The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
How many retaliatory terror attacks on americans performed by citizen of those countries?
What point are you trying to make? US bad? Anything more thoughtful to offer?
The US are an empire and they have behaved as an empire over the last 70 years (bombing, overthrowing governments, supporting dictators). By historical standard, they have proved less coercive than empires of proportionally comparable reach. Think of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the Japanese...
When did USA bomb a civilian house that wasn't a part of a larger operation? Terrorist attacks only target civilians, I have never seen such an attack by USA. They always try to target military or leaders.
The last time I know USA did a terror attack was japan in ww2, but everyone did terror bombing during that war, and the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then. If USA still ran that doctrine you would have Tehran and the rest of major Iranian cities leveled to the ground now, that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks.
That may very well be true, but the world is a lot bigger than what your eyes can capture. "I don't see it, therefore it doesn't exist" is a state of mind that most people grow out of around the age of 8 months.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre : When the soldiers got to the village, they did not find any NLF troops. Despite this, many soldiers began to kill the villagers, mainly elderly people, women, and children
> [the USA] always try to target military or leaders
> the first world stopped doing terror bombings since then
Nixon and Kissinger were not part of the first world, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu : Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused [..] The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government
Nixon decided to keep the bombing a secret from the American people as to admit to bombing an officially neutral nation would damage his credibility
> that is what it looks like when the strongest military in the world perform terror attacks
In the context of 9/11, that seems like a strong statement to make.
The terrorists (let us agree on this label a priori) got everything they could ever wish for and then some.
Regular Americans in general lost freedoms of movement and communication. The whole political landscape shifted right. The US invaded and destabilized Iraq and Afghanistan. Pakistan and Syria got weaker than ever. The Saudis gained hugely in influence over the whole region.
Wahhabism is now influential in areas where they hardly existed before! They almost controlled Egypt for a while. And when the US retreated and gave controlling power back to the Taliban they showed the whole world that a needle pick in the belly of the beast was all that was necessary. That has given new courage to similar terrorist cells, a situation the rest of the world is still struggling with.
The whole world focused for almost two decades on their part of the world. Nobody can say that 9/11 wasn't an important catalyst for all that. And at a price that would not even cover catering had this been an organized intelligence operation. Terrorism can clearly and empirically be a very cost effective lever in ideological, political and religious struggle.
Terrorist is often a term used to describe freedom fighters, in order to delegitimize them. Basically this is such a common tactic that it is unsurprising that the two are sometimes conflated.
Basically all of history. Terrorist is a term people use for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change. Freedom fighter is a term used for people who use violence and intimidation to attempt to cause political change that you are sympathetic to.
Both words have identical meanings, the only difference is if you happen to agree with the people commiting the violent acts or not.
Only online. The Viet Cong weren’t targeting civilians. They hit American soldiers. Targeting military and narrow political power are the hallmark of proper rebellions. Targeting civilians is how terrorism works.
The closest analog to terrorism in warfare is actually strategic air campaigns. Dresden and the London Blitz are closer to terrorism than e.g. the uprising in Bangladesh or even the Taliban toppling the Karzai regime. And lo and behold, strategic air campaigns have a history of uniting the enemy much more than undoing them.
> people do not use the word terrorism or freedom fighter to describe the actions of a state actor during open war
People also don’t use the term to relate to rebellions. It’s more an internet meme or cases where like a few people call e.g. Russia a terrorist state by analogy. Freedom fighters fighting rebellion tend to work to keep civilians on their side. When they don’t, they become terrorists and tend to lose.
No, not at all. Methods and targets/victims also matter. Using violence to achieve specific military objectives or as a response to violence is not the same as indiscriminate murder and terrorism.
Not really. The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause. They found success when they started acting as a more-competent government than our fucks in Kabul. If we want to debate whether the Taliban under occupation had any success with its terrorist tactics, I guess I’d concede that one man’s terrorist is another’s guerrilla fighter. But even then, guerilla tactics rely on a sympathetic local population. So a guerrilla team bombing civilians is undermining its own cause.
I'm not exactly an expert on Afghan politics and the reason for the failure of the western backed government are surely multifaceted, but don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
> don't you think that destabilizing the country through terror attacks played a role in the sustained weakness of the government as well as the withdrawal of the West?
Not an expert either. I haven’t seen one make this case. What I have seen is cross-conflict studies on the success of terrorism, and that sets my baseline for Afghanistan being a special case. (Domestic terrorism works a little bit more frequently than international terrorism. But they’re both very, very bad strategies that frequently blow back.)
> The Taliban’s attacks on civilians didn’t help their cause
Umm, do you mean al-qaeda (if you are referring to 9/11). Al-qaeda and the Taliban are different groups. Neither are particularly nice, but only one did 9/11.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
> The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded
That’s certainly not how it works.
They just became highly unpopular amongst the populations they were trying to liberate (which generally preferred more peaceful solutions) and lost their support base and had to disband.
