If We Forget Our Past, We'll Have Less Future

Terror is a boring subject. Except in the size (both actual and potential), there is utterly nothing new about terrorism.

It's all happened before. To us. In our recent past. As usual, we Americans have forgotten it all.

If the Geek had a mind to (and if he believed you would have the patience to read through it), he would go back to the late 19th Century when the noise of bombs exploding in pursuit of political goals nearly overpowered the sound of industry in American cities. It was a great time for terrorists of varying sorts, shooting and bombing their way to one presumed utopia or another.

Or the Geek might go back to the days immediately following the Great War (World War I, if you prefer.) Once again political objectives were pursued by bombs. Anarchist attacks on government and business figures killed few (other than inept bomb throwers) even though history of a sort was made one day in 1920 when a vehicle bomb (a horse drawn cart filled with dynamite) tore a good sized hole in lower Wall Street near the House of Morgan.

The bombing campaign at war's end had only one result. It propelled a politically ambitious US Attorney General named Palmer to initiate a highly publicised series of raids against supposed foreign subversives. This Red Scare constituted an assault against civil and constitutional rights far surpassing any committed to date under the badly mis-named USA Patriot Act.

Since the Geek spent some years teaching US history at the university level he is aware of the limited attention span of Americans regarding the past. So, we'll take only a very small step into our collective experience.

We'll go back not quite forty years. To the last (literally) explosive years of the Fabled Sixties. Specifically, the sixteen months between January 1969 and April 1970. The first of the Nixon years. The peak of the Vietnam War and its opposition.

The Long Year of the Bomber.

The Weather Underground was making and planting bombs. So also was the Puerto Rican nationalist group, FALN. Joining in the fatal fun were Croatian nationalists, right-wing Zionists, and other, smaller groups too numerous to reference.

During this sixteen month period there were more than 35, 000 bomb threats. Actual bombings numbered 4,330 and 1,175 attempted bombings. Most of these were small devices, many of a purely incendiary nature. The vast majority killed no one. Even so, forty-three people were killed across the country.

The bombers were complemented by the assassins. The Black Liberation Army and the various Black Panther groups preferred retail level killing, particularly of policemen.

Between the pistol shots and bombs (384 in New York City alone), it was hard to get a good night's sleep in most large American cities.

The motivation behind the bombs and bullets differed from group to group. The intent of all was the same--to terrorise. It didn't matter if the end goal was revolution or simply to end the war, the means employed was the same--terror.

The bombs and bullets did cause fear. The incidents were widely publicised in the media of the day. Some, such as the bombing of the Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which killed one graduate student, became major stories with long legs.

Long legs or not, the bombs and bullets and the transient anxiety they produced didn't bring about the results hoped for by the shooters and bomb layers.

The Nixon White House howled with outrage. Nixon's constitutional rights hating Attorney General, John Mitchell, grunted and threatened. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI lumbered into action. Local police forces received more Federal money with which to purchase new cop shop goodies including automatic weapons. (The relationship between M-16 toting cops and bombers in the night has always eluded the Geek.)

Congress funded the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and similar programs of dubious utility in that period's War on Terrorism, which had great benefit to recipients in the form of fatter paychecks and the aforementioned goodies.

Overall, life went on as before. We the People read the headlines, watched the if-it-bleeds-it-leads TV coverage and got on with our lives.

Barely more than a decade ago, a pair of loonies from the farthest fringes of the survivalist shore of our domestic political scene took it upon themselves to demonstrate frustration with the federal government by blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in what was, up until 9/11, the highest body count act of "terror" in US history. The Geek put quotation marks around the word terror because the act had no definable political purpose or goal.

The net effect was simply that law enforcement at all levels did what its members are paid to do. The act was investigated, perpetrators arrested, tried and convicted. Case closed.

The Unibomber of the Eighties and Nineties had, if his "Manifesto" is taken at face value, a political goal. He didn't like technology and thought it should be stopped. (If this constitutes a goal, it is in the same league with King Canute's attempt to roll back the tide.) The FBI blundered around for years getting nowhere slowly as the Unibomber's packages arrived from time to time. Before Uni's brother ratted him out, a few were wounded, one killed, and no one terrorised.

Since the first attempt on the World Trade Center, the scale of terrorist actions has shifted radically. So has the scale of the US response.

Other than those two complementary features, no other aspect of terrorism has altered. Before you object by bringing up foreign sponsorship, the Geek will engage in preemption.

Earlier waves of terror had foreign links as real as that provided by al-Qaeda. The anarchist terror attempts of a century ago were part and parcel of European anarchist movements. The post-WW I attacks were at least inspired, if not directly linked, with the leftest revolutionary groups in Eastern and Southern Europe.

The Croatian bombing at LaGuardia Airport 29 December 1975 was foreign. The US had no involvement with internal problems of Yugoslavia. We hadn't manufactured the country. Nor had our policies contributed to the internal frictions. Still, the Croatian Liberation Forces in a post-attack statement held the US responsible as it hadn't acted to force Belgrade to give Croatia its independence.

Go figure.

There is no doubting the responsibility of Libya for the downing of an American airliner over Scotland. This was a clear act of state sponsored terrorism. It didn't gain Libya anything positive.

Americans weren't terrorised even though passenger loads on transoceanic flights fell sharply for awhile. The US government changed its policy toward Libya to be sure. We got tougher.

In short, there is nothing new. We've seen it all before. As a nation we've lived through it all before. The events of 9/11 were tragic. The butcher's bill was greater than the aggregate of all previous terrorists acts.

Even with the oft-repeated warnings of worse yet to come, there is little reason to totally lose our collective cool. There is little reason for We the People to demand--or even allow--our government to engage in over-reactions whether these take the form of further reductions in rights and privacy or more ill-advised adventures in regime change.

During World War II there was a slogan. It was, "We did it before--we can do it again!"

Looking ahead from the vantage point of history, the new slogan should be, "We lived through it before. We can live through it again."