Hacker News Reader

Comment by charred_patina | Hacker News Reader

I am curious, how do you distinguish between the two? To me it seems like the US designation of terrorist just means "group we don't want to negotiate with". The US has backed rebels and regimes that have done equally bad (if not worse) stuff in the past, and not labeled them as terrorists.

I am not trying to justify or defend a group whose motto is "curse on the Jews" but I don't think the designation of terrorist is particularly useful for understanding the situation.

"We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way" -- Toby Keith

Maybe this quote would be helpful for understanding the anger Americans felt post-9/11, but it wouldn't be helpful for understanding US geopolitics.

View on HN

Terrorism targets civilians with violence in order to achieve political goals.

This describes pretty much every country on the planet right now.

I think the real distinction is that terrorists are non-state actors who use violence (bad). States are legally allowed to use violence (necessary).

But the common parlance of terrorist usually means "US designated terrorist" which really means "group we refuse to bargain with".

The Taliban were a terrorist group, now they are a government. The Iraqi army was a legitimate army, then many became ISIS, a terrorist group.

Taliban are terrorists and will always be terrorists. It’s pretty easy to understand what a terrorist is.

The USA spent trillions of dollars with this mindset and now has to recognize them as a legitimate government.

My point is you can either be realistic and save yourself a lot of headache, or you can be idealistic and waste a lot of time and money because of your own hubris.

Targeting civilians is not the same as collateral damage.

The US doesn't target civilians- that's a war crime.

States invent a legal framework that they can use to differentiate their civilian casualties from the civilian casualties of other groups they refuse to acknowledge.

That is what I mean by the state monopoly on violence. You can't legally beat your neighbor. A cop can. You can't shoot protestors, a national guardsmen may be able to.

The state devises a legal framework to justify its violence. Operating within this framework is designated as "peacekeeping action" or "law enforcement". Operating outside of it becomes "violence". Even though the actions are the exact same. It's all just kind of arbitrary is my point.

A tree is judged by its fruit and this framework has been extremely successful in creating a peaceful and prosperous world order.

Prosperous for some.

Didn't prevent anyone from targeted, strategic bombing of civilians starting in WW 2. Did get anyone anywhere.

No it does not. There's a clear difference. Just because many terrorists evolve to become governments does not make them less of a terrorist at the start.

You can be one thing, then change to another thing. It doesn't rewrite history.

A terrorist intentionally targets civilians, and non-terrorist does not. That's it.

A non-terrorist might kill civilians, but not intentionally.

> A terrorist intentionally targets civilians, and non-terrorist does not. That's it.

When a leader targets their own people, we don't call them terrorists. My point is that the distinction comes down to whether the state is recognized as legitimate or not, and it's really just arbitrary.

> When a leader targets their own people, we don't call them terrorists.

Of course we do, look at what we said about Assad in Syria.

It's not arbitrary at all, people just say that to try to engage in moral relativism. The line as not as fuzzy as you are making it out to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com