So at what point do eco-terrorists seek to cause nuclear incidents with the intent of causing less harm than human development and presence would cause?
(This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type novel...)
This is the plot of Rainbow Six, where a scheming group of evil environmentalists plan to unleash a weaponized strain of Ebola on the world to wipe out 99.99% of the global population so that the ecosystems will survive. Other comically evil things the environmentalists do include experimenting on homeless people abducted from the street and provoking/funding acts of terror worldwide as part of some hazy cover up for their activities.
It all ends in tears for the environmentalists though, at the hands of an all-American red-blooded special forces hero and his multi-national above-the-law and above-Top-Secret counter-terrorism task force.
Not really Clancy's finest hour, IMO, but a good look into the conservative id.
Well that's the thing: The book comes from a different world. More precisely, it came from 1998, when the Soviet Union (Tom Clancy's traditional antagonist of choice) was long gone, but Islamic terror wasn't yet the obvious replacement. He wrote a string of books with odd antagonists (eg, Japanese nationalists) during the period.
Who names their covert terrorism op that? That's just asking for it.
Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror, or fear, to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence against peacetime targets or in war against non-combatants.
With the advent of the B29, the US was dropping napalm and phosphorus on Japanese cities to create massive firestorms. The glow of Tokyo burning was visible for hundreds of miles. On the scale of horror or inhumanity, I’m not sure how to compare different types of aerial bombardment targeted civilians as instruments of war production that needed to be eliminated.
[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-h...
[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
PS, Pearl Harbour was against military targets, and peacetime is arguable considering the embargoes, etc. Still not "high ground" by any means, but hardly unprecedented. The US already had a fleet there precisely in case it was needed against the Japanese empire.
World War 1 was where his really came to roost. The machine gun and artillery turned the western front into an industrial scale killing machine that only ended when the German economy ground to a halt. Technology improvements in WW2 enabled destruction at a scale never witnessed in history and incomparable on a relative scale to nothing except Caesar’s Gallic campaign.
The way to win was about metrics — building more arms and killing as many people as possible. Japan was no different than cavalrymen in WW1, who believed that elan and decisive victory in the field would carry the day. Sociopaths like Curtis Lemay figured that out.
And since when did saying "I hate you, I'm going to war with you" make it OK to indiscriminately kill civilians.
ISIS has declared war on England. Does that make it OK for them to bomb the subway?
That the Japanese didn't employ terrorist tactics against American civilians? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
> And since when did saying "I hate you, I'm going to war with you" make it OK to indiscriminately kill civilians
Maybe ask the Japanese? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
If you can't understand a strategic decision to bring a war to an end and avoid a larger loss of life, I don't know what to tell you.
Funny definition is that.
So, how do you call acts of agression performed by governments against non combatants?
Since the only reason not to call them terrorism is to paint (your?) government actions with a nicer brush, I assume you call those acts "liberation events"
War crimes.
The reason not to call it terrorism is because that is not what the word means. If a sovereign nation formally declares war to another, any action covered by international convention is classified seperately from "civil" or militant violence.
https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:LouvainX+Louv16x+1...