Thursday, December 2, 2021

Terrorism 101

A couple weeks ago the premier of Alberta did yet another stupid/malevolent thing. 

David Suzuki had recently opined on Twitter that "pipelines will be blown up if leaders don't act on climate change". To me that is just a statement of an obvious fact. If our leaders choose to totally ignore this existential crisis, eventually people who are concerned about it will take matters into their own hands. But Jason Kenney is choosing to act like he believes this was an incitement to violence. Here's his attempt to spin that narrative at a CBC news conference.  

As someone who has myself been called a "terrorist" for publicly suggesting--among other things---that a certain multi-national fast food restaurant should stop lying to the public about their packaging's impact on the environment, my blood boils at this nonsense. Conservatives all across the country (and the world) repeatedly use the "terrorist" label to smear people who are trying to benevolent things like slow down the human race's suicidal insistence that we collectively jump off the climate cliff. With that in mind, I thought it might be worth some time and effort to deconstruct the words "terrorist" and "terrorism".

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Simply stated, "terrorism" is an attempt to scare people into accepting the imposition of a certain state of affairs against their will. In WWII the Allies followed a campaign of "terror bombing" in the hope that it would demoralize and terrify the German and Japanese populations into giving in and surrendering to the Allied armies.  As Robert McNamara famously stated in the movie The Fog of War, 

LeMay [General Curtis LeMay, American head of their strategic bombing campaign] said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

Terrorism goes way, way back in human history. Probably the most "efficient" terror state was the Mongol Empire. It managed to control vast swathes of Asia with a relatively small military simply by insisting that unless a city surrendered without resisting, it's entire population ran the risk of being put to the sword. Moreover, if any part of the already existing empire showed any interest in rebelling, it similarly ran the risk of mass murder. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia comes up with the following:

Ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in certain geographical regions, causing great demographic changes in Asia. According to the works of the Iranian historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv and more than 1,000,000 in Nishapur. The total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine. Population exchanges also sometimes occurred.

and

About half the population of Kievan Rus' may have died during the Mongol invasion of Rus. The figure refers to the area roughly corresponding to modern Ukraine. Colin McEvedy (Atlas of World Population History, 1978) estimates the population of European Russia dropped from 7.5 million prior to the invasion to 7 million after it.

Historians estimate that up to half of Hungary's population of two million were victims of the Mongol invasion of Europe.

Stories about Mongol reprisals preceded their arrival, which probably meant that leaders found themselves under extreme pressure to simply give in without a fight, which not only prevented costly battles but ensured that the Mongols would be able to preserve the tax base of conquered territories.

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I put a lot of work into these articles, which I hope help people better understand the world around them. I freely offer these words to anyone who wants to read them. But if you can afford it, why not help me financially? It's easy to do through both Patreon and Pay Pal.

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The above are examples of "state terrorism". But what Kenney and the corporation which slandered me were talking about is done by "non-state actors". Again, this has a long history. Everyone knows about Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the IRA---but how many readers remember the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, the Red Brigade, and, the Japanese Red Army?  These were big-deal terrorist groups that caused a fair amount of mayhem during the 1970s. 

If we go even further back in time, we come up with the Anarchist terrorists. I'm not sure how much they were followers of the actual ideals of this political system, but they mostly seemed to be motivated by the idea of "propaganda of the deed". That is the idea that if individuals will take action either individually or in small groups, the results will inspire others to follow suit. I suppose the ultimate result would be so much mayhem that the government would fall to pieces and an Anarchist utopia would result. (I'm not sure that the people involved had made much effort to think things through.) In the case of these individuals, they assassinated leaders of the ruling class. The following are some of the more "stand out" acts of Anarchist terrorism:

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But if you really want to talk about the "big leagues", the most successful non-state terrorist actor in American history was the Ku Klux Klan. This is a terrorist organization that allowed white Southerners to reassert control over the states of the Confederacy after Union troops left at the end of the era known as "reconstruction" and hold it up until the Civil Rights era. Indeed, the organization still lingers on, although it was probably permanently damaged by a lawsuit in the 1980s that set the legal precedent that a hate organization is financially liable for the criminal acts done in its name. 

Until relative recently even I was under the impression that racist lynch mobs  tended to be disorganized bunches of yahoos who got together once in a while when motivated by equal amounts of alcohol, racism, and, whatever stupid rumours they had heard. It's easy to see why I would think this, as this is the image that was presented to me by almost all the popular depictions of them that I had ever seen. Here's one of those iconic film representations.

The truth was much, much different. Lynching was a key part of the Jim Crow strategy that the Southern elite used to retain white control over the South even though they had lost the Civil War. The important thing to understand is that lynching wasn't just a bunch of drunk rednecks taking the law into their own hands. It was a calculated strategy that the ruling elite in the South used to control the vast numbers of blacks that lived in their part of the country, and which they exploited in to support their privilege.

This was such a part of society that lynchings would sometimes be announced before hand in local newspapers. (Bring your whole family---pack a picnic lunch!) Local politicians would be photographed taking part to help in their election campaigns. And if---for one reason or another---you couldn't attend yourself, photographers would sell souvenir pictures. Take a look at the following short video that references all these points.


A report by the Equal Justice Initiative published a report titled Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror found evidence to support that there were at least 3959 lynchings in the US between 1877 and 1950. In the words of the authors,

Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in America and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West during the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America. The administration of criminal justice especially is tangled with the history of lynching in profound ways that continue to contaminate the integrity and fairness of the justice system.

Two points made in this report that are especially important to this article are that lynchings were used to promote a specific form of politics---namely white supremacy, and, that as the overt lynching declined, it was replaced by a significant increase in the use of capital punishment through the criminal justice system to replace it. 

In support of the first point, the report mentions in conversation with living survivors that many reported that they or relatives moved to the North specifically to escape lynchings. One particular case that they cite came from Georgia.

After a lynching in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, white vigilantes distributed leaflets demanding that all black people leave the county or suffer deadly consequences; so many black families fled that, by 1920, the county’s black population had plunged from 1100 to just thirty.

With regard to the replacement of lynchings with the criminal court's use of the death penalty, the report points out that as lynchings declined in the South, the use of capital punishment increased in lock-step.

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South. Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states’ rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past. As contemporary proponents of the American death penalty focus on form rather than substance by tinkering with the aesthetics of lethal punishment to improve procedures and methods, capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror—“a direct descendant of lynching.”
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Just to show how much support there was in the USA for racist violence, I'd like to share a segment from a 1925 Pathe news reel that I came across online. It shows a 40,000 person march in front of the White House. (The municipal authority told the organizers that the people involved had to have their faces uncovered in order to get a permit.)

Lest readers suppose that this was just a group of "yahoos" from the countryside who invaded the capital, here's a quote by President Woodrow Wilson from his 1901 book, A History of the American People which shows how "mainstream" the KKK has been in the South during my grandparent's time.

“The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

Wilson was a notoriously racist president. Among other terrible things, while in office he unravelled what few positions that still existed for blacks in the federal bureaucracy from the time of Grant (who was remarkably progressive on race issues). 

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Readers might be excused if they thing I've gotten a bit side-tracked with the KKK, but I went onto this tangent as a way of introducing a series of articles on white supremacy that I've been researching. Just as a bit of a "send off", I thought I'd include this cool---yet depressing---public domain map that I found. It shows all the lynchings that the Tuskegee Institute could find in it's database superimposed on a map of the USA (click on the picture for a larger version). Key in a playlist that starts with Dixie and ends with Strange Fruit.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

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