About Article

“Terrorism” is linked to “terror” which is a state of mind, created by a level of fear that so agitates body and mind that those struck by it are not capable of making an objective assessment of risks anymore. Fear is a powerful tool in politics. Demagogues have at times conjured up the fear of an impending threat from across the borders to rally the populace behind them. The second use of fear in politics is more direct: despots and demagogues decide to apply the fear directly on the populace or sections thereof in order to terrorize them into obedience and submission.2 “The purpose of terrorism is to produce ter ror,” Lenin, a practitioner of the second method, once said dryly. The use of intimidation is not the monopoly of the state. Organized crime uses it too, but it does so discriminately. Terrorists use it more often indiscriminately and at random against a target group. Hence the enhanced fear they manage to gen erate among a much wider audience. The extreme fear caused by exemplary acts of violence against some members of a target group often stands in no proportion to the actual harm done. Those individuals experiencing acute ter ror are either paralyzed by extreme fear (immobilized) or panic from such fear