No one defends terrorism. I will not be the first. Rather, people argue as to what terrorism really is, and quickly try to make the case that what they do and condone is never terrorism, but political retaliation that is justifiable, etc. The Mau Mau were called terrorists by the British, even though the British massacred more than twenty times as many Mau Mau as were ever Mau Mau killing British. But the British simply did not label their own behavior as terrorism. Rather, it was a rational defense of the Empire. There was actually a moment in the popular movie Gandhi that dramatized this point crisply, even for those who have never read the history of Indian Independence. When the British fired on that crowd, it was never labeled terrorism by the British press.

These observations are not new. Indeed, it is not the contested feature of the definition of what constitutes terrorism that I wish to address, rather, the historical evolution of the very concept of contemporary terrorism. To even begin to understand how we got to where we are, it is imperative that we go back to the original concept of a "theater of war."

THE THEATER OF WAR

The concept of the "theater of war" goes back at least five hundred years, to a time in which European armies were composed of men who designated the "battlefield" as the appropriate arena of conflict. Much like contemporary prize-fighters who are limited to the ring, boxing gloves, and rounds set off by agreed upon parameters, these battlefields delimited the legitimate landscape for the war. While it is certain that there were a few skirmishes that leaked off the battlefield, the "arena of conflict" was established by this limited notion of an agreed-upon terrain.

Ultimately, Napoleon met his "Waterloo" on the field of battle so-named. Generals deploy troops, have their men dig trenches, and "take" hills. But what of situations in which one army so out-numbers another, or is so much better equipped that there is no real contest? Do generals really want to go into battle when their numbers are one-tenth that of their enemy? Well, hardly on a straight-forward battle-field encounter. Thus, strategy and cunning enter the formula, and cutting armies off at passes, starving them by destroying supply lines, etc., etc., began to enter the "theater of war" as legitimate strategies. That is, before they ever got to some place called the field of battle, it was legitimate to intercept and harass, to use decoys, false signals, etc., etc. All is fair, goes the saying, in love and war.

We can see that it is only a matter of degree to shift away from grand strategy on or around the battlefield to the cunning of ambush (before the "battle") to the next major development, guerilla warfare.

GUERILLA WAR

So long as European nations were doing battle with each other, there was the notion of a theater or arena of battle, more or less agreed upon as to the terms of actions and ultimate settlement. However, in the colonial period, European powers had to do battle with people who were to a) face them with inferior arms, and b) employ different rules of the game. The inferior arms meant that Europeans could slaughter thousands of "natives" at will. That slaughter was never called "terrorism." (Yet, what greater terror than to be enslaved upon one's own land by a people who had contempt for your culture and your way of living?) More important to my line of argument, however, is that the colonized would later employ tactics that would shift the very meaning of "war." Now, rather than conscripted men, or mercenaries, or male volunteers conducting a battle in designated uniforms, now, the people themselves might be the enemy. In some ways, the Americans "started it." The British Redcoats, marching in formation, were fair game for the locals. The locals were usually not in uniform.

Later, the other colonized peoples of the world would further blur this distinction. Women could and did carry muskets and fire them. Children could be used as runners. In guerilla war, any actor in the occupied territory could be a soldier in disguise.

But guerilla warfare also has its own constraints and vulnerabilities, and those constraints and vulnerabilities would force a further development of "war" quite far removed from the old notion of a clear and delimited battlefield, or an arena or theater of war. Guerilla movements usually had a form of organization that rendered it especially vulnerable to infiltration. In Algeria, the French were able to pay impoverished Algerians to penetrate that movement, and act as informers. (Almost intrinsic to the colonial situation was the huge gap between the colonizer and the colonized. This was the basic structural circumstance that made the payment of infiltrators a continual tool against the guerilla movement.) The French used their tool, the payment of informers. The Algerians were to use their tool, the apparent random targeting of French institutions and French lives. This strategy of the Algerian guerilla movement, forced with its back to the wall by the decimation of their infrastructure by French-paid infiltrators, was dubbed terrorism by the French.

TERRORISM

Seen from this angle, the emergence of terrorism in the contemporary world is an empirically understandable progression from the battlefield to the strategic ploys of generals to avoid the battlefield, to guerilla warfare. When the French blew up some German soldiers occupying their (French) land in 1942, the French did not call this terrorism. But when the Algerians blew up some French occupying their land in 1956, the French called it terrorism. As I said at the outset, no one defends terrorism, because no one believes that what he or she is doing is terrorism. Thus, if we are to understand terrorism, we must try to penetrate the logic of the actor, and not simply reduce these actions to a simple-minded notion of "lunacy." One final thought on this matter will, I think, help to rescue the notion of "terrorism" (as we apply it to others, never to ourselves) from the dust-bin of total irrationality and inexplicability. It comes from Thomas Hobbes central insight about the human condition and the social order.

HOBBES' NOTION OF EQUALITY

Much has been said about Hobbes' theory of the state, the Leviathan. He envisioned a "war of each against all" unless or until humans could erect a third party, the state. And while Locke is frequently credited with developing the notion of the equality of men, it was Hobbes who had the original formulation. It is not a happy or optimistic notion of human equality, but it is directly to the point of this essay on the development of terrorism. Hobbes noted that in the animal kingdom, the strongest male could dominate. This was sheer physical power among many mammals, especially the most advanced gorillas. In contrast, he said, humans were equal because even the physically weakest human could end the life of the strongest human.

There may be a parallel here in the affairs of nations. On the surface, the most powerful nations clearly dominate the weaker nations. In the "theater of war," a weak nation would no more do battle with a strong nation than a welterweight would get into the ring with a heavyweight. Ah, but here is where the Hobbesian point starts to have an analog. Outside the ring, the welterweight is "equal" to the heavyweight, at least in Hobbes' morbid prism. And, indeed, outside the theater of war, the guerilla warrior begins to "equalize" matters. Taking it further then, the "terrorist" (recall that "terrorist" is always a label used from without) can bring the biggest, strongest, toughest nation to a point where its inhabitants are so afraid of death that they become hostages in their own land, afraid to fly outside their own country -- or maybe, even inside their own borders.