Genocide

The ultimate act of repression is genocide (Chirot and Edwards 2003). Genocide, a term coined during World War II, refers to the deliberate extermination of a group because of its race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality. The term comes from the Greek word genos, or race, and the Latin root-cide, or killing. By definition, genocide is the worst crime by government of all and is often called a “crime against humanity.” The most infamous example of genocide, of course, is the Nazi slaughter during World War II of 6 million Jews, more than twothirds of all the Jews in Europe, and of up to 6 million other people, including Poles, Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, and gypsies (Gilbert 1987). In the late 1800s, Russia also committed Jewish genocide by murdering hundreds of Jews in massacres called pogroms. More than 2 million Russian Jews fled their homeland for the safety of the United States, Palestine, and other areas (Klier and Lambroza 1992). In yet another act of genocide, about 1 million Armenians died from thirst, starvation, or attacks by roving tribes after Turkey forced them into the surrounding desert in 1915 (Nazian 1990).

Unfortunately, genocide did not end with the Nazis. Observers in 2004 said the mass murder of Africans in Sudan by an Arab militia group called the Janjaweed amounted to genocide. As the “International Focus” box in Chapter 10 discussed, political unrest in the western region of Darfur led the Sudanese government to pay the Janjaweed to quell the rebellion. The Janjaweed did so through mass terror including murder, rape, torture, and the burning of whole villages. By July 2004 more than 1 million Africans had been displaced, and it was estimated that between 300,000 and 1 million would die from murder and starvation if the Janajaweed were allowed to continue their terror (Heffernan and Ayotte 2004).

A decade earlier, ethnic conflict in two regions of the world led to tens of thousands of deaths and repeated charges of genocide. One region was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former republic of Yugoslavia that declared its independence in a referendum in early 1992. At the time of the declaration, Bosnia consisted of three nationalities: Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. The Muslims and Croats voted overwhelmingly for independence, while the Serbs mostly boycotted the referendum. The move to independence led to a civil war pitting the Serbs against the other two groups. By the end of 1992, Serbs controlled about 70 percent of Bosnian land and had begun forced expulsions, called “ethnic cleansing,” of Muslims from the land they captured. They also began to massacre thousands of unarmed Muslim and Croat men, women, and children (Post 1994). In addition, Serb troops raped an estimated 20,000 Muslim women in an act termed by some observers as “gynocide” (Quindlen 1993).

In 1994 a civil war also tore apart the African nation of Rwanda, which consisted of two major ethnic groups, the Hutu, who controlled the country, and the Tutsi. In April 1994 a plane carrying the Rwandan president, a Hutu, crashed after reportedly being shot, and the government blamed a Tutsi rebel group. Government troops responded by massacring some 200,000 Tutsis in the next three weeks and at least 500,000, and perhaps as many as 1 million, overall by the end of June. Tutsi forces fought back, scored some significant victories, and captured the Rwandan capital in July. Some 1 million Hutus fled the nation in response (C. Lynch 1995).

During World War II, the Nazis imprisoned Jews another groups in concentration camps such as this one and eventually slaughtered some 6 million Jews and 5 to 6 million other people.

Some 15 years earlier in the late 1970s, more genocide had taken place in Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot forced city residents to move to rural areas and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. In 1979 Vietnamese troops helped Cambodian opponents of the regime overthrow it (Martin 1994).

Genocide is typically linked to totalitarian governments, but democracies can also commit it. Here the U.S. treatment of Native Americans is widely cited. When Europeans first came to this continent, about 1 million Native Americans lived here. Over the decades, tens of thousands were killed by white settlers and then U.S. troops, while many others died from disease introduced by the Europeans. Deaths from these two sources reduced the Indian population to less than 240,000 by 1900. Many historians and other scholars say the killings constituted genocide against American Indians (Wilson 1999).

The term genocide was used again during the Vietnam War years. The Vietnam War cost the United States more than $150 billion and killed some 58,000 U.S. soldiers and other personnel and almost 2 million Vietnamese. Ten million South Vietnamese became refugees. The United States dropped four times as many tons of bombs, many targeting civilian populations, as the Allies had dropped over Germany in World War II. Some were strictly antipersonnel in nature, sending out small nails able to shred muscles and body organs but not able to dent military equipment, or steel pellets able to penetrate flesh but not trucks (Branfman 1972). Many bombs contained napalm, a “jellied” gasoline that would ignite when the bomb dropped from the plane, splatter across a wide area, and burn anything it touched. Often the “anything” was children and other civilians. In 1968 U.S. troops massacred up to 200 civilians at My Lai village. Although this massacre received wide attention after it was publicized, Vietnam veterans later revealed many other civilian massacres that never came to light (Meyrowitz and Campbell 1992).

