Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Robin Hood was a terrorist!

Last week all of us were given topics to speak on, for the last evaluation of our Effective Business Communications sessions. Like the rest I was also given two topics, one being the title of this post and the other one being “The creative artist’s freedom to creativity is a threat to social stability”. The second one was so long that I lost my breath when I read it the first time, so I decided to stick to the first one, which I thought would be easy to prepare, although that was not the case eventually. But nevertheless I went forward and below is what I thought would be the script, which again was not the case.

Honestly speaking I was perplexed when I first looked at this topic. Robin Hood is and has been one of my favourite childhood heroes. I had no answer, not even any idea where to look for them. No clue at all.

But then it reminded me of Krishna sir and I saw a ray of hope with secondary research. I decided to dig deep and read as much as possible about Robin Hood and Terrorism.

I was surprised to find out that there was no fixed, universally accepted, agreed upon definition of terrorism or who is a terrorist. The closest I came was this UN General Secretary report which stated “Terrorism is any act which causes bodily harm with an objective of intimidating a larger population”. And terrorist is anyone

Whose methods are violent in nature,

Whose aims and motives are Political in nature,

Whose actions have a wide psychological effect than the immediate victim,

And who works with an organization with a clear cut chain of command.

After reading this, I was even more confused. I thought how Sherwood’s Prince of Thieves could be one of such.

Yes his methods were Violent in nature. Yes his action had a far wider psychological effect than on the immediate victim, so much so that even King John felt it. And yes he had an organization called the “Merry Men” with him being the leader.

But what was it that he really did? He robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. He was what a lot of economists call today a believer of “Equitable Distribution of wealth”. If he would have existed a few centuries down the line, his name would have been taken with the likes of Lenin or even Karl Marx. He championed poor’s cause, a hero of the poor, and a messiah for the oppressed.

He cannot be termed as a terrorist, at best a communist. I believe Robin Hood was a terrorist or hero depends upon from which side of the fence you are looking through.