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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

> When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism

Only if the motive for dropping those bombs is to advance a political/ideological agenda.

We need to be very clear that "terrorism" has a very specific meaning. It's not just a group or individual who terrorises.

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This definition only reinforces the parent's point. What it rules out as "not terrorism" is regular organized crime, which isn't too much into bombings anyway. Bombs are almost never used without a political/ideological agenda, because they're too expensive and require too much coordination to make, maintain and deploy.

By that logic, you could describe WWII as just a bunch of terrorists who disagreed.

Which of course, nobody does.

Except that to some extent, they do. When my country was occupied by the Nazi Germany, people who fought back were called freedom fighters by us. They were called terrorists by the Nazis.

Sure, but I don't think that extent is useful for the purposes of this discussion.

FWIW, you and I are likely from the same country.

My point being, one country's terrorist is another country's freedom fighter. There is some nuance here, but we're talking about somewhat random and indiscriminate murder of civilians who may or may not be connected to a military group in hopes people at large will stop supporting that group. There's a political agenda in there, and there's death of innocent civilians. There's strong element of fear too - I remember reading articles about drone strikes in Pakistan years ago, in which it was reported that the locals developed a fear of clear blue sky. A fear of good weather, because that's when drones come.

If one objects to calling it terrorism because they're really trying to hit the combatants only, and objects to calling it a war crime because technically there's no war with an internationally recognized nation state, then how should we call it?

You're wrong, all those WWII resistance fighters were by definition terrorists to germans/japanese. Its just that US marketing over-used the term in past decade and a half to label anybody inconvenient as a justified target for extermination because 'national security'

Genuine question: if the motivation for this bombing was not political or ideological, what was it then?

I think terrorism is killing random members of a population to scare the others into some political or ideological change. It wouldn't count if it was targeted at fighters and civilians got killed by accident.

That sounds like a reasonable definition. But how would this definition qualify the Taliban attacks on military bases and police stations in Afghanistan?

I think one would need to put something like that as a guerrilla war.

There needs to be a distinction between:

* attacking civilians (terrorism)

* attacking The System, but going for softer targets and not taking its military might directly head on (guerilla war)

* attacking The System, in a Military v Military setting (regular warfare)

While there are groups that will never have the direct strength to take a head on fight, I think it's beneficial to have a category showing that they limit their targets to agents of the system rather than any random civilian.

It was an accident.

Sure, but what was the motivation for dropping the bombs if you say it was not political or ideological?

Is the killing of tens of millions of civilians so far with sanctions an accident too? If you can kill them with sanctions why not with drone strikes?

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