Torture, Assassination, and Related Violence

Governments often resort to political violence that stops short of genocide. This violence includes torture and beatings; assassination, execution, and mass murder; and related actions including forced expulsion. This is government rule by terror and has been termed state terrorism (Bushnell 1991). One of the most notorious examples of state terrorism of the previous century occurred under Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, a purge of Communist party leaders who might have threatened Stalin's reign resulted in the execution of thousands as Stalin's secret police terrorized the Soviet citizenry (Conquest 1990).

State terrorism did not end with Stalin. International human rights groups have documented thousands of government-sponsored murders, beatings, and related violence across the world. In Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere, dissenters are kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. In Bosnia and elsewhere, government troops have raped women routinely. These human rights violations are once again much more common under totalitarian regimes than in democratic societies, but, as we see later, the United States has seen its share of government violence over the years.

One of the most notorious acts of government violence in the last two decades was the June 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square in China. A “democracy movement” of thousands had shaken China to the core. On June 4, 1989, several thousand unarmed demonstrators, many of them students, gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China's capital, to demand democratic reforms. The military's response was to open fire and slaughter several hundred demonstrators. Many others were arrested and imprisoned, with some later executed (Black 1993).

Political violence by governments includes torture, beatings, and other forms of physical abuse. In this famous photo from 2004, a prisoner of U.S. forces in Iraq is hooded, apparently wired to an electrical device, and forced to stand on a small box.

Governments also assassinate selected dissenters whom they perceive as special threats. As just one example, in the late 1970s peasants and other poor citizens in El Salvador began demanding that the government provide land, jobs, and other help to the poor. Many Roman Catholic priests and nuns supported the protesters. One of the most vocal clergy was Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated by government troops in March 1980. His death became a rallying cry for dissident forces for several years (Goldston 1990).

Government Violence in the United States The United States has also seen its share of political violence committed against dissenters, especially those in the labor movement. In Chapter 9 we saw that law enforcement officials fatally shot 18 strikers, many of them in the back, during an 1897 coal mining strike and wounded 40 more. Another labor massacre remembered by history occurred in Ludlow, Colorado, in April 1914 at a tent city of striking miners and their families evicted from their company-owned homes. On Easter night, April 20, company guards and National Guard troops poured oil on the tents, set them afire, and machine-gunned the families as they fled from the tents. Thirteen children, one woman, and five men died from bullet wounds or smoke inhalation (McGovern and Guttridge 1972).

During the 1960s, violence against Southern civil rights activists by police, state troopers, and white civilians was common. Several dozen civil rights workers were murdered and hundreds more beaten. The murdered included Southern blacks as well as Northerners who had come to help the movement. Other violence greeted civil rights demonstrators engaging in protest campaigns, especially those in Selma, Alabama, in April and May 1963 and in Birmingham, Alabama, in March 1965. In Birmingham, police clubbed nonviolent demonstrators, attacked them with police dogs, and swept them away with powerful fire hoses. In Selma, state troopers again clubbed the demonstrators with nightsticks, attacked them with police horses, and used tear gas. Both episodes shocked the nation and helped win federal civil rights legislation (Branch 1998).

On the heels of the civil rights movement came the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The Panthers initially organized free breakfast programs for poor children and criticized police brutality against blacks. Police and other law enforcement agencies responded with a multifaceted effort, including lethal violence, to harass and discredit the Panthers (Churchill and Wall 1990). In December 1969 Chicago police knocked down the door of Panther leader Fred Hampton one night and shot him fatally as he lay in his bed. They also shot another Panther leader, Mark Clark, who died later from his wounds. The police claimed that Hampton had fired at them when they burst into his room, but later investigation revealed that all the bullets in the room, except perhaps one, came from the police, suggesting that Hampton and Clark were murdered in cold blood (Balkan, Berger, and Schmidt 1980).

The kind of official violence used against Southern civil rights activists and the Black Panthers was much less common during the Vietnam antiwar movement, but some still occurred. On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops fired into an antiwar rally at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others. Several of the students were just watching the rally or walking to classes (Davies 1973). Ten days later campus protest not related to the war brought police and state troopers onto the campus of Jackson State College, a historically black college in Mississippi. At one point they fired rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns into a dormitory, killing 2 students and wounding 12 others (Spofford 1988).

