If the government had no idea that those terrorists and hackers were there when they bombed that apartment, then it'd be terrorism. If they didn't want to tip off the bad guys by having the civilians evacuate before the bombing, its a horrible tragedy, but I wouldn't call it terrorism. After all, the civvies weren't the primary target of the raid.
Are you going to ask what the definition of "is" is? If I snap one day and shoot up a store because the cashier gave me the wrong change, there's no political or ideological motivation. If a man suicide-bombs the same store believing he'll go to heaven for killing infidels, that's an ideological motivation, and if he's trying to make a statement about his country's government that's political.
I'm not sure that definition is specific enough to be useful then. At least, not without some more information about what counts as politically motivated. If I poop into my hand and throw it on Jack because he blasphemed the name of Jon Stewart, would that count as terrorism?
It would be politically motivated violence against a civilian target.
Are you going to ask what the definition of "is" is? If I snap one day and shoot up a store because the cashier gave me the wrong change, there's no political or ideological motivation. If a man suicide-bombs the same store believing he'll go to heaven for killing infidels, that's an ideological motivation, and if he's trying to make a statement about his country's government that's political.
No, I'm not getting down to that level of detail. Language is important, though. Trying to encapsulate a loaded phrase such as "terrorism" into a one-liner deserves discussion.
Wait, why am I responding to Jack? I don't care about what he says.
Churbs, do you get what I'm trying to say? It's as good of a definition as I've seen, but I'm a fan of more concrete definitions when we're talking about something as important as terrorism.
I realized that my knowledge of the history of this situation is pitifully low, so I should probably read a book. Suggestions?
As much as I'm loathed read wikipedia for a rough jist of it then look at the news maybe? Nothing hard and fast springs to mind that would give you a fair view.
Then I'd say that'd be at least a terroristic act. But now is it still terrorism if I throw my own poo at you in retaliation and accidentally get some on Churba?
I think that the definition is quiet simply anything other than "for the lulz". The important part is the deliberate targeting of civilians in order to cause panic or terror in the hope that you can either use the threat of future violence or the chaotic aftermath to get your agenda through.
A "proper" war, whatever that means, is supposed to be both sides lining up their uniformed dudes and million-dollar machines and having at it until one side or the other calls uncle. Unfortunately it never really works that way, though ironically we are swinging back that way due to the fact that war material is getting so expensive and intensive to produce. 20th century wars between major powers were defined, with a few extreme exceptions like very early Blitzkrieg tactics, by attrition; as long as you could keep putting effective bodies and machines on the front, you were in the game, and wars were won by whoever replaced their losses faster. So you won by bombing enemy factories and cities until they could no longer replace those losses and they crumbled.
That is so impractical these days that it is your immediately capacity to destroy the enemy that matters, because there simply will not be time to replace losses before all your factories and bases are leveled with laser-guided munitions and the tanks roll through your street.
Of course, major powers just don't fight each other anymore. Instead it's all this irregular shit with a bunch of dudes with rifles and mines booby-trapping civilian areas and using public perception as their primary weapon.
The problem doesn't come with the definition, but like anything that involves legal framework or actual physical harm to another human being, the practical application of that definition.
Definitions aren't meant to be precise and perfect descriptions - their function is to point towards clusters in thingspace. For what you call "practical application", that kind of definition is entirely sufficient. The important thing is to escape the rhetoric behind terms like "terrorist" and get to the substance of the matter - civilians getting fucking killed.
There are grey areas with respect to targeting militants in the knowledge that civilian casualties will also occur. The important thing to note is that these areas - drone strikes being a notable example - are clearly grey and not white (or black, for that matter).
Churbs, do you get what I'm trying to say? It's as good of a definition as I've seen, but I'm a fan of more concrete definitions when we're talking about something as important as terrorism.
I getcha, I getcha. I'd like a more concrete definition too, but it's a bit difficult - for example, you shouldn't have a definition that includes Hamas, but excludes the IRA or Baader-Meinhof. Or one that includes Baader-meinhof, the IRA, and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, but also includes, say, The red cross, for a ludicrous and unlikely example.
Frankly, I try not to get too involved in that sort of thing. Combatant, non-combatant, civilian and Enemy non-combatant(which, despite what some think, is not merely a euphemism for "terrorist") are about as complex as I tend to get. The further away from the loud bit you are, the more philosophical and convoluted the whole thing becomes.
