The sixteen acres of Lower Manhattan where once stood the World Trade Center towers, reduced to a million tons of rubble and entombing some four thousand people as a result of the aerial attacks staged by Islamist terrorists on September 11, 2001. The site name gained currency in the media within a couple weeks of the overpowering disaster.
The expression has a military meaning that some observers believe makes it in-appropriate for this use: ground zero means the detonation spot of a nuclear blast.
Where the two crosshairs meet in the sight cross is the “zero,” that is, where the bomb is to strike. As a term in the language of nuclear destruction, ground zero has thus come to connote nuclear Armageddon.
The Reverend Frank Geer, initially disturbed by the Armageddon imagery, came to see the site rather as a point from which everyone would have to start rebuild-ing. “We are down to nothing . . . we have to come together to create something of true and lasting value. . . . Maybe that’s an apocalyptic feeling, but to me it felt not like an end but a beginning, or an end and a beginning” (Horgan and Geer 2002, 48).
A more mundane problem with ground zero is that more than a hundred U.S.
companies went by that name at the time of the attacks. These companies quickly began to feel some direct or indirect fallout from the media’s focus on the term as applied to the devastated New York City site. “No company in its right mind would call itself Pearl Harbor or the Holocaust,” said Charles Biondo, a corporate design specialist based in New York. “People now associate ground zero with something very bad” (Bruce Horovitz 2001, 2B).
Some Palestinians now use the term ground zero to designate the Occupied Ter-ritories, conveying their view of the social and political destruction wrought there by the Israeli state. See also HOLOCAUST; 9-11.
Guerrilla
A member of an unofficial military band, or small force, that engages in irregu-lar, limited warfare against an established or occupying regime or invading conven-tional army. The guerrilla’s struggle is typically aimed at addressing alleged wrongs done to a people by a regime or invading power and at achieving political and so-cial change. The term is the diminutive form of the Spanish guerra, “war,” thus meaning “little war.” Also spelled guerilla.
Although guerrilla warfare reaches deep into history, the term itself was first used to describe the Spanish and Portuguese resistance to French occupation (1808–14) resulting from the French invasion of these two countries. The Spanish-Portuguese irregulars, who harassed Napoleon’s armies then vanished into mountain strong-holds, were called guerrilleros.
Rather than pitched battles against an army, guerrillas engage in such hit-and-run-style activities as ambush, sabotage, and assassination to hamper the regime’s
Guerrilla
82
army and wear it down. American Revolutionary War soldier Francis Marion (“The Swamp Fox”), for example, who adopted guerrilla tactics from the Indians, led raids of small bands of men against British troops using surprise, moving quickly over swampy terrain (see also SWAMP).
Guerrilla warfare is fought primarily in rural areas by indigenous people who blend in with the populace, on whom they depend for refuge, supplies, and knowl-edge of the local terrain. In attempting to root out guerrillas from this cover, the conventional army may kill civilians by mistake or for strategic reasons. A classic case was in South Vietnam, where a U.S. Army officer, who had a whole village burned to keep the Viet Cong from using it as a guerrilla sanctuary, declared, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” Guerrilla fighting is also said to take place in cities, waged from poor urban quarters by means of bombing, robbery, and kidnap-ping, among other criminal activities. However, Laqueur (1987, 5) claims urban guerrillais a fraudulent term, since the guerrilla aims ultimately at building an army and alternative government, goals impossible to accomplish in cities.
