On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 09:30 AM, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-- On 14 Sep 2001, at 0:27, Riad S. Wahby wrote:
The labels "act of terrorism" and "act of war" are mutually exclusive. The former is by definition perpetrated by a non-governmental grou The claims by Dubya et al to the contrary are incoherent politibabble.
Nonsense. The words "terror" and "terrorism" came to have their modern meaning when they employed to describe the policies of the government of France, and later the policies of the Paris Commune.
"Terrorism" is something that governments do. Later the word came to be extended by as hyperbole to the large scale violent acts of private organizations and individuals.
What is called terrorism is just warfare carried on in one of its many forms: -- the terror bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all designed to so terrify the population that they would sue for peace -- the practice for millennia of "torching a village," usually with residents locked inside. Or of piling skulls, or of placing heads on pikes, or of "taking ears" -- the mining of the harbor of Managua by U.S.G. forces, designed to terrify the local population into overthrowing the government they had mostly-democratically elected (much more democratic than, say, the government of Egypt or Pakistan, etc., none of whose harbors the U.S.G. mined) And so on. Warfare carried on by other means. --Tim May