At the federal level, the U.S. government has conspired in or otherwise supported the torture and murder of dissidents and the assassination of political leaders in other nations in the last half-century. During the Vietnam War, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established the notorious “Operation Phoenix” program that arrested, tortured, and murdered some 40,000 Vietnamese civilians (Chomsky and Herman 1979). Following orders of the White House and State Department, the CIA has supported coups that deposed and often killed national leaders in countries such as Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Iran, and South Vietnam. Each assassination and coup made these politically unstable nations only more chaotic and often plunged them further into civil war or led to despotic governments that terrorized their citizenry (Moyers 1988). In just one example, Salvador Allende was democratically elected the head of Chile in 1970 but was a Marxist opposed to U.S. corporate involvement in the Chilean economy. In response, the CIA helped undermine the economy and aided right-wing terrorist and other groups opposed to Allende. In this context, the resulting coup in 1973 that killed Allende was perhaps inevitable. It replaced a democratic government, even if socialist, with a military junta that murdered, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of citizens over the next several years (Davis 1985).

Surveillance, Infiltration, and Disruption

In George Orwell's (1949) classic novel 1984, Big Brother was always watching, and citizens had no freedom of movement. The aim here, of course, was to make sure no one could do anything unobserved that might threaten the existing order. Orwell's novel remains a frightening indictment of totalitarian societies that today still have police and other law enforcement agents spy on the citizenry, infiltrate dissident groups, and harass and disrupt their activities.

One of the cornerstones of democracy is freedom of movement and lawful dissent. Yet from the 1940s to the 1970s, the FBI, CIA, and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies systematically and illegally spied on hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who were lawfully involved in civil rights, antiwar, and other protests (Davis 1992). These agencies also infiltrated many dissident groups and did their best to disrupt their activities. The FBI's efforts were part of its counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO, begun in 1941 to target the Communist and Socialist Workers parties (Davis 1992). During the 1960s, the FBI turned its attention to the civil rights, antiwar, and other social movements that began during that decade. Using wiretaps and informants, it monitored the activities of tens of thousands of citizens, some of them leaders of these movements but most of them unknown except to their families and friends. Perhaps the most famous target of FBI harassment was the great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, believed the civil rights movement was Communist-inspired and that King was at best a dupe of Communists or at worst a Communist himself. The FBI bugged motel rooms in which King stayed to gather evidence of alleged extramarital affairs and at one point wrote him anonymously, urging him to commit suicide before this evidence became public (Garrow 1981).

Some FBI and other informants further acted as agents provocateurs who tried to disrupt dissident groups by fostering internal ideological debates and by urging them to violence (Churchill and Wall 1990). The chief aide to Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader killed by Chicago police, was in fact an FBI informant who tried to get Hampton's group to be more militant and told authorities the layout of Hampton's apartment so that they knew where he would be sleeping when they raided it (Balkan, Berger, and Schmidt 1980).

The story of Scott Camil, a Marine decorated with nine medals for his service in Vietnam, is instructive. Camil later became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which, because it was a powerful antiwar voice, was infiltrated by the FBI and local and state police. Several law enforcement agents became VVAW leaders and tried to have VVAW become violent (Schultz and Schultz 1989). An FBI memo mentioned an investigation aimed at “neutralizing Camil at earliest logical date” (Camil 1989:325). A month later he was arrested on kidnapping charges that were eventually dropped. He was also arrested but later acquitted for marijuana possession. His house was burglarized and his files taken, and his lawyer's office burglarized, with only Camil's file taken. Several months later, Camil and other VVAW members were arrested for allegedly conspiring to disrupt the 1972 Republication National Convention. A prosecution witness was an FBI informant who became one of Camil's best friends and had attended meetings between the defendants and their attorneys. Camil had even taken care of the informant's child. Camil later learned that more than half the people at some of his VVAW meetings were undercover agents. There were so many agents that, according to one police informant, “The spies were spying on the spies that were spying on the spies” (Camil 1989:328).

The congressional investigations' disclosure in the 1970s of all of these surveillance activities prompted much public and news media outrage. Congress enacted legislation to limit such surveillance, yet the FBI continued such efforts in the 1980s when it spied on some 2,400 individuals and many organizations in the United States opposed to the White House's Central American policies (Gelbspan 1991). As part of its efforts, the FBI photographed rallies on college campuses and elsewhere and investigated individuals who attended films on U.S. Central American policy. The FBI also conducted surveillance of gay rights groups in the early 1990s (Hamilton 1995).

