Admonitions to shrug your shoulders at terrorism because car accidents kill more people always ring hollow with me.
The word terrorism is a propaganda word intended to make the audience pass moral judgment on the act and ignore the larger issue of why the conflict exists in the first place.
I too find acts of violence upsetting, but it's dangerous to buy into the propaganda around the word terrorism, since it's used to justify abandoning diplomacy and dehumanizing the enemy.
And it's used to curb the rights of your own citizens.
[1] https://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/abu-bakr-naji-the...
Is France fulfilling Daesh's goals by destroying their administrative, economic and military infrastructure? What kind of action or inaction would go against Daesh's goals in your opinion?
The word is not merely propaganda, it is a word whose extremity exactly conveys the revulsion and moral judgement of the speaker. As with any label, you run the risk of superficiality and preoccupation with simplified narratives, but "terrorism" is NOT just propaganda, and it deliberately conveys more than "acts of violence". (A clinical term with its own problems of distancing audiences from the immediate reality.)
I wrote this because your last sentence seemed to imply something that I've noticed crop up in these kinds of discussions: the (typically Western) assumption that there is legitimacy to both sides of any conflict, and that, recognizing this, a diplomatic solution can be achieved. I've yet to see concrete evidence that this is the case. Short of deprogramming, how do you reason with a group of people brainwashed to be fundamentally unreasonable?
It's a really bizarre amplification and dehumanization of the enemy... I realize this is a part of war propaganda, but it's particularly distasteful because it amplifies the environment of fear the terrorists were trying to create in the first place.
The goal of any tactic in war is to break the other side's will to keep fighting. Terrorism is an effective tactic because it can usually be carried out at convenient times and doesn't require much logistics, sophistication or funding.
Psychological warfare aimed at a civilian population, right? Even if you agree that it was, you have to admit that is not how the history books are writte, because we don't use the propagana term "terrorist" to describe our own actions.
War criminals versus 'terrorists'.
How does that sound? Is it really a propaganda term if you're a common war criminal who committed mass atrocity against civilians? Or a terrorist?
Both side prosecuted bombing of population centers. They also both get away with it. Probably the reason why there wasn't prosecutions in the first place because they fear the precedence that will set.
ETA: I'm talking about the Paris attacks specifically, not giving a formal definition of terrorism. If you don't count those as terrorism, I don't know what you would count. This semantic mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.
* Bombing of Dresden: Terrorism
* Nuking of Hiroshima: Terrorism
* America's Drone strikes: Terrorism
Context and motive is everything. You cannot boil it down to an easily digestible soubd-byte to base your opinion on.
Regardless of that, the events that you mentioned are massive, coordinated, state-level actions. I just can't accept labeling those as terrorism without that word losing any meaning. Yes, those events are horrible, but not every horrible thing that involves killing civilians is terrorism even when if's brutal mass murder. There are other words too, like genocide, war crimes, massacre, assassinations, etc.
Hiroshima was in the midst of a full blown state vs. state war, in which the US was not the aggressor against Japan.
While it is true that it was hoped the atomic bomb would be as useful psychologically as it was physically, there is no true comparison here, and this is argumentative for the sake of trying to make a point.
You're right, the Hiroshima attack in itself was worse in terms of the death and suffering of innocents than all Islamic terrorism of the past 20 years put together.
Thus unless we expect one side to nobly surrender, we ought to expect the most extreme atrocities to occur in war.
When you think about it, it's silly to draw an arbitrary distinction of humane combat, since if we really wanted to be humane we'd have our leaders compete in chess boxing or something that would minimize the destruction of property and loss of life.
Bombing innocent people simply isn't right and isn't effective. If you're honestly sympathizing with these people or justifying their actions (which you seem one skip and jump from doing), you should at least want them to do things that are effective at getting the change they want.
Then again, maybe their entire motive is to bring global sharia law and secure their place in heaven by killing as many innocent infidels as possible. As far as I know, ISIS has made no claims that were less extreme than this. I have no problem dehumanizing someone with that sort of motivation. It's barbaric; it's monstrous. They have made no attempt at diplomacy, and there is no chance.
Fortunately, We would never do anything like bombing innocent people, because We are the Good Guys, and all our actions are therefore entirely justified. Only They do things like that, because They are the Bad Guys, and Their actions are barbaric and monstrous.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/06/u-s-journalists-who-inst...
The amount of economic damage to the west has been profound, and yet our leaders would be happy to spend 20% of GDP indefinitely on ineffective projects attempting to thwart terrorism.
So yes, terrorism works very well and often terrorist groups transition into respectable and moderate political parties.
I refuse to give up freedoms or deny those freedoms to innocent people out of fear of terrorists. That's not "shrugging my shoulders". That's not succumbing to the terror that is so obviously the tool of terrorism.
To me, the problem with terrorism (aside from the terrorists) is that there are people willing to jump in immediately with political (or financial) agendas. Within hours, I'd already seen comments on FB about how fewer people would have died if France had a 2nd amendment. And, over the past few days, I've seen so much pro-police-state propaganda in the US media that it frankly scares me to death.
No - we really don't need more 'surveillance' or more build-ups in 'defense spending'.
Call me 'crazy', but I really think we should be spending the trillions and trillions of dollars (which would otherwise go into the pockets of the propagandists) on our generation's geniuses to enable them to create the technologies that makes disease, poverty, and inequality obsolete.
But at least Donald Trump is going to ensure that we get all the Iraqi oil. /sarcasm
Using IraqBodyCount.org's estimate, Iraqis suffered 1.86 micromorts per day from March 2003 to present. Compare to 2.18 μmorts/day during the Iran-Iraq War or 29,090 μmorts inflicted on Halabja residents in one day in 1988.
Here's a calculator, with my data in the Iraq tab:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wH6BOoKXun-C3_WLHZr7...
(n.b.: I use conservative estimates to yield higher μmorts for the US-initiated Iraq War and lower for the other two, like 1988 populations for Iran-Iraq and 2003 populations for the US invasion/aftermath. IBC measures only documented deaths; I used their figure for total deaths including combatants. Alternative figures are listed in the cells/notes on the right. Feel free to plug in different values and see how things change.)