I was chatting with my buddy Sid Sharma yesterday, and he was talking about how he worried that some of the more radical anti-American extremists he's run across in places like Ann Arbor might one day try to hook up with groups like Al Qaeda. He's run across people there who burned American flags on 9/11 and shouted that bin Laden was a hero, so that's not as goofy as it might sound.
I was not too worried about that because such people are usually so stupid and drug-addled that they aren't good for much of anything. Besides which, I said, I'm not sure there's been a single decade in American history that hasn't had incidents of domestic terrorism.
Then I came up short. Yes, we've definitely had many domestic terrorists in my lifetime. In the last 40 years, we've had the Symbianese Liberation Army, the Manson Family, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers under Huey Newton, Ted Kaczynski, abortion clinic bombers, the Oklahoma City bombers, and the Earth Liberation Front, and I'm sure I've forgotten some. Just in the period from 1967 to 1973 there were something like a thousand terrorist bombings in the United States--funny how many people don't remember that.
People don't learn this in history classes, but there were bombings and assassinations being committed by anarchists in the 1920s and 1930s.
You'd also have to put some activities from the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and 1930s (and later), in the realm of terrorism--if public cross-burnings, random rapes and beatings, and lynchings aren't terrorism, I don't know what is. You'd also have to count the activities of abolitionist John Brown in the mid-1800s, and the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and 1870s, I suppose.
But that's sort of where I stopped short. That doesn't quite fill in my "every decade of American history" statement, does it? It leaves most of the 1700s and 1800s blank. Also, other than Klan activity, I can't think of much that would have been going on in the 1940s or 1950s.
Can anyone think of anything I'm missing?
To be clear, my definition of "terrorism" would be the intentional targeting of civilians and private property for destruction, for primarily political purposes.
I'd be interested in knowing what is being described as acts done by the Black Panthers under Huey Newton.
Huey ordered a number of political killings. Many of them were of people who left the Panther organization, so I don't know if they count as "civilian" targets, but his Panthers were implicated in the assassination of at least one Oakland superintendant, for political reasons. Then again, at the same time, Huey was busy running a large prostitution and drug ring in the area under the Panther aegis. They were also amassing huge caches of illegal automatic weapons, grenades, and other explosives in their safehouses (unlike the legally-obtained weapons they had when they first started), according to eyewitnesses, most of whom were/are former Panthers. Including Huey's bitch Elaine Brown, who in her own autobiography cops to all this and more, including political beat-downs she herself ordered. She avoids confessing to certain murders, although many former Panthers and people affiliated with them have implicated her in political killings.
Bobby Seale these days pretty much admits that this is the kind of enterprise the Panthers were after he left--in fear for his life, although he doesn't say so in public very often. He defends the panthers saying that they weren't a criminal and terrorist enterprise until after he left, and he blames Huey for turning things nasty and violent.
I suppose it's a matter of debate as to whether you'd call Huey and Elaine's panthers terrorists or just organized criminals, since they were making a lot of money selling drugs and in other kinds of racketeering.
Look for Elaine Brown's autobiography, and also David Horowitz' book Radical Son, where he documents at length his involvement with the Panthers.
There's a real unhealthy tendency by some people to romanticize these guys. Maybe in the early days, it was like Bobby Seale says, just a bunch of idealistic socialists who bought some weapons legally because they believed in good ol' American concepts like the 2nd amendment and self-defense. But there's no real doubting what they were when he and Eldridge Cleaver left the organization.
Dean,
The hard part is differentiating between terrorists and organized criminals - and there's not much to choose between them...after all, Saudi Arabia is just a mafia-family with UN representation; and the difference between Arafat's shakedown thugs and the Cosa Nostra is.......hmmmm....
One way of looking at is that since the time when humans started earning more than their basic keep, its been a war between those who wish to prosper by honest labor and those who wish to live off the honest labor of others. Those who wish to live off the labor of others have dressed it up in a score of different costumes, but when you come down to it the dishonest always have this in common: they don't like to work.
Robespierre never did a lick of work, nor did Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin...I don't recall the story where bin Laden worked his way up to the wealth he used to finance terrorism and if Arafat, Saddam, Assad or Mubarak ever punched a time-clock, its not recorded anywhere. These people are just the most evil representations of the dishonest...but we can also look at the "soft" dishonest; what does Jesse Jackson do for a living? How does Sharpton pay for those fancy haircuts? To go over to the Panthers of the 60's: how many of the leaders of that group drove a truck before becoming revolutionaries? I understand that Mao's rich mother made him sweep up after dinner, but other than that I don't recall him ever sharing the burdens of the workers he claimed to represent...
