[...]... age, often passing from father to son, but also through the kidnapping of very young children At the age of ten or eleven, boys were allowed to accompany the killers and watch from a distance, under the guidance of a tutor, to learn the skills of the sect’s trade and, above all, how to keep quiet They actively participated from puberty on The sect worshipped Kali, Hindu goddess of death According to the. .. movement, rather than its mode of action, that is subject to moral evaluation In the context of the wars of national liberation of the 1950s and 1960s, terrorist activities are often seen in a positive light because they hastened the liberation of oppressed peoples Those agents of terrorism be they in Algeria or Indochina—are heroes For the most part, they harbor no regrets It all boils down to idea of a... intended to intimidate or coerce a government, individuals or groups to modify their behavior or policies.”3 The definition of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is: Terrorism is the enduringly conducted struggle for political goals, which [is] intended to be achieved by means of assaults on the life and property of other persons, especially by means of. .. pyramids of heads after the fall of Baghdad Our own twentieth century, which produced Nazism and the Stalinist terror, will be remembered as the century of genocides from those of the Armenians of the Ottoman empire in 1915–16 and in Rwanda in 1994 (committed to general international indifference) to that of the Jews and the Gypsies from 1942 to 1945 It will also be remembered for its massacres of specific... psychological effects are disproportionate to its purely physical results.” Today’s terrorism is what specialists call group or bottom-up terrorism, but top-down (state) terrorism has been far more prevalent throughout history It enjoyed its heyday in the twentieth century with the advent of totalitarianism In terms of victims, top-down terrorism has taken a vastly higher toll than its bottom-up counterpart... according to the Marxist theory, would come when the inherent economic characteristics of the capitalistic regime brought about its collapse.18 Of course, not all of the activity of the revolutionary party was clandestine There were front organizations and other tools of propaganda that performed the important task of preparing the hearts and minds of the people But the most important element of Leninist... of the insurgents in the successful cases, but to a lesser determination on the part of the governments The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the failure of the August 1991 coup in Moscow are other seeming demonstrations of the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance Yet in these examples too, the success of the unarmed civilians was a result of the rulers’ indecisiveness and ineptitude In all... not all national liberation movements resort to terrorism to advance their cause In other words, some insurgent groups are both terrorists and freedom fighters, some are either one or the other, and some are neither Terrorism and Morality The hero of the moralistic approach to terrorism is a Russian named Ivan Kalyayev, who was a member of the “combat organization” of the underground Social Revolutionary... issued by the Pentagon intelligence chief and second, because of his staff’s inability to follow his advice despite its specificity There was also a disconnect between the quaint picture of a marginal fanatic—practically the living image of the cartoon anarchist in black cape, bomb in hand—prepared to blow the place to smithereens and the speechifying on the imminence of high-tech terrorism, the notorious... displace the government from its control of the remainder.”13 Usually, but not always, a coup grows from the ranks of the military In any event, for a successful completion of a coup, the rebels must ensure the cooperation of at least part of the armed forces The success of a coup depends upon surprise, in order to catch the government off guard It is, therefore, imperative that preparations for the coup . visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library. has also been true historically of most forms of terrorism, such as that of the Jewish Zealots of the first century c.e., for example, or of the Ismaili sect of Assassins from the eleventh to the thirteenth. Browner UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON University of California Press, one of the most distin- guished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the