Humanity Wins When Fear Of Terrorism Strikes Out

Terrorists penned yet another violent episode of death and injury on an unsuspecting citizenry in Brussels last week. These events follow similar, highly publicized attacks in Paris, France and San Bernadino, Calif., and comparatively little-noticed, but no less horrific, massacres on an Ivory Coast beach and an intersection in Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

This past week a neighbor, aware of my work as a travel writer, asked if I’d henceforth fear traveling to Europe following the Brussels attacks. Although I don’t share it, I definitely understand her apprehension.

These devastating events truly seem to occur with frightening frequency nowadays. At times it’s hard to determine if our contemporary world, riven by a pervasive strife born of a myriad of political and personal disputes, has really become more dangerous, or if digital media’s omnipresence has simply provided instant access to the daily dissention that in many ways defines human history.

But even a cursory look back suggests there’s little new under our contemporary sun. Human events going back to antiquity are filled with indiscriminate violence intended to achieve political, religious or ideological goals.

Recorded history regards the Sicarii of Judea, the 1st century “dagger men,” who attacked prominent Jewish collaborators with Roman rule, as among the earliest terrorists. Historian Josephus describes the band as operating within crowds at large festivals, utilizing daggers hidden underneath their cloaks to murder their chosen victims. Following their attacks, Sicarii members would quietly stroll into anonymity amid panicked crowds.

Contrary to contemporary beliefs, the 11th century Hashshashin was not compelled by hashish-smoking, but by enmity for their opponents in the wake of Holy Land unrest caused by the Crusades. The Shia Muslim group assassinated Persian governors and military commanders whose forces they were too small to assault outright.

More than 800 years later, terrorism emerged in the United States with the Ku Klux Klan’s formation in 1865. Created by defeated Southern soldiers and citizens in the aftermath of the Civil War, the group used violence, lynching, rape and murder to intimidate newly freed slaves in particular, and African Americans in general.  

A future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, narrowly escaped lynching by a crowd of Ku Klux Klan members in 1946 in Columbia, Tennessee. The then-civil rights lawyer had earlier won acquittals for nearly two dozen black defendants accused of instigating a race riot.

Between 1881 and 1885 the Irish Republican Brotherhood waged a dynamite campaign against the public of Great Britain in a campaign intended to end centuries of English rule. The group used timed explosives planted in public gathering places to engender fear across metropolitan Britain.

Later, in a two-year span between 1894 and 1896, individuals linked with anarchist causes killed the president of France, the prime minister of Spain and the empress of Austria-Hungary.

Terrorism has even transcended race, religion and politics to embrace issues of gender. Adopting a slogan of “Action Not Words,” the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) sowed chaos in Great Britain between 1912 and 1917, severing telephone lines, spitting at police and politicians and bombing private houses and public property. In 1912 one member threw a hatchet at Herbert Henry Asquith, the British prime minister.

It’s been observed that the very definition of terrorism is controversial, as perpetrators rarely identify themselves as “terrorists.” Many instigators clearly view themselves are aligned against real or perceived persecution and injustice.

Yet be they politically, ideologically or religiously motivated, the one aspect bonding these acts together is intolerance, be it towards another person, group or idea.  The absence of patience, empathy, understanding and identification with our fellow human brothers and sisters is at the root of violence playing out across the world, across generations.

Humankind has yet to identify a panacea that would banish such conflict to our collective memory. Perhaps one does not exist, and we are doomed to continue such self-destructive acts. But if any method does exist to cultivate the understanding whose absence allows such occurrences, travel is certainly a key element.  Travel’s impact on intolerance could not be better explained by the man I like to think of as the foremost American travel writer, Mark Twain.

In “Roughing It,” his 1870 account of his journeys across the United States from the Midwest to Hawaii, Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”