Word: terrorism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Terrorism has undergone a sea change since the old days of skyjackings and hostage taking. Back then, the who and the why were known: leftists like the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang, nationalists like the I.R.A., the P.L.O. and the Kurdish Workers' Party, and state sponsors like Syria and Iran, all with rational political objectives. In an odd way, the older forms of state-sponsored terror were easier to manage. They were tactical ploys with built-in limits to the damage that could be inflicted if the groups hoped to win hearts and minds to their causes...
...most notorious exemplar, though, is bin Laden, the Saudi-born terror kingpin charged with organizing the embassy bombings that killed 224 in Kenya and Tanzania two years ago. But even he represents only one part of the new-style problem: hundreds or perhaps thousands of tiny cells, each made up of a few like-minded zealots, nearly impossible to penetrate and linked only loosely through shared finances and training grounds...
Competing with him for such devilish distinction is Lenin, who snatched from obscurity the 19th century ideology of communism and devised the modern tools of totalitarian brutality. He begat not only Stalin and Mao but in some ways also Hitler, who was enchanted by the Soviets' terror tactics. Doesn't the presence of such evil--and the continued eruption of totalitarian brutality from Uganda to Kosovo--make a mockery of the rationalists' faith that progress makes civilizations more civilized? Isn't Hitler, alas, the person who most influenced and symbolized this most genocidal of centuries...
...Terror, however, was the Khan's greatest weapon. Cities that resisted the Mongols were made into examples. Their populations were slaughtered indiscriminately, with survivors marched before the Mongol armies to buffer counterattacks: human shields nearly eight centuries before Saddam Hussein. Cities that surrendered without a fight were spared, their citizens merely enslaved...
...could ask this of any year, any century: Which has the greater impact, good or evil, the heroes or the villains, Roosevelt and Churchill or Hitler and Stalin? To what extent do they depend on each other, when threats produce resolve, when terror engenders courage, when an ultimate challenge to principle has the effect of making principles stronger, forging them by fire? Thoughtful people who argue for Hitler as the Person of the Century do not want to honor him; they want to autopsy him, understand what made him strong and what finally killed him, and search, perhaps...