During the Vietnam war, the FBI and other intelligence groups spied on thousands of antiwar dissidents involved in lawful protest and sometimes infiltrated groups opposed to the war.

After the terrorist acts of 9/11, the U.S. government increased its surveillance of people suspected of terrorism. Critics said the government surveillance eroded civil liberties and included people who were engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment. The “Crime and Controversy” box reviews this debate.

Legal Repression

A favorite repression strategy in totalitarian nations is to arrest and imprison dissidents. The aim here is to use the guise of law to legitimate political repression, even though the arrests and prosecutions are based on “trumped-up” charges. Stalin's reign of terror involved many “show” trials that depicted his opponents as dangerous threats to law and order. Otto Kirchheimer (1961) called this repressive use of legal procedure “political justice.” Its goal is to put dissidents behind bars, to discredit their movement by labeling their conduct as criminal, and to intimidate supporters and potential sympathizers. Dissidents imprisoned under these circumstances are commonly called political prisoners. When trials do occur, they are “sham” trials lacking the due process found in democratic legal systems (Christenson 1986). Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have identified thousands of political prisoners throughout the world over the years. The “International Focus” box discusses a political prisoner in China.

Political trials and other repressive uses of the law also occur in democratic societies, where officials hope that arrests and prosecutions will prompt the press and the public to view dissidents as common criminals. They also hope to intimidate the dissidents and their movements and to force them to spend large amounts of time, money, and energy in their defense. For these reasons, democratic governments often prefer legal repression to violent repression, which risks looking too extreme (Kirchheimer 1961).

U.S. history has been filled with legal repression (Rosati 2004). To cite one example, federal law prohibited virtually all criticism of World War I. Arrests and prosecutions of some 2,000 labor radicals and socialists during the war muffled dissent and destroyed the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union. After the war ended, federal agents raided homes, restaurants, and other places in 33 cities across the country and arrested some 10,000 radicals in what became known as the “Palmer raids,” named after the U.S. attorney general at the time. Legal repression was also used during the Southern civil rights movement of the 1960s, when thousands of activists were arrested and jailed on trumped-up charges, forced to spend large sums of money on their defense, and subjected to beatings and the very real possibility of death in Southern jails. Convictions by white judges and juries were a foregone conclusion. Several Southern cities used mass arrests and prosecutions to thwart civil rights protest campaigns. By avoiding police violence, these cities' efforts seemed reasonable and even won plaudits from the press and federal officials (Barkan 1985).

This repressive use of the law was less common during the Vietnam War, when antiwar activists usually ended up in court because they committed civil disobedience (discussed later). However, the government did not abandon this tactic entirely. In 1968 it prosecuted renowned “baby doctor” Benjamin Spock and four others for conspiracy to violate Selective Service laws by advocating draft resistance, even though some of the defendants had never even met each other (Mitford 1969). Four of the five defendants, including Spock, were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, although their convictions were later overturned.

As part of their campaign against the Black Panthers, law enforcement officials used legal repression as well as violence and surveillance. More than 760 Black Panthers were arrested across the nation in the late 1960s, with their bail reaching almost $5 million (Wolfe 1973). One of the most celebrated Black Panther trials, in New York City in 1970–1971, involved 13 defendants arrested in 1969 for 12 counts each of conspiracy to bomb department stores and police stations and to murder police (Zimroth 1974). After an eight-month trial, the jury deliberated only three hours and found the defendants innocent of all 156 counts. Despite the acquittal, most of the defendants had been in jail for over two years. The government's multifaceted repression effectively ended the Black Panther Party by 1972 (Wolfe 1973).

Native American activists have also been subject to legal repression. In 1975 two federal agents entered the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to arrest a Native American suspected of stealing a pair of boots. A violent confrontation resulted in the deaths of the two agents and of one member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an Indian activist organization. The killing of the AIM member was never investigated. Of four Native Americans arrested for killing the two agents, one, Leonard Peltier, an AIM member, was convicted despite a lack of evidence and apparent improper conduct by the prosecution and judge at his trial. Peltier was sentenced to life in prison and has been cited as a political prisoner by Amnesty International (Peltier 1989).

Personal Economic Gain

Officials at the local, state, and national levels of government may misuse their offices for personal economic gain, most often by accepting bribes and kickbacks for favors they give businesses and individuals. These favors include approving the purchase of goods and services from certain companies and handing construction contracts to other companies. This form of graft goes back at least to the nineteenth century, when public officials in the major U.S. cities were notorious for corruption, documented by muckraker Lincoln Steffens in his famous 1904 book, The Shame of the Cities, in which he detailed corruption in many cities, including Chicago, Minnesota, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Perhaps the worst offender was William March “Boss” Tweed, the head of New York City's Democratic party organization after the Civil War. Tweed and his associates robbed New York of up to $200 million (about $3.4 billion in today's dollars) in a 10-year span, as more than two-thirds of every municipal contract went into their pockets (Hershkowitz 1977).

