Early History of Terrorism

Originally posted by Swills
Terrorism, is it a new concept or an ancient concept? What do you know about it? Where did it begin? Did it begin in the Middle East during the 20th century? Who were the first known terrorists? How were terrorist dealt with and did they succeed or fail?

The first terrorist that I know of is Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde.
No one dealt with Genghis Khan...that is a backwards idea.
Sometimes a town or city would see him and his army coming and they would just start throwing all of their riches and their treasures over the wall immediately.

Did he succeed or fail?


He was wildly successful.

Terrorism has always been with us.

Lions are King of the jungle it is said

Yet groups of Male Apes will seek out any that endanger their territory.
They then terrorize it as only Apes can - Of course the Lion will always flee.

However no loss of life or injury occurs.

Terrorism is a way to confuse and strike fear into it's target.
Such as a false flag attack and the creating of a bogeyman.

Religion uses terrorism - The fear of Hell for example

Terrorism is many faceted in other words
In the case of Apes it is necessary to protect their young and vulnerable.

reply to post by queenannie38


No one dealt with him? I thought a wall dealt with him?

How would you define Terrorism?
To kill a Lot of civilians with horrific attacks!

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
YES that IS Terrorisms!

reply to post by Swills




Quite the contrary, actually...the Mongols under Genghis broke through the wall in the early 13th century...evidently it took a few years to accomplish but they did...they took all of China over and then some. The Yuan dynasty is the one that was established by his grandson, Kublai Khan at the end of that same century.

Genghis' campaigns were supposedly so devastating, they caused climate change!




Check it out:

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com.

Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.

Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.

In other words, one effect of Genghis Khan's unrelenting invasion was widespread reforestation, and the re-growth of those forests meant that more carbon could be absorbed from the atmosphere.

Is that insane, or what?!?!

Originally posted by buddha
How would you define Terrorism?
To kill a Lot of civilians with horrific attacks!

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
YES that IS Terrorisms!

Well, I can't answer for Swills, but the way I see it, terrorism is the epitome of psychological warfare.
And I was looking for some other opinion/perspective on terrorism that echoes my thought, to share on this thread, and I found this excellent paper by Robert D. Hanser, titled 'Psychological Warfare and Terrorism.' The link takes you to the report in pdf format. The actual report is only 3 pages long and I highly recommend giving it a quick skim-over, at least, if you relate to the following excerpt:

Therefore, terrorism is simply a psychological weapon aimed at both its immediate victims as well
as a much wider audience, in the hope of obtaining some sort of behavior change from that audience (Boyd, 1994; Wilkinson, 1985; Gaynor, 2002). Thus, it is not so much that the act of terrorism employs psychological warfare, but more the case that terrorism is the quintessential and perhaps most base form of psychological warfare that can be inflicted. As noted previously, the entire act of terrorism is based on manipulation and the modification of a group’s behavior due to threats or actual harm against a minority of that group’s population (Gaynor, 2002; Schmid, 2005). Terrorism exploits the psychological vulnerabilities among both enemy and friendly populations as a means of compensating for physical or material disadvantages. In this regard, terrorist forms of psychological manipulation hope to demoralize their enemy or paralyze that enemy with fear (Boyd, 1994; Gaynor, 2002). Simultaneously, these acts are thought to be effective in motivating the terrorist’s allies and friends (Boyd, 1994; Gaynor, 2002; Schmid, 2005). Thus, it is that terrorism is a form of psychological warfare that fulfills dual objectives; one objective being to demoralize the terrorist’s enemy and the other objective seeking to improve the morale and commitment of the terrorist group’s membership.

THIS, especially: "the entire act of terrorism is based on manipulation and the modification of a group’s behavior due to threats or actual harm against a minority of that group’s population" fits what happened in NYC on 9/11 perfectly!

Because of the 3,000 deaths that were caused that day by deliberate acts of terrorism, life in America was suddenly and irrefutably changed dramatically.

reply to post by artistpoet


I do not see terrorism in the natural behaviors of apes or lions or any other non-bipedal member of the animal kingdom....well, I take that back...maybe in the primates...I'm thinking back to a television show that I think was called Orangutan Island. It could be, though, very possibly, that these primates have learned terrorism rather than have been originators of same. I can't say for sure.

But I guess what I'm thinking about what you've said is that animals don't have this whatever-it-is that we human have in our psyches that make us both fearful as well as fearsome. I think there is a survival instinct in all of us, including humans, but I don't think the fear factor is something the animals are cursed with the same way we seem to be, as a species. Which might also be an irrational idea since I do believe that animals can, and do, LOVE...and since fear is the opposition of love, then if they can love, do they not also fear?

I don't know.
Fear makes your mind run away but survival instinct just gets your adrenaline and legs going...once the danger is no longer imminent, the mind goes back to the usual. But with the kind of fear that terrorism is designed to invoke, the mind becomes prisoner to the anxiety and fear's countless other myriad variations on its theme.

It is a debilitating process...not a productive one but destructive, and is in some measure self-destructive.
The survival instinct that animals seem to have is the exact opposite, imo.