Terror - Terror and Terrorism

Terror and Terrorism

David Forte states that the primary difference between terror and terrorism is that while terror can be neutrally evil, i.e. random violence committed by robbers, rapists and even soldiers, terrorism has the additional political or moral dimension, being the systemised use of randomly focused violence by organised groups against civilian targets to effect a political objective.

However Charles Tilly defines "terror" as a political strategy defined as "asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime," and therefore ranges from:

1. intermittent actions by members of groups that are engaged in wider political struggles to
2. one segment in the modus operandi of durably organized specialists in coercion, including government-employed and government-backed specialists in coercion to
3. the dominant rationale for distinct, committed groups and networks of activists.

According to Tilly, the term "terror" spans across a wide range of human cruelties, from Stalin's use of executions to clandestine attacks by groups like the Basque separatists and the IRA and even ethnic cleansing and genocide

Recently, M. Korstanje and P. Tarlow recognize that terror movies draw an ethnocentric discourse where vulnerable tourists, most of them young, are attacked during their journeys. The war on terror, triggered by Bush´s administration, not only modified the way of making terror movies, but also engendering a discourse following these lines: a) devils do not respect hospitality, b) hospitality may be defined as the emergence of hostility, c) tourists are vulnerable because they are not familiar with visited territory, and d) terror tends to demonize the others. Certainly, 9/11 and war on terror have closed the boundaries of US and strengthened its ethnocentrism.