One of the most infamous national scandals, Teapot Dome, occurred during President Warren G. Harding's administration in the early 1920s. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall took bribes in 1922 of more than $400,000 (about $4.4 million in today's dollars) for leasing government-owned oil fields to private oil companies. Fall then resigned in 1923 to join one of the companies. He was convicted in 1929 of accepting a bribe, fined $100,000, and sentenced to one year in prison. Harding's attorney general was tried but not convicted in 1926 for other corruption. In yet another scandal, the director and legal adviser of Harding's Veterans Bureau were accused of embezzling Bureau funds. The director was convicted and imprisoned, and the legal adviser committed suicide (Noggle 1965).

Three decades ago, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign his office because of his own political corruption. During the 1960s, Agnew was a Baltimore County executive and then Maryland's governor. Baltimore County grew rapidly during that time, with roads, highways, bridges, and sewers being built. Contractors and engineering and architectural firms kicked back as much as 5 percent of their contracts to Agnew and other officials who approved the contracts. Agnew continued to receive these kickbacks while he was governor and later vice president. He eventually resigned in 1971 and pleaded no contest to one charge of income tax evasion. His punishment was a $10,000 fine (far less than the $80,000 in kickbacks he took just as vice president) and three years' probation (Cohen and Witcover 1974).

Governor John Rowland of Connecticut was forced to resign in July 2004 amid evidence that he had been involved in several forms of corruption, including having worked done on his vacation house by companies with business relationships.

The most notorious case of political corruption during the past few years probably involved the governor of Connecticut, Republican John Rowland, who was forced to resign in July 2004 after evidence that he had been involved in several examples of corruption, including having work done on his vacation house by companies with business relationships with the state and awarding contracts to companies with which he had personal ties (W. Yardley 2004).

Political Power and Influence

Officials may also misuse their office for political power and influence. There are too many examples of such corruption, including campaign fraud, to recount here, but the most celebrated examples of the last quarter-century, the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, do deserve some mention.

The well-known Watergate scandal began with a mysterious burglary in June 1972 at Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate office complex and hotel in Washington, D.C. and two years later toppled President Nixon and many of his chief aides and cabinet members, including the U.S. attorney general. It involved illegal campaign contributions in the millions from corporations and wealthy individuals, dirty tricks against potential Democratic nominees for president, lie after lie to the Congress and the public, obstruction of justice, and the secret wiretapping of people critical of the Nixon presidency (Bernstein and Woodward 1974).

A decade later the Iran-Contra scandal occurred and had the potential for toppling the Reagan presidency. The scandal involved key figures in the upper levels of the U.S. government, including the CIA director and National Security Council advisers John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane. These people and others allegedly helped supply weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held in Lebanon. The money gained from the Iranian arms sales was then used illegally to supply weapons and other materials to the Contras in Nicaragua, a group of right-wing rebels trying to overthrow the left-wing, democratically elected Nicaraguan government. The arming of the Contras in this manner violated congressional prohibitions on Contra funding. Some of the illegal funds for the Contras also came from drug smuggling in Latin America that was aided and abetted by military and CIA officials. There is strong evidence that President Reagan knew of and approved the arms sale to Iran, even though at times he denied any such knowledge, and several officials later lied to Congress (Arnson 1989; Cohen and Mitchell 1988).

Terrorism

If revolts and riots are often hard for us to understand, terrorism is even more baffling because it usually involves the killing and maiming of innocent bystanders. Wartime violence is understandable, if tragic, because the soldiers being killed and wounded are appropriate targets. But the innocent lives lost through terrorism are senseless killings that fill us with rage. This was the common reaction in the United States after three vicious terrorist acts against U.S. citizens in the late 1980s and 1990s. Two were reportedly carried out by Middle Eastern forces: the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland that killed 270 passengers, crew, and people on the ground; and the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City that killed 6 people and injured more than 1,000 (Dwyer 1994; Schmidt 1993). The third occurred in April 1995 and was home-grown terrorism: U.S. citizens linked to right-wing militia groups blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building and killed 168 people, including many children in a day-care center. This bombing, occurring as it did in the heart of our country and involving so much destruction and loss of life, including the kids, was considered at the time the most senseless terrorist act of all.

