Religion and Terror
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This research deals with the linkage between religion and terrorism and how terrorism as a phenomenon has evolved in the modern period, including an examination of the special case of the Irish Republican Army. Jonathan R. White (2003) argues that there is a certain logic in the connection that derives from the notion of faith and belief, which fosters fervent emotional conviction. Equally as important, however, in the logical nexus of religion and terrorism is the kind of religion that is involved. White describes Marvin Harris's view that religions are either killing or nonkilling, with the former looking to the deity for crisis intervention and comfort and the latter looking for an agency of transcendence of the vicissitudes of experience. But it is not that simple, for a nonkilling, transcendental religion can also become the agent of privileging certain groups, including a state.The problem comes about because of the human tendency to reify belief by way of mythology and symbolism, such that the myth becomes real and the symbol is no longer metaphorical but becomes literalized. Thus the Promised Land that Hebrew scripture may have originally intended as a metaphor for communion with God mutated into a belief that a specific piece of land was meant for the Jews. Similarly, the medieval-and-after wars between and among Muslims, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Catholics, especially as played out in the Balkans, fed and were fed by the in
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revolution of 1848, except for the bitter legacy of class warfare, partly because of varying degrees of revolutionary commitment to violence and partly because of the effectiveness of bourgeois retrenchment. The main theorist of revolutionary socialism, Karl Marx, condemned violence.
Militant anarchism gained increasing appeal in the second half of the 19th century. One theorist was Proudhon, who envisioned a kind of yeoman communitarianism as a corrective to nationalism but whose nonviolence was rejected by anarchist terrorists (especially Russian), notably Mikhail Bakunin, who assassinated Czar Alexander II and other officials. Other advocates of "violent action" and "the propaganda of the bomb" included two American Russian TmigrTs, Johan Most and Emma Goldman. Other antigovernment revolutionaries were nationalists, notably the Irish Republican Army, which also used militant anarchist tactics.
Terrorism was part of the Russian revolutionary ethos as articulated by Bakunin, and it gained momentum for the abortive 1905 revolution, through Czar Nicholas II's disastrous handling of Russia's involvement in the Great War, to the 1917 revolution. Initially led by the Menshevik faction, the February revolution was ineffectual in dis
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Northern Ireland, War II, Buddhist White, Germany Bolshevik, Middle East, A1 White, Protestants Catholics, Orthodox Catholics, Cold War, Stewart Parnell, northern ireland, white 2003, irish republican, home rule, irish republican army, indigenous irish, 19th century, huntington 1993, republican army, middle east, modern terrorism, origins irish troubles, weapons mass destruction,
Approximate Word count = 3555
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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