The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,211

campaign, John Kerry told a New York Times interviewer, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”191 Confirming the definition of a gaffe in Washington as “something a politician says that is true,” George Bush and Dick Cheney pounced on the remark, calling Kerry “unfit to lead,” and he quickly backpedaled.

The ups and downs of terrorism, then, are a critical part of the history of violence, not because of its toll in deaths but because of its impact on a society through the psychology of fear. In the future, of course, terrorism really could have a catastrophic death toll if the hypothetical possibility of an attack with nuclear weapons ever becomes a reality. I will discuss nuclear terrorism in the next section but for now will stick to forms of violence that have actually taken place.

Terrorism is not new. After the Roman conquest of Judea two millennia ago, a group of resistance fighters furtively stabbed Roman officials and the Jews who collaborated with them, hoping to force the Romans out. In the 11th century a sect of Shia Muslims perfected an early form of suicide terrorism by getting close to leaders who they thought had strayed from the faith and stabbing them in public, knowing they would immediately be slain by the leader’s bodyguards. From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. These groups did not accomplish any political change, but they left a legacy in their names: the Zealots, the Assassins, and the Thugs.192 And if you associate the word anarchist with a black-clad bomb-thrower, you are recalling a movement around the turn of the 20th century that practiced “propaganda of the deed” by bombing cafés, parliaments, consulates, and banks and by assassinating dozens of political leaders, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of France, King Umberto I of Italy, and President William McKinley of the United States. The durability of these eponyms and images is a sign of the power of terrorism to lodge in cultural consciousness.

Anyone who thinks that terrorism is a phenomenon of the new millennium has a short memory. The romantic political violence of the 1960s and 1970s included hundreds of bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies, leagues, coalitions, brigades, factions, and fronts.193 The United States had the Black Liberation Army, the Jewish Defense League, the Weather Underground (who took their name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), the FALN (a Puerto Rican independence group), and of course the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA contributed one of the more surreal episodes of the 1970s when they kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974 and brainwashed her into joining the group, whereupon she adopted “Tanya” as her nom de guerre, helped them rob a bank, and posed for a photograph in a battle stance with beret and machine gun in front of their seven-headed cobra flag, leaving us one of the iconic images of the decade (together with Richard Nixon’s victory salute from the helicopter that would whisk him from the White House for the last time, and the blow-dried Bee Gees in white polyester disco suits).

Europe, during this era, had the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Freedom Fighters in the U.K., the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the ETA (a Basque separatist group) in Spain, while Japan had the Japanese Red Army and Canada had the Front de Libération du Québec. Terrorism was so much a backdrop to European life that it served as a running joke in Luis Buñuel’s 1977 love story That Obscure Object of Desire, in which cars and stores blow up at random and the characters barely notice.

Where are they now? In most of the developed world, domestic terrorism has gone the way of the polyester disco suits. It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die.194 Lest this seem hard