What is terrorism? It turns out that there is no universally agreed upon definition.
There is no legal or scientific consensus on the definition of terrorism. Various legal systems and government agencies use different definitions of terrorism, and governments have been reluctant to formulate an agreed-upon legally binding definition.
…The United Nations General Assembly condemned terrorist acts by using the following political description of terrorism in December 1994 (GA Res. 49/60):
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.
While there is no agreed upon definition, the terms is broadly understood to be along the lines of “the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.”
It should not be surprising that there is no agreed upon definition. Governments, including (and especially the US and Israel) have opposed creating a definition because they know that almost any definition would implicate them as terrorist states. By not having a clear definition, the word then becomes a pejorative to be used as a term of propaganda against one’s enemies while exempting oneself. If pressed, they will retreat to ‘intent’, that it is the motivation for the actions that matters. This is conveniently self-serving since one can always ascribe benign motives to ones own actions (even if the outcome was appalling) and malignant ones to one’s enemies.
Kyle Kulinski uses the right wing condemnation of some of Hasan Piker’s comments about US atrocities to argue that by any reasonable reasonable definition, especially the sheer numbers of innocent people killed by the actions of the US all over the world over a long period of time, it becomes clear that the US is the biggest perpetrator of terrorism in the world and he says that American people should face up to this brutal reality.
Do you know what your country actually does around the world? Donald Trump bombed an elementary school. They bombed it once, then they bombed it again to kill the survivors. One father got a call to say his daughter had survived the attack, then the U.S. fired another missile at the school and killed her. Little kids’ backpacks and body parts were scattered everywhere. Then they lied about it and pretended Iran had blown up its own kids. That’s your country. Your president did that. Pete Hegseth has made it clear he doesn’t believe in the laws of war and thinks Islam is our enemy. Why would he care if he blows up a school?
The other day, they bombed a wedding. It was a direct hit on a residential area. Reuters says “bloody shoes lay amid the rubble, and wedding decorations that are common in that part of Iran were strewn about.”
…How about what they’re doing in Cuba? They’re deliberately letting kids with cancer die by strangling the country economically, then blaming it on “socialism.” The New York Times reports that medical supplies and food aren’t reaching the country because nobody will ship there due to the threat of sanctions. People are going hungry, they’re not getting surgery. The Times says people are having to use grocery bags as colostomy bags. Supplies being kept out of the country include “water treatment kits, antibiotics, contraceptives and pregnancy tests,” as well as cancer and tuberculosis treatments. The power grid just collapsed again because they won’t let fuel into the country. And they’re doing this on purpose. They say they’re killing Cubans in order to bring down their government, so they can seize Cuba’s assets and distribute them to their friends. When did al-Qaeda ever starve an entire country in order to plunder its resources? That’s next-level terrorism.
And what about the genocide in Gaza? That’s done by a U.S. proxy state, Israel, with American money and bombs. They’ve killed a minimum of 70,000 people. They’ve wiped out entire families. They’ve systematically wiped out whole neighborhoods. The mosques, the universities, even the graveyards. Israel doesn’t care. They destroy everything. They are doing it so that Gazans want to leave. They are terrorizing them in the hopes they can make Palestinians plead to be allowed to flee the broken remnants of their homeland. They say that’s what they’re doing, they admit that the plan is ethnic cleansing. This is terrorism, and Trump is sending them more 2,000-pound bombs to drop on apartment buildings and hospitals, which they will.
Kulinksi goes back in time to argue that this is not some recent development or that it is exclusively done by Republicans but shows that John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all enthusiastically participated in these kinds of terrorist activities.
Kulinski says that his characterization of the US as a major perpetrator of terrorism will predictably generate great umbrage among people who want to perpetuate the illusion that their country only acts out of noble motives, but notes that there is a curious omission in their response.
The thing you’ll notice is that none of the people who are outraged about Hasan Piker’s remark will provide a counterargument. They won’t say why it’s wrong. It just feels wrong to “American patriots.” But they won’t talk about all the literal, real-world, deadly terror this country inflicts on people we don’t care to think about.
…The truth needs to matter. In defamation cases, truth is always a defense. The U.S. is the biggest, baddest bully on the block. We do not care about international law, human rights, the Constitution, or justice. How are we supposed to change anything for the better if we can’t acknowledge the most obvious things in the world?
Kulinski thinks that Americans need to grow up and shed the fantasy that they are living in a country that only acts with good intentions and that any of the horrors that the US has committed in the past was due to errors or incompetence or a few rogue actors. They need to face the reality of what their nation is really like, saying “too many Americans are like the kid in the Sopranos who can’t believe his daddy is in the Mafia.”