Very good point, actually. I'm so used to people being careless with the words they use that it strikes me as weird when a well thought out definition is used.
This is part of the reason I think the term "terrorism" is a bit silly. A huge part of war is scaring the bajesus out of your enemy with the hope that you won't have to kill them if you make them surrender. The nuclear bombing of Japan is probably both the best example of terrorism in history, and a strong argument for it.
The United States were desperate to avoid having to mount a ground invasion of Japan, because they had every indication that it would be the most grueling, miserable and awful conflict in human history. Even though the Japanese navy and air force was devastated, their army was armed and ready to go. It would have been the very worst combination of urban, island and mountain fighting, which through the Pacific, Stalingrad and Italy throughout the war had taught the world was simply the worst kind of fighting there is. On top of that, the US had seen that the Japanese simply would not surrender no matter how bad their situation was, on island after island of watching men throw themselves into machine-guns with swords and grenades rather than surrender, watching the civilian families of officers walk into the sea and drown when the defenses failed. They were convinced they would be landing on an island filled to the brim with people who would fight to the last man, woman and child.
You know the Purple Heart, the metal they give out for getting wounded in combat? They haven't made a new one of those since WW2, because they made so many of them in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. They estimated a million US causalities, and considerably more Japanese causalities.
So the US turned to terrorism.
Racism probably played a large part, no doubt. I'm sure many US decision makers believed there was no point in negotiating with the Japanese as they believed them sub-human and incapable of reasoning, or were more willing to categorize the entire Japanese people as a collective entity while believing the German and Italian people as being under the yoke of a dictatorship. But for the most part it was pragmatism born of pure terror; the US wanted to do whatever they could to avoid having to land troops and start up that meat grinder. So they started the process of razing from the air with napalm.
They made some effort, of course. They dropped leaflets warning where they would be bombing, records containing the sound of distant B-29s so civilians would know when to head for shelter, and they made a token effort to target munition and aircraft factories, strategic ports, etc. But in reality the effort was mostly to break the fighting spirit of the nation from the air and force them to surrender, which is pretty much textbook terrorism. The atomic bombs were just an escalation of that.
Really, terrorism isn't anything more than a snarl word the same way "honour" used to mean. It is a thing we declare certain acts to be so we can be more offended over them and justify larger retaliation.
This is part of the reason I think the term "terrorism" is a bit silly. A huge part of war is scaring the bajesus out of your enemy with the hope that you won't have to kill them if you make them surrender. The nuclear bombing of Japan is probably both the best example of terrorism in history, and a strong argument for it.
I agree, but that is not an indictment of the term "terrorism". It's an indictment of how most people fail to genuinely think about the actual concepts involved.
Yes, terrorism can be justifiable and historically most likely has been in several cases. However, I would argue that in the modern world this is no longer the case. Modern military forces have the capacity for surgical strikes, and people have the ability to use the Internet to reach the entire world as an audience. What justifiable role can terrorism serve now?
The issue of the justification of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki his a huge talking point in history still. Hing sight is a wonderful thing, as the Captain knew, but it can be used as justification of prior actions. Case in point "Well Edward III was right to kill his prisoners as he did not have enough people to guard them", yes pragmatically thats right. But it still does not mean that what happened was right. Yes the bomb might have stopped the war the rub is that this was not on the military but on civilian targets. So a lot of the arguments of stopping the military start to find problems of validity, because its all very good saying that the civilians would have taken up arms and all but if there not armed then you have a problem. The part that irritates me is how the fire bombing campaign that lead up to it is sort of ignored. Now if you want a good example of fucking shit up then Dresden is a good example. I should stress that I'm coming at this from the historical perspective and that there are still screaming debates over whether it was right or not.
Terrorism is a tricky one as the old adage goes "One mans terrorist is one mans freedom fighter". It boils down totally to the subjectivity and your perspective. Part of my dads family will not talk to the others due to their involvement with the IRA. Do I think that it was right what they did not really but I get where they were coming from.
Yes, terrorism can be justifiable and historically most likely has been in several cases. However, I would argue that in the modern world this is no longer the case. Modern military forces have the capacity for surgical strikes, and people have the ability to use the Internet to reach the entire world as an audience. What justifiable role can terrorism serve now?
There is nothing surgical about high explosives. Until we can program tiny remote kill drones to take out individual targets base on genetic identification we are going to have to deal with collateral damage. It isn't pretty but it's true.
