State Terror

State Terror, use by the government of a state of systematic menaces and reprisals, often illegal even under the state's own constitution, to enforce obedience and active collaboration on the population. By its nature it is difficult to identify, and concepts vary according to the surrounding ethos of historical periods, geographical areas, and cultural characteristics. Despotic regimes of the past frequently indulged in practices of this kind that would be condemned by the standards of modern democracies without serious contemporary criticism. The most developed forms of state terror, for which the term was invented, have been the systems employed under Fascism and Communism in the 20th century.

Such totalitarian regimes were characterized by a monopoly of mass media, the imposition of monolithic ideology, a demand not merely for obedience but for active participation in the state police measures, and an apparatus of secret police and concentration camps to discipline or even exterminate opponents. Potential leaders of opposition were particularly singled out, and killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Often the arms of state terror apparatus reached abroad and attacked enemies among exiled populations; a particularly notorious case being the murder of Leon Trotsky by Soviet agents in Mexico. Agents of many national intelligence and security organizations have, of course, used illegal means to deal with opponents at home and abroad. What distinguishes such episodes from a system of state terror is the scale of the operation and its total endorsement by the leadership. Often, indeed, the apparatus of terror, the state, and the governing party become inextricably mixed, and the system frequently destroys elements of its own leadership. Thus such Nazi leaders as Ernst Röhm, head of the Storm Troopers (SA), and the head of the Soviet Secret Police, Lavrenty Beria, were themselves executed by their own terror machines.

On a much lesser scale, some regimes have resorted to extra-legal means to discipline specific elements in the population, particularly criminals and alleged criminals. Police forces in such countries as Brazil have used death squads to eliminate criminal elements, in some cases including homeless children, without arrest or trial.

The extreme, totalitarian manifestations of state terror have inspired a vast semifictional literature, of which Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and 1984 by George Orwell are leading examples.