[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Charlie Stross]

On 30 Sep 2012, at 04:47, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:

> 
> 
>> (e.g. resistance fighters against WWII German invaders).
> 
> Uh, not agreed. Sorry to be such a rightous prick (I guess this is how I 
> look) but resistance was not a terrorism.
> 
> Terrorists are, for me, some kind of brain washed borgs directed by 
> cowards, going after _unarmed_ and _unprepared_ civilians whom they never 
> before met.


Er, no. Cognitive failure mode here. Repeat after me:

"Terrorism is a TACTIC, not an IDEOLOGY."

This is an important distinction to make. We designate people as terrorists because of WHAT they do, not WHY they do it.

Unfortunately over the past decade we've run into a witch hunt in the west, in which certain ideologies have been labelled "terrorist ideologies". Which of course makes it impossible -- unacceptable -- to negotiate with the moderates on the same side as the lunatic radicals and killers. Which is the gold standard mechanism for cutting off grass-roots support for the killers: you bring the moderates into your political discourse and thereby isolate the hot-heads. Worked example: Northern Ireland. Or South Africa, for that matter. The deputy first minister of the Northern Irish assembly is a former senior commander of the Provisional IRA; and do I have to explain Nelson Mandela?

Here's the distinction: terrorism is a term applied to any tactic designed to *terrify* a civilian population into doing something that the user of those tactics want. The British RAF fire-bombing of German cities during WW2 was pretty clearly an act of terrorism intended to demoralize and scare the German civilian population towards surrender. So were the Nazi mass-reprisals against civilian populations in territories they'd occupied, killing large numbers of random civilians for each German soldier killed by the resistance. 

The term gets abused when, for example, the Nazi authorities designated resistance fighters targeting German soldiers as terrorists (and treated them as such). Or recently when the UK ended up with the muslim equivalent of a teenage goth poet (of the really cut-my-wrists-and-hope-to-die bad poetry writing variety) getting banged up in prison for Terrorism *for publishing bad teenage poetry on the internet*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samina_Malik
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/12/anattackonliberty

It may be bad taste, and it may be stupid, but it's not terrorism. 

We should be much more careful about how we use that term ...



-- Charlie