[PDF] Europes Last Red Terrorists eBook

Author : George Kassimeris
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 36,68 MB
Release : 2001-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814747568

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Since the 1970s, Europe's last Marxist-Leninist terroriststhe Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November have waged a violent campaign against US and NATO personnel, Turkish diplomats and members of the Greeks military and business elite. In May 2000 they assassinated a top British diplomat in Athens in a daring daylight attack. Yet no one suspected of belonging to the organization, let alone of being involved in its terror campaign, has ever been arrested. This is the first book to deal with revolutionary terrorism in Greece. Tracing the history of 17 November, Kassimeris demonstrates how it has persevered with a one-dimensional view of a world peopled by heroes and villains, that has precluded the emergence of a coherent ideology. Combining fanatical nationalism, contempt for the existing order, and the cult of violence for its own sake, 17 November has stubbornly refused to accept that its eclectic belief system is incompatible with modern democratic principles. Unlike Italy's Red Brigades or Germany's Red Army Faction, which both assailed "the capitalist state and its agents," 17 November hopes to create an insurrectionary mood that will propel the Greeks into revolutionary political action without disrupting society as a whole. As such, 17 November's terror campaign has been an audacious protest aimed at discrediting and humiliating the Greek establishment and the US government, but one that has never sought to develop widespread revolutionary guerrilla warfare.

Author : Yonah Alexander
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 10,53 MB
Release : 2012-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 1136294201

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This unique volume explores Europe's most dangerous communist terrorist organizations and reveals how they use violence as a means of political communication and persuasion. It outlines seven terrorist groups from Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and Turkey and gives their modus operandi, rationale and political messages in translated communiqués never before available in English.

Author : George Kassimeris
Publisher : Hurst Publishers
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 22,3 MB
Release : 2013-10-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1849042837

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The long story of Greek terrorism was meant to have ended in the summer of 2002 with the collapse of the country’s premier terrorist organisation and one of Europe’s longest-running gangs, the notorious 17 November group (17N). However, rather than demoralising and emasculating the country’s armed struggle movement, the dismantling of 17N and the imprisonment of its members led to the emergence of new urban guerrilla groups and an upsurge in and intensification of revolutionary violence. Given the sheer longevity of the 17N terrorist experience, George Kassimeris sets out to analyse the life histories of the group’s imprisoned members. Their stories, told through their own words, offer us a clearer picture than we have ever had of the political and ideological environment that provided the foundations upon which revolutionary terrorism took root in the mid-1970s. This book also brings up to date the gritty story of Greek terrorism, by analysing the country’s post-17N generation of urban guerrilla groups, placing their extremism and violence in a broader political and cultural perspective.

Author : Alessandro Orsini
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 14,33 MB
Release : 2011-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0801461391

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The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies intended as a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State," the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group of violent anticapitalist terrorists revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. Like their German counterparts in the Baader-Meinhof Group and today's violent political and religious extremists, the Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia. In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, Alessandro Orsini contends that the dominant logic of the Red Brigades was essentially eschatological, focused on purifying a corrupt world through violence. Only through revolutionary terror, Brigadists believed, could humanity be saved from the putrefying effects of capitalism and imperialism. Through a careful study of all existing documentation produced by the Red Brigades and of all existing scholarship on the Red Brigades, Orsini reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. Orsini has devised a micro-sociological theory that allows him to reconstruct the group dynamics leading to political homicide in extreme-left and neonazi terrorist groups. This "subversive-revolutionary feedback theory" states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. Orsini makes clear that this political-religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled "purifiers of the world." From Thomas Müntzer's theocratic dream to Pol Pot's Cambodian revolution, all the violent "purifiers" of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony. Orsini’s book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.

Author : George Kassimeris
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 11,14 MB
Release : 2006-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0814747973

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The images from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have been a grim reminder of warfare's undiminished capacity for brutality and indiscriminate excess. What happened in Abu Ghraib has happened before: the World War II, and more recent wars and insurgencies in Algeria, Congo, Angola, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and many others, all bear witness to the ever-present human capacity to commit barbaric acts if circumstances allow. What drives people to mistreat, humiliate, and torment others? In an age when real time war, violence, and torture are becoming addictive forms of entertainment, it is now more critical than ever to deepen our understanding of the extraordinary distortions of the human psyche and spirit that occur in wartime. Eight distinguished scholars explore, in this first collective effort, the effects of the barbarization of warfare on our cultures and societies. Contributors: Joanna Bourke, Niall Ferguson, Jay Winter, Richard Overy, David Anderson, Hew Strachan, Paul Rogers, Kathleen Taylor, Marilyn Young, Paul Rogers, Anthony Dworkin, Amir Weiner, Mary Habeck, and David Simpson.

