Political Terrorism Volume 2 1974-78

Any things change with time, even the meanings that words convey. Terrorism is a word whose connotation has been subtly transformed in recent years as the world has grappled with the troubling problems of assassination, the murder of hostages and the changing styles of political violence and coercion.

In the late Nineteenth Century and on into the early Twentieth, the terrorist was usually considered almost identical with the political extremist who used his gun or bomb to eliminate the one individual who personified, for him, a hated tyranny. Al though almost certainly a conspirator, the terrorist then was of ten viewed as a lone individual-or at least one who acted alone and seldom, if ever, an American.

During the past decade, the term terrorist has come to be used not so much for describing an individual as for characterizing a politically extremist group. Such a group would, in the popular perception, not infrequently be made up of college-educated young Americans, although it was more likely to be composed of young men and women from other countries. The victims of these groups have sometimes been diplomats or other government figures, but more often they seem to be "innocent" people who are chosen at random and who may have little or no connection with the cause for which the terrorists act.