# When would you become and insurgent or a terrorist?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-would-you-become-and-insurgent-or-a-terrorist/356079>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [May 9, 2006, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-would-you-become-and-insurgent-or-a-terrorist/356079 "2006-05-09T16:14:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2006, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-would-you-become-and-insurgent-or-a-terrorist/356079/41 "2006-05-10T22:12:37Z")

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Perhaps it should be born in mind that political violence is likely to decay into mere criminal violence. The Mafia and the Irish Republican Army were once political organizations, and both degenerated into mere criminal gangs.

And as someone else has already pointed out, political violence has a way of backfiring. Terrorist violence against the civil rights movement backfired very badly. The biggest problem the insurgents in Iraq have is that their own violence has badly alienated many of the very people whose support they so badly need.

And once you’ve let that genie out of its bottle, it can be awfully hard to put it back in; it becomes easier and easier to rationalize violence every time someone gets in your way. Communist terrorism in Tsarist Russia ended in Stalinist repression that killed tens of millions of people.

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**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2006, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-would-you-become-and-insurgent-or-a-terrorist/356079/42 "2006-05-10T22:19:26Z")

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> [@Pjen](#):
>
> Except insofar as it validates the current insurgency in Iraq to a certain extent. There is an “Iraqi” government in place, but whether it is truly legitimate is another matter.

The government it replaced was very clearly not legitimate by any sane standard.

> [@Pjen](#):
>
> Given that Iraq is currently occupied by forces which are wished ill by a majority of Iraqis, maybe the insurgency is not so surprising and may be quite excusable.

I don’t regard it as a given that the majority of Iraqis are implacably hostile to Coalition forces. Even if they were, it doesn’t automatically follow that they support the insurgents. We were told that the Vietnamese supported the Viet Cong. The failure of the Tet offensive clearly showed that they didn’t.

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