History:
The Irish Republican Brotherhood was
one of the earliest organizations to use modern terrorist
tactics. Pictured, "The Fenian Guy Fawkes"
by John Tenniel (1867).
Depending on
how broadly the term is defined, the roots and practice of terrorism can be
traced at least to the 1st-century AD.[81]Sicarii Zealots, though some
dispute whether the group, a radical offshoot of the Zealots which
was active in Judaea Province at the beginning of the 1st
century AD, was in fact terrorist. According to the contemporary Jewish-Roman
historian Josephus,
after the Zealotry rebellion
against Roman rule in Judea, when some prominent Jewish collaborators with
Roman rule were killed,[82][83]Judas of Galilee formed a
small and more extreme offshoot of the Zealots, the Sicarii, in 6
AD.[84] Their
terror was also directed against Jewish "collaborators", including
temple priests, Sadducees, Herodians,
and other wealthy elites.[85]
The term
"terrorism" itself was originally used to describe the actions of
the Jacobin Club during the "Reign
of Terror" in the French
Revolution. "Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe,
inflexible", said Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre. In
1795, Edmund Burke denounced the Jacobins for letting
"thousands of those hell-hounds called Terrorists ... loose on the
people" of France.
In January
1858, Italian patriot Felice
Orsini threw three bombs in an attempt to assassinate French
Emperor Napoleon III.[86]Eight bystanders were killed and 142 injured.[86] The
incident played a crucial role as an inspiration for the development of the
early terrorist groups.[86]
Arguably the
first organization to utilize modern terrorist techniques was the Irish Republican Brotherhood,[87] founded
in 1858 as a revolutionary Irish nationalist group[88] that
carried out attacks in England.[89] The
group initiated the Fenian dynamite campaignin 1881,
one of the first modern terror campaigns.[90] Instead
of earlier forms of terrorism based on political assassination, this campaign
used modern, timed explosives with the express aim of sowing fear in the very
heart of metropolitan Britain, in order to achieve political gains.[91]
Another
early terrorist group was Narodnaya Volya, founded in
Russia in 1878 as a revolutionary anarchist group inspired by Sergei
Nechayev and "propaganda by the deed" theorist Carlo
Pisacane.[81][92][93] The
group developed ideas—such as targeted
killing of the 'leaders of oppression'—that were to become the
hallmark of subsequent violence by small non-state groups, and they were
convinced that the developing technologies of the age—such as the invention of
dynamite, which they were the first anarchist group to make widespread use of[94]—enabled
them to strike directly and with discrimination.[95]
Scholars of
terrorism refer to four major waves of global terrorism: "the Anarchist,
the Anti-Colonial, the New Left, and the Religious. The first three have been
completed and lasted around 40 years; the fourth is now in its third
decade."[96]
