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Comment by aegiso | Hacker News Reader

When an organized group of people uses force to take your belongings, leveraging tactics of fear for political ends, isn't that firmly within the definition of terrorism?

I don't know the facts here so I'm not implying anything in this specific case, but I like to remember that the terminology we use drastically shapes our thinking.

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Secretary-General Kofi Annan actually tried to define terrorism at the end of his tenure... He suggested : "Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act."

That would make the bombing of Dresden and Nagasaki (and any other bombing under the 'strategic bombing' doctrine where the objective was to drain the people's will to fight) to be terrorism, though. It would make some of what the ANC did terrorism. This, however, would not be terrorism.

I think Kofi Annan was bang on the money. About time we had a workable definition of the word (beyond just 'whatever the other guy does'). However he didn't get very far with it at the UN level.

    "LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been 
    prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, 
    and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay 
    recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral 
    if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you 
    lose and not immoral if you win?"

Robert S. McNamara, in the documentary series The Fog of War.

[0] http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html

International law is a joke when only people who lose wars are prosecuted.

(I have a lot to say on this point, but I'll leave it at that and point you to this[1])

[1] a series of three blog posts, old now and in need of rewriting:

http://politicomaniac.net/2011/02/the-failure-of-the-state/

http://politicomaniac.net/2011/02/lie-back-and-think-of-engl...

http://politicomaniac.net/2011/02/fluffy-federalism/

I note that the definition there means that some of what were arguably the most effective bombings conducted by the IRA weren't terrorism. Which is nice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Docklands_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Manchester_bombing

If you just want to make a rhetorical point, sure. If you want different things to have different names so that we can have intelligent discussions about them, no.

Right on. I literally believe the United States government is doing more harm to the United States than the terrorists are, but they are not themselves terrorists by any stretch of the imagination.

> by any stretch of the imagination

You do realize they do stuff like this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24557333), right? No stretch of the imagination? I'd also say fomenting a culture of fear is a terrorist activity (and by definition, their end goal). Right now the US government are experts at creating such culture.

Tell that to government first. Its government lies... sorry, PR that started this re-defining lark, not us people. We have to discuss these things in their terms now, unfortunately.

I don't see why we do.

No, taking belongings has nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism is about using terror as coercion and presumably, they're searching his stuff because they want to find something, not because they want the attention.

Terrorism is about using terror as coercion

I'm not seeing where that contradicts his experience.

Terrorism is politically motivated, there is no evidence of that.

Yeah, I don't see at all how security theater is politically motivated, you're right.

Well, I'm not really going to get into the underlying rationale behind security theatre, but I would imagine that such actions would need to meet a certain threshold of how blatantly political they are.

Yeah, we call out governments for abusing the terror excuse, but we seem prone to applying the term inappropriately ourselves.

Maybe we should be using the term "oppression."

No, because government.

The problem of political authority: http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/1.htm

Simply and narrowly put, that may be terrorism, but to call this terrorism would be speculation -- it's not politically-charged attention-whoring in the strictest sense.

Another staple of terrorism is random violence, and we're not quite there yet.

Is an armed raid on someone's house not random violence?

An armed raid on a specific person's house house isn't random, however raiding any house in a particular neighbourhood would fulfil such a definition.

It's not random from the perspective of the police, but from the perspective of a citizen it might as well be.

Like what happened in Boston after the bombings?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWsbBhzxYw8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Gb6i5DF9k

Terrorism is largely defined not by technicalities, but by what people find to be outside the accepted rules.

Customs, while oppressive and invasive, has always been that way, since time immemorial. Thus, its not considered to be outside the rules.

No, because here, it's the good guys doing it (wink).

"When an organized group of people uses force to take your belongings, leveraging tactics of fear for political ends, isn't that firmly within the definition of terrorism?"

No, that's democracy.

And the dumbest ideas always win, because the broadest section of the population can understand them.

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