Musings: Further thoughts on Terrorism

 (Some thoughts evoked by recent events in Irael and Gaza)

 Terrorism/ terrorist is a “hiss-word”: intended less to convey information than to provoke an audience reaction. A terrorist is, by definition, a bad guy. Conversely, no good guy can be a terrorist, even though his actions might be considered to be similar.

What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom-fighter? The cynical answer is that “it depends where you’re standing”: one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter. Nevertheless, it should be possible to draw some distinction.

Terrorism always has some underlying political motive. Thus, ordinary gangland killings and bombings are not considered terroristic, but could be if there was some underlying ethnic or religious conflict

One might have thought that there is always a natural right to defend your home against a foreign invader, but in military law this is not the case. It is a longstanding principle of war that, whereas enemy uniformed soldiers are entitled to be treated justly, partisans, guerrilla fighters and civilians in arms can simply be killed out of hand. They are, in fact, always treated as terrorists.

It is straightforward to designate certain actions as terrorism (for instance, “9-11” in New York in 2001), but more difficult to define terrorism as such. Are all political assassinations necessarily terroristic? Most of us would agree that the killing of the Nazi leader Heydrich in Prague in 1942 was justifiable and not terroristic: but should it be viewed differently if numbers of civilian bystanders were killed in the operation?

Can governments be guilty of terrorism. such as the mass bombing of cities? Possible examples might be Dresden or Hiroshima in 1945, or indeed Gaza? 

What should be the best response by a government whose citizens have suffered a terrorist attack? Might it only serve to make things worse? In the instances of 9-11 and October’s events in Israel, the governments concerned understandably felt they had to do SOMETHING: hence the Afghan war and current events in Gaza. The  campaigns in Afghanistan and then Iraq were militarily successful in the short term, but not at all useful in the eventual results. By contrast, Mrs Thatcher’s government did NOT react violently to the I.R.A.’s Brighton bomb in 1984, which almost succeeded in killing the entire Cabinet. Why did she behave with such caution? Was that in fact the best response, leading eventually to the Northern Ireland peace process?

The most spectacular example of an understandable reaction going horribly wrong is, of course, the response of the Austrian government to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian-backed terrorists (freedom fighters?) at Sarajevo in 1914!

Postscript: “Situationism”is a term stemming from events in France and elsewhere around 1968. This involves taking actions so violent that the state responds with extreme violence of its own, which falls mostly upon the local population rather than the perpetrators. This has the effect of discrediting the moderates, forcing everyone to take sides, and turning opinion against the government. Should the Hamas gunmen of October be regarded as situationists?