Our fury over these acts, however, paled in comparison to what we felt on September 11, 2001, when our nation came under attack. As you well remember, two jets rammed into the World Trade Center in New York City, another hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed into a remote Pennsylvania field. These coordinated acts of terrorism left about 3,000 dead.

It is tempting to view 9/11 and other terrorism as irrational, demented acts, but such a view would obscure the rational, political purposes of terrorism, which is best seen as a strategy, however horrible and desperate, for achieving political goals (Snowden and Whitsel 2005). This understanding of terrorism is reflected in its definition: “The use of unexpected violence to intimidate or coerce people in the pursuit of political or social objectives” (Gurr 1989b:201). The motivation here is to frighten or demoralize one's political targets or the public at large.

Several types of terrorism exist (Gurr 1989b). A first type is state terrorism, which, as discussed earlier, involves the use of police and other government agents to repress their citizenry through violent means. As we saw, state terrorism is common in totalitarian nations but has also occurred in the United States. A second type is vigilante terrorism, initiated by private groups against other private groups to preserve the status quo. Much vigilante terrorism takes the form of the hate crime discussed in Chapter 9. Bombings of abortion and family planning clinics and the murders of physicians performing abortions in the 1990s were other examples of vigilante terrorism (Smothers 1994). Many feminists also consider rape and battering to be a form of vigilante terrorism against women.

This photo of the World Trade Center after the September 11 attack reminds us of the horror of terrorism. However irrational terrorism might seem, it is best seen as a strategy for achieving political goals.

A third type of political terrorism, and the one falling under the “crime by government” rubric now being discussed, is insurgent terrorism, “directed against public authorities for the purpose of bringing about radical political change” (Gurr 1989b:209). The violence involved includes bombings, shootings, kidnappings, and hijackings, and its targets include public figures and the general public, public buildings, and buses and other means of transportation. This is the type of terrorism most familiar to, and of most concern to, the public, even before 9/11.

Although the Oklahoma City bombing was committed by Americans with right-wing views, insurgent terrorism from the left side of the political spectrum historically has been more common within the United States. Indeed, much of the colonists' violence in the Revolutionary War period (discussed in Chapter 9) was, in fact, insurgent terrorism (Brown 1989), as was the labor violence, discussed earlier, by the Molly Maguires. Left-wing insurgent terrorism also marked the U.S. landscape during the 1970s and 1980s (Gurr 1989b). The Black Liberation Army and other African American militants ambushed and murdered 26 police officers between 1970 and 1973, and the Weather Underground bombed the New York police headquarters in June 1970, the Capitol in March 1971, and the Pentagon in May 1972. A decade later some of its former members bombed other public buildings and took part in an October 1981 armed robbery of a Brink's truck in which a guard was killed (Dan Terry 1994). Other terrorist groups of the time included the New World Liberation Front, which committed some 30 bombings in 1974 and 1975 against International Telephone and Telegraph and Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, which murdered Oakland's superintendent of schools in 1973 and, in its most celebrated act, kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst the next year (Gurr 1989b).

This history of home-grown terrorism notwithstanding, the terrorism that concerns Americans most of all in this decade originates in the Middle East. The 9/11 terrorism is an example of the fourth type of terrorism, transnational terrorism (also called global terrorism), that is committed by residents of one or more nations against human and property targets in another nation (Kegley 2003). The 1988 bombing of the Pan Am flight and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center were examples of transnational terrorism that eventually had its most devastating impact for Americans on 9/11. Other examples of transnational terrorism in the world in recent years include bombings by Palestinian nationalists in Israel of buses, public buildings, and other targets.

President John K. Kennedy, left, and his brother Robert, right, were both gunned down by assassins during the 1960s.

Political Assassination

Arelated form of political violence is political assassination, or the murder of public figures for political reasons. Political assassinations are often part of a larger campaign of political terrorism, but they also are sometimes committed by lone individuals bearing a political grudge. Murders of public figures are considered political assassinations only if they are politically motivated. If someone kills a public figure out of jealousy or because of mental illness, it is not a political assassination and thus not a political crime as conceived here. Like terrorism, political assassination has a long history. One of its most famous victims was Roman dictator Julius Caesar, who was killed by a group including his friend Brutus and memorialized in Shakespeare's famous play. Moving much further forward in European history, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 helped start World War I.

