Modernist Terrorism Red, Black, and White

Abstract

‘Great events cast their shadow before them’, the German poet Wolfgang Goethe stated cryptically. However, the constant foreshortening of historical perspectives in an increasingly present-centric ‘media age’ has been aggravated by selective memories induced by the current ‘War on Terror’ (i.e. on Global Salafi Jihad) in the decade following 9/11. The combined effect tends to blank out from our reading of contemporary history the long, menacing shadows of terrorism, both religious and secular, that had already fallen over many parts of the world in the two decades preceding that limpid, innocent, early autumn morning in New York. It is easy to forget, for example, that in 1984 the Reagan Administration had already declared a ‘War against Terrorism’ as a reaction to the truck bombings of the US Embassy in April 1983 and then the barracks of the French and US Multinational Force of peacekeeping troops six months later, an attack causing the most serious casualties inflicted on the US and French military in a single day for decades. The assaults were carried out by the Shi’ite Muslim terrorist organization operating under the name Islamic Jihad (AKA Hezbollah) during the Lebanese Civil War. It led to the withdrawal of the Multinational Force from the Lebanon, another rare example of terrorism actually succeeding in its immediate aims. Although Islamic Jihad was commonly referred to as ‘fundamentalist’, in Eisenstadt’s terms it should perhaps be more precisely considered communal-nationalist-religious because of the importance of its territorial ambitions.