Abstract
In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City and the federal building in Oklahoma City, newspapers published maps showing the radius of potential destruction from such blasts. The ballistic results were frightening as were other scenarios concocted about attacks on the vulnerable infrastructure of bridges, subways, buildings, and tunnels.1
It is safer to believe evil of everyone until people are found out to be good, but that requires a great deal of investigation nowadays. Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
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Notes
Discussions on the trials of the World Trade Center bombers, their organization and objectives, may be found in Robert J. Kelly, “The Politics of Atrocity and the Cult of Counterterrorism,” Parts I and II, Magazin für die Polizei, 23(198,199) (Oct./Nov. 1992) and R. J. Kelly, “Guilty: The Verdict against Terror in the World Trade Center Bombing,” Magazin für die Polizei, 25 (July/August 1994).
J. D. Simon, The Terrorist Trap: America’s Experience with Terrorism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
I. Cohn and G. S. Gordon-Gill, in J. Goldberg, “A War Without Purpose,” New York Times Magazine, January 22, 1995, pp. 36-40. Child Soldiers (Geneva: Institut Henry-Dunant). T. Rosenberg, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (New York: Morrow, 1991).
B. M. Jenkins, Future Trends in International Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, 1985), p. 7176. R. J. Kelly and W. Cook, “Experience in International Travel and Aversion to Terrorism,” Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 10(2) (April 1994).
K. L. Adelman and N. R. Augustine, The Defense Revolution: Intelligent Downsizing of America’s Military (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990).
Space limitations preclude a discussion of chemical and biological weapons that are quite lethal, readily available, and easier to handle than nuclear weapons. Among states that have resorted to chemical agents, Iraq has been the most blatant during its war against Iran in the 1980s and against Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq.
A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Knopf, 1982).
On the issue of changing social identities where sex, gender, ethnicity and race replace class notions, see Stanley Aronowitz, Roll Over Beethoven: The Return of Cultural Strife (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), and
William W. Zellner, Countercultures: A Sociological Analysis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), for discussion on marginal and irredentist nativist movements that are transnational in scope and aspiration.
R. J. Kelly, “Political Crimes and the Emergence of Revolutionary Nationalist Ideologies,” in R. S. Denisoff and C. McCaghy, (Eds.) Deviance, Conflict and Criminality, Chicago: Rand McNally, (1973).
R. J. Kelly, “From Pistols to Ploughshares: The IRA’s Farewell to Arms,” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 20(1):106 (1995).
Mark Hagopian, The Phenomenon of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974)
Albert Parry, Terrorism from Robespierre to Arafat (New York: Vanguard Press, 1976)
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), Ch. 8. These writers suggest that terrorism practiced by states was not an isolated, fortuitous—even if recurrent—expression of a government’s exasperation but a system: a plan for mass intimidation, compulsion, and murder. In the hands of government agencies operating clandestinely, terror is a deliberately calculated response to challenges, real or imagined (and the latter too frequently illustrates the paranoia rampant in a regime), where punitive activities including assassination, exile, incarceration, informal reprisals, the suppression of free speech and criticism, the ubiquity of police agents and informers, and the violation of human rights create an apparatus of repression that has durability and never ceases to function, going on intermittently at varying levels of intensity throughout the life of a regime.
In contrast to the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94, according to Pipes, the Bolshevik Terror emanated not from below but from the Politburo permanently chaired by Lenin himself. Pipes’s anti-Leninist zeal blinds him to authoritative accounts of the French Reign of Terror where not individuals but bureaucracy and laws initiated the violence. Furet, for instance, thinks that the bloodletting was unleashed by the Law of 22 Prairial—the Law of Suspects—which later consumed most of The Committee of Public Safety and the Republicans who supported its extremist repressions. See Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Georges Lefebvre, The Thermidorians, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books). Indeed, on examination of state-sponsored terror across the historical sweep of great transformative revolutionary movements in the Russian, French and Chinese cases—especially the Cultural Revolution and “Great Leap Forward” inaugurated by Mao, it becomes evident that (1) they are principally focused on the key enemy—the people themselves—and (2) the apparatus for the repression is a mix of party officials, military, and police cadres. In this connection, see
Richard M. Pfeffer, “Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution” in Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (Eds.), National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World (New York: Free Press, 1971). Pfeffer, in spite of himself, describes how Mao set in motion widespread terror against the Chinese masses through his mobilization of party cadres and youth. Though they were directed to carry out purges of party elites, bureaucrats, and party opponents, not surprisingly it was the peasants who felt the brunt of the repression.