When the population was complaining that they had to go to the Taliban for help because the Americans could do nothing to help them when the local military was corrupt and abused the people.
Because it was expensive and the local population did not care for the Kabul government we were protecting. It is hard to prop an unpopular government in a country of 40 million.
The US military was averaging only 12 deaths in the years before withdraw.
Most of what the taliban was doing is closer to asymmetric warfare than terrorism.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
About as many as bad terrorist groups that began due to catastrophically bad decisions of leaders in the West. I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics. Imperialism and neocollonialism are real, actual policies, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that. If such policies hit locales where it's not culturally wrong to die for a cause, it's obvious you'll get terrorists after a while. I suspect this was calculated risk until it stopped being that: the locals got their own exploding sticks and decided to use them.
It's so incredibly sad to watch: for decades, tons of people made mostly rational (from their point of view) decisions, yet each step inevitably brought us closer and closer to the current situation. Add a few cultural, social, and personal pathological cases into the mix, and what you have is basically a speedrun to 9/11.
Note that I'm not justifying terror attacks, just saying they are a very predictable consequence of decades of policy-making.
> I'm sorry to break it to you - the plural you - but all the terrorists that are not traditionally domestic (local leftist/rightist extremists are everywhere, after all) - and the fact they are against the West - is simply a consequence of Western politics.
Then why doesn't south America perform a lot of terrorist attacks? If that was the reason then you would see sub saharan africa perform way more terrorist attacks than the middle east.
No, the elephant in the room is religious zealots, they perform terrorist attacks, most other groups do not perform a lot of terrorism. A history of oppression just makes you happy the oppressors left, it doesn't make you a terrorist that go and try to make the oppressors come back like the middle east does.
no, it's nothing specific to "The West" or the decisions it has taken. The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters keen on overthrowing its "yoke".
How would the Mongols, the Russians, the Egyptian empires have solved the israeli/palestine conflict? Do you know where the terms zealots and sicario come from? Did the Romans solve these terror attacks by reconsidering their "catastrophically bad policies"?
> The typical "They hate us because our bad policies" does not explain why every empire (western or not) has had to contend with dissenters
It's interesting that you actually wrote down in this sentence the very explanation you say doesn't exist. It's pretty obvious: instituting an empire is the policy others will hate you for. The fact that you can't imagine this despite spelling out the facts yourself is curious.
Not being an empire is an option, too. That won't save you in all cases, especially if you're seen as a fallen empire, another empire's lackey due to alliances and dependencies, or your culture is simply incompatible with some other culture that happens to be frequently in contact with you. But it will reduce the likelihood of a convincing narrative - one that could lead people to hijack planes and fly them into buildings - emerging.
It's not a topic that can be fully discussed in HN comments, as there are many complexities involved, but "They hate us because we decided on a policy to be an empire" is not that far from the truth, I think.
Indeed, empires do not have to exist, and the world could constitute of individual nations ruling themselves independently in democracy peace and happiness.
By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think? Empires have existed all over the world however. Perhaps we should accept what is a fact of life of human societies, and try to minimise its most egregious aspects, rather than wishfulling hoping for the profound change that will never materialise.
The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard, and internal dissent is not crushed or exterminated as it would have been were the Americans behaving as the Ottomans, the Romans, the Mongols, the Spanish, USSR etc...
I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
> By historical standard, over the last 10000 years prosperity, democracy and peace have hardly been the norm, don't you think?
Agreed! From my own reading (not a specialist), for example, in Europe, there were only a handful of years (literally) between 3000 B.C. and ~1950 A.D. when there was actual peace on the continent. Wars, rebellions, coups, civil wars, uprisings - every single year for five thousand years there was bloodshed, the borders moved, cities perished, populations starved, and so on.
And yes, this happened both when an empire/global power existed and when none was around. And yes, the Pax Romana (and similar periods) did bring many benefits to the world. At the same time, though, all the empires always incited hatred among the groups under them: the Romans bloodily suppressed quite a few uprisings even during that "Golden Age" (which you know, since you mentioned "zealots" in a previous comment). They wouldn't need to do that were they not an empire, which is my point.
> The pilots who flew planes into buildings 25 years ago were saudis, Saudi Arabia was never part of a western Empire. They trained in Afghanistan which was never part of a western empire (Alexander the Great does not count).
The terrorists don't need to be "part of empire" to feel threatened by that empire. Putting soldiers on the ground, for any reason, half a world away, while demanding special treatment for the troops, assuming their country's jurisdiction naturally follows their citizens in other nations, and so on - just one of those is enough to be seen as an imperialist power by the locals. The USA did all of these and more throughout the world, but especially in the Middle East. They didn't have to act that way, but they did, as it's natural for empires. The violent backlash locally and terror attacks at home are just normal, expected reactions to an empire acting like one. It's also worth noting that the entire Middle East is a fallen, fractured Empire. I'm not sure how much that influenced things, but I can imagine it fueled some ambitions in countries like Saudi Arabia to build another Ottoman Empire, this time centered on Riyadh. (Just a guess - I'm not well-versed in post-Middle Age history of the Middle East.)
