No, that was genocide. They weren’t being scared off, they were being killed off.
No, I mean if the Japanese won the war and labelled Truman a terrorist for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their doing so would erroneous, because the bombings were not terrorist acts.
Certainly. I have looked at it (the dropping of atomic bombs), and it was not terrorism.
No.
A bumper sticker I saw:
Terrorist. It’s what the large army calls the small army.
You are contradicting yourself.
Are you positing that the dropping of the atomic bombs, or the fire bombing of Tokyo were not intented to errm… ‘break the will to resist’?
The term, at around the outbreak of war, for those kind of bombings (as opposed to Tactical Bombing) was actually Terror Bombing.
That they started using the term Strategic Bombing, when the allies started doing it, doesn’t detract from its purpose..to instill terror and break the will to fight among the civilian population.
I’m not sure what atomic bombs he is referring to, but it’s worth noting that WWII-era strategic bombing policy is vastly different from what we have today.
I was responding to post 73 by pchaos, wherein he or she remarked:
Agree that modern bombing, such as drone strikes, has little in common with strategic bombing.
I disagree.
I wrote: A terrorist uses terror attacks against civilians to force policy changes.
Key part: A terrorist uses terror attacks against civilians to force policy changes.
Breaking enemy morale was one aim. I stated that in post 53.
Bombing enemy cities during a legitimate conventional war effort is not a terror attack. I gave the Charles Tilly definition of terror in post 66, here it is again: “asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime.”
The Tokyo bombings, and the atomic bombings:
- Were not asymmetrical; it was a war of state against state.
- Were not means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime; bombing is a legitimate part of warfare.
I’m sorry, but it is true. As I said the USAAC initially had great faith in precision bombing but quickly found in practice that actual precision wasn’t possible with the technology of the time. The intended target would be a specific factory or such, but it was clear to all that any degree of accuracy wasn’t happening and in fact most of the bombs were falling wide of the intended target and just hitting the city.
No, it’s not. You’re pretending that weakening German morale didn’t mean explicitly trying to kill civilians. I’ll bold the part of the quote that you seem to want to ignore in your own bolding:
I never said it was or wasn’t terrorism, just that by your own attempt to define terrorism would clearly make this terrorism; the tactic was to set as many Japanese civilians as possible on fire. There was no legitimate military target that these civilians were unfortunate collateral damage of, they were the target.
I’d suggest you either don’t understand the meaning of the word war or don’t understand the meaning of the word terror. The statement that war is not terror is absurd on its face; it’s precisely what it is. War may not be terrorism, but it is clearly the application of terror upon the enemy. What do you imagine breaking the morale of the enemy implies?
Patently untrue. Someone didn’t suddenly come up with the idea of nuking enemy cities because so many nuclear weapons had been built; nuking enemy cities was the first and primary role of nuclear weapons. Total war means the deliberate targeting and bombing of enemy cities to kill the civilians in them. That was what was done in WW2, that was what was done both time nuclear weapons have been used in war, and that was what they were going to do if the Cold War had gone hot. The idea of deliberately targeting enemy cities and civilians as the logical end of total war predates nuclear weapons and WW2, particularly influential was Giulio Douhet’s Command of the Air which he wrote in 1921.
Which makes the strategic bombing in WW2 terrorism under your definition; killing civilians intentionally was precisely what was done. Again, I am not saying strategic bombing in WW2 was terrorism, I’m saying your definition of terrorism isn’t particularly useful.
And again, before you try to duck behind ‘political tactic’, as von Clausewitz wrote in one of the most influential books on war, war is the continuation of politics with the intermingling of other means.
Well, are we talking intent, or results?
Pretending? Hardly. Of course bombing cities meant killing civilians. That’s not disputed.
Only if you make “terror” mean “killing”.
I cited and use the definition of terror coined by the political scientist, Charles Tilly. What definition are you working from?
That’s not what I claimed, sir (or ma’am). It was pointed out that Cold War military stockpiles were intended to prevent the enemy from counterattacking, rather than simply to wipe out a maximum number of civilians. You replied that due to multiple warheads being assigned to targets, that the effect would be a strike on each city in the targeted nation. I’m saying that that doesn’t represent a shift in strategy, it’s what happens when you have tens of thousands of warheads assigned to counterforce targets.
Not if they aren’t terror attacks. See post 86.
You’ve made it clear that this is your view. This is because you read “the systematic use of terror as a means of political coercion”, and inserted your own definition of terror. I hope that you see that this is where the disagreement lies.
Care to supply a rival definition?
They day I learned what roux was, I asked the chef what the difference between a sauce and a gravy was.
He said, “About $10 a plate”
You accuse me of splitting hairs, and then go off rambling about what Sherman or whotheever said war was hell.
If you can’t tell the difference between ‘splitting hairs’ and what I, or anybody else said, then I don’t know what you are even looking for in this thread, and may want to pursue your argument further in GD or the Pit.
Then, you start cackling about everybody dying from ‘collateral damage.’ Do you even have a point, or are you just not even reading the other posts before you start trying to lecture people?
You derived your difference from your own preconceptions and not from the ‘discussion above.’