And thus it is with those we more generally recognize as criminals - the muggers and theives and con artists...when they are interviewed behind bars, its invariable that they'll eventually come up with a statement of how they didn't want to participate in the "sqaure" world where you went to a job and earned an honest buck.
So, when we discuss these things, its good to keep that in perspective - each and every one of the enemies of civilization has always, and always will, be wanting to essentially pull a fast one; convincing people to even die for the right of the leading revolutionary/criminal to not have to work for a living.
Also to be noted are the terrorist activities of extreme right-wing groups like the Posse Comitatus, the Brotherhood, and the various followers of Lewis Bream all over the Southern States and in the Pacific Northwest and also in the western states. Also the folks of Elohim City in OK - some say the Oklahoma City bombers were also affiliated with that group.Some of the rightwing 'Wise-Use", anti-enviros have also gotten engaged in acts of violence, i think.
I suppose it's a matter of debate as to whether you'd call Huey and Elaine's panthers terrorists or just organized criminals, since they were making a lot of money selling drugs and in other kinds of racketeering.
Just looking to your definition. As you'll have noticed by now, I do like to be precise.
The Manson Family?
Look at their political agenda, and what they did in order to forward it.
It was weird, but then again, it didn't make any less sense than the SLA's agenda, did it? And that was the whole point, the entire point, of the Tate/LaBianca murders, and the further stuff they were planning to do before they got caught.
Try on for size the destruction of a couple of hundred Indian tribes in north America, including their homes, portable or permanent villages, their food supply, and not infrequently, their lives. All for political purposes.
Not that I disapprove of any of this. Remember, I have frequently preached on these pages that national territories belongs to those who conquer them, settile them, and organize armies sufficiently strong to keep out any would-be competitors. That is a fundamental way of nature which the human race has practiced since the beginning, and the founding of America was no different.
But here, I am citing the conventional wisdom that you espouse, not mine.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I would agree that some--not all, but some--of the warfare against Indian tribes here qualified as terrorism, Arnold. Likewise some of the warfare methods practiced by those same tribes against each other, and against European settlers (not all of which can be said to have been provoked).
Good point.
I do, as usual, find your willingness to embrace mass slaughter of innocents disturbing, but, I suppose that's those perverse Christian values I've been unable to shed in my adulthood, despite my apostacy.
(Now let's wait for some fool to come along and claim that Christian values murdered more people than other value systems. The historic record really doesn't support any such notion, but an awful lot of people believe that bilge anyway.)
My co-worker and I had a debate about whether the some of the colonists were terrorists as well. I argued against this, but his point was simply that families of Tory's were targeted because of their political point of view. Also, one could count the tea-partiers as well. But again, terrorists, I don't know.
I argued against, because random civilians weren't targeted, but he countered by saying the families of Tory's were innocents. There's a lot of debate that could be done on this point alone. So I'm just tossing this into the mix.
The problem with defining terrorism is that the boundaries are always really mushy.
Kansas in the late 1850s (after the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854) was consumed by terrorism. The phrase to remember is "Bloody Kansas". From the same period, John Brown's raid on the US armory at Harper's Ferry was at least arguably terrorism, though probably better described as insurrection.
Additionally, there was quite a bit of anti-immigrant violence in the late 19th century, which should probably be viewed as terrorist.
I find it peculiar that nobody seems to question the racist, restrictive, anti-European immigration policies of the Original Americans.
Hmm, the Palestinians are not big on immigration rights, either, are they?
Most confusing.
Palestinians are very much in favor of immigration rights as long as it entails them immigrating to Dearborn, Michigan, so as to be able to set up liquor/party stores, or stores selling prepaid cell phones and pagers!!!! Now, when it comes TO the mid-East, Palestinians are definitely not in favor of immigrants, especially if those happen to be Jews!!!
Some of the Whiskey Rebellion tactics were terroristic in nature (destruction of property). Washington was almost called from retirement to put it down. In fact his apparent acceptance of command quashed the rebellion.
America has always tolerated terrorist acts against property - acts against people are out of bounds. The ELF could be hunted down today in half an hour. The DoJ and local officials don't want a show trial.
When they kill somebody (and they will) they will be destroyed. Personally, I'd favor trying them now for property crimes (PETA too). The insurance companies are picking up the tab (for the most part) which means that everyone paying for liability (read fire) insurance is paying for these idiots fun and games.
God help them if I'm on a jury when they are nailed.
For the '50s, do consider the gang of Puerto Ricans who shot up the House of Representatives for whatever noble Cause they were pushing.
I think I would maintain a distinction between terrorism and war crimes. Today, we would classify some of the atrocities in the Indian Wars ( of each side BTW ) as terrorism and some as war crimes.
To bring in the Geneva Convention of Prisoners of War ( obviously post-dating the Indian Wars ), I tend to classify bodies of combatants that would qualify as prisoners of war ( ie., not illegal combatants ) as committing war crimes per se.
