Comment by kelipso
Comment by kelipso 2 days ago
To me it just looks like rhetoric, an us vs. them type deal. Call something terrorism so that you can justify using any kind of violence against them basically.
Comment by kelipso 2 days ago
To me it just looks like rhetoric, an us vs. them type deal. Call something terrorism so that you can justify using any kind of violence against them basically.
Not really. Not all violence is terrorism. Not all bad things are terrorism either. But terrorism is always bad. Ukrainians killing Russian soldiers isn't terrorism. Hezbollah trying to kill Israeli civilians is terrorism.
> What would you call Russians killing Ukrainian soldiers
War.
But terrorism is always bad.
Suppose some country occupies another country and the occupied country has no proper army to fight back, therefore they resort to methods of unconventional warfare to fight back against the occupation. Would some call this terrorism? Would this qualify as terrorism given some proper definition of the term and objective judgment of the situation? Would it be bad? What if they not only target the military of the occupier but also their civilians as it is them who voted for the government doing the occupation? What if they did this out of some kind of necessity because targeting the occupying military is not effective given the power imbalance?
This book does an OK job of examining those philosophical arguments.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/terrorism-and-the-right...
Suicide bombers at least really have skin in the game compared to blowing up people half way around the world by drones at the press of a button. If you want to look down on people, then do it for their reasons to fight or the targets they pick, not for their choice of weapon.
It isn't rhetoric... It is a specific combat strategy that small nations employ against huge ones. By targeting non-combatants and creating "terror" you can break the will of a larger nation.
If the USA in 2001 could have waved a magic wand that killed all the Taliban and didn't touch a hair on any non-combatants head they would have waved it and called it a day.