Can the war on terrror be won?

[puddleglum]

@Kobal2

I know there was such a thing as propaganda of the deed, and a spatter of assassinations committed in the name of anarchy, but it wasn’t a movement. There wasn’t any organization, and there barely were leaders (although there were some - mostly in Spain, where itinerant rabble-rousers went village-to-village to stir up some shit - but then shit really needed stirred out there at the time if’n you askin’ me).
At best it was an idea in the wind of the times.

This is totally ahistorical. Bakunin had significant support at the first international, the movement had its own journals, own leaders, and own labor unions. “Itinerant rabble rousers” the CNT had 1.5 million members at one point and was a significant force in Spanish politics for decades. There were Anarchist parties in most european countries. Anarchists and anarchist parties played parts in the Paris Commune, the Bavarian Socialist Republic, and the Spanish Revolution. It was alot more than an idea in the wind.

[Kimstu]

@puddleglum

Yes, terrorists acts getting less frequent and then stopping is the definition of success. The stopping was not spontaneous petering out, it came as a result of government crackdowns and as a failure of the terrorism to achieve revolutionary aims.

Actually, as I noted, the abandonment of Anarchist movement terrorism appears to have been a consequence of the worldwide upheavals of WWI and the Russian Revolution, not any unspecified “government crackdowns”.

I don’t consider a terrorist movement that persists for thirty years and then dies out in the aftermath of an actual global shooting war and bloody revolution to be a particularly impressive example of a “successful war on terror”.

[Kobal2]

@puddleglum

This is totally ahistorical. Bakunin had significant support at the first international, the movement had its own journals, own leaders, and own labor unions. “Itinerant rabble rousers” the CNT had 1.5 million members at one point and was a significant force in Spanish politics for decades. There were Anarchist parties in most european countries. Anarchists and anarchist parties played parts in the Paris Commune, the Bavarian Socialist Republic, and the Spanish Revolution. It was alot more than an idea in the wind.

These anarchists were emphatically not the same as *those *anarchists, and while the very phrase “propaganda by the deed” was taken from Bakunin’s writings, throwing bombs at busy cafés is not what he meant.

[T.M]

No you cannot you can only hope to contain it. The estate where I live had a massive drugs problem including the manufacture and wholesale of drugs. Because some of the residents provided the police with information the problem has been contained to that of addiction, still a problem but manageable. It is the same with terrorism you have to rely on the unknown informers who can give you crumbs of information that will increase the threat to the terrorist of capture. In the case of Islamist terrorism containment is in the hands of unknown Muslim informers.

[adaher]

First, terror is a tactic, so you can’t defeat terror anymore than you can defeat murder, rape, or genocide. Or war, for that matter. But you can defeat certain enemies and arguably Al Qaeda is pretty much defeated and has been supplanted by ISIS. ISIS can be defeated as well, in fact I’d argue ISIS is easier to defeat than Al Qaeda because it has ambitions of taking territory and taking over countries. That makes it a conventional military force as well as a terrorist organization, so they can be fought conventionally.

As for a WWII style war, that can actually happen, but if it does it means we lost the War on Terror, in much the same way we lost the peace after WWI. If ISIS and ISIS-style regimes pop up all over the Arab world then eventually that will lead to all out conventional warfare and the likely destruction of those nations by Western forces, which would hopefully lead to the end of Islam as a force for ordering societies in much the same way that the destruction of Japan ended Shinto as such an organizing force and basically turned Japan into the world’s first atheist country.