Are there any academics on the EDF?

[Davis]

Blah Blah Wrote:

?You are not comparing like for like there. The contexts are entirely different and context is extremely important. The former an act of all out war between nations throwing everything at each other. The latter, an act in isolation. A better comparison would be with any battle in Vietnam.

Terrorism is so called because it's the method of groups without armies, designed to strike disproportionate fear, hence the term, and also hence why it never succeeds as a method in itself. So an appropriate use of the word for the 7/7 bombers?.

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Therefore, according to your description, in a case of ?all out war? would the targeting of civilians on a tube then not be terrorism? Does the context change the categorization of the act? And what and who defines the context?

Regardless, it is important to point out the large scale indiscriminate bombing of civilians is a strategy of warfare which ?western liberal democracies? use. For example, during World War Two the aerial bombing of civilians was initiated by the British and continued even after Hitler had threatened if they did not stop he would respond by bombing British cities. The renowned British historian A. J. P. (1961) Taylor argues that,

?After the war they wanted to pin on him [Hitler] the guilt for everything which happened, regardless of the evidence. This is illustrated, for example, by the almost universal belief that Hitler started the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, whereas it was started by the directors of British strategy, as some of the more honest among them have boasted? (pg 16).

The aerial attack alone against Hamburg by the British in 1943 yielded the first ?fire-storm? in history and killed in the region of 50000 civilians, whose main cause of death was either burning or asphyxiation. Was this not an act of terrorism for the men, women and children who were burnt alive in their homes?

A key to understanding the true nature of terrorism is by firstly defining the term ?terrorism?.

Blah Blah how would you define the terms ?terrorism? and ?war?, and do they differ from each other?

[El Pibe]

blah blah, you're right that context is everything but then you got all muddy.

The context that davis is getting at is who is doing the labelling. In this case it's the British, the attackers and the attacked.

I'm pretty sure there aren't any Germans who consider the RAF heroes and there are probably radicalised muslims who consider the 7/7 chaps heroes.

There is a danger of strawman going on of course in that the moral issues of bomber command's strategic bombing are well documented and discussed and, apart from the sort of unthinking jingoists who share those stupid Britain First photos, most people will at best think of the pilots as brave chaps given a shitty job, or at worst war criminals; certainly that term is often applied to Harris.

[alice]

a single act can be either terrorist or act of war. the effects may be exactly the same. the difference being in who/ what authorized the act.

[Otta]

Yep, pretty much what alice said.

[Blah Blah]

Labelling is always going to be biased and serving the agenda of those doing the labelling of course. But that doesn't mean there's no universal truth in there somewhere El Pibe. And can we really judge Harris next to the atrocities being committed on all sides? Isn't that just the nature of war? Most of us have never had to experience war thankfully, but at the time you would have been hard pressed to find any sympathy for Dresden from the millions of British civilians living night after night through the horrors of blitz. Horrors that go way beyond just the bombing of homes. The same can be said for the treatment given out by Russian troops on Germans. Hard to criticise after the horror enforced on Russian men, women and children as they invaded. Not condoning any of it of course, but it's what happens in all out war.

Davis, there is argument on both sides regarding many aspects of WW2, all of them valid. It's like saying the British invented eugenics and therefore we can't really blame the Germans for using that 'science' in justifying there views of jews and russian slavs. No-one forced germany to invade her neighbours. Civilians die in all kinds of bombing. Many of the strategic targets of docks etc were in amongst civilan areas in the UK. So in targetting those areas the Germans were also targetting civilian areas. Any notion that the Germans had a regard for civilian life that the British didn't, is nonsense. Just as we can't make any assumption that had Hamburg or Dresden not happened, the Germans would have behaved any differently.

Hamburg was not terrorism because terrorism is as defined in my post above. The official definition is 'the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.' Hamburg clearly does not fit into that because we were at war. Was it a war crime though? That's a different question. But in a war where people were being interned and enslaved because they were Jewish, communist, black, russian, etc, even before war had been delcared, it's hard to argue that the Germans were somehow 'clean' until the Brits started bombing civilians.

This is the problem with retrospective analysis. We weren't there. Everyone could clearly see at the 1936 Olympics what direction the Nazi Party were taking Germany in. It was a fearful and horible place to be if you were one of those groups the government was targetting. In light of everything, by the time of Hamburg, it's not hard to see why the British had little stmpathy for a nation that was essentially a tyranny. It's doesn't make any of it right, but again, look at it in context, not as an isolated inceident, and then how we get there starts to be more clear. War is a process, not a series of events in isolation. That's what history turns it into though.

