[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Anders Sandberg]

On 30/09/2012 11:55, Charlie Stross wrote:
> "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.

Yep. Cannot be reiterated often enough.

In a world of globalized mass communications terrorism is likely a more 
effective tactic than in the past. Commit deeds of terror around 
Hadrian's Wall and it takes weeks before Rome hears it, and the news 
will likely never reach Hispania or go far outside the imperial 
administration  - and that was in one of the empires of the past with 
best communications. While open democratic societies might seem 
vulnerable to being influenced by terrorist fears, they are also fairly 
resilient since opposing courses of action are usually heard and 
discussed. Democracies crash in terrorism handling only when it causes 
only one view to be acceptable in public discourse.

However, there is a mixing of terrorist tactic and guerilla tactic. 
Guerillas essentially aim at making it expensive - in terms of 
resources, PR, manpower, whatever - to control a territory or to do 
something. It is the smart tactic if you are outnumbered and 
out-resourced: you do cheap attack that forces the enemy to do expensive 
things, and you make sure you have small losses. A pure guerilla tactic 
would only aim at inflicting cost on the enemy, but since that cost can 
also be in the sphere of public and international support, creating 
terror is an option - and not necessarily a bad one. Similarly many 
groups that want to achieve change through terror will adopt guerilla 
methods since they work - most such groups are small compared to states 
and other powers (who, if they want to terrorize, have other means: 
terror is after all part of 'shock and awe').

On the other hand, the evidence that terrorism works as a tactic to 
achieve ends seems to be pretty weak. Guerilla warfare works fairly well 
(if you are willing to pay the horrific price), and I suspect that many 
terrorists - just like non-terrorists - conflate the two. Which suggests 
a very sad reason for some terrorist attacks: they chose the wrong 
tactic because they bought into the propaganda.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University