NCJ Number
140313
Journal
International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice Volume: 16 Issue: 1 Dated: (Spring 1992) Pages: 15-42
Date Published
1992
Length
28 pages
Annotation
The role of ideological thinking in shaping the motivation of terrorists and their capacity for committing gratuitous violence is examined; the author argues that participation in terrorism involves a complicated interplay between rationality, logic, and psychological impulses.
Abstract
The doctrines, principles, concepts, and ideologies of a terrorist movement afford emotional relief and gratification in much the same way as religious ideas serve these functions for believers. Ideologies are characterized by the historical consciousness they breed among adherents, the use of logic as a method of interpretation, and an association with culturally defining masterpieces of the past. Biographies of 20th Century revolutionary heroes, used as testaments to the tactics these leaders chose, reflect two main themes: the hero's pivotal role in interpreting the collapse of a given social system and the State's betrayal of the people. In these biographies, the revolutionary leader realizes that terrorist violence is actually a means of serving the people. Psychologists, sociologists, and economists have all taken different approaches to explaining what motivates terrorists. Terrorists attempt to justify to the rest of the movement, and to the world, their actions through what the author terms techniques of emotional containment including rhetorical discourse, doubling, fundamentalism and emnification, dramaturgical works and moral spectacles, and declarations of total war. On another level, terrorists construct their own reality through several conceptual and cognitive processes, defined here as composition and decomposition, weighting, deletion and supplementation, and deformations. 3 notes, 65 references, and 1 appendix