"Great Britain’s Role as a State Sponsor of Terrorism" Topic

"…Britain's support for the Royalist counter-revolution followed this pattern and resembled the situation between Palestinian terrorists and their state-sponsors in the 1970-90s. Syria, Iraq, and Libya all sponsored terrorist groups and allowed them to recruit from Palestinian refugee communities and militias. These countries often directed their terrorist protégés' actions against their enemies, as Syria used Abu Nidal to attack Jordanian airlines offices in order to prevent Jordan negotiating a peace with Israel, or as they used them to challenge Yasser Arafat for leadership of the Palestinian movement. State-sponsors placed restrictions or red-lines on terrorists' actions because they were concerned about the consequences if the terrorists acted too violently. With early 19th century Britain there was a convergence of aims with the French Royalists and hence no need for red-lines, nor was there any attempt to use the terrorists for other purposes. As will be made clear below, Britain fully supported both the objective -- restoration of the Bourbon monarchy – and the means employed to achieve it -- insurrection and political assassination – of the Royalists it sponsored.

Byman considers the provision of safe haven to be to be the most important form of assistance a state can provide. [24] Such havens enable a terrorist group to survive and, as Bruce Hoffman notes, "terrorists win by not losing." [25] In this case, safe haven in Britain was accorded to the leader of the Royalist counter-revolutionary movement, the count d'Artois, brother of the Royalist pretender and the person who would succeed him as King Charles X. He lived in Holyrood House (today the Queen's official residence in Scotland) and was provided a pension by the British government. Émigré noblemen, Royalist leaders, like Cadoudal, Hyde de Neuville, and Saint-Rejant, and their followers also were able to find refuge in Britain. But this support went far beyond provision of haven to include the more active forms of facilitation. Prime Minister William Pitt and foreign secretary George Grenville believed ‘in the necessary conjunction of military effort with those of the underground, not only in France, but also in Holland and Switzerland." [26] Just as Syria in part used its Palestinian terrorist organizations to fight a war by proxy with Israel, so Pitt and Grenville viewed support for the Royalist insurgency and ultimately terrorism in France as part of their war effort – employed as an adjunct to military means at first and, when defeated militarily, as the primary means to effect a strategically favourable outcome -- a "fifth column", in the words of Bruce Hoffman.

Napoleon's successful campaign of 1800 against Austria, which culminated in the battle of Marengo (June 14, 1800), disappointed both Royalists and Republicans alike. Some Jacobins in his government secretly had wished for a disaster to stop the increase in his personal power. [27] When in August Napoleon wrote to the Bourbon pretender stating definitively that he would not play the part of general Monk and restore the monarchy, plotting began anew as both Royalists and Jacobins undertook the assassination attempts described above. The Royalists also turned again to insurrection. Under their plan Britain was to provide supplies to Chouans still in arms in the west of France and would dispatch a new force of Royalists led by d'Artois. The scale of military assistance can be gauged when Napoleon wrote to general Guillaume Brune, the French commander in the area, commenting that Cadoudal, the Chouan's chief, had been supplied with at least 30,000 British muskets. [28] Even so, by 1801 the French government had prevailed militarily and most leaders of the rebellion had signed a pacification convention ending the revolt. The war itself between Britain and France lasted until March 1802 when, under the terms of the Peace of Amiens, Britain recognized the French Republic. That left few options for French opponents of the regime on either the right or left: coup d'état, terrorism, or both…"
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Amicalement
Armand

This thread will self-destruct in ten…nine…eight….

Oi! Freedom fighters, free..dommm fi..ght..errrss. Ha ha yeah, seven…six…five…

The British government backed anyone who would cause the French regime difficulties- Orangists in the Netherlands received similar support – it is more akin to the support of the Resistance movements in occupied Europe in WW2 but then one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter…

And she backed the Spanish guerrillas and regular army in the Iberian Peninsula.

These actions were nothing akin to today's "state sponsored" terrorism.

Jim

The British government backed anyone who would cause the French regime difficulties- Orangists in the Netherlands received similar support – it is more akin to the support of the Resistance movements in occupied Europe in WW2 but then one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter…

They even had a name for it – "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" – always thought that sounded better than "The Special Operations Executive" – had an uncle associated with them in the Scandinavian Section.

(smile)

I'm waiting for Gazzola and Kevin here… (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Couldn't the same be said for all the allies fighting Nazi in World War II. The Allied governments sponsored all sorts of partisan activities. This could be called state-sponsored terrorism except that the actions were directed against military not civilian people.

This could be called state-sponsored terrorism except that the actions were directed against military not civilian people.

Well civilian collaborators were considered fair game. The deliberate targeting of the general civilian population was something introduced in Western Europe as a deliberate tactic of Sinn Fein/IRA in their 1939 bombing campaign in Britain.

Terrorism is not a policy. It is a tactic. Britain didn't support "terrorism" per se. What she did was to shelter and finance counter-Revolutionary and anti-Napoleon groups, mostly, although not exclusively, monarchists. Some of those groups, but not all of them, engaged in terrorist actions. Probably Great Britain's government didn't care for how they achieved their goals.

It is annoying how we have transformed what is a mean to an end -terrorism- in something else. You read a paper and can believe that "Terrorism" is an ideology or a political project. It is absurd. It is not, or it shouldn't be, a sustantive. It should be just an adjective. Palestinians, for example, sometimes use terrorist actions to advance their agenda, but also another dozen of political tactics, from civil disobedience to propaganda offensives in Western media.

Good point Antonio…

Amicalement
Armand

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