The Nature Of Terrorism
A Darwinistic Function?
May 27, 2002
Just as an overgrown forest can be humbled in an inferno created by a single lightening bolt, so can the mightiest nations be brought to their knees by the fury of terrorism.
Charles Darwin, creator of the natural selection theory, proposed that:
Individuals born with certain characteristics, e.g., strong legs, keen eyesight, good camouflage, will enjoy an advantage over their peers. If these individuals can pass these traits on to their offspring, their offspring will enjoy the same advantages. If the surrounding environment gradually changes, it may come to pass that new characteristics are more advantageous than old ones, for instance, a new color that makes better camouflage. As the environment changes, individuals with these new characteristics will do better, live longer and produce more offspring until eventually, the population will look very different from its original version. If the population changes enough to satisfy some taxonomist, it will be classified as a new species. In other words, new species arise when the environment favors new characteristics over old ones.
As the shooting and propaganda wars rage in the battle against “international terrorism”, it is possible that the lines dividing fact from fiction may be dissolving in the interests of international hegemony.
The essence of terrorism is as old as the existence of humans on this Earth.
In his excellent discourse “A Brief History Of Terrorism”, Martin Walker makes the following observations:
Until well into the twentieth century, terror usually meant state terror.
It was the Nazi occupiers of Europe during the Second World War who characterized the work of the French, Czech, Polish, and other resistance movements, supplied and fomented by Britain's Special Operations Executive, as "terrorism."
For the resistance movements, and for their British backers in SOE who had been ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze," they were not terrorists but freedom fighters. Their clandestine work of sabotage and ambush—destroying bridges and railroads and assassinating German officials and their local collaborators—was a wholly justifiable tactic of a war of national liberation..
Similar tactics were used against the British in Palestine by Israeli freedom fighters (or 'terrorists') like the future prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. The Irgun and Stern Gang blew up civilians in hotels, assassinated British troops, and ambushed British patrols, all in the name of the national liberation of Israel.
The devastating Arab defeat (Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967) and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip inspired the Palestine Liberation Organization—too weak to fight an orthodox struggle—to adopt terrorist tactics.
Most of the post-1968 terrorist groups have been defeated or marginalized. The two that survived, the PLO and the IRA, were sustained by a degree of popular legitimacy that stemmed from their origins as national liberation movements.
It is not possible to negotiate with a suicide bomber who never said what his goal was before crashing a civilian airliner into a civilian target.
It is quite possible that war is terrorism and terrorism is war. The semantic subtleties dividing the two terms “war and terrorism” are based on the natural conditions surrounding the perpetrators of acts, which under any definition or justification, equal human barbarism.
If a population is contained within a clearly defined and recognized geographic border and organized under a clearly defined and recognized government, its acts of human barbarism are defined as acts of “war”.
Conversely, if a population lacks clearly defined geographic borders and governmental structure then its acts of human barbarism are condemned by the State as “terrorism”.
Just as Darwin might have predicted, a population with the natural advantage of being contained within a recognized country optimizes its advantages through the use of standing branches of its military and the conduct of “war” whether it be for purposes of national defense or national aggression.
Those populations without the advantages of being organized within the blanket of a recognized country must adapt to their natural conditions and wage acts of human barbarism under the semantics of “terrorism”.
To walk a further step down the path of human vanity, the perpetrators of “war” create an air of legitimacy by establishing “rules” of “warfare” while simultaneously illegitimating their opposition as rogues of “terrorism”. The perpetrators of “terrorism” similarly view their barbarism as legitimate acts of national liberation against the illegitimate terrorism of hegemonic state aggression.
Is there really a difference, other than the differences created by semantic hypocrisy, between the warfare of the Allied fire bombing of civilian population of World War II Dresden and the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center?
Both were viewed by their self-interested perpetrators as legitimate actions that optimized the natural advantages of the inflicting parties to the disadvantage of the afflicted.
By any stretch of semantics, the result in both instances was human barbarism.
Perhaps it is time for humanity to cleanse itself of semantic hypocrisy.
There must either be hope for human cohabitation or a surrender to the hopelessness of humanity’s aggressive nature. Unfortunately, the former does not appear to be the natural state of the human condition while history proves the latter to be the rule.
There is a certain inevitable sadness to the fate of the human condition when one beholds the momentary beauty of nature’s forest. A diverse tapestry of continually regenerating beauty whose only bounds is its ability to support itself. And, then in an instant, a single bolt of lightening reduces this tapestry into a barren topography…if only to grant it the ability to once again find a balance within which to recommence its genesis.
To be otherwise would be outside the rule of nature. But…isn’t that what civilization is supposed to be about?
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