The list of public figures assassinated since the 1960s is dismaying. It includes Medgar Evers, Southern civil rights leader; Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India; John F. Kennedy; Robert Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel; Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt; and Joseph Yablonski, United Mine Workers activist. Two lesser known figures, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, were assassinated in late November 1978 by a former supervisor with personal and political grudges. In addition to this list of assassination victims, several other figures in the United States were the targets of assassins in the last three decades. Former Georgia Governor George Wallace was paralyzed by an assassin's bullet in 1972; President Gerald Ford suffered two assassination attempts only weeks apart in 1975; and President Ronald Reagan almost died from an assassination attempt in 1981.

When political assassinations occur, a common reaction is that the assassins must have been mentally ill individuals suffering from delusions of persecution and grandeur and other psychiatric problems. Political scientist James W. Clarke (1982) called this view the “pathological theory of assassination” and said it is a myth. He added that “probably no group of political actors is more poorly understood than American assassins” (p. 4). In a study of 15 attempted or completed assassinations of U.S. presidents and other national figures involving 16 assassins, Clarke concluded that only three were insane. Of the remainder, five, including John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, and Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert Kennedy, were very rational and very politically motivated. The rest suffered from various personal problems they thought their assassinations would ease but were by no means insane.

History of Civil Disobedience

The idea of civil disobedience goes back at least to ancient Greece. After the death of King Oedipus, according to Greek mythology, his two sons killed each other in a battle for the throne. The new king, Creon, considered one of the sons a traitor and ordered that he not be given a proper burial. His sister, Antigone, thought this order violated divine law and defiantly buried the son. In response, Creon sentenced her to death. She soon disappeared, and Greek mythology differs on whether she was executed, committed suicide, or fled (Bushnell 1988). The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was also sentenced to death for defying the state by teaching unorthodox religious views. After his sentence, he declined several opportunities to escape from prison, and eventually drank a cup of hemlock and died (Stone 1989). Both Antigone and Socrates remain symbols of courageous, conscientious resistance to unjust state authority.

Civil disobedience also appears in the Bible. In the New Testament, Jesus' disciples disobeyed government orders to stop their teachings because they felt their loyalty was to God rather than to the state. Jesus himself can also be regarded as a civil disobedient who died for refusing state orders to stop his religious teaching. The conflict between religious belief and state decrees continued to be addressed in the medieval period, when Christian theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote in the 1200s that people are obligated to disobey the laws of the state when they conflict with the law and will of God. A few centuries later, Sir Thomas More was executed for practicing this obligation. More was lord chancellor, the highest judicial authority in England, from 1529 to 1532. During that time King Henry VIII wanted a divorce so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The pope refused to grant permission. More resigned his post to protest the king's actions. Two years later he was imprisoned for refusing to take an oath that the king ranked higher than other rulers, including the pope, and he was beheaded in July 1535 (Kenny 1983). Like Antigone and Socrates, More remains a symbol of conscientious resistance to state authority, and his courageous defiance became the subject of the award-winning play and film, A Man for All Seasons (Bolt 1962).

Disobedience to the law for religious reasons continued during colonial America, as pacifist Quakers refused to pay taxes to support the colonial effort in the war against England (Brock 1968). Depending on how civil disobedience is defined, many of the colonists' acts of resistance to British rule can also be considered civil disobedience. One of the earliest and most famous nonviolent instances of this resistance occurred in the 1730s, when John Peter Zenger's newspaper criticized New York's royal governor and Zenger was prosecuted for seditious libel. Even though the law clearly stated that it was illegal to publish any statement, however true, that criticized the British government, the colonial jury found Zenger not guilty, and their verdict helped establish freedom of the press in the colonies and later in the new nation (Finkelman 1981).

A major event in the history of civil disobedience occurred in 1849 with the publication of Henry David Thoreau's (1849/1969) famous essay on the subject. Thoreau had spent a night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes to protest slavery and the Mexican War, and the essay arose from a public lecture he gave in 1848 to justify his tax resistance. It is one of the most famous essays in U.S. history and profoundly influenced such important literary and political figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau began it by saying, “I heartily accept the motto—'That government is best which governs least,'” and went on to ask, “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” Answering his own question, Thoreau continued that if a law “is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” of government. He added, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man [and woman] is also a prison” (pp. 27, 34, 37).