Shea's rebellion. Quantrell's Raiders. American indians. Jeane Lafite. the Mafia.
John Brown's actions in Kansas need to be placed in the context of the time: "Bleeding Kansas" and all that. You can't single him out.
In the Harper's Ferry raid, it was an attempt to start a revolution. Was G. Washington a terrorist? If so, then the word lacks meaning.
Q: Was Nat Turner a terrorist?
Harassment of loyalists during and just after the revolution sometimes rose to "terroristic" levels. That covers the 1770's and 1780's.
It was civilian harassment, beatings, and arson during the 1830's and 1840's (including the murder of Joseph Smith himself) which drove the Mormons to leave New York, Ohio, and finally Missouri.
I doubt that there was a decade between 1880 and 1940 where there wasn't union violence, either by employers, by workers, between union and non-union workers, or all three. Some of that - intimidation murders of union organizers and scabs, burning of factories, rises to the level of terrorism (politically motivated, targeted at civilians).
White on Black violence in 1919-1921 - post WWI, including anti-black riots in in many large cities, was motivated by the desire to intimidate blacks into returning to "their place" and thus was political, and thus terroristic. The worst may have been the killing of up to 3000 African Americans and destruction of about 35 city blocks in the black section of Tulsa, OK in May 1921.
And, of course, the Klan was actively terrorising Blacks and others from almost the moment of their founding through at least the 1970's. It was at its worst in the 1870's and 80's, and the 1920's, but it never really stopped until the Klan was reduced to cross-burning and marches in the late 70's/early 80's.
I'll second Bleeding Kansas and the Whiskey Rebellion. Also, some of the tactics of the Wild West outlaws closely resembled terrorism. Some, like the James gang, learned terrorist tactics as guerilla soldiers for the Confederacy in places like Missouri.
Don't forget the Haymarket incident in the 1880s, either.
Had to read down a ways, but my contribution is written out very clearly by rvman. (And, d'accords, Dean himself in various posts above...)
That 'might makes right' shortcut lurks just under the surface of civilized humans to this day, but we (as a race) are getting it more and more under control as we progress, carrying forward an ever-advancing civilization.
You say we didn't learn of it in school, but we still had the residual icon of those anarchist bombings until very recently: the bushy-eyebrowed, long-black-scraggly-bearded guy in a robe with a round bomb and its burning fuse!
He was based on those bombers of the pre-WWI era, radical Bohemian type, and he lived as a cartoon caricature for many decades... (see Mad Magazine's "Spy-vs-Spy")
You could argue that Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys in Vermont were engaged in terrorism against landlords and officials from New York before the Revolution came along and gave them something more productive to do.
I don't remember stories of physical attacks on civilians, but a favorite tactic was to remove and burn the roofs from homes settled under New York grants. Sherrifs sent from New York were regurally thrashed.
Of course, people are still rather fond of Ethan Allen in Vermont.
You won't find anything in any part of the world prior to the Industrial Revolution that you can classify as terrorism, but of course institutionalized violence was still the order of the day.
But it is easy to make a case not only for every decade but for every year between about 1800 and today. (I will leave out the Whiskey Rebellion, Shea's rebellion, the Indian Wars and the Haymarket riots as they have been mentioned.) Just a few more that spring to mind are the Trail of Tears (1825), the Molly Maguires (1870s-1890s), "Gangs of New York"(1830s-1870s), draft riots (1865), railway strikes of 1877, when Pittsburgh, Reading, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Buffalo were mob-ridden, assassination of Pres. Garfield by an anarchist terrorist(1881), massacre of striking steel-workers at Homestead, Pennsylvania(1892),the Pullman strike (1894), the Chinatown riots in SF (1900), assassination of Pres. McKinley by an anarchist terrorist (1901), the great anthracite strike(1902) which the Federal Commission characterized as "stained with a record of riot and bloodshed", the labor wars between the WFM and the "copper bosses" and silver mine owners in Colorado and Idaho (1900-1919), the "dynamite outrages" by the structural iron workers, stretching across the entire country, reaching a climax in the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910, the Lawrence, MA, massacre of women and children being evacuated from a strike-torn town (1912), the Ludlow Massacre (1914), anti-German riots and killings around both world wars(1914-1918) and anti-Japanese in the second(1941-1945), Detroit race riots (1943), a bloody attack by anti-communists and racists on two outdoor concerts by Paul Robeson (1949). (In fact, a Google search just on "race riots US" yields results for most years from 1865 to the present.)
If you want ot argue that all those already listed are terrorists than you might want to include the revolts against the Intolerable Acts by the American colonists. I feel your definition of "terrorism" is too broad and is really more case specific.