Oh, what the hey. What’s the Pit coming to what with all the apologies being chucked around and perfectly good rant threads being turned into Great Debates?
jjimm: I can accept that you don’t really think that any of the Allied forces were terrorists, and I apologize to you for interpreting your post as though you asserted that. I believe you see my point on it, also.
So what we’re getting to is this it appears:
A terrorist is someone who commits an act of terrorism.
Well, you have to ask yourself if the US, or UK, French, or indeed any government, has ever indulged in an act that could be interpreted as ‘terrorism’? I point you to, e.g., the French secret service sinking the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.
If you concede that this or any other act has indeed occurred, would you now permanently characterise these governments/countries as terrorists?
This definition seems to be more than a bit simplistic.
Alternative definition:
A terrorist is one who behaves in a pattern of committing acts of terror.
For example, (regarding the definition), many people tell lies (from making up excuses as to why they were late for work to telling their spouse that, “no, you don’t look fat.” In normal English usage (i.e. in the way we use language to communicate) such persons are not called liars. A liar would be a person who habitually lies. Similarly, a boss or parent or large child may occasionally invoke a threat beyond what is normally acceptable behavior to induce an employee or smaller child to perform a specific act. This is a bullying tactic. However, if the person who employed the bullying tactic did it as a one time event, it is unlikely that most people would consider that person to be a bully, reserving the application of that word to persons who engage in a pattern of such behavior.
It is, of course, possible to define anyone who has ever told a lie as a liar or anyone who has ever engaged in a single bullying act as a bully. That is not how the speakers of the language perceive that usage for those words, however.
Similarly, it is quite possible to look upon the bombings of Coventry, Dresden, and Nagasaki as terrorist acts without insisting that the nations who carried out those attacks were inherently terrorist in nature. In the case of Coventry, we have a whole list of other actions by that government, leading to the deaths of around 12 million people, to support that label.
That’s the part you didn’t get. You are indeed oversimplifying.
Semantically speaking those who commit acts of terror are terrorists. Morally speaking it is such a subjective definition that it ceases to make any sense.
Out of a semantic perspective Hiroshima was an act of terror, hence the Allies could be called terrorists. However, in the perspective of the morals of WWII that is a questionable if not downright idiotic label since the common moral ground was that the peoples of the nations involved were viewed as responsible parties to the war. As a matter of fact it was as an effect of seeing the error in this stand and the terrible suffering that resulted from this tactic that the moral point shifted and it became morally unacceptable to attack civilians in the post WWII era. To appease the boiling anger that Monty might be experiencing as he reads what I am writing, I might add that the US voiced these concerns already during the war and were championing restraint and at least attempting to target chiefly military targets with more precision during the carpet-bombing of Germany. Unfortunately that was neither technically nor politically possible in the end.
Further it should also be said that even if the ‘they started’ argument stinks of sandbox politics, ‘they’ did in fact start. Hitler called the tactic of loading tons and tons of ordinance on urban centers and other civilian targets ‘Schrecklichkeit’ meaning literally terror and he was first out with it. As often the reply wasn’t that much more decent than the first blow, maybe it even had to be that way – who am I to judge?
Fact remains that if any nation today would deliberately explode a bomb in an urban center with little tactical or other military value the rest of the world community would probably be pretty fast in there condemnation of the act and the word ‘terrorist’ would be flying around right and left. That wouldn’t have happened in late 1944 or mid 1945.
I didn’t say you accused me of calling the Allies terrorists. I said:
… which was in response to you saying:
You know damn well I didn’t call them evil. I said they were military actions deliberately mass-targeting civilians, and that this -in retrospect- was a very, very bad idea. Especially in the case of Nagasaki.
I see that you’ve since come to the insight that it is indeed possible to accuse a government (either hostile or friendly) of an act of terror without calling that government terrorist per se. I’m glad you did.
If we disagree, and I try to get my point across with accompanying evidence, I expect a proper response - with similar backing. Your resonse was basically: “Reputed estimates indicate that a conventional war against Japan could have cost more lives than those lost due to the two A-bombs. Those estimates and their sources can be found by you if you’ll go look for them yourself.”
I humbly wonder that if you’re so certain of those estimates, then why did you not bring them forth yourself to lend support to your position? Saying “I’m right, but I’m not going to show you why” makes you sound like a weasel, whether you like it or not.
[QUOTE] Originally posted by Coldfire *
**But chances are (barring Dresden style carpet bombings and the like) that:[ul][li]The majority of those lives would have been military, and:[]No way in HELL would the number have been anywhere near 340,000.[/ul]**[/li][/QUOTE]
I’m sort of scared to get into this, but just as a nitpick on point number 1, you’re right, the majority of the lives lost would have been military, but, especially at the end of WWII, the military/civilian distinction was blurred…they would have been military deaths, but a lot of those “military deaths” would be recent civilians, taken off the street, told “You’re in the home guard”, and given a rifle or sharp stick, and ordered into battle, just like in Germany at the end of the war, when 14 and 60 year olds were thrown in front of the advancing Allied armies to get slaughtered.