> They were able to strike the American empire because, contrary to the common political discourse on the left, the American empire is a rather open and benevolent hegemon by historical standard
Agreed. Though I'd say whether an empire is open and benevolent or strict and brutal doesn't influence the number of terrorist attacks. Yes, if you're benevolent, the hatred may be less prevalent - but then your security is weaker, so you can have the same number of attacks even with fewer "freedom fighters". The issue is being seen as an empire: as long as you can be cast as one, some people will hate you automatically, even if, all things considered, you're actually pretty tame and even beneficial to others.
> I am not apologizing the American empire, I am not even american nor do I like the culture that spews out of the US, especially these days, but one has to put things into historical context if we are to understand the nature of terror attacks.
If America is not attacked by terrorists because it is an empire and acts like one - then why? That's what I don't get in your argument. If the USA didn't maintain military presence across the region (ME), didn't wholeheartedly support the "Zionist regime" (which also acts like an ethnocentric empire - Aztecs come to mind as a comparison), didn't historically meddle in the region's politics by both carrot and a lot of stick, etc., would they be hated enough for people to suicide bomb them?
Apparently, 90% of the terror attacks happen in the context of local instability (a civil war, rebellion, uprising, coup, etc.). You really need something special for the foreign terrorists to be willing to travel half a world just to blow themselves up on your doorstep. If it's not the imperialist policies, then what is it? If I understand your argument correctly, it's all religious fanaticism? But then, why would those fanatics attack the US, instead of enjoying some jolly sectarian bloodshed locally, like they did for centuries? There are enough religions and sects in ME to fuel terror attacks for a few more millennia, I'd guess, and it's not like that infighting stopped completely. How come the US was added as another traditional target for "death to ..." calls? I don't think it would happen without America's heavy involvement there...
"You really need something special for the foreign terrorists to be willing to travel half a world just to blow themselves up on your doorstep"
Yes, and what could be that something special?
Imperialism says you?
Britain and France have been struck by terrorism yet they no longer have an empire. Ok, guilt by association could be a motive...
But then why would Belgium and Germany be struck? oh, and Sweden too? And all these kidnapped christian girls in Nigeria? and in every case by Sunni-Muslim...
Maybe it's anti-imperialism, who knows... perhaps some middle eastern sunni muslims were really upset that Sweden ever had an empire, and decided that ramming a crowd with a truck was a good way to avenge the "oppression" perpetrated by Sweden 300 years ago.
That, or maybe you could adjust your worldview, and realise that religious fanatism has been a pretty strong motivator for atrocities throughout history, and even in such enlightened times as ours, there are still people who would conduct the most horrendous acts for their faith and the credibility it gives them within their group.
In all cases, the Chinese, who also suffered from such attacks (the perpetrators were of the same religion), found a "solution" that is much more aligned with imperialistic norms throughout history. They have not been struck since.
And no, be at rest, I am not for the establishment of a surveillance state, but pointing the wilful blindness in your reasoning.
> That, or maybe you could adjust your worldview, and realise that religious fanatism has been a pretty strong motivator for atrocities throughout history
But I do agree! I'm not trying to say that religion (and culture, more broadly) is not an enabling factor or even one of the important causes for terrorist attacks.
What I'm disputing is the assertion that religion is the sole cause, and the attacks would continue with the same intensity if the policies in the attacked countries were to change.
As I mentioned before, that wouldn't eliminate all the attacks: if your culture is fundamentally incompatible with some other culture, which also praises martyrdom, chances are you will get attacked by religious fanatics motivated by their beliefs. That's the case for Sweden. Germany and Britain sent troops to ME multiple times in the past 20 years alone, at the behest of USA, so they get both the religious fanatics and "freedom fighter" kinds of attacks.
Again, I'm not disputing that some cultures, faiths, and populations have a higher probability of resorting to terrorism. I'm not saying that GTFO of the ME would solve all terrorist attacks. However, I believe the imperialist policy is one of the reasons people try to blow other people up, and that dropping said policy could, in a few decades (!), result in the lower attack rate.
That's all; I'm not trying to say religion (particular kinds of it, especially) is not a factor. It most definitely is. As I mentioned, the sectarian bloodshed is very common and often takes the form of terror attacks. You will always get religious fanatics trying to kill others because they don't fit into their doctrine. However, the foreign policy does matter, and you can reduce the rate of attacks greatly by not antagonizing people who are not religious fanatics, but would still want to blow themselves up to "save their nation", to "reclaim sovereignty", to "destroy the occupiers", and so on.
So yeah: religion is, for sure, a risk factor. But so is foreign policy, and my argument is that the policy is the bigger factor and the one that is much easier to adjust. To get rid of religious-motivated terror attacks, you would need to become Iran (and that wouldn't work: you'd just get Christian terrorists!); to get rid of "freedom fighter" kind of attacks, you just need to stop forcing your way into countries half a world away.