That isn't to say that terrorism is justified, just that civilian casualties are inevitable in any military action. It's wrong to expect the military to take action without expecting them, and anyone who calls for military action should know just what the consequences will be.
This is part of the reason I think the term "terrorism" is a bit silly. A huge part of war is scaring the bajesus out of your enemy with the hope that you won't have to kill them if you make them surrender. The nuclear bombing of Japan is probably both the best example of terrorism in history, and a strong argument for it.
I agree, but that is not an indictment of the term "terrorism". It's an indictment of how most people fail to genuinely think about the actual concepts involved.
Yes, terrorism can be justifiable and historically most likely has been in several cases. However, I would argue that in the modern world this is no longer the case. Modern military forces have the capacity for surgical strikes, and people have the ability to use the Internet to reach the entire world as an audience. What justifiable role can terrorism serve now?
How can you do a surgical strike against a terrorist if you do not know who they are? Dave can be lobbing grenades in ons street then walk round and now hes an upright citizen.
"It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee
I think terrorism is a broad, near meaningless term when it comes to strategic and tactical discussions. Any armed conflict will ALWAYS involve civilian deaths, intentional or otherwise, so either all of war is terrorism or terrorism is a meaningless. Labeling people terrorists or calling certain actions terrorism only plays into a political machine used to manipulate public opinion.
Yes, terrorism can be justifiable and historically most likely has been in several cases. However, I would argue that in the modern world this is no longer the case. Modern military forces have the capacity for surgical strikes, and people have the ability to use the Internet to reach the entire world as an audience. What justifiable role can terrorism serve now?
There is nothing surgical about high explosives. Until we can program tiny remote kill drones to take out individual targets base on genetic identification we are going to have to deal with collateral damage. It isn't pretty but it's true.
That isn't to say that terrorism is justified, just that civilian casualties are inevitable in any military action. It's wrong to expect the military to take action without expecting them, and anyone who calls for military action should know just what the consequences will be.
The difference between ones or tens of civilian casualties and thousands or tens of thousands is enormous, and the difference between a legitimate military target and a civilian target is also reasonably clear.
As such, it's entirely reasonable on that basis to say that terrorism was perhaps a necessary means of war in the past, but no longer is.
How can you do a surgical strike against a terrorist if you do not know who they are? Dave can be lobbing grenades in ons street then walk round and now hes an upright citizen.
If you don't know who they are, you don't kill them. That's why intelligence agencies are a thing.
How can you do a surgical strike against a terrorist if you do not know who they are? Dave can be lobbing grenades in ons street then walk round and now hes an upright citizen.
If you don't know who they are, you don't kill them. That's why intelligence agencies are a thing.
Yes I know they are a thing :^ The point I was getting at was the problem of trying to define who is exactly a combatant? Maybe I used to simple and example. One that seems to have been a tricky one. Say you are being mortared, you can't see who's shelling you but every now and then you see this guy poking his head out with a radio and seeing where they land. He doesn't have a gun, just there in some fetching jeans and T. Is he a combatant? Can you shoot him then? Or what if you find where he lives is it right to then go raid him and arrest him?
In a war of attrition, it is a race to see which runs out first; willingness to continue, or ability to continue. When you strike at and defeat enemy armies, you often find yourself increasing the resolve of your enemy against you because you have turned their armies into martyrs. Mileage will vary depending on the cause of the war and local culture, of course; places like Iran, Russia and the religious parts of the US are very good, historically or currently, at turning their losses into gains in that way, while the urban US, Europe, and, say, Iraq don't take to casualties too well. Actually, Iran and Iraq are very good examples of this cultural difference, especially considering they had a big war of attrition fairly recently.
The military culture of Iraq is one shared with a lot of the more established Middle-Eastern nations, and in broader terms the way much of the developed world sees things. War and armies are a necessary evil, sustained for the good of the country. The military gets some nice toys to create force multipliers, but hasn't got the same level of public support or reserves you might see elsewhere. When you lose a battle, it's time to reconsider fighting in the first place. During the Iran/Iraq war, Iraq maintained extensive technical superiority and won-sided casualty ratios right up until they started losing battles at all, at which point they fell to pieces.
