Terrorism can be defined as (a) indiscriminate military violence or as (b) indiscriminate military violence by non-state organizations such as revolutionary movements or resistance or, as it is usually understood, as (c) use of terror as a political or military instrument. Because of the disagreements over who is a terrorist, there has been only feeble international cooperation on dealing with terrorism.
Terrorism is a socially constructed notion that is continuously renegotiated at the political level. It is almost a truism that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Terrorism is generally defined as the symbolic use of actual violence, for political reasons, against non-military targets. By symbolic use, scholars of terrorism suggest that terrorism is successful when its message reaches a large public, much larger than the circle of those actually harmed by it.
The arbitrary nature of dishonesty, the abuse of power, authoritarianism, the subjection of minorities and direct action in the form of coups, components of a general climate of implicit or explicit violence, form the destabilizing cultural context which serve as an internal inducement for the growth of terrorism. Combating terrorism without attacking this cultural context or, even worse, combating terrorism on the basis of this context is a fruitless task. It may end terrorism momentarily, but it will leave untouched the conditions for its re-emergence. The struggle against terrorism can bear fruit only if it is undertaken as a struggle by the whole of society against the roots of its own cultural degradation and lawlessness. The great mistake is to call for the survival of authoritarian structure as a form of prevention of terrorism. To do so would mean giving terrorism the conditions for its own reproduction.
Nor may we close our eyes to another painful wound in today's world: the phenomenon of terrorism, understood as the intention to kill people and destroy property indiscriminately, and to create a climate of terror and insecurity, often including the taking of hostages. Even when some ideology or the desire to create a better society is adduced as the motivation for this inhuman behavior, acts of terrorism are never justifiable. Even less so when, as happens today, such decisions and such actions, which at times lead to real massacres, and to the abduction of innocent people who have nothing to do with the conflicts, claim to have a propaganda purpose for furthering a cause. It is still worse when they are an end in themselves, so that murder is committed merely for the sake of killing. (Papal Encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 30 December 1987).
It was the militant ideology of Western economic totalitarianism which paved the way for the equally militant neo-ideological delusions. While the financially capitalist crisis mechanisms of shareholder value threw billions of people into poverty and despair, the majority of the global intelligentsia mockingly sang the song of capitalist democratic optimism. They now have paid the price: When critical reason is silenced, its place is taken by murderous hate. The objective unbearableness of the ruling mode of production and living no longer asserts itself in a rational, but an irrational manner. After the retreat of Critical Theory the advance of religious and ethno-racist fundamentalism followed. As long as the fundamental emancipatory critique of capitalism does not form itself anew, the eruptions of social and ideological paranoia will be the sole gauge for measuring the degrees in which the contradictions of the world society have matured. Under these conditions this means the new quality of mega-terrorism in the USA, the officially ignored and downplayed crisis of the globalized capitalist system, has taken on a new dimension.
Terrorists are murderers, cold-blooded killers and if people start looking for root causes, devising explanations or making excuses, they are only wasting their time.