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Part II: Terrorism - Created by Imperialism

A lot of confusion is generated in progressive and revolutionary circles on the question of terrorism. Some even suggest that terrorists are on the side of the people and are striking a blow against imperialism, arguing that the problem is just with their tactics. However, the entire history of terrorism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proves the opposite – the terrorists are agents of imperialism used to attack the struggles of the people and to advance the interests of the imperialists. Terrorism was created by the imperialists as a method of combatting revolution, as well as to sort out contradictions among themselves..

When the term terrorism was first coined, to describe the actions taken by the bourgeois revolutionaries in France against the titled classes, it was defined as the use of terror to govern. However, in the twentieth century, terrorism has become defined as the use of violence that deliberately targets civilians. Increasingly, this definition has been modified to apply only to individuals and small groups, with acts of state terrorism being justified as legitimate security measures. This is particularly the case in regard to the state terrorism practiced by the United States and its allies.

Europeans were the first imperialists to perfect the use of terror to subjugate entire populations. They ruled in their colonies through genocide, slavery and torture and became the masters of collective punishment as a form of intimidation. All of this was done in the name of the highest-sounding ideals of the day – bringing “civilization” to the darkest corners of Africa, Asia and the Americas, bringing religion to savage heathens, and so forth. The reality was that through the use of violence they were able to impose colonial rule and ruthlessly exploit the natural and human resources of the lands they had colonized.

Joseph Conrad was one of the first writers to expose the brutality of colonialism to European audiences. Conrad travelled around the world first with the French merchant marines and then the British merchant navy. He visited colonial outposts in every corner of the globe and was shocked by what he described as the “unchecked terror” used by the Europeans to maintain power. His experiences in the Belgian Congo became the basis for his searing indictment of European colonialism – Heart of Darkness, published in 1902.

Imperialist powers were also the first in modern times to use violence indiscriminately against civilian populations. The U.S. used terror tactics against Aboriginal peoples in order to subjugate them and expropriate their land. The world’s people experienced state terrorism during the First World War, with both sides deliberately targetting civilians with bombings and gassings. Following that war, the world witnessed the worst crimes of the twentieth century: the Armenian genocide, the Japanese invasion of China and rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the manufactured famine in Bengal, the Indonesian massacres of the 1960s and, most recently, the genocides in Rwanda, Burundi and Sudan.

The imperialist states also created the modern terrorist groups which commit mass murder and, borrowing the language of the early imperialists, try to justify their crimes in the name of high-sounding ideals. These groups are used in circumstances where the imperialists cannot operate openly, to undermine revolutionary struggles, to destabilize governments and to attack the economic interests of competing imperialists without actually going to war.

Two of the first modern terrorist groups to operate came into being early in the twentieth century. The Irgun (the group’s full name, Irgun Tsvai-Leumi, was Hebrew for Military National Organization) and their allies in the Stern Gang were both Zionist groups dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. They were also dedicated to the use of terrorism to drive the indigenous Arab population in Palestine out of their land.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Irgun and the Stern Gang were responsible for a number of assaults against civilians, including a series of attacks against Arab villagers from 1937 to 1939. Irgun claimed responsibility for a marketplace bomb set off in Haifa in February 1939 in which 24 Arabs were killed, with others killed in bombs that exploded in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv on the same day. In 1946, Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing close to 100 people. According to Uri Avnery, a member of Irgun who is now an Israeli peace activist, Irgun received funding from both the Polish and British governments. Both governments supported Irgun’s goal of creating a Jewish homeland – the British to consolidate a colonial base in the Middle East and both governments to rid their countries of Jews.

Irgun was eventually absorbed into the Israeli Defence Forces after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and its members continued to be associated with acts of state-sanctioned terrorism against the Arab population over the next few years. The most infamous of these acts was the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when Irgun and Stern gang soldiers “lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them”, as Israeli Simha Flapan writes in The Birth of Israel. According to Flapan, “the ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Arab population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.”

Deir Yassin was the first in a series of such massacres, designed to enable the IDF to expel hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians with little resistance. In the four months after Deir Yassin, Irgun carried out similar atrocities in the Palestinian villages of Lydda, Ramle, Doueimah, Quibya and Kafr Kassme.

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