Man observes reality. It feels like the most obvious statement in the world until you realize how thoroughly propagandized and incurious the majority of the American population is.
My prediction is that liberal-interventionist war hawks will accuse him of being a tankie or a campist. Kyle will be forced to backtrack his statements and apologize if he wants to stay in the orbit of the Democratic party and keep that viewership.
Moral philosopher Susan Neiman says in an interview at Jacobin (login required): The Left Should Start Using the Word “Evil”
I knew from early on that Barack Obama was evil or corrupt or whatever you want to call it.
He did not want to prosecute those who had clearly committed crimes under the Dubya adminsistration because that would create a wossname legal ground to prosecute future administrations.
He continued the repression of the former Haitian president who had won an election but was escorted out by US soldiers.
He kept making concessions to Republicans he did not need to do.
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He chose not to make the larger scale economical stimulation of the economy FDR would have done, because he is at heart embracing trickle-down economy. Jobs came back, but they were low-pay jobs at places like Amazon.
We know the political consequence of that.
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Joe Biden started by declaring he would not add judges to the supreme court, which shows he was clueless.
He appointed a dud as chief justice because he was afraid of being seen as radical. He sat on his hands while Gaza civilians were murdered.
Clinton and Pelosi also played a big role in all of this.
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I am sitting an ocean away and I wonder how Americans can be so fucking clueless about what happens under their noses.
One trick that governments (not just the USA) have used to successfully excuse themselves from terrorism is to define it as something that is done only by non-state actors. This wasn’t always the case -- “terrorism” was used to describe the actions of governments during the two world wars, but at some point in the later 20th century the definition was conveniently shifted to apply the term almost exclusively to non-state people and entities.
I think that one reason Democrats haven’t prosecuted Republicans for domestic or foreign crimes is that the USA is so polarized that anything that looks like a political prosecution to either side could lead to real violence up to, possibly even an all-out shooting civil war. Nobody sane or decent wants that -- civil wars are always horrible things.
springa73 @#5, yes civil wars are horrible things, but for all of my life the USA has been killing people of other countries, if it takes you killing each other to stop you killing people in other countries there are a lot of people in other countries who would say “get on with it, and leave us be”.
@#6
Being from the US myself, I cannot so easily consign my friends, family, and fellow citizens to misery and possible death in a war that could be orders of magnitude worse than anything that the US has been involved in since WW2.
Also, why would you think that the US would be less dangerous to the rest of the world if it was in a state of civil war? It’s in everyone’s interest that there be no civil war in any nuclear power.
Note that the UN statement does not limit terrorism to violence: “Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror …” AFAIK it is widely accepted that also economic weapons, like embargos and tarriffs, can be used as tools of terrorism.
Trump has been shooting everywhere with his tarriffs. He has even used them to make personal profits from stock markets. And economic terrorism against Cuba started already in1960.
What is terrorism? … there is no universally agreed upon definition.
The earliest use of the word I’ve found came from 1826, in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. She uses it to describe a group spreading (essentially true) rumors about a deadly plague.
Modern usage usually entails violence or threats of violence against civilians to force a political change. This exactly fits Trump’s policies towards Iran, Bush’s policies towards Iraq, and countless other “interventions”.
birgerjohansson @ # 3: Joe Biden … appointed a dud as chief justice …
Biden made only one SC appointment, an associate justice who has so far excelled.
Our Chief Justice was appointed in 2005 by the Shrub. 🤬
birgerjohansson @ # 3: Joe Biden … appointed a dud as chief justice …
I think this refers to Biden’s appointment of Merrick Garland as Attorney General, as his actions there suggest that he would have been a dud if Obama’s appointment of him to the Supreme Court had been confirmed. Obama, Biden, and Garland just couldn’t accept that the regular order was being thrown out.
Bruce @ 11
Thank you. I am not familiar with the titles. In Britain or Germany the titles of ministers are more straightforward.
Bruce @ # 11 & birgerjohansson @ # 12 -- aha! Agreed, Merrick Garland may claim the title of Biggest Dud Attorney General of all time (if we put Todd Blanche in the Most Corrupt category).
If you look at how the word terrorism is generally used, the definition is just violence a state doesn’t approve of. Police beat up protesters: totally fine. Environmentalists damage oil infrastructure: terrorists
The label is just emotive these days. May as well call people evil, or crazy