What is terrorism?: Re: Re: Re: How to reduce terrorism

» cwg - Re: Re: Re: How to reduce terrorism

Terrorism - it's difficult to define. From its word origin, we can assume that it includes tactics that are meant to terrorize your opponent, presumably by killing civilians, into abandoning your agenda against the perpetrators.

Yes, there was an act of terrorism on 9-11-2001. It killed roughly 5000 civilians. Since the Bush administration openly declared this an act of war, terrorism does not seem to be restricted to acts outside of war.

Let's see... vietnam was already mentioned. Many many more civilians were purposely killed than on that one day in september. But hey, they were only vietnamese. We're talking first class Americans here.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 150,000 PURPOSELY killed civilians... 40,000 immediately, over 100,000 died from effects of radiation. Propaganda has it that this saved many more lives by winning the war early and preventing a land war in Japan. The truth is that Japan was ready to surrender under the one condition that the Emperor would not be touched by Americans. So Americans made the choice to trade their pride about total victory (they ended up pardoning the Emperor anyway!) against 150,000 civilians. Terrorism? War crime? Probably both.

On a side note, it was not the attack on Pearl Harbor that started the war between Japan and the US. It was America's embargo and sea blockade against Japan six months earlier. According to customary international law, the US committed acts of war half a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan was running out of oil, and had no choice.

The US are not the only ones, but they're often involved. They helped the British in the WW2 bombardment of Hamburg and Dresden, wiping out 500,000 German civilians just weeks before the war was over. The end was already in sight, this atrocity unnecessary.

The US claim they are defending human rights. Ask the African-American population in the south of the contemporary US where they could start.

If anyone has not seen the big neon HIPOCRISY sign over President Bush's head, they must be completely braindead.

I don't know if I agree that this is about West v. East, however. There is a lot of domestic policy involved. When Bush was elected and started pissing everybody off, people said "He needs a war to make up for this s***." Oops. Look what he found.

What do we learn from all this? I agree with the previous posts, in that we have to see the ROOT of terrorism, not the symptom. There are no inherently EVIL people out there who just hate American freedom so much that they suicide bomb themselves. Anyone who thinks about that should see that that's clearly BS. People are pissed off at the US for very good reasons, and it should not have surprised anyone that sooner or later, the populations of the poor countries strike back.

- CWG

-- posted by cwg