Now the same could be said for terrorism too. It doesn't just arrive out of thin air. But terrorism is a specific tool of those without armies and resources, for political or cultural gain. Terrorists aim to maximise the impact of their acts and that's why they attack civilian targets.

Btw I didn't say that war and terrorism are different things per se. They are just terms we use to catagorise different types of aggression. All I said is that an all out war, like WW2, is very different to an isolated terrorist attack in London. The differences should be obvious.

[Alan Medic]

Blah Blah Wrote:

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> That's a bit simplistic Alan, but even there,

> terrorism didn't achieve what it set out to do.

> Ultimately opposing sides have to talk to each

> other and find a middle ground they can both live

> with.

If it's simplistic how would define what happened?

[Blah Blah]

Well because the IRA ultimately was a splinter group of it's former self and ended up fighting it's own former members who supported the 1921 anglo-Irish treaty, something that was certainly a compromise, but none-the-less a negotiated one between the concerned sides. And it cost Michael Collins his life. The IRA that we are all familiar with achieved absolutely nothing through it's terrorist activities. If anything, the modern IRA made sure there would be no further concession through it's stance for decades to come. And in the end they had to come to the table and enter into democracy. There was never going to ever be any other option.

[El Pibe]

There is no universal truth. Full Stop.

Officiation and authorization are pretty subjective concepts themselves. And why does the idea that an authorised body legitmises violence acceptable?

Again, its about labelling. Everyone likes to feel right, everyone likes to cloak themselves in legitmisation. The IRA, PIRA, Continuuity ad infitum will always dress themselves in military language, but then why shouldn't they, are they not fighting a war in their eyes; aren't al qaeda and their self defined cells?.

Who gets to describe or proscribe the universal truth?

[El Pibe]

hell, s versus z is a political statmment. s'all politics innit.

[Blah Blah]

Now you sound like missteak ;)

I take your point. I think all I'm trying to say is that hindsight is selective and a wonderful thing (and that includes historical recollection). At the time things are far more complex, and yes everyone thinks they are right - which is why wars start in the first place!

[El Pibe]

Political violence of any ilk is a sort of insanity if you ask me ('m a ludicrous peacenik though, jaw jaw* and all that), but I guess never underestimate human beings' ability to justify cruelty.

And there is a sort of moral tit for tat in war, each terrible act pushing the envelope of what was previously unacceptable into desirable. And world war 2 was so terrible....and long....

But that doesn't mean people aren't aware of their moral qualms as they temporarily trangress those limits, I'm pretty sure people understood at the time, those bomber crews far more than most.

But absolutely, it's very easy to judge, years later, in our safe world, sat on the internet our hyperbolic-judgemental-booths ;)

*a quote attributed to a man who loved a good scrap, not to mention condemned 2 million indians to death by refusing to do anything about a man made famine, but that's another tale.

[Blah Blah]

Totally agree, and it's all very tragic.

For part of my post-graduate degree I looked at the psychological impact of conflict and war, on those making the decisions, doing the fighting and civilians impacted. As I'm sure you know, there's a slow but steady mental health breakdown that occurs and ultimately, the longer it goes on the more that psychopathy triumphs. So it is no suprise to me that what we can easily distinguish as war crimes in peace time (and be rightfully shocked by), seem perfectly normal and acceptable at the peak of war. And by he end, ordinary people are so broken that they have no resources to call their leaders to account.

Even terrorist acts/ bombings have a trajectory of response. The first bombing/ beheading brings a reaction of shock, the second a reaction of outrage, and the third becomes a call for revenge. The point being that an act of terror goes from being a new experience to one we get used to. Human beings can get used to all sorts of things, and just as the norm can shift, so too can the accepted norm of reaction.

[Davis]

.

[LadyDeliah]

When the CIA kidnapped Chavez, in furtherance of their botched coup attempt, didn't Chavez say that they fitted the US's own definition of a terrorist organisation? But the US continued (and still continue) to intefere in Venezuelan politics and despite massive majorities at elections, called Chavez a dictator.

It seems to me, that as the most militarily and economically powerful country in the world, any atrocities done in the US interest are fine, whilst any done that undermine their interests are acts of terrorism.

It's not about the acts, it's about who they benefit and who backed them.

[????]

Anyone else playing Private Eye Bingo? I've ticked off Dave Spart and Pseuds Corner

[El Pibe]

lupine leinster?

[Davis]

.

[peristalsis]

Davis Wrote:

> On July 22nd 1946, ... Beiruit in 1982.

Remember to mark and attribute your quotations.