Comment by rtsil 10 months ago
I don't know about that. When Al Quaeda attacked the USS Cole, a purely military vessel without a single civilian casualty, the US administration and the entire US military called it an act of terrorrism.
Al Qaeda isn't a nation-state so by definition it falls into terrorism. It's like if Greenpeace sunk a military vessel because the sonar was killing sea life that would be terrorism. It would have some serious side effects if it was OK for private non-governmental actors being able to target militaries and be seen as legitimate in their actions.
Of course, if we consider all actions by non-state combatants against state military actors to be terrorism, the US and Western Europe has frequently been a big sponsor of terrorism. A recent cause that many are sympathetic to of this nature that immediately comes to my mind are the Kurds in Syria during the Syrian civil war.
> Greenpeace sunk a military vessel
Funny exemple knowing France sunk a Greenpeace vessel. That act has been called "state terrorism".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warri...
But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists. And they knew it too, viz. Benjamin Franklin's famous line 'Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately.'
Preemptively invalidating all non-state actors is just a way for people with power to avoid challenges to it. Every single oppressive regime describes rebels as terrorists and employs circular arguments to assert its own legitimacy. Using this to dismiss military attacks on military targets is, frankly, bullshit.
What Franklin said was true though. If the US revolutionaries had failed, they would have been rightfully hung for treason by the British. If you're some private actor attacking military targets in some country, you'd be a terrorist. I'm no fan of Iran for example but if somebody was caught launching rockets at an IRGC base the Iranian government could legitimately treat them as terrorists/traitors no problem.
Eh - that depends on how you do it, right?
If everyone in your ‘private actor’ group wears uniforms, acts in the open (ie marches in formation, operates tanks instead of setting boobie traps, etc), and then attacks military operations directly it’s going to require an extreme amount of squinting to call that group terrorists.
Whoever is running it would probably get a pretty fair title of warlord. But they’re different.
At the same time, it a gov’t organization runs around bombing civilian targets in a campaign to scare everyone in their opponents country out of their mind, pretty hard to not call them terrorists.
> But by definition the founders of the USA were terrorists
I don’t remember reading any attacks on civilians in the revolutionary war. The civilians would have all been Americans, so it wouldn’t make sense.
The British regarded them as traitors, and would have hung them for treason and sedition.
Since 2009 Hezbollah's charter has been far more nationalist than religious (even endorsing democracy as the desirable form of polity). This isn't to say they're not influenced by their religious views, but nor do I think Islam has any monopoly on bad ideas. I am not a fan of monotheistic religions in general, as they all rest on the conceit that there is only One True Way to think about spiritual matters and such certitude is often used to excuse atrocities. More often, religious rhetoric is used as a common framework to organize participants in what is often a much more prosaic struggle over resources and geographic advantage.
Why do you assume they had your sense of ethics? 10 was often considered the age of adulthood. Little men had no specific exception from work or war, or expectation of education outside specific classes. Being a regular troop was more often from 16, but plenty fought from 10 up or had other roles in battle.
Sure. "The definition of terrorism is controversial and political."
How governments, media, etc. use that word is often politically loaded and not based on some agreed objective definition.