Violent extremism

“ The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of Western values upon their cultures. ”

“ From beneath their feet rose always the subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were to persist. ”

“ Growing more violent every instant the mob continued to hoot and yell through the streets; stopping before some of the handsomest dwellings they passed, attacking them with violence, and breaking in the doors and windows ”

“ The terrorist organization will tend to emulate the very characteristics of its enemy it fulminates against the most. Thus, all such groups are rebarbatively authoritarian, execrably violent, devoid of human empathy or emotions, suppressive, ostentatious, trenchant and often murderous. ”

“ These lawless elements, consisting of Communists of the Maoist faction and members of the New People’s Army, had been engaged in terrorism and violent acts, such as assassinations and kidnappings, thus endangering public safety and threatening national security. ”

“ They have organized hate and violence. They use force not only in secret, but in broad daylight. I have seen how they use it on the human body, its life and health, imposing monstrous and destructive tasks on human beings! ”

“ The extremists of the citizens' councils, the political leaders who in terms violent and inflammatory have repudiated their oaths and stood against due process of law have helped unloose this flood of hate and bombing. ”

“ They want to answer violence with violence; they want to respond to the terrorism of the Government with a terrorism of their own. And in Germany at this time there were a number who argued that, as they were in fact outlaws, why should they not adopt the tactics of outlaws? Should men peaceably and quietly submit to every insult and every form of tyranny—to be thrown in jail for speaking the dictates of their conscience and even to be hung for preaching to their comrades the necessity of a nobler and better social order? ”

“ Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence--the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers--and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. ”

“ Yet, as I have said, there is one force making for terrorism that throws a confusing light on the whole series of tragedies. Why should the governments of Europe subsidize anarchy? Why should their secret police encourage outrages, plant dynamite, and incite the criminal elements to become anarchists, and in that guise to burn, pillage, and commit murder? Why should that which assumes to stand for law and order work to the destruction of law and order? What is it that leads the corrupt, vicious, and reactionary elements in the official world to turn thus to its use even anarchy and terrorism? ”

“ The director of the Terrorism Studies Center over at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland says that these attacks, he expects, are going to be increasingly brutal, more ruthless, less idealistic. For some, he says, violence becomes an end in itself, a cathartic release, a self-satisfying blow against the hated system. Little that can be done about that, if indeed the man's right. ”

“ For our terrorist enemies, violence is not only justified, it is necessary and even glorified—judged the only means to achieve a world vision darkened by hate, fear, and oppression. They use suicide bombings, beheadings, and other atrocities against innocent people as a means to promote their creed. ”

“ Terrorist forces, by means of violence, sabotage and intimidation, pose a serious threat to world peace and security by scorning human rights, slaughtering innocent people, endangering public security, and creating fear and panic in society. ”

“ Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others. The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. ”

“ The continued violence of the militants—smashing windows, slashing the canvas of valuable pictures, burning the contents of letter-boxes, letting off explosives in empty churches, etc.—caused intense irritation and resentment among the general public, and afforded an excuse to those M.P.'s who had promised their support to our movement to break their word. ”

“ We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. ”

“ But to have Louvain’s atrocities justified, to have the destruction of towns systematically brought about in a spirit of fiendish reprisal or as part of a propaganda of military terrorism, this is what revolts the world. It is this demoniacal barbarism, raised to the ultimate power for evil by modern mechanism, that staggers civilization. ”

“ The whole country is being pillaged. Escaped convicts, straggling Russian prisoners, degraded soldiers, murderers are plundering country houses, farms, whole villages, and inciting the mob to violence. ”

“ Living in this condition of continual warfare—their hand against all men, and, with rare exceptions, all men against them, the gallows or the bullet their certain doom—it is not to be wondered at that crimes of violence shocked and aroused the community. ”

“ Violence is increasing in scope, complexity, and lethality. There are multiple sources of violence in Iraq: the Sunni Arab insurgency, al Qaeda and affiliated jihadist groups, Shiite militias and death squads, and organized criminality. ”

“ We have already seen the system of extensive combinations carried on in defiance of the laws;—organized bands and tumultuous assemblages of peasantry, extorting money, and enforcing their demands with threats of violence;—wanton destruction of property, in the breaking of machinery, in attacks upon private houses, and in the far more horrible crime of the nocturnal incendiary;—violence and excesses in many towns;—and riot, pillage, and arson, defying for some days, in a great city, municipal authorities and military force. ”

“ At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle, between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear, and moderate people who work for peace. ”

“ By reacting with excessive force borne of horror, outrage and frus- tration, a society may play into the terrorist's hands. Excessive force, indiscriminately applied, breeds its own fear and erodes the fabric of civic stability. ”

“ Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without. The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists, Socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the enemy. ”

“ The method of the Fascisti is calculated, organized terrorism. They aim to paralyze the workers with naked fear and to destroy every semblance of organization and independence among them. Murder, arson, rape, kidnapping, and the systematic violation of every right, human and civil of the workers, are the means they use in their work of destruction. ”

“ Thousands of men, besmeared with blood, dust, and clay, half naked, brandishing weapons still dripping with gore; whirling torches; shouting out roars of triumph; howling in desperate lamentation; kneeling and weeping over the dead with the most violent affliction; wrapping themselves in robes and armor; tearing away their raiment, and flinging sword and spear into the flames; throwing hundreds of corpses into one promiscuous burning, round which they danced with furious exultation; carrying away on litters of lances and branches, corpses that they seemed to hallow as more than mortal ”

“ Such is the tragic story of barely forty years of terrorism in Western Europe. It reads far more like lurid fiction than the cold facts of history. Yet these amazing irreconcilables actually lived—in our time—and fought, at the cost of their lives, the entire organization of society. Surely few other periods in history can show a series of characters so daring, so bitter, so bent on destruction and annihilation. ”

“ But the fact that you ruin thousands of men in prisons, fortresses, galleys, and exile, break up millions of families and ruin millions of men, physically as well as morally, in the army, that fact is not an imaginary but a real act of violence, which, according to your own argument, one ought to oppose by violence. And so you are yourselves these wicked men against whom, according to your own argument, it is absolutely necessary to use violence," the oppressed are sure to say to their oppressors. ”

“ Terroristic activity consists in the destruction of the most harmful persons in the Government, the protection of the party from spies, and the punishment of official lawlessness and violence in all the more prominent and important cases in which such lawlessness and violence are manifested. ”

“ And that mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us, for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed. Remember it then, all men. We will never be the aggressor, we will infringe on the rights of no people, but shall stand for our own until death. ”

“ Other occupied countries report the same type of non-violent resistance. There are strikes of parents against sending their children to Nazi-controlled schools, strikes of ministers against conforming to Nazi decrees, demonstrations, malingering, and interference with internal administration. ”

“ It is directed solely against the scab, placing him in such fear for life and limb as to drive him out of the contest. But when terrorism gets out of hand and inoffensive non-combatants are injured, law and order threatened, and property destroyed, it becomes an edged tool that cuts both ways. ”

“ I tremble at the thought that our own civilized and chivalrous people may at any moment be confronted with this lava flood of savagery and destructiveness. Now, if ever, the opportune moment has come for all civilized nations to join in protest, stiffened with a unanimous threat, against the continuance of such crimes against the human race. Europe ought surely to have the line drawn at the poisoning of wells, the persecution of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children. ”

“ Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire. ”

“ Thanks to this reform, we might again see the State triumphing by the hand of the executioner.
Proletarian acts of violence have no resemblance to these proscriptions; they are purely and simply acts of war; they have the value of military demonstrations, and serve to mark the separation of classes. Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the fields of battle ”

“ The idea that by this sort of terrorism human society, as at present organized, could be moved to abdicate all its functions, and to deliver itself into the hands of an organization of murderers, is so absolutely preposterous that its serious conception can be attributed only to an utterly deranged state of mind. ”

“ CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN TERRORISM Over the past decade, political terrorism on an international scale has become one of the ugliest and most pressing problems confronting the community of free nations. ”

“ What expression, or what degree of contempt is most appropriate for the citizens connected with these rebel efforts;—persons owing a true and faithful allegiance to the Government, yet aiding and abetting its public enemies, persons who while professing a common fealty with their fellow citizens, would welcome to their homes incendiaries, and incite them to murder and plunder those very fellow citizens, and compel them to suffer all the horrors of a cruel warfare! ”

“ It is an unfailing maxim, that, if policy enjoins an act of violence, its execution ought never to be entrusted to the violent; ”

“ For every guerilla we kill with a 'smart bomb,' we kill many more innocent civilians and create rage and anger in the Iraqi community. This rage and anger translates into more recruits for the terrorists and less support for us. ”

“ Rioting mobs drowned out the chant of religious fanatics who hailed Judgment Day. Great fires turned the air murky and flame-shot. Machine guns spat regularly in city streets; looting, murder, and fear-crazed crimes were universal. Civilization had completely vanished overnight. ”

“ It is plain, that were all things in perpetual tumult and confusion,—disturbance and contention on all sides—deeds of violence and wrong committed in open day, and no power to check them,—robbers breaking into houses, and murderers running through the streets with naked swords in their hands,—in such a state of things, what could the peaceable and well-disposed do? ”