NCJ Number
93678
Editor(s)
D C Rapoport,
Y Alexander
Date Published
1982
Length
388 pages
Annotation
Fifteen essays treat issues created by terrorism for various secular and religious reasons; common themes pervading all contributions are the moral climate that produces terrorism, doctrines terrorists use to justify themselves, and the moral predicaments that terrorists create.
Abstract
An introduction to Part One, religious terror, compares actual religious and secular movements, their political and moral contexts, and the strategy and tactics employed. The first paper studies the successful efforts of Jewish terrorists in the first century to provoke a popular uprising. Other authors compare images and metaphors used to describe rebels and their antagonists, with attention to the myths of Prometheus and Satan and myths of progress. One paper examines the notion of the just war, while another analyzes liberation theology in the Latin American context, where no religious approach can adequately deal with oppressive social conditions. Chapters in the section on state terror focus on revolutionary France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The final section on rebel terror begins with an analysis of the Narodnaya Volya party in Russia, explaining what the Russians did and the moral quandaries that they felt in doing it. The next author explores the most common justifications that terrorists and their sympathizers use, arguing that the very idea of terror is inherently immoral. The three remaining chapters deal with responses to rebel terrorism by communities deeply committed to protecting individual rights. Specific issues considered are the propaganda technique of transferring guilt from the originator of embarrassing acts to the adversary, whether terrorists have legal rights, the applicability of the laws of war to international terrorism, and eliminating the terrorist opportunity. Footnotes accompany each chapter. An index and approximately 170 references are supplied.