Places like Iran, meanwhile, maintains an army as a great national institution. (Not specifically true in Iran, actually; the army proper gets dicked, but there are a large number of militia which have the same cultural purpose) People sign up out of patriotism and loyalty, and what the military lacks in new toys it makes up for in number and attitude. When these sorts of armies lose, it spurs the population into backing them even harder. This kind of culture measures defeat in attitude rather than causalities; remember Iran marched teenagers with plastic keys to heaven across minefields and into machine-guns because it was more important to them to maintain operational tempo and strategic pressure than tactical victories or limited casualties.
Iraq is the sort of place you can beat conventionally. Indeed, we did that. We rolled in, blew up all their toys, and they started surrendering so fast we weren't sure what to do with them all. (Of course, then everyone got bogged down in a stupid civil war that Saddam had suppressed by oppressing everyone equally.) By contrast, you couldn't really defeat Iran like that. Once you blew up their shiny stuff, they'd just bunker down in the cities and make you extract them house by house. They would fight you on the beaches, in the streets, etc etc. The way you beat a nation like that is to stop fighting them entirely and start terrorizing them. You have to make things look less like a fight and more like a beating behind a shed, give them the impression their enthusiasm counts for nothing. Then they fold.
This was demonstrated quite horribly throughout the 20th century. WW2 was basically every nation in Europe transitioning from Iran-like attitudes to Iraq-like attitudes. Something interesting about the US military is that both attitudes are present at the same time, which leads to all sorts of weirdness.
"It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee
I think terrorism is a broad, near meaningless term when it comes to strategic and tactical discussions.
Sure, it's not especially relevant to strategic and tactical discussion, because for those purposes it doesn't really matter what constitutes "terrorism", except perhaps when it's a matter of law that you stand to get in trouble for.
Any armed conflict will ALWAYS involve civilian deaths, intentional or otherwise, so either all of war is terrorism or terrorism is a meaningless.
That's a false dichotomy; the correct answer is that some but not all of war is terrorism. There are grey areas, but not being able to easily classify something as black or white doesn't mean that everything is the same colour.
Labeling people terrorists or calling certain actions terrorism only plays into a political machine used to manipulate public opinion.
Sure, but given that it's a term that continues to be used, it's better to examine it critically.
Comments
It would be politically motivated violence against a civilian target.
Churbs, do you get what I'm trying to say? It's as good of a definition as I've seen, but I'm a fan of more concrete definitions when we're talking about something as important as terrorism.
A "proper" war, whatever that means, is supposed to be both sides lining up their uniformed dudes and million-dollar machines and having at it until one side or the other calls uncle. Unfortunately it never really works that way, though ironically we are swinging back that way due to the fact that war material is getting so expensive and intensive to produce. 20th century wars between major powers were defined, with a few extreme exceptions like very early Blitzkrieg tactics, by attrition; as long as you could keep putting effective bodies and machines on the front, you were in the game, and wars were won by whoever replaced their losses faster. So you won by bombing enemy factories and cities until they could no longer replace those losses and they crumbled.
That is so impractical these days that it is your immediately capacity to destroy the enemy that matters, because there simply will not be time to replace losses before all your factories and bases are leveled with laser-guided munitions and the tanks roll through your street.
Of course, major powers just don't fight each other anymore. Instead it's all this irregular shit with a bunch of dudes with rifles and mines booby-trapping civilian areas and using public perception as their primary weapon.
There are grey areas with respect to targeting militants in the knowledge that civilian casualties will also occur. The important thing to note is that these areas - drone strikes being a notable example - are clearly grey and not white (or black, for that matter).
(On the topic of definitions, this is recommended reading material:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/ )
Frankly, I try not to get too involved in that sort of thing. Combatant, non-combatant, civilian and Enemy non-combatant(which, despite what some think, is not merely a euphemism for "terrorist") are about as complex as I tend to get. The further away from the loud bit you are, the more philosophical and convoluted the whole thing becomes.
The United States were desperate to avoid having to mount a ground invasion of Japan, because they had every indication that it would be the most grueling, miserable and awful conflict in human history. Even though the Japanese navy and air force was devastated, their army was armed and ready to go. It would have been the very worst combination of urban, island and mountain fighting, which through the Pacific, Stalingrad and Italy throughout the war had taught the world was simply the worst kind of fighting there is. On top of that, the US had seen that the Japanese simply would not surrender no matter how bad their situation was, on island after island of watching men throw themselves into machine-guns with swords and grenades rather than surrender, watching the civilian families of officers walk into the sea and drown when the defenses failed. They were convinced they would be landing on an island filled to the brim with people who would fight to the last man, woman and child.
