Defining Terrorism

[Joseph Tracy]

There are serious problems with this long article trying to give a definitive answer to the question of what is terrorism.  He traces the history of the usage of the term which changes mostly depending on who gained power in violent struggles. The core of the writer’s dilemma is that he wants to exclude nation states as sponsors of terror but is faced with a great many examples of that very phenomenon: Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet, the post-revolution leaders of 18th Century France are a few he mentions. One can think of many others which are less politically safe to criticize. He never mentions the history of US policy toward native tribes, or British colonial violence. 

He ends by defining terrorism as the tactic of inducing terror by those with little power.  This is a betrayal of language. Terror is terror, no matter who wields it. If Stalin was not engaged in terrorizing his countrymen, if the Fascist powers did not engage in terrorism then why are these  examples of state terror held in universal moral abhorrence? Is it only because they ultimately failed? The writer wants to classify such tactics as war crimes. But that won’t hold up to logical scrutiny.  The tactic they used was terror, not breaking laws. The classification of war crime is after the fact when the wars were lost. What they did was not legitimized by the state power they had while they did it. 

The trouble with trying to make a word fit your favored political view of the world is that it leads to the Orwellian use of language portrayed in 1984. 

I much prefer the obvious root meanings that leave a word in the metaphoric realm that is the fundamental nature of language. Terror is extreme fear  induced by violence. Terrorism is the active induction of such fear.  Political terrorism is the active induction of fear for political goals.

> On Nov 30, 2015, at 5:26 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> My apologies if this has been posted to the list before. 
> 
> What is terrorism? Few words have so insidiously worked their way into our everyday vocabulary. Like `Internet' -- another grossly over-used term that has similarly become an indispensable part of the argot of the late twentieth century -- most people have a vague idea or impression of what terrorism is, but lack a more precise, concrete and truly explanatory definition of the word. This imprecision has been abetted partly by the modern media, whose efforts to communicate an often complex and convoluted message in the briefest amount of airtime or print space possible have led to the promiscuous labelling of a range of violent acts as `terrorism'. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the television and -- even within the same broadcast or on the same page -- one can find such disparate acts as the bombing of a building, the assassination of a head of state, the massacre of civilians by a military unit, the poisoning of produce on supermarket shelves or the deliberate contamination of over-the-counter medication in a chemist's shop all described as incidents of terrorism. Indeed, virtually any especially abhorrent act of violence that is perceived as directed against society -- whether it involves the activities of anti-government dissidents or governments themselves, organized crime syndicates or common criminals, rioting mobs or persons engaged in militant protest, individual psychotics or lone extortionists -- is often labelled `terrorism'.
> 
>     Dictionary definitions are of little help. The pre-eminent authority on the English language, the much-venerated Oxford English Dictionary,
> 
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-terrorism.html

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