Spam reported.
Both, obviously.
Then why do you continue to dispute it? You seem to want to pass off killing civilians as collateral effects of the strategic bombing campaign when killing civilians was in fact the specific intent. They were not collateral damage, they were the target.
Huh? Your attempt to define terrorism is deliberately killing civilians, which is precisely what strategic bombing was.
The one the rest of the world uses. Terror has been part and parcel of war since the dawn of time; it’s absurd to think otherwise. Breaking an enemy’s morale and shock effect on the field of battle is caused by spreading terror in the enemy ranks. I’d also question if your definition of terror as per Charles Tilly is not in fact his definition of terrorism, not terror.
Which is complete, unmitigated nonsense. The stockpiles of nuclear weapons were intended from the start to wipe out the maximum number of enemy civilians. The destruction of every city in the US, Western and Eastern Europe, the USSR and China was not going to be a side effect of tens of thousands of warheads assigned to counterforce targets. The cities themselves were the targets, pretending otherwise borders on the delusional. What exactly were the nuclear counterforce targets of the US nuclear arsenal from 1945-49 when it was the only nation on earth with the bomb? Had WW3 happened in 1947 I can assure you the lack of a counterforce target wouldn’t have prevented the US from dropping an atomic bomb on Moscow. I give you Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, CiC SAC and the architect of the firebombing of Japan’s view on the matter:
They most certainly are; you are again trying to act as if breaking an enemy’s civilian morale by bombing them doesn’t mean what it says on the tin; the bombs are being dropped on enemy cities for the explicit purpose of killing as many civilians as possible. There is no military target that they are collateral damage to; they themselves are the target. As Latro has said, the term for this at the outbreak of the war actually was Terror Bombing.
This is simply not true, I am using the conventional definition of the word terror. You on the other hand are using the words terror and terrorism interchangeably.
So we’re on the same page and it’s clear that I’m not inventing my own meaning of the word “terror”:
I’ve already provided my take on the difference between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” in this thread; the choice of words is more an indication of the speakers support or disapproval of a group more than anything else.
If intent matters more than outcome in determining moral judgement and war is not terror, then clearly the events of 9/11/2001 were not terrorist acts, right?
Whoever comes up with these quotes is a massive troll. I’m frankly astonished by people who deliberately refuse to acknowledge the difference, or who try to eliminate the moral difference between legitimate and unlawful forces.
The Geneva Convention spells out the difference between lawful and unlawful combatants pretty clearly. I’m always stunned by the number of people who talk about what should and should not constitute a war crime, but have never actually bothered to read it.
“Lawful combatants” has almost nothing at all to do with “terrorism”. “War crimes” have even less, since most of the acts that most of us would agree are terrorist are not done as a part of a declared war, nor to they necessarily involve either governments or military forces. And it’s not simply “people” who talk about these things, it’s governments, which have a vested interest in obfuscating what does or doesn’t constitute terrorism. As I mentioned upthread, the US government insisted that the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon was a terrorist act, though is was clearly and specifically aimed at an exclusively military target. Though, again, the US hadn’t declared war on Lebanon or vice versa, and the truck bomber (probably) wasn’t working under the direct orders of a government nor was he a member of the military.
These things are not nearly so cut and dried as you imagine them to be.
A “freedom fighter” is someone on the winning side of a war. A “terrorist” is someone who is on the losing side.
Consider the (Israeli) Menachem Begin…in the war of Israeli Independence, he was a terrorist (he headed the “Stern” gang)-which had participated in several bombings , among them the King David Hotel. Now, he is remembered as a freedom fighter.
Yasir Arafat was on the losing side…hence, he was a terrorist.
They were both, to different missions at different times.
I think I see part of the disagreement. I gave Tilly’s definition of terror in post 66, in a reply to you. However, in posts 76 and 77 I wrote:
These were in replies to pchaos, who asserted that:
So, pchaos claimed that a label of terrorism was a function of losing a war, and killing “too many” civilians. I differed with that take, but my definition of terrorism was never just “deliberately killing civilians.” I gave it in post 50: “the systematic use of terror as a means of political coercion.”
In post 66 I further defined the “terror” part of “use of terror”, per Charles Tilly: “asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime”.
Thus, my definition of terrorism that you so disagree with was never “deliberately killing civilians.”
It’s terror, in the sense of terrorism. Here’s the context, from Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists, Sociological Theory, Vol. 22, No. 1, Theories of Terrorism: A Symposium.
So, a definition of what the “terror” in terrorism means.
This is a digression of a digression, so I’ll plead nolo contendere. If you’re mistaken, I’m sure another poster will chime in. If not, I concede.
Which is the issue, terrorism doesn’t just mean use of “acts that cause intense, sharp, overmastering fear”, nor is it any “violence or threats of violence used for intimidation or coercion”. The connotation of terrorism, the political tactic, is much more specific. Exhibiting a scary film isn’t terrorism, a person threatening their girlfriend isn’t terrorism, in the sense that is under discussion.
The problem with this is that the words aren’t opposites, they describe different things. Malthus conveyed this very well in post 37.
I have no idea what you mean, here, can you help me with a clarification?