"Attack on America" - a Personal Response (fwd)

[Tim May]

On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 09:30 AM, jamesd at 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