The First Hit Men

I agree that terrorism today usually involves the use of explosives, but it wasn't always so. The National Geographic article that I told you about claimed that the first terrorist know to history was "The Old Man of the Mountain". That's how his name translates into English anyway. This guy first became known to Europeans from the writings of Marco Polo, who claimed to have once been his "guest", but eventually managed to escape. Now Marco Polo claimed a lot of things, and some of them might even have been true but, in his lifetime, he was generally considered to be kind of a bull shit artist. Most of the information we have about The Old Man of the Mountain comes from rumors and legends anyway, but there is general agreement among historians that the guy really lived, even if he didn't do all the stuff the legends attributed to him.

The Old Man, so the story goes, was the founder of an organization called "The Hashashan", The Hashish People. Our English word "assassin" is derived from this Arabic word, because these guys were indeed assassins. As their name implies, The Hashashan did a lot of drugs, which made them formidable adversaries because they didn't seem to care if they survived one of their missions or not.  They mostly took out prominent, well guarded, people, and they usually didn't make it out of there alive, which didn't seem to bother them. One fictionalized account that I read, which has about as much a chance of being true as any of them, went something like this:

When The Old Man would send somebody to town to recruit new help, they would put something in the guy's drink that would render him unconscious. When he woke up, he would find himself in a pleasant place surrounded by wine, women, and song, and was given drugs that would make him feel like he had died and went to Heaven. Indeed, that's what everybody told him had happened to him. Some time later, the guy would pass out again and wake up in some unpleasant alley back in town. He would then be contacted by one of the Old Man's agents who would inform him that he had been sent back to perform an important suicide mission, say to take out the Caliph or somebody like that. Of course he would be killed instantly by the Caliph's bodyguards but, not to worry, he would immediately be transported back to Heaven, where he would be amply rewarded for his loyal service.

I doubt that the Hashashan used explosives, they might have had them in China by then, but I don't think they had them in the Middle East yet. Nevertheless, these guys are credited with being the first terrorist organization known to man. As we all know today, a dedicated killer who doesn't care if he lives or dies is really hard to stop. Of course you don't have to be suicidal to be a terrorist, but it helps.

Going back to the dictionary definition, it said that terrorism is the systematic use of terror for the purpose of coercion. This would seem to imply that, just because people are terrified of you doesn't make you a terrorist. To qualify, you would need to be deliberately instilling terror in people for the purpose of getting them to do something, or not do something. While bombing or other acts of war certainly instill terror, I believe you would need to be doing it for the express purpose of instilling terror, rather than to accomplish some other military goal like taking Hill 109. Then again, it would certainly be easier to take Hill 109 if your enemy was scared shitless and ran away as soon as your guys started to advance. As with most of our discussions, there doesn't seem to be an easy answer to this question but, if there was, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to talk about it.

Happy New Year.