At 04:50 PM 14/09/2001 -0400, Eugene wrote:
>I think it is very productive to focus on what defines "terrorist
>action." Are bombings of Dresden (no military targets at all, more than
>100,000 civilian casualties) or Hiroshima in WWII, or Tripoli (in
>1986?), or Baghdad (1991), or Belgrade (2000), or Grozny (Chechnya) are
>acts of (state) terrorism? Where are boundaries of "non-terrorist,
>military action"? How is terrorism defined: by the target and intention
>of the action or by impact on civilians (so-called "collateral damage")?
>Is it OK for the sake of fighting terrorism to bomb a city? These are
>difficult questions that should be decided before any military action is
>taken place.
>These are difficult questions that should be decided before any military
>action is
>taken place.
>
>What do you think?
They are not difficult questions. The answer is that they are all acts of
terrorism. We have had a century of mass terrorism. It is senseless to
intellectualise such acts as anything else other than mass murder for the
purposes of instilling terror. That was the intention behind all of them.
It never works. It never achieves anything. It is invariably inhumane.
It needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.
Phil
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:14 PDT