRIES like the United States where organized terrorism seldom shows its hand, there are, nevertheless, human time bombs primed to explode in race riots, youth revolts or other forms of social anarchy. These upheavals shake social and political structures even in strong nations. They fear that professional agitators might seize control of rioters and lead them on in organized terrorism.

In some countries terrorists are armed with modern weapons. These range from sophisticated fast-action machine guns, high-explosive bombs, Russian-made SAM’s and hand-held antiaircraft missiles to the air-and-ground paraphernalia of war possessed by the PLO in its war with Israel. In most countries chemical weapons capable of poisoning a city’s water supply are available. But, most of all, nations dread the day some terrorist group might come into possession of a nuclear bomb. Could it then hold entire countries hostage? Or fool nuclear nations into thinking one had attacked another?

Fear is the ultimate weapon of terrorists. Fear of death makes hearts faint in the mightiest of nations. When a rumor spread that Colonel Qaddafi (American leaders view him as a terrorist) was sending “hit men” to the United States to kill President Reagan and others (whom Qaddafi views as terrorists), a Washington news bureau reported that “nothing like the Libyan scare ever has descended on this city, at least not in peacetime.”

To All Men Bitter in Soul

Is there no way to banish fear? No power to meliorate the distrust, the hatred, the bitterness that poison the hearts of men? Maybe they were hoping for such a blessing when men graced a wall opposite their United Nations building with these words from the Bible:

THEY SHALL BEAT THEIR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES, AND THEIR SPEARS INTO PRUNINGHOOKS: NATION SHALL NOT LIFT UP SWORD AGAINST NATION, NEITHER SHALL THEY LEARN WAR ANY MORE

Two contemporary prophets, Isaiah and Micah, recorded those words more than 700 years before Christ. (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3, Authorized Version) In their terrible enmities, some nations and some men might scorn anything from the Bible. But the Bible is not a “Jewish book,” any more than it is a “Christian book.” Look farther back in history before there were any Jews. Look back some 2300 years before Christ​—to Noah’s son Shem. The God of the Bible is “Jehovah, Shem’s God,” states Genesis 9:26. True, Shem was grandfather to Eber, the ancestor of the Jews. But Shem, according to Bible scholars, was also forefather of the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Elamites, the Aramaeans and the Lydians. Those ancients occupied parts of what are now Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. The time was when Jehovah, Shem’s God, had His witnesses in those lands.a

He has His witnesses in those lands today. They are in fact over all the earth. Millions of Jehovah’s Witnesses are joined in a global peace. Many of them were once like those who fled to young David when he himself was a fugitive from King Saul of Israel. “All men in distress and all men who had a creditor and all men bitter in soul began to collect together to him, and he came to be a chief over them.” On two occasions some encouraged David to assassinate Saul. In time David became king, but not by terroristic tactics.​—1 Samuel 22:2; 24:4-6; 26:8-11; 2 Samuel 5:1-3.

Men who hope in the United Nations may not realize that what they etched on the UN Plaza wall is a divine prophecy. It is bound to be fulfilled, not in the fashion of the meliorist​—one who believes that the world naturally tends to get better and, especially, that it can be made better by human efforts. The prophecy points to the coming of God’s Kingdom. Men do not set God’s Kingdom up for him by political means. The Almighty brings in his Kingdom from heaven through his Son, the heir to “the throne of David.”​—Luke 1:32; Isaiah 2:2-4; Daniel 2:44; 7:13, 14.

Before that Kingdom exerts full power over the earth God has his witnesses announce it as a testimony to all the nations. The people who heed that good news are demonstrating already that by God’s power they can melt their war spirit into a spirit of peace. They are learning war no more.

Two other Bible prophets, Ezekiel (38:21) and Zechariah (14:13), foretold that in the winding down of the world it will go into its finale with each man’s hand against his neighbor. Who knows what role the terroristic “wars within” may play in that? But this world’s way of releasing the bitter animosities and hurts in men’s hearts only by draining their lifeblood need not be your way. In whatever land you live, no matter what your circumstances, why not share with Jehovah’s Witnesses in the accurate Bible knowledge through which our very nature is transformed into a new personality “created according to God’s will in true righteousness and loyalty”?​—Ephesians 4:22-24, 31, 32.

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People who heed God’s Word are learning war no more