What, exactly, is a terrorist?
- Thread starter ThankQ
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All Seeing Eye
Admiral
TERRORIST - Someone who does acts to cause Terror in other people.
TERRORISM - The act of doing something to instil terror in other people.
TERRORISM - The act of doing something to instil terror in other people.
Terrorism, to me, is the targeting of civilians and civilian interests with violence in order to influence a government into a course of action that you desire.
This is distinct from targeting military resources in theatre, which is simply guerilla warfare, and from regular violent crime.
This is distinct from targeting military resources in theatre, which is simply guerilla warfare, and from regular violent crime.
Scary definition, which implies that anyone who disagrees with you is a terrorist.
Keep the "terror" in terrorist definitions! A terrorist seeks to elicit fear in the population and make them spend so much time looking inward, that the society begins to fragment from within. The goal is that self-doubt inspired by fear will help defeat the enemy.
That is so severely naive and simplistic as to be almost meaningless in the context of this discussion.
There is a lot of debate on this subject, but I'd consider an act of terrorism to be a disruptive or violent act by a non-state entity designed to instill fear into a civilian population in order to achieve a political outcome.
States can do the same thing, but then I think it would tend to fall under the definition of an act of war.
I think we've made war a bit too clean. We have "precision" guided missiles, which make "surgical" strikes, that take down some of these small countries against which the west fights without hurting [many] innocents. And we expect the same treatment from enemies who could hardly inflict even the tiniest amount of serious damage against our militaries.
Whether or not it was "foul play," 9/11 was the best way to strike a blow that hurt. It damaged the US economy directly and the World economy indirectly. It shattered morale across the US, and plunged us into wars which were even more costly. If they'd taken down a few shopping malls in the months that followed (as all the email chains promised), consumer spending probably would have plummeted like a rock, bringing today's depression on a few years earlier.
Terrorism is hard to define because people always seek find exceptions. The leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wholesale destruction of towns and cities throughout Europe during WWII were all military actions. Civilian dead in Iraq and Afghanistan are collateral damage, or the civilians are stupid for living amongst the terrorists. Are we terrorists for leveling cities, killing innocents who are being used as shields, and etc?
The fact is, unpalatable as it may be, civilians die in war. If you're looking to destroy a society, you focus on infrastructure (power, communications, IT hubs and routers), economics (markets, commerce centers, banks), etc -- all of which are run by civilians.
If you really want to define terrorist, it's pretty simple: an enemy that we can't blow up from 10,000 feet with a few "surgical strikes."
Whether or not it was "foul play," 9/11 was the best way to strike a blow that hurt. It damaged the US economy directly and the World economy indirectly. It shattered morale across the US, and plunged us into wars which were even more costly. If they'd taken down a few shopping malls in the months that followed (as all the email chains promised), consumer spending probably would have plummeted like a rock, bringing today's depression on a few years earlier.
Terrorism is hard to define because people always seek find exceptions. The leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wholesale destruction of towns and cities throughout Europe during WWII were all military actions. Civilian dead in Iraq and Afghanistan are collateral damage, or the civilians are stupid for living amongst the terrorists. Are we terrorists for leveling cities, killing innocents who are being used as shields, and etc?
The fact is, unpalatable as it may be, civilians die in war. If you're looking to destroy a society, you focus on infrastructure (power, communications, IT hubs and routers), economics (markets, commerce centers, banks), etc -- all of which are run by civilians.
If you really want to define terrorist, it's pretty simple: an enemy that we can't blow up from 10,000 feet with a few "surgical strikes."
Well, that fits in line with Bin Laden and Co, but that motive doesn't apply to many domestic terrorists.
Terrorism doesn't even have to be directed at the general population, it can be against one group in that population.
hellsgate
Commodore
I figure it must be the douchebag parents of kids that go around doing whatever they want, (see "drinking and driving", "grinding up candy and snorting it", "huffing paint or whatever sounds cool at the time", "hanging themselves after Hussein's execution", "leaping off bunk beds after a WWF show on TV", "swarmings") only to have the parents not notice in the meantime that their kid's an even bigger sociopathic moron than they are. (See "Kelley Ellard".)
i like simple
A "terrorist" is anyone who threatens the financial interests of the ruling elite. Nothing to do with the meaning of the root word.
TERRORIST
noun; someone who does acts to cause terror in other people
As in: "Everybody! Get out of the dictionary! Right NOW! Terrorists have planted a bomb in there!"
[saunters back into dictionary and looks up the words "defuse" and "Jack Bauer"
]
Terrorism is inflicting violence randomly on civilians with the goal of instilling crippling fear in a population as a whole. The individual acts of destruction have no military value in whatever campaign the terrorists are conducting; the people killed and the structures destroyed have no special significance. The purpose is for as much of the population as possible to fear that they could be next if the population as a whole does not cooperate the terrorists. One man with a gun can intimidate an entire crowd because nobody in the crowd wants to be the one to die.
If you want a serious answer, the concept of terrorism/terrorist is no different from any other human construct - these are not axiomatic entities and so can be whatever a critical mass of sufficiently influential people choose to define it as. Same with concepts like poverty, racism, etc.
So the only way to answer the question is to be silly.
It worked for Yoda, and dammit, it will work for me.
These are both good definitions.
The problem with 'terrorism' as a concept is that it's pejorative. No one except for the extreme French Revolutionaries has ever identified themselves as 'terrorists'. Most of history's terrorists have tried to pretend that they were engaging in something besides terrorism.
We hear, for example, that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." But this is a false dichotomy. The simple fact is that many of history's freedom fighters have also been terrorists: that is to say, they have used terrorism as a strategy (or as part of a wider strategy) in their freedom struggle.
This I must disagree with.
Both states and non-state actors will resort to terrorism, when it suits their interests and purposes. Indeed, as I pointed out above, the first modern terrorists were the French revolutionaries: they not only engaged in terrorism, they called it terrorism. That's why there is a period in the Revolution called 'the Terror.'
What's more, the worst terrorists in history have invariably been states, not insurgents. This is true both in quantitative and qualitative terms. In the 20th century, more people were murdered by their own governments than were killed in war.
As Edward S. Herman put it, insurgents engage in 'retail' terrorism, while states engage in 'wholesale' terrorism.
Finally, it is possible to engage in acts of terrorism, even in war. During the Second World War, for example, German counterinsurgency strategy was explicitly terroristic: the Germans relied heavily on mass executions of civilians and other reprisals to terrorize and intimidate the Third Reich's subject populations. The strategy adopted by Great Britain's Bomber Command was just as explicitly terroristic. Bomber Harris set out to burn down Germany's cities in an effort to demoralize the civilian population and turn it against the Nazi regime.
Ironically, in both cases, these strategies often had the opposite effect. By transgressing the cultural norms of Western warfare, and attacking defenceless civilians, both parties actually strengthened the resolve of their enemies to continue the struggle. Strategic bombing, for example, never succeeded in turning the Germans against the Nazi regime: if anything, it made them more dependent on that regime, and filled them with bitterness toward the Allied "terror fliers." Strategic bombing only worked when it was directed against military-industrial targets.
For terrorism to work, it must be omnipresent and inescapable, as it was, for example, in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Otherwise, it's liable to blow back on its practitioners, as it did on al-Qaeda.
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