Repressive terrorism

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 400.

Revolutionary terrorism

Types of political terrorism

Revolutionary terrorism is the use of systemic, terroristic violence to bring about a revolution. Most groups that succeed in doing so use similar tactics to maintain their rule. Revolutionary terrorism has its origins in reactionary ideas, and in the purported cycles in human societies that rotate the allocation of power. Only with the French Revolution — the Reign of Terror — in the 19th century did the idea evolve of a revolution that could bring about democratic will, participation and collective freedoms, that could carve utopia out of earth, rise to prominence. This type of terrorism is associated with groups, however small they may be, which use ideological and revolutionary constructs to change the existing social order in someway.

Repressive terrorism is the use of systematic, centralized violence to suppress, put down, and restrain certain groups, such as dissidents, or even an entire population. It is considered always unpredictable and arbitrary. Secret police, state agents, and informers support the tyrannical rule, whose harsh methods, such as the use of torture, liquidation, and purges, strikes fear into a population.

The Nazis who used mass terror in combination with electoral propaganda are an obvious example that warrant no further comment. Along with Mussolini's regime, the Nazis funded the Croatian fascist Ustashi organization, and the Rumanian Iron Guard, both of which held ultra-right wing nationalist philosophies. With the Ustashi, for example, this included massacring large numbers of Serbs and establishing a concentration camp for Serbs in Slovenia.