Path and Interpretation

Abstract

The proliferation and intensity of incidents of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s earned terrorism and terrorists the attention of scholars, government agencies and the mass media. The literature on terrorism has grown dramatically, but there is as yet no agreement on what terrorism is. The Russian revolutionaries (Narodnaya Volya — People’s Will) of the late 1870s were the first to develop a theory of terrorism:

Terroristic activity consists in destroying the most harmful persons in the government, in defending the party against espionage, in punishing the perpetrators of notable cases of violence and arbitrariness on the part of the government and the administration, and it aims to undermine the prestige of the government’s power, to demonstrate the possibility of struggle against the government, to arouse in this manner the revolutionary spirit of the people and their confidence in the success of the cause, and finally, to give shape and direction to the forces that are fit and trained to carry on the struggle. (Schmid and de Graaf, 1982)

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

George. Santayana, Persons and Places