Defining Terrorism

[Danny Weltman]

Joseph, I'm not sure that your definition based on "obvious root meanings"
is very convincing, because "terror" is not, as you put it, "extreme fear
induced by violence" - things can be terrifying even if they are not
induced by violence. For instance, take the example given by Carl Wellman
discussed in this article - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/terrorism/ -
"a professor threatens to fail students who submit their essays after the
due date, causes panic in class, and thereby engages in terrorism." As the
article notes, Wellman's definition is "idiosyncratic," but it's the sort
of definition you're providing, so if we agree with you, we'll have to
agree that the professor is engaged in terrorism, along with scary movies,
black widow spiders, and so on. This is not to say that you are wrong
(you've got Carl Wellman on your side at least), but there are definitely
downsides to just saying "terrorism is the induction of terror."

Danny

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 7:04 PM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>
wrote:

> As far as US Law goes, Terrorism is not strictly defined. This is
> purposeful, apparently due to the protean nature of Terrorism. Literally
> there is no definition. They like it that way.
>
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 8:40 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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