"The Purpose of Terror Is--To Terrorise"

So said Lenin, and he ought to have known. There is just one little problem with his famed dictum.

"What's that?" You ask.

The Geek is happy to tell you what. Lenin, a man who grew up in the context of terrorism, whose older brother was hung as a terrorist, and a guy who practiced terrorism on both the retail and wholesale level neglected to mention the important qualifier.

Get a grip on this.

He should have added, "Those who are willing to allow themselves to be terrorised."

Now, put it all together. The purpose of terror is to terrorise those who are willing to allow themselves to be terrorised.

Reads a lot differently, now, doesn't it?

Terrorism as a tactic depends for its success on the willing self-selection of its victims. What that means is really quite simple. People have a choice when presented by either the threat or the reality of terrorism. They can either suck it up and press on or be cowed, intimidated, reduced to blobs of quivering protoplasm without the will to face up to and defeat both the tactic and those who employ it.

To get a good handle on the concept that terror depends for its success upon the willing agreement of people to be terrorised, a brief trip to the history of war is necessary. Don't fret, the Geek will make it short and relatively painless.

After the Great War--World War I--the defense intellectuals of the Twenties and Thirties cast about for ways in which future war might be fought without the horrid bloodletting of frontal attacks on entrenched positions. Many of these heavy hitters for whom war was much more a theory than a practice hit on the idea of bombing civilian population centers.

The basis for this idea was the very, very limited experience the British had gone through with a series of attacks on London by German airships. In the first air raid or two, there had been a measurable, but still insignificant panic as the bombs fell through the night sky.

Casualties, damage, and panic had all been minuscule. Still, it left some air power fanatics convinced that massive air attacks upon the civilian population of an enemy center would wreak such terror that the panic stricken population would collapse in days forcing their government to surrender.

The years between 1925 and 1939 were filled with lurid descriptions of bombs falling on helpless civilians. The civilians would run in circles, scream and shout, fall on their knees in fear, collapse in psychosis or otherwise be rendered major non-participants in the war. Industry would stop. The trains would quit running. Governments would fall. Soldiers would raise the white flag.

Some military commanders such as Lord Trenchard in England would glom onto the pornography of terror from the air and work to develop an independent or strategic air force whose sole purpose in life would be to terrorise.

Trenchard was replaced by a man named Harris, who was a true believer in air delivered terrorism. Backed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Harris developed and deployed the British Bomber Command in a program euphemistically called "worker de-housing."

The target of the RAF Bomber Command's night raids was not the industrial or military infrastructure of Germany nearly so much as it was the civilian population. The primary purpose of the air campaign was to terrorise the German population into surrender (or at least a reduction in German industrial output.)

Wait one!

Hadn't England been bombed itself during the Battle of Britain and the subsequent "Blitz?"

You bettcha. Day and night raids were directed against military and civilian targets, but due to technical inefficiency and British resistance, many of the bombs had fallen on densely populated, purely residential areas.

Did the British public panic from the sheer terror of it all?

No. Not a chance. The people on the wrong end of the bomb sight buried their dead, gathered their wounded, repaired the damage, and got righteously hacked off.

At Churchill and the British air force for not protecting them?

Of course not. Their anger was directed at the Germans, at the people doing the bombing.

For reasons that escape lucid, rational explanation, Harris, Churchill and the other advocates of worker de-housing or area bombing using fire bombs apparently believed that the German public was less resolute, less stolid, and more given to being terrorised than the British. When the first raids, including one by a thousand bombers on Cologne failed to produce the desired state of submissive terror in the Germans, there was no move to re-evaluate the tactic. Instead, Harris et al simply tried harder.

More bombers. More bombs. More fires. More civilians in the bomb sights. Even after the world's first firestorm created in the densely packed old city area of Hamburg killing over forty thousand in one night failed to produce terror, the British kept on.

Six hundred thousand German civilians died under the bombs and the fires they produced. Even with this level of horrific loss, the terror bombing failed. There was fear, panic, and much anger within the German public. But, they were not terrorised.

The purpose of terror is to terrorise those who allow themselves to be terrorised.

Neither the British nor German publics allowed themselves to be terrorised. The bombs fell to be joined eventually by German cruise missiles and rockets. Cities burned. People died. But no terror.

The purpose of terror is to terrorise those who allow themselves to be terrorised.

The US president tried to make this point in his typically inarticulate way when he urged Americans to "go shopping" in the days after 9/11. He might not have remembered (or even been aware of) the World War II realities. He was more likely briefed on the more recent British experiences during the long years of "Troubles" with the Irish Republican Army and its offshoots.

Year after boringly bloody year, terrorist bombs exploded not only in Northern Ireland but in England as well. Bombs blew up pubs. Under cars. In boats. Even the neighborhood postbox could explode on you.

Sure there were no large body counts. Nothing akin to 9/11. Nothing that equalled the 7/7 attack on the London Metro. It was flea bite terrorism, but terrorism nonetheless.

To err on the side of accuracy, it was attempted terrorism. There were no loud outcries demanding that government policy change on Northern Ireland. The British public and HM Government sucked it up, pressed on, and eventually their firmness brought a peaceful solution to the "Troubles."

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise those who allow themselves to be terrorised.

The terror bombings in Madrid seemed to have worked. They seemed to have brought about a political change in Spain desired by al-Qaeda. However, a close analysis of political opinion in Spain prior to the Madrid outrage indicates with a high level of persuasiveness that the Socialists would have won even without the background noise of explosions. That being the case, the Spanish contribution to the effort in Iraq would have terminated anyway.

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise those who allow themselves to be terrorised.

In the case of Israel, the use of the terror tactic can be seen to have been every bit as counterproductive as was its employment against Germany during World War II. Rather than cowing the Israeli public, forcing the Israeli government to meet the terms offered by its opponents, bombs on buses and rockets aimed at schools have had the opposite result overall.

Terror, like any other tactic of war, is not universally successful. Terror, unlike other tactics of war, is often counterproductive.

Get a grip on this fundamental principle of conflict. Pressure consolidates long before it fractures. The tactic of terror is aimed intentionally at the softest of targets--civilians. That means paradoxically that it is aimed at the hardest of targets--the aggregate toughness of will of the civilian population.

Terror, whether delivered by mass fleets of bombers four miles overhead or executed by a faceless martyr with a fuel-air explosive laden vehicle, is more likely to anger than to cow. It is more likely to consolidate political will than to fragment it. More likely to infuriate than to intimidate.

The choice finally lies with every individual in a target population. That means it rests with each of us. Today and tomorrow.

When the next attack happens, each of us will have to make a choice. Each of us will have to decide.

Do I allow myself to be terrorised, to kneel in submission? Or--

Do I suck it up, get on with our lives and give the enemy no joy from his efforts?