Terrorism: Essential Primary Sources provides insight into the scale and complexities of terrorism across a sweeping landscape of time, geography, act, and motive.

Despite the suffering inflicted on the innocent, it is an unarguable political reality that what constitutes terrorism is often contentious and heavily tied to cultural perspective. A suicide bomber labeled as a terrorist by one society may be referred to as a martyr in the news reports designed for more politically sympathetic audiences.

Groups and governments often resort to tortured language and labels as they attempt to either justify or dissociate themselves from often-horrific acts of violence. Moreover, as documents of early Nazi propaganda demonstrate, the label of terrorist is also used as propaganda to stir hatred against ideas, causes, or peoples.

Terrorism: Essential Primary Sources adopts the fundamental view that terrorism refers to an attempt to achieve a goal by violent or destructive acts intended to induce change through fear. The motives of terrorism are as diverse as the acts themselves and cover a range of religious, social, economic, and political passions.

As with the case of the Unabomber, the seed of terrorist acts may exist solely in the mind of an individual, or as in the case of al-Qaeda, may germinate into far-flung cells that operate globally. Although many definitions of terrorism restrict the label to sub-national groups, governments may water the seeds of terrorism with money or, as in the case of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan, allow it to grow in fertile soil.

The roots of terrorism can also be buried in the history of countries now considered flowers of Western democracy. The term terrorism comes from the French terrorisme (in or under the Terror of the French Revolution), and finds ancient philosophical and linguistic origin in the Latin verbs terrere (to make one tremble) and deterrere (to frighten one from).

Terrorism as a tactic of revolutionaries is not a new phenomenon practiced only in distant and dusty lands. A description of a brutal tarring and feathering of a loyalist man by colonial revolutionaries provides evidence that America's own founding insurrectionists used physical intimidation against British noncombatant loyalists. Ironically, the Boston Tea Party—a 1773 raid by colonialists on British ships in protest of high taxes, long taught as a heroic prelude to the American Revolutionary War—could easily be classified under new FBI guidelines as an act of terrorism.

Terrorism is also a tool of economic repression. The excerpt from Ida B. Wells's 1892 "Southern Horrors" pamphlet provides evidence that nineteenth-century lynching of African-Americans was not the exclusive product of Klu Klux Klan hatred, but was also inflicted to preserve established economic interests. Evidence of similar motive is also provided for later terrorist attacks against Chinese immigrants.

Rather than attempt subjective judgment as to whether acts are those of freedom fighters, patriots, or terrorists, the editors have attempted to establish a logical basis for the selection of primary sources that independently hold conflicting views of terrorism.

As a foundation, the editors incorporate the definition of terrorism found in the United States Code as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience."

In order to allow a more culturally diverse and broader international perspective on terrorism, however, the editors also include resources devoted to terrorism deeply planted in religious or social fervor. Examples of such causes are found in resources related to anti-abortion murders and ecoterrorism.

Obviously, not all acts of terrorism or significant resources related to terrorism can be included in a single volume, nor can all viewpoints find voice. Copyright restrictions also prevented the inclusion of some desired source materials. However, the primary sources selected for inclusion in Terrorism: Essential Primary Sources provide a foundation for understanding the often-entangled branches of cool political calculation, cold indifference, and blinding rage that bud into brutal acts.

K. Lee Lerner & Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, editors
London, U.K.
July, 2005