Author : George Kassimeris
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 14,21 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Terrorism
ISBN : 9780231700016

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Today more than ever, governments are determined to protect the public by rooting out terrorists and bringing them to justice, but in dealing with extremism, governments often violate citizens' individual civil liberties. In their zeal to attack terrorism and preserve domestic security, governments pass laws that violate basic freedoms and privacies and undermine the support of the public. To avoid hysteria and unwise policymaking, both citizens and officials need to rely on fact and sound judgment and remain skeptical of political propaganda.In this collection, scholars demonstrate that the realities of our post-9/11 world are not necessarily new. Many governments, from Putin's Russia and Fujimori's Peru to Italy in the 1970s have at times repressed the very liberty and democratic freedoms terrorists seek to destroy. Essays address the use of terrorist threat to sustain a credible anti-terrorist narrative, sway public opinion, and push through draconian legislation. For the most part, the contributors remain sympathetic to the efforts made by states to protect their citizenry; however, they encourage awareness and vigilance to prevent the wholesale exploitation of the fundamental rights of a democracy.

Author : Lorenzo Vidino
Publisher : Prometheus Books
Page : 403 pages
File Size : 22,86 MB
Release : 2009-12-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 161592311X

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Written by an expert at The Investigative Project, a counterterrorism institute and America's largest private data-gathering center on militant Islamic activities, this text fills a critical gap in the understanding of the new threats posed by Islamist terrorism.

Author : Anna Cento Bull
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 30,19 MB
Release : 2013-06-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1135040796

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Ending Terrorism in Italy analyses processes of disengagement from terrorism, as well as the connected issues of reconciliation, truth and justice. It examines in a critical and original way how terrorism came to an end in Italy (Part I), and the legacy it has left behind (Part II). The book interrogates a wide array of published memoirs and a considerable number of new face-to-face interviews with both former terrorists and first and second generation victims In the last two decades, and especially in recent years, former extreme-right terrorists in Italy have started to talk about their past involvement in terrorist violence, including, for the first time, acts of violence which have for decades been considered taboo, that is to say, bomb attacks against innocent civilians. These narratives add to the perspectives offered by members of left-wing terrorist groups, such as the Red Brigades and Prima Linea. Surprisingly, these narratives have not been systematically examined, yet they form a unique and extremely rich source of first-hand testimony, providing invaluable insights into processes of youth radicalization and de-radicalization, the social re-integration of ex-terrorists, as well as personal and collective healing. Even less attention has been paid to the victims’ narratives or stories. Indeed, the views and activities of the victims and their associations have been seriously neglected in the scholarly literature on terrorism, not just in Italy, but elsewhere in Europe. The book therefore examines the perspectives of the victims and relatives of victims of terrorism, who over the years have formed dedicated associations and campaigned relentlessly to obtain justice through the courts, with little or no support from the state and, especially in the case of the bombing massacres, with increasing awareness that the state played a role in thwarting the course of justice. Ending Terrorism in Italy will be of interest to historians, social scientists and policy makers as well as students of political violence and post-conflict resolution. .

Author : Leigh Neville
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 65 pages
File Size : 11,56 MB
Release : 2017-10-19
Category : History
ISBN : 1472825284

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The Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 was a shock awakening to the public. In the decades since, European countries have faced a wide range of threats from Palestinian and home-grown terrorists, to the more recent world-wide jihadists. The threats they pose are widespread from aircraft hi-jacking and political assassinations to urban warfare against security forces, and murderous attacks on civilian crowd targets, forcing governments have had to invest ever-greater efforts in countering these threats. This book traces the evolution of police (and associated military) counter-terrorist forces across Europe over the past 45 years. Using specially commissioned artwork and contemporary photographs, it details their organization, missions, specialist equipment, and their growing cross-border co-operation.