Which terrorists do you think while you may not agree with their methods who you’re sympathetic or think their ideals were right? This by no means means an endorsement of their actions or even most of their ideology.
John Brown-For obvious reasons though his plans were highly unrealistic
Pro-life terrorists-Again highly realistic and what they’re doing is quite immoral and hypocritical but at the same time when a million fetuses are murdered every year
Organisation armee secree (OAS)-With the French government’s essential abandonment of the Muslim loyalists in Algeria and the massacres of both the harkis and the pieds-noirs, they were in many cases simply forced to block Algerian independence.
So are you going to use “terror” and “terrorist” in the 1947 modern sense (meaning what’s really in the news today that is practically everyone’s mindset) and attempt to apply it in a revisionist, dishonest manner back to a time (say John Brown) where the word isn’t historically applicable?
I think Curtis LeMay’s ideals were in the right place when he orchestrated the massive deaths of civilians through aerial bombardment. He was looking out for what was best for the country; he realized that the alternative to the bombing was to invade with ground troops, which would lead to many thousands of our own men being killed. In a war, you have to look out for number one…that’s all there is to it. You do whatever you can to ensure that your own people stay safe. Still, it’s tragic how many innocent people were minding their own business and then reduced to heaps of molten flesh from all those bombs.
I’m much more sympathetic to people than to ideals. If propagating or defending your ideals involves maiming and killing innocent people, as a general rule you’ve lost me. And I agree the OP is apparently lumping all types of rebellion into terrorism, which makes a mess of this discussion.
I was very surprised to find that I agreed with large parts of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto (aka, “The Unabomber Manifesto”, aka “Industrial Society and Its Future”). It’s a though-provoking read, though I think he does make a few leaps in logic and a few generalizations that might not make for an entirely sound argument.
Not really. (Ok, I’ll confess to an ulterior motive: I’d like Qin Shi Huangdi to keep participating in this thread, and he has a habit of posting OPs and then not saying anything else in the thread.) But no, he does not explain how “a million fetuses are murdered every year” justifies shooting doctors who perform small numbers of controversial abortions, or harming nurses who work at clinics or individual women who go for abortions.
It seems obvious to me. If I were pro-life and really believed that a million people every year were being killed and the government wasn’t doing anything to stop it, I’d probably be willing to do anything to stop it, including killing the people who were doing the abortions. I mean, the legalized murder of a million people a year is an atrocity on a grand scale, isn’t it?
He makes no claim that it justifies that; on the contrary, he explicitly says that attacks on clinics and clinical staff are “immoral and hypocritical”, which is pretty much the opposite of “justified”.
His overall point is not that terrorism is ever justified; it is that terrorism is sometimes used in pursuit of objectives which are admirable in themselves.
And of course he’s right. Terrorism is a tactic. It can be used in pursuit of any objective. It doesn’t cease to be terrorism when used in pursuit of an objective which (a) happens to be good in itself or (b) you and I happen to agree is good. But the goodness of the objective does not necessarily justify recourse to terrorism, and Qin Shi Huangdi neither says nor implies that it does.
But while it’s right to observe that terrorism can be pursued in the service of a good objective, the invitation to identify terrorists whose objectives were good seems pointless to me. We might as welll try to identify green-eyed politicians whose objectives were good, or female politicians whose objectives were good. The question implies that it will be rare or exceptional to find examples of political movements employing terrorism in pursuit of a good aim, but there is no reason why this should be so. Terrorism is a tactic; it’s a response to a set of circumstances. Psychotics aside, terrorism is normally employed when people consider that they don’t have any more effective tactics open to them to acheive their objectives. That rarely depends on whether the objectives would be judged by you or me to be “good” or “bad”.
I understand they believe they’ll stop abortions by killing doctors. :rolleyes: I am pointing out that their strategy doesn’t make any sense. These people usually target doctors who perform only the rarest abortions, ones that make up a tiny fraction of the “atrocity.” And they’re also happy to target nurses and receptionists who are guilty of nothing in particular and whose loss won’t stop any abortions. They act on their so-called ideals only so far as they think the public controversy over the abortion methods will protect them from the consequences of murder and terrorism. It’s not idealistic at all. It’s chickenshit.
I suppose that depends on what you think he meant by “but when a million fetuses are murdered every year.” Does it mean ‘…their feelings are understandable?’ Does it mean ‘…something needs to be done?’ I’m trying not to assume too much about what he didn’t say, but to me, that incomplete comment does come off as a partial justification. Maybe I am jumping to a conclusion and I realize this is about sympathizing with someone’s ideals, but to me, that comes off as a very casual way of handwaving away murder.
Maybe I’m not putting my cards on the table, but the bottom line is this: it is the height of absurdity for a poster who claims to be a deeply religious Christian, as Qin Shi Huangdi does over and over, to dismiss shooting a man in church with “but when a million fetuses are murdered every year.”
It seems like a perfectly logical consequence of the “pro-life” mindset. It seems to me like their beliefs should compel believers to kill abortion doctors, with the exception of those who are also complete pacifists. After all, how many people would stand idly by if they knew 5 year olds in their community were being slaughtered, even if it were being done legally? I’m surprised there isn’t more anti-abortion violence.
That doesn’t take into account whether the violence really achieves the desired goal and leaves out any consideration of proportionality. Since terrorism is partly about communicating a message to the public, I think even terrorists generally consider those things.
To me, at any rate, it seems clear. In the cotext of his OP he means that the objective of preventing abortions is a “good ideal”. I struggle to understand his admittedly incomplete sentence in any other way, and I particularly struggle to understand it as a “handwaving away” of murder given that, even if he hasn’t bothered to complete his sentence, he has found the time to say explicitly that these acts of pro-life terrorists are “immoral and hypocritical”.
In my above post, I overlooked the fact that Captain Amazing said “If I were pro-life----.” (bolding mine) The word “If” changes the meaning of his statement and I, as I often do, flew off the handle when I shouldn’t have.