J. Inciardi, “Narcoterrorism: A Perspective and Commentary,” in Robert J. Kelly and Donal E. J. MacNamara (Eds.), Perspectives on Deviance (Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing, 1991).
M. S. Steinitz, “Insurgents, Terrorists and the Drug Trade,” The Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985.
R. W. Lee, III, “Colombia’s Cocaine Syndicates,” in Alfred W. McCoy and Alan Block (Eds.), War on Drugs (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
R. J. Kelly, “Breaking the Seals of Silence: Anti-Mafia Uprising in Sicily,” USA Today Magazine, July 1994.
P. Williams, “Transnational Criminal Organizations and International Security,” Survival, 36(1) (Spring 1994).
J. O. Finckenauer, “Russian Organized Crime in America,” in Robert J. Kelly, Ko-lin Chin, and Rufus Schatzberg (Eds.), Handbook of Organized Crime in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
D. E. Kaplan and A. Dubro, Yakuza (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1986)
C. Sterling, Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
C Sterling, Thieves’ World, pp. 14-15.
In specifically addressing the international nature of organized crime, the United Nations Economic and Social Council observed that: International experience shows that organized crime has long ago crossed national borders and is today transnational.... It should be noted that aspects of the evolutionary process undergone by society may make powerful criminal organizations even more impenetrable and facilitate the expansion of their illegal activities. (United Nations, Report of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice on Its First Session, Substantive Session of the Economic and Social Council, Vienna, Austria, 1992, p. 32)
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia two years ago he planned to travel by train from Vladivostok in the East to Moscow in order to get a feel of the mood of the country. Somewhere east of the Urals in the Donets region, racketeers stopped the train demanding a “fee.” It was only through the intervention of high officials and the mobilization of regional police that he was able to proceed unmolested by extortionists.
J. Holder-Rhodes and P. A. Lupsha, “Gray Area Phenomena: New Threats and Policy Dilemmas,” CJ. International, 9(1) (January-February 1993); National Strategy Information Center, The Gray Area Phenomenon: Report of a Research Seminar (July) (1992). (Washington, DC).
R. J. Kelly and K. Chin, “Illegal Chinese Immigrants and Smuggling Rings,” National Science Foundation, Report (1995).
In this connection, Aristotle has some useful insight. Commenting on types of government and the character of leaders, he says: When speaking of royalty we also spoke of two forms of tyranny, which are both according to law, and therefore easily pass into royalty. Among Barbarians there are elected monarchs who exercise a despotic power; despotic rulers were also elected in ancient Hellas, called Aesymnetes or dictators. There monarchies, when compared with one another, exhibit certain differences. And they are, as I said before, royal, in so far as the monarch rules according to law over willing subjects; but they are tyrannical in so far as he is despotic and rules according to his own fancy. There is also a third kind of tyranny, which is the most typical form, and is the counterpart of the perfect monarchy. This tyranny is just that arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or better, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman, if he can escape from it, will endure such a government. The kinds of tyranny are such and so many, and for the reasons for which I have given. (Aristotle, The Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941) II, 219.
J. B. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
M. Van Crevald, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991).
Ibid., 193.
In looking for parallels with the right-wing militia movements spreading in rural white America, mainly in the states west of the Mississippi, some similarities with urban groups are apparent. First, the wariness of federal law enforcement agencies (FBI, ATF) and the criticism of their high-handedness in dealing with ordinary citizens are matched by community suspicions and misgivings about local police forces in the racial ghettos of most large American cities. Second, in addition to the fear promoted by law enforcement the motives behind the formation of the movement may be no different in essence than those that led to urban crime families and street gangs; in short, the Arizona Patriots and Michigan Militia are matched, as it were, by the Crips and Bloods of Los Angeles.
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Rieber, R.W. (1997). Terrorism, Organized Crime, and Social Distress. In: Manufacturing Social Distress. Path in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0053-1_7
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