Good piece by Shuggy on terrorism and how the usual view of it is Eurocentric - Jacobin France, Tsarist Russia, Baader-Meinhof. But there is an old tradition of terrorism in the USA:-
In 1870, a federal grand jury designated the Ku Klux Klan as a 'terrorist organisation'. In 1999, the city council of Charleston came to the same conclusion. There are good reason for this. From its foundation in 1865 to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, the KKK were the most prolific terrorist movement in the United States, responsible for numerous acts of intimidation, violence, arson and murder. Prior to 9/11, up to and including the Oklahoma City bombing, practically all acts of terrorism in America had been committed by angry white males. Now, their 'grievances' were, I think, illustrative of the point I'm struggling to make. Defeat in the Civil War, Abolition and later the dismantling of Jim Crow were racist repositories for their rage at a loss of status. The response was typical of extreme reactionary and fascist movements everywhere in that it was near nihilistic towards the present and dreamed of the resurrection of a mythical lost age. What is always characteristic of these imagined histories is that they are places where everyone knows their place.Honour killings are a local form of terrorism. They attempt to intimidate all women in the group where they occur, keeping other potential victims cowed and fearful. They are less indiscriminate in who they kill, but are the method by which men try to hang on to a past where the patriarch’s word was law and they were little despots to their families and respected by their neighbours for being so. Mehmet Goren, who was found guilty of killing his daughter, was a criminal and gambler but still demanded obedience from the womenfolk, just as a shiftless piece of white trash was outraged at being treated in an uppity way by a black man. As stated here:-
An honour killing uses violence as theatre to intimidate others. It stands to enforce a sexual code of conduct by violence and threats. An honour killing is part of an organized effort to subjugate women to a specific and oppressive view of society. Although the total number of honour killings in Canada is still relatively small, probably less than 50 in total to date, the impact on the community as a whole is huge. When compared to a worldwide figure of perhaps 5,000 honour killing a year the implied threat is heightened. But numbers alone do not tell the story. Even at its height, the number of lynchings in the American South was fairly small (probably less than 100 a year) but the intimidation huge. Southern blacks knew the danger of speaking up for their rights; with honour killings, women can see the risk of behaving outside their place.
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