As military units who attack armies, though not in pitched battle, and who vie for control of territory, to some extent ruling its population, guerrillas differ from terrorists (Hoffman 1998, 41). While very different in strategy from that of a con-ventional army, guerrilla operations nevertheless include the use of ordinary mili-tary arms such as rifles, machine guns, or mortars, for example, and, in many cases, the wearing of uniforms, making them more similar to conventional army opera-tions than are the terrorists’. Rubenstein (1987, 30) notes also the need among revolutionary guerrillas for a high level of mass participation, centralized leadership, and a professional fighting force. In addition, guerrilla movements often achieve lasting political change. By contrast, what is often called terrorism is most often executed by small teams (even lone assassins) lacking some or all of these charac-teristics. Guerrillas also differ from terrorists in attempting to maintain the loyalty of civilian populations. Terrorists may show little concern when the conventional army retaliates against civilians among whom they hide, since such retaliations, the terrorists cynically calculate, may breed a desire for revenge that gains them public support (Carr 2002, 123). Terrorists and guerrillas, however, share certain charac-teristics: the duration of their struggle is typically long, and the violence committed considerable (Merari 2002).
Political opponents who call guerrillas “terrorists” may do so to discredit their cause. At the same time, the conventional army often practices terrorism against the guerrillas—but they call it “counterinsurgency.” When suffering losses, how-ever, their backs against the wall, guerrillas may also move over to the tactics of terrorism. For example, guerrillas organize forms of intimidation, such as dragoon-ing men into the guerrilla army, to ensure the cooperation of the people. As they transform from guerrillas into terrorists, losing mass support, the guerrilla becomes more like the isolated minority that terrorists often constitute, which is more closely associated with crime and fanaticism. In addition, guerrillas might have (or be ac-cused of having) connections with terrorists in other countries.
Guerrilla
83 Guerrilla fighters see themselves as liberators or revolutionaries and may be given
the esteemed name “freedom fighters” by supporters. During World War II, Soviet and European guerrillas fighting the Nazis were known as resistance fighters and partisans (Spanish paisano). When Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were refining the art of guerrilla warfare, la guerrillero, in Latin America but also beyond, was glo-rified. In the United States, groups such as the National Rifle Association have also romanticized the idea of the guerrilla, arguing that the U.S. Constitution le-gitimizes guerrilla actions by privately armed citizens in the event of combating government abuses (see Wills 1999 for a counterargument). At the same time, guerrilla forces scorn the opposition—its supporters or anyone who refuses to par-ticipate in the struggle—as traitors (see TRAITOR), foreign invaders, and dictators.
While guerrilla is often used loosely to mean terrorist, the terms differ in conno-tations and tone as well as denotation. In some contexts, guerrilla is used to con-vey political or moral neutrality, as when the media speak of “guerrillas” or “soldiers”
though they could also have used terrorist. Hoffman (1998, 36) reports that a sam-pling of American newspaper reports of Palestinian terrorism in 1973 found that the word guerrilla was used more frequently than terrorist to describe perpetrators, and he complains of the equivocation that leads to the fuzziness of such terminol-ogy. At the same time, however, the U.S. government has often identified leftist guerrillas in such negative terms as narcoterrorist, regardless of whether the guer-rilla group is actually connected with drug trafficking. In the Palestinian context, the substitution of guerrilla with such loaded expressions as “Iran backed Shi’ite fanatics,” tapping connotations of irrational violence stereotypically linked with Islamic groups, may be considered as rendering the resistance illegitimate (Said 1997, xlvii).
The nonmilitary or military-like uses of the term guerrilla reflect its military mean-ings and draw on what might be considered its macho sex appeal. “Guerrilla”
marketers, for example, tout their unconventional weapons for making money, and people involved with such combative work as waging “war” on drugs speak of
“guerrilla” politics. Guerrilla hacker is applied to computer hackers who strike at gov-ernmental institutions to wreak mayhem, threatening an “electronic Pearl Harbor.”
A group of women artists, writers, performers, and filmmakers who fight discrimi-nation with “facts, humor, and fake fur” have dubbed themselves the “Guerrilla girls”
(they wear gorilla masks to “focus on issues rather than personalities”). See also ARMY REFERENCES;BRIGADE;CAVES;COMMANDO;EXTREMIST;FREEDOM FIGHTER;INSURGENCY;
LIBERATION;RESISTANCE;REVOLUTION;SOLDIER;TERRORISM;WARRIOR. Gunman SeeCOMMANDO.
Gunman