You know the Purple Heart, the metal they give out for getting wounded in combat? They haven't made a new one of those since WW2, because they made so many of them in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. They estimated a million US causalities, and considerably more Japanese causalities.
So the US turned to terrorism.
Racism probably played a large part, no doubt. I'm sure many US decision makers believed there was no point in negotiating with the Japanese as they believed them sub-human and incapable of reasoning, or were more willing to categorize the entire Japanese people as a collective entity while believing the German and Italian people as being under the yoke of a dictatorship. But for the most part it was pragmatism born of pure terror; the US wanted to do whatever they could to avoid having to land troops and start up that meat grinder. So they started the process of razing from the air with napalm.
They made some effort, of course. They dropped leaflets warning where they would be bombing, records containing the sound of distant B-29s so civilians would know when to head for shelter, and they made a token effort to target munition and aircraft factories, strategic ports, etc. But in reality the effort was mostly to break the fighting spirit of the nation from the air and force them to surrender, which is pretty much textbook terrorism. The atomic bombs were just an escalation of that.
Really, terrorism isn't anything more than a snarl word the same way "honour" used to mean. It is a thing we declare certain acts to be so we can be more offended over them and justify larger retaliation.
Yes, terrorism can be justifiable and historically most likely has been in several cases. However, I would argue that in the modern world this is no longer the case. Modern military forces have the capacity for surgical strikes, and people have the ability to use the Internet to reach the entire world as an audience. What justifiable role can terrorism serve now?
Terrorism is a tricky one as the old adage goes "One mans terrorist is one mans freedom fighter". It boils down totally to the subjectivity and your perspective. Part of my dads family will not talk to the others due to their involvement with the IRA. Do I think that it was right what they did not really but I get where they were coming from.
Edit ninj'd
That isn't to say that terrorism is justified, just that civilian casualties are inevitable in any military action. It's wrong to expect the military to take action without expecting them, and anyone who calls for military action should know just what the consequences will be.
I think terrorism is a broad, near meaningless term when it comes to strategic and tactical discussions. Any armed conflict will ALWAYS involve civilian deaths, intentional or otherwise, so either all of war is terrorism or terrorism is a meaningless. Labeling people terrorists or calling certain actions terrorism only plays into a political machine used to manipulate public opinion.
As such, it's entirely reasonable on that basis to say that terrorism was perhaps a necessary means of war in the past, but no longer is. If you don't know who they are, you don't kill them. That's why intelligence agencies are a thing.
The military culture of Iraq is one shared with a lot of the more established Middle-Eastern nations, and in broader terms the way much of the developed world sees things. War and armies are a necessary evil, sustained for the good of the country. The military gets some nice toys to create force multipliers, but hasn't got the same level of public support or reserves you might see elsewhere. When you lose a battle, it's time to reconsider fighting in the first place. During the Iran/Iraq war, Iraq maintained extensive technical superiority and won-sided casualty ratios right up until they started losing battles at all, at which point they fell to pieces.
Places like Iran, meanwhile, maintains an army as a great national institution. (Not specifically true in Iran, actually; the army proper gets dicked, but there are a large number of militia which have the same cultural purpose) People sign up out of patriotism and loyalty, and what the military lacks in new toys it makes up for in number and attitude. When these sorts of armies lose, it spurs the population into backing them even harder. This kind of culture measures defeat in attitude rather than causalities; remember Iran marched teenagers with plastic keys to heaven across minefields and into machine-guns because it was more important to them to maintain operational tempo and strategic pressure than tactical victories or limited casualties.
Iraq is the sort of place you can beat conventionally. Indeed, we did that. We rolled in, blew up all their toys, and they started surrendering so fast we weren't sure what to do with them all. (Of course, then everyone got bogged down in a stupid civil war that Saddam had suppressed by oppressing everyone equally.) By contrast, you couldn't really defeat Iran like that. Once you blew up their shiny stuff, they'd just bunker down in the cities and make you extract them house by house. They would fight you on the beaches, in the streets, etc etc. The way you beat a nation like that is to stop fighting them entirely and start terrorizing them. You have to make things look less like a fight and more like a beating behind a shed, give them the impression their enthusiasm counts for nothing. Then they fold.
This was demonstrated quite horribly throughout the 20th century. WW2 was basically every nation in Europe transitioning from Iran-like attitudes to Iraq-like attitudes. Something interesting about the US military is that both attitudes are present at the same time, which leads to all sorts of weirdness.