As far as casualty estimates, military reports drawn up at the time suggested combined US casualties for Olympic and Coronet at about 500,000. This isn’t even considering Japanese casualties.
Your point about the blurred distinction between civil and military is certainly valid. Then again, it was a sign of the times that wasn’t exclusive to the end of WWII. The Mobilisation in the Netherlands in 1939 put tens of thousands of civilians in a potential war zone. These men were reinforcing our professional army, which consisted out of 30,000 men (!) at the time. They thought it was all a joke: we were neutral, after all. Yet, they died, and of course the German bombers didn’t distinguish between a pro soldier and a mobilised electrician.
The difference is that Japan WAS at war (“had it coming”, if you will), and would certainly have lost many lives - as would the US have, should they have opted for a ground war.
But while the estimate of 500,000 for US troups is enormous (and I’m glad those lives were not expended), I’m really interested in the estimated potential Japanese losses. After all, we’re trying to compare to the 340,000 who died directly or indirectly because of the A-bombs.
Tom~ and Sparc, you both said roughly the same thing in re the definition of terrorism. From Tom:
And yet, wouldn’t most English speakers consider Mark David Chapman a murderer? He didn’t make a habit of it, but murder seems to be one of those categories that only requires one act for membership. Why not terrorism?
I never said that one or a few acts of terror were excusable (and nor did anyone else AFAIRC, I might say so that no misunderstanding arises). However, I do agree with Tom’s point that the tendency towards repetition or arguments that it is an acceptable means to an end is what makes the terrorist. We’re still stuck with the problem of moral subjectivity though.
If you murder someone, you’re a murderer. If you rape someone, you’re a rapist. I think it’s not inconsistent to suggest that if you blow up a cafe, you’re a terrorist. But I guess I’m still missing something . . .
difference between an individuals’ action/description and that of a ‘nation’ and/or group perhaps?
as in the fact that USA may have done something that some may see as a terrorist action does not mean that they’re a terrorist state. just as if a member of my family (even the head of my family) commits a crime, that doesn’t make the family itself a criminal family.
Yes. As an individual, you are a terrrorist. The fact that you, personally, are willing to engage in that act establishes that there is something in your character that is consistent with terrorism.
A nation, however, composed of millions of people with conflicting opinions and contradictory goals does not indicate its character with a single act, or even with a series of acts undertaken for a limited period under stressful conditions. (Even among individuals, numerous people have committed second degree (non-premeditated) murder without incurring the label “murderer”; a few–e.g., some battered wives–have even committed first degree murder without incurring that label.)
The imposition of the label should reflect the character of the entity (individual or corporate) so labeled. Does that mean that some labeling is subjective? Sure. But the world is not composed of a row of neat boxes into which we can readily categorize things, no matter how much it would comfort us to be able to do so.
I am not about to try to define all the criteria with all of their nuances that should be met in order to apply any given label.
This particular sidebar discussion began when Monty drew the conclusion that a claim of a terrorist action against the U.S. was tantamount to labeling the U.S. as terrorist. My only point is that there is not such a clear-cut relationship between the performance of an act and incurring a label based on the a noun form of the verb describing the act. We are far too fractious, here, to ever reach an objective definition of who may be a terrorist. I propose that we can avoid some of the flames of misunderstanding by recognizing that the way we use the language is not quite so rigid as to demand a one-to-one correspondence between labels for acts and labels for actors.
Well, that’s my point, though. To say, “Those are military deaths” loses it’s uniqueness when it’s applied to a Dutch electrician, a Japanese farmer, or an American carpenter, all of whom are told “You’re soldiers now”.
Well, two things. First, I don’t know that the Japanese casualties wouldn’t be pretty much similar, if not even greater, because of improved American weaponry, and the Japanese tendency during the war to not surrender even when they were being overrun. I haven’t seen any Japanese casualty estimates that I consider reliable, though.
Secondly, there’s a part of me that wonders why it matters to make that distinction between American lives lost and Japanese lives lost. Why not say, “These are the total casualties from dropping the atomic bombs” and compare that to “These are the total casualties from invading Japan”? I think that you need to take American losses into consideration if you ask whether or not the dropping of the bombs were legitimate warfare.
Ah, it’s a Catch 22, isn’t it? We all agree that reliable estimates on potential Japanese casualties aren’t forthcoming. I’ll go out on a limb, and say the 500,000 estimate for American casualties is hardly reliable either: based on what scenario, exactly?
The main point I was trying to make in the first place was that dropping #2 on Nagasaki was cruel - an act of terror, if you will.
Whether this applies to Hiroshima too depends on the knowledge available to those that made the call to drop A-bombs in the first place.
