Walter Laqueur, "The New Terrorism" (Repost)
Walter Laqueur, "The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction"
Oxford University Press | ISBN 0195140648 | 2000 Year | PDF | 2 Mb | 320 Pages
Oxford University Press | ISBN 0195140648 | 2000 Year | PDF | 2 Mb | 320 Pages
The use of violence to achieve political goals stretches all the way back to biblical times, and Walter Laqueur outlines its long practice in these pages. Yet his main concern is with the 21st-century threat of "megaterrorism": "What we know about past ages of barbarism is frightening enough," he writes. "The consequences of aggressive madness in the age of high technology and the era of weapons of mass destruction may well be beyond our imagination." Along the way, he offers a fascinating sociology of terrorism; its practitioners, for instance, tend to come from the educated middle classes (although this is far from a hard-and-fast rule).