The abolitionist period during which Thoreau wrote was marked by the nonviolent civil disobedience against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law that required citizens to help capture and return runaway slaves and prohibited interfering with their capture. In response, abolitionists were arrested for helping slaves escape in the South and for obstructing their capture or freeing them once imprisoned in the North. Northern juries often acquitted abolitionists in the resulting trials (Friedman 1971). Two decades later, suffragist Susan B. Anthony voted in November 1872 in violation of a federal law prohibiting people (including all women) from voting when they had no right to vote. During the next few months, Anthony gave more than 50 speeches in upstate New York criticizing the lack of women's suffrage. At her June 1873 trial in Canandaigua, New York, the judge refused to let her say anything in her defense and ordered the jury to find her guilty. Anthony was allowed to give a statement before sentencing that attracted wide attention and ended with the stirring words, “I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, ‘Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God’” (Barry 1988).

Moving forward almost a century, nonviolent civil disobedience was the key strategy of the Southern civil rights movement. Rosa Parks's heroic refusal to move to the back of the bus was only the beginning of civil disobedience aimed at protesting and ending segregation. Southern blacks were arrested for sitting-in at segregated lunch counters, libraries, and movie theaters and for “kneeling-in” at segregated churches. They were also arrested countless times for peacefully marching after being unfairly denied parade permits (Chong 1991).

One such arrest landed Martin Luther King, Jr., in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he wrote an essay, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” which rivals Thoreau's essay in its fame and impact. King (1969) began his letter by detailing Birmingham's notorious segregation and reviewing the civil rights movement's legal efforts to end it. Justifying his decision to violate a city injunction prohibiting peaceful marches, King distinguished between just and unjust laws and said, “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” He continued, “One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly…, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law” (pp. 78–79; emphasis his). He then noted, “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’…. It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal” (p. 79).

The civil rights movement's use of nonviolent civil disobedience inspired similar protest by other social movements of the 1960s and decades since. There are too many instances to detail here, but some of the most dramatic occurred during the Vietnam War when devout Catholics burned draft files. Wearing clerical clothing or otherwise dressed neatly, they went into about 30 draft board offices across the country, seized their files, took them outside and then poured blood on them or burned them, and waited to be arrested while they prayed. These events involved more than 150 Catholic priests, nuns, and lay Catholics and destroyed more than 400,000 draft files (Bannan and Bannan 1974). The most celebrated one occurred in May 1968 in Maryland when nine people burned 378 draft files with homemade napalm and awaited arrest while they said the Lord's Prayer. A meditation by one of the participants, Father Daniel Berrigan (1970:93–95), said in part, “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children. …We have chosen to say with the gift of our liberty, if necessary our lives: the violence stops here; the death stops here; the suppression of the truth stops here; this war stops here.”

Other examples of civil disobedience abound. In the recent past, many people broke the law and were arrested for protesting the U.S. government's intention to invade Iraq in March 2003, and close to 2,000 protesters were arrested at the Republican National Convention in New York in August 2004. Earlier that year, the mayor of New Paltz, New York, broke the law and faced misdemeanor charges when he officiated at the marriages of 25 same-sex couples (Foderaro 2004).

Countering Terrorism

The 9/11 attacks and other examples of transnational terrorism before and since have stimulated much thinking of how best to combat this form of political violence. For better or worse, however, the counterterrorism literature is filled with disagreement. Many counterterrorism experts support a combined law enforcement/military approach that emphasizes military strikes, arrests, and harsh prison terms (Poland 2004); this is the approach the United States used after 9/11. Historically, these measures have sometimes helped, but it is also true that terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere have remained strong despite the measures. Certainly Al Qaeda, the group behind 9/11, remained a significant threat to the United States as this book went to press. Some terrorism experts think a law enforcement/military approach may ironically strengthen terrorist groups by giving them more resolve and by winning them at least some public sympathy (Rubenstein 1987). In another problem, this approach may also curtail civil liberties. After 9/11, the U.S. government detained hundreds of Middle Eastern residents in secret and prevented them from consulting with attorneys. It also passed the Patriot Act, which expanded government power to quell not just terrorism but also other kinds of dissent. These and other government actions were harshly criticized by groups and individuals concerned about civil liberties (Cohen and Wells 2004).

Another way to combat terrorism is to address the problems underlying the grievances that terrorists have. The key question, of course, is whether doing so would only encourage terrorists to commit more random violence. And it is obviously not possible to appease the many Middle Eastern terrorists who detest the American way of life without doing away with America itself or at least drastically changing our culture. That said, some experts cite American imperialism as a major reason that much of the world, including terrorists, dislikes the United States (Rubenstein 1987). Eliminating U.S. intervention overseas, they feel, could thus help to reduce terrorism. This issue is beyond the scope of this book, but some critics say, without trying to excuse any terrorism, that U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the decades has led to some of the hatred for the United States that terrorists have today (Lewis 2003).