Terrorism and the Consolation of History

Richard Drake | Professor of History, University of Montana

My name is Richard Drake, and I teach history at the University of Montana. I’ve been at the University since 1982, and one of the courses that I teach is “Terrorism in the Modern World.” We cover the history of terrorism from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, all the way to the present time.

Terrorism is generally defined as illegal or immoral violence that has a political aim. Since 9/11, American foreign policy and much of American domestic policy has focused on the problem of terrorism.

What I’d like to do is discuss the lessons of history that the great historians of the past can teach us about terrorism. Historians have been writing about terrorism really for 2,500 years, going all the way back to Thucydides, the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War. I’d like to give an overview of some of the conclusions that historians have reached about the subject of terrorism in the past, and to see if those lessons can be applied to the problems of terrorism that we face today.

That is my plan.

Thucydides wrote about the problem of terrorism that engulfed Athens following their defeat in the Sicilian Expedition of the Peloponnesian War. He writes about the political assassinations—the murders that became routine in Athens following that defeat. And of course what he concludes from those examples of violence—terrorist violence—is that any lost war is a danger point for any society. Political radicalism and political violence begin to mount in an environment that is created by a lost military campaign.

Additionally the medieval chronicles reek of terrorist violence. The two greatest chroniclers of the crusades, Jean Froissart and Geoffrey Villehardouin, write about endless scenes of pillaging and massacres on really both sides—the Muslim as well as the Christian side of that struggle. They describe one scene where Crusaders butchered a civilian population to the cries of “God Be Praised.” There are many scenes like this scattered throughout the chronicles of the Crusades.

There are two authoritative historians of the Renaissance, Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Guicciardini, who write almost exclusively about the political violence that engulfed Italy all through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Bruni talks of politicized violence, dynastic violence, which resulted in cruel scenes of massacres, assassinations, betrayals, and feuds. We think of the Renaissance as a great time of cultural achievements in literature and art, but you would never know that any of these artistic and cultural achievements were going on based on what Leonardo Bruni tells us in his classic book, History of the Florentine People. The whole book deals mainly with war, violence, terrorism in all forms.

In Francesco Guicciardini’s The History of Italy, we find the same message. Again he was writing at a time when Michelangelo and Leonardo de Vinci and Raffaello Sanzio were creating their artistic masterpieces of the High Renaissance. Yet he doesn’t write a line about any of that. All he can talk about are the wars and political rivalries that are just drenching the streets of Florence and Rome in blood. He has a particularly vivid image about the violence of the period. He says that what was actually going on was that the Arno River in Florence and the Tiber River in Rome were full of cadavers. It was a time of unlimited violence of the worst kind.

So we are not alone in facing the problems of politicized violence.

In fact the next period in European History, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, was a time of almost unlimited human suffering, unlimited warfare. The great German historian of the nineteenth century, Leopold von Ranke, has written two books about those wars of religion that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation touched off. His first book is The History of the Civil Wars in France in the 16th and 17th Centuries. It deals with the French phase of these religious wars. The most infamous example of violence in that period is the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, when Catholics butchered thousands of Protestants, and of course Protestants returned the favor. There were these reciprocal massacres that went on for decades.

He tells us, after studying these horrors, that there is absolutely nothing worse than the mixture of religion and politics. The fanaticism that arises out of that combination is just the most extreme form of evil imaginable.

In the following century, in the seventeenth century, there occurred the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 – 1648. Leopold von Ranke wrote the classic book about that as well. It describes the blood-curdling scenes that religious wars were responsible for. There were just untold massacres, slaughters of every conceivable kind, civilian populations butchered on both sides. It was a dark period, a real dark age in European history.

Now it is not a historical coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War that we begin to see increased signs of deism and agnosticism and atheism in European society. The person who epitomized this shift to a much more secular way of thinking about society and thinking about mankind is Voltaire in the eighteenth century. He epitomizes the French Enlightenment with his famous utterance, “Ecraser l’infâme!” or “crush the infamous thing,” by which he meant religion. Until the last Catholic, the last Protestant, the last Jew, the last Muslim, are all gone the world is going to be drenched in blood.

He said that religious traditions have a way of producing fanaticism and we can’t afford this fanaticism anymore. We have lost huge numbers of people because of these outbursts of religious fervor and what we need to do now is really to move toward a more scientific conception of the world. We really need to replace the Bible with science. Science needs to be the authority, not scripture.

Now what the great historian of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville, says about the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is that even the secular value system of the Enlightenment produced its own terrorism. Of course we think of the Great Reign of Terror in France from 1793 – 1794. He connects this period with certain Enlightenment ideas and policies and traditions. There are connections between the old regimes in the French Revolution where he links intellectual, cultural developments with their political outcome.

What Tocqueville argues is that it is not just religion that produces these terrorist horrors, but secular, non-religious traditions can produce them as well.

He says that terrorism is a much more complex, daunting problem than what Voltaire thought it was. We’ve seen how in modern times secular ideological systems have been responsible for the worst terrorism. We think of the Bolshevik Tradition in the Soviet Union for example which culminated in Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago, with at least 20 million people killed by state terrorism. We think of the Nazi Holocaust and other slaughters for which Nazism, a secular ideology, bears responsibility.

It seems to me that the problem of human violence is a dauntingly complex one, and it really rises above any kind of simplistic solution for it, such as the one offered by Voltaire.

I want to conclude this commentary today by trying to extract from the historical record the lesson that seems to me to be the most pertinent to the challenge that we face with terrorism today. It is a lesson put forward by Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on the French Revolution. He asks the question, “How did the French Revolution occur? Why did it occur? Why did it take the form it did?”

He makes the penetrating observation that as we learn more and more about the French Revolution it becomes evident that the most important part of the story regarding the French Revolution does not concern the Revolutionaries. In order to understand why and how the revolution occurred when and where it did, it is more important for us to understand why the establishment failed, why the government failed, why the monarchy of Louis the XVI simply lost any understanding, any capacity of how to govern.

The system became bankrupt. Their policies were counter-productive. The anger and fury of the populace over these failed policies was really promulgated by an establishment that had lost touch with reality, so distracted by its privileges, by its wealth, by its insolence vis-à-vis the rest of the population. That is the element of the story that really deserves the historian’s notice. Even more than what the revolutionaries were doing.

What he concludes, and the lesson from history regarding terrorism that is most pertinent, is also the most germane to what we are facing today. He says that it is when a government fails, when an establishment or a hegemony fails, when these things happen and increasing numbers of people become alienated and disillusioned and disaffected, it is at that moment that radical groups begin to surge, just as they did in 1789 in France.

And that is true historically.

I think that is true even for our own time. If we apply Tocqueville’s lesson to the challenge of terrorism that we face today, the question becomes: Are our policies and actions lending aid and comfort to our adversaries? Are our policies in dealing with the Muslim world for example, designed to augment the following of radical groups? Are they designed to infuriate those people further? Or are our policies designed to try to tamp down the radicalism, the fanaticism, to isolate these groups and cut them off from a broad swath of the population?

I think that is the question for today, and I will close on that.