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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. There are certainly people who believe both or either of those were terrorism.

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Bertrand Russell's conjugations. I am a freedom fighter, you are an insurgent, he is a terrorist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

A misguided and antisocial attempt at freedom, if that was the intention...

Terrorism is the use of violence to promote an ideology. Full stop. Nothing precludes a terrorist act from helping people. Even Pablo Escobar set up schools and other institutions in his neighborhood.

Sure, but "terrorism" explicitly implies a value judgement. Why else would you take issue with the term "political violence", which is equally technically correct? It is violence for political aims.

You were clearly trying to make a point beyond the prescriptive definition of the word, so this comment reads like backtracking to me.

You are missing a key component of terrorism which is that the political violence is illegal/not lawful.

Political violence which is in line with societal norms is not terrorism. The value judgement isn't implied, it's the main the feature of the word.

When I first learned about it terrorism - as opposed to general political violence - included creating fear in the opposing side, which is the reason for the name.

I think with your definition everything would be terrorism which usually isn't what one wants.

I agree that's the coherent prescribed definition of terrorism. In practice, whether somebody admits something was terrorism depends largely on which side they agree with. When they agree with the terrorist, euphemisms like 'freedom fighter' are often used instead.

There are probably some Columbians who were on the receiving side of Escobar's gifting and called him a humanitarian for it.

True. I visited Medellin a couple of times between 97 and 2006 when I was doing business in LATAM, and I recall clearly that many locals had tremendous admiration for Escobar, constantly praising all he did for the city and the community, while de-emphasizing, and sometimes justifying, the true nature and methods of his business.

It's interesting you mention Pablo Escobar, because I don't know if you could say his bombing campaign was ideology-based; however it most certainly was intended to cause terror, e.g. (narco)terrorism.

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