La Terroriste, a 1910 poster depicting a female member of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party throwing a bomb at a Russian official’s car – public domain image provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Polish Central Archives of Historical Records and used in Wikipedia “Terrorism” – that headless body goes a bit hardcore

(4) TERR0R

Psychological and religious warfare lead naturally to terr0r or terr0rism as a type or at least a means of warfare.

Terr0r or terr0rism is obviously a subset of psychological warfare as a means of targeting an adversary’s morale or collective psyche, particularly of their civilian population or political state through violence against them or other non-combatants.

And modern terr0rism is most often associated with religious warfare – one religion in particular although more than one religion has resorted to it. In fairness, religious extremism has been identified by at least one source to have overtaken nationalist separatism to “become the main driver of terr0rist attacks around the world”, although that remains the subject of debate.

While modern terr0rism is usually traced to “19th revolutionary politics”, an “ancient lineage” of pre-modern religious terr0rism has been proposed – with three particular examples of religiously motivated groups, the Thugs or Thuggees in India (made famous by the second Indiana Jones film), the Order of Assassins in medieval Islam (who sadly lack the same movie treatment), and the Jewish Sicarii Zealots in Roman Judaea.

Terr0r in its broadest sense has always been one of the means, probably the most straightforward means if you have the stomach for it as most pre-modern societies did, to deploy psychological force in a war against an opponent in the form of intimidation or manipulation by fear and shock – whether combatants or non-combatants (or both). And by always, I mean from the prehistoric origins of war itself, if the evidence of prehistoric brutality is to be believed or the inference from historical or contemporary observations from tribal warfare is correctly inferred.

One of the best examples of the use of terr0r in war is not surprisingly by the Mongols, who routinely threatened besieged cities with annihilation if they resisted rather than surrendered – and acted on those threats.

On the other hand, terr0rism is a narrower form of the more general terr0r deployed against opponents in war from prehistory onwards – usually defined as terr0r through violence against non-combatants or civilians and typically identified as a development of modern history.

Terr0rism is “the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims…primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants”.

However, “there are various definitions of terr0rism, with no universal agreement about it. Different definitions of terr0rism emphasized its randomness, its aim to instill fear, and its broader impact beyond its immediate victims”.

Apparently, the terms “terr0rist” and “terr0rism” originated during the French Revolution – perhaps not surprisingly given the political terr0r or notorious reign of terr0r in that revolution. Indeed, modern terr0rism originated in the political ideologies that arose from and after that Revolution, combined with the weapons produced by industrial technology that lent themselves to the assassinations or attacks that characterized 19th century terr0rism – notably the pistol and dynamite.

However, both the terms of terr0rist and terr0rism as well as archetypal form of modern terr0rism “became widely used internationally and gained worldwide attention” from the 1970s onwards.

“Various organizations and countries have used terr0rism to achieve their objectives. These include left-wing and right-wing political organizations, nationalist groups, religious groups, revolutionaries, and ruling governments”. That last is represented by ” state terr0rism, with its institutionalized instrumentation of terr0r tactics through massacres, genocides, forced disappearances, carpet bombings, and torture” and is “is a deadlier form of terr0rism than non-state terr0rism”.