On 24 January 2003, the US Department of Homeland Security became the 15th executive department and its first secretary was sworn in by President Bush.
The Act creating the department identified its primary mission. The first element of that mission was to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States”.
The Act includes a necessarily lengthy definition of “terror” consistent with its root “terrere” or Latin “to frighten”. In short, legal “terror” comprises not only danger and crime, it superimposes an intent to intimidate or to coerce the US people or their government.
In other words, a terrorist act is not merely criminally dangerous in the narrow sense. It is an act antithetical to the US and its people.
The sting, of course, is what is meant by “people” of a nation in a global world. The US, like other nations, has had difficulty in reconciling the rights of innocent US nationals descended from countries which have sponsored terrorists acts. Then there is the issue of “domestic terrorism”. In a nation founded upon revolution and forged by civil war, the line between free movement and terrorism is rarely straight.
Much domestic and foreign criticism of the US position has been bound up in making light of the term “War on Terror”. The idea of “war” against a noun has been invented, so the argument goes, to justify unnecessary intrusions on justice.
The argument is for others. For the historian, there is the very different path taken by the French in their revolution and civil war.
In 1793, 210 years before the US created a homeland department to combat terrorism, the French created a terrorism department to protect the homeland. In the Reign of Terror, terror literally became “the order of the day”. Five months later, Robespierre said:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the homeland.
A further five months later, the government executed Robespierre.
