Abstract
The term “terrorism” is derived from the French la terreur. As now understood terrorism began in the French Revolution with the deposition and execution of Louis XVI. On April 6, 1793, the French National Convention created the Committee on Public Safety, which we now associate with Maxmilien Robespierre. Citizens thought to have sympathies with the monarchy were brought before the Committee to have their “virtue” tested.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted by Marisa Linton, “Robespierre and the Terror…,” History Today 56 (2006): 23.
- 2.
David C. Rapoport, “The Fourth Wave: September 11 in the History of Terrorism,” Current History (December 2001): 419–424.
- 3.
Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 6 and 7.
- 4.
J. Angelo Corlett, Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). His chapters on terrorism are some of the best discussions in the literature.
- 5.
Card, 154.
- 6.
Ibid., 158.
- 7.
Louis Pojman cites these figures: In the 1980s 4684 people died from terrorist acts; in the 1990s 2468 deaths from terrorism. “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism,” in Terrorism and International Justice, edited by James P. Sterba (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135.
- 8.
Michael Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” in Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 51.
- 9.
Card, 129.
- 10.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity, 74–75, cites the hope of Commander Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris that Allied bombing of German cities would shorten the war by breaking the morale of the German population. Lord Cherwell claimed that sustained Allied bombing would destroy 20–40 million homes. His estimates turned out to be wildly inaccurate, and “…as in the Blitz on London, civilians may become more determined to resist.”
- 11.
Card, 166.
- 12.
Shannon French, “Murderers, Not Warriors: The Moral Distinction Between Terrorists and Legitimate Fighters in Asymmetric Conflicts,” in Sterba’s Terrorism and International Justice, 31–46.
- 13.
“Murderers Not Warriors,” 37.
- 14.
Michael Walzer, “Non-combatant Immunity and Military Necessity,” in Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1977), 145.
- 15.
See Peter A. French, Cowboy Metaphysics: Ethics and Death in Westerns (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997). See also his The Virtues of Vengeance (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2001).
- 16.
Peter French, “Virtuous Avengers in Commonplace Cases,” Philosophia, 44 (2016): 384–385.
- 17.
Corlett, Terrorism, 125.
- 18.
Ibid., 133.
- 19.
Ibid., 134.
- 20.
Quoted by Corlett, 143, from Jarveson’s, “Terrorism and Morality,” in Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, edited by R.G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150.
- 21.
Card, 135.
- 22.
Ibid., 128. She cites Bat-Ami Bar On on what it is like to live daily under terrorist conditions. Bar On grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli military, and later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State University. See her The Subject of Violence: Arendtean Exercises in Understanding (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
- 23.
Card, 124 and 131.
- 24.
Walzer, Arguing About War, 53–54.
- 25.
Ibid., 55.
- 26.
Corlett, 143.
- 27.
Quoted by Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), 27–28.
- 28.
Cited by Tomis Kapitan, “The Terrorism of ‘Terrorism’,” in Sterba’s Terrorism and International Justice, 60.
- 29.
Norman Loayza “How to Defeat Terrorism: Intelligence, Integration, and Development,” The Brookings Institution, Monday, July 25, 2016. My italics. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2016/07/25/how-to-defeat-terrorism-intelligence-integration-and-development/.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, “Moral Virtue,” 1103a33.
- 32.
Corlett, 169.
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DeArmey, M.H. (2020). Terrorism: Cruelty, and Destructiveness for Everyone. In: Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_12
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