Terrorism: Good Strategy or Crime against humanity?

[one_raven]

If they are "unfortunately necessary" then they are irrelevant

I disagree.

would it matter who died if you blew up an hotel?

Most certainly, because I would want to directly harm as few innocent people as possible.
I would prefer to target infrastructure and "smoke them out" and force the people to force the hands of their government.
That would be ideal, but I know better than to hope for that ideal.
Any loss of life would be terribly unfortunate, but unfortunately necessary in all likelihood.
I wouldn't hate the people of the country.

If there were workers from your country, would that stop you from targeting soldiers from another

As much as possible, absolutely.

 

[TW Scott]

Please see the discussion of the definition of "Terrorism" on the Linguistics board. Attacks against legitimate military targets may be revolution, insurrection, guerrilla warfare or many other things, but they are not terrorism. And the phrase "military target" takes on a broad meaning in the context of one people occupying another. Strictly speaking, it could conceivably apply to all able-bodied adult nationals of the occupying nation who have indicated their intention to support the occupation.

Terrorism has worked for the United States. As I insist in the other discussion, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki perfectly fit what should be the textbook definition of the word "terrorism": An attack of military style, scope or magnitude against civilian targets, as an attempt to terrorize the civilian population into supporting a cause so unpopular among them that there is no peaceful way to garner that support.

Terrorism is extortion. And the U.S. nuclear attack on Japan was the only major terrorist act in history that actually achieved its goal. (As I said in my other post, please correct me if I'm wrong on that.) The Japanese citizenry gave up its code of honor and demanded that its government surrender. Every modern terrorist can point to the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and say to his skeptical countrymen, "See, terrorism worked for America so it can work for us."

This is a bad enough legacy for us to live with. There's no need to creatively redefine the American Revolution as terrorism. Once again, Sam is falling into her old habit of pretending to be an expert on America and the West when she doesn't know shit about us.

BTW, Sam, did you notice that Obama really has promised to shut down Guantanamo, just as we told you he would the last time you started pontificating bullshit about America?

Unfortunately Fraggle, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. Hiroshima was one of several bases where the ENTIRE japanese popoulation was going to be trained to be suicide defenders. Not just the men but the women and children as well. Nagasaki was a major communications site, the hiding place of several generals, a Zero factory and the beginnings of a nuclear pile experiment. While surely less powerful weaponry could have gotten the job done of destroying these facilities, we needed more. Basically we used overwhelming force against a military target to dishearten the military and civiliian population. In a way this could be terrorism, but the primary target was military in nature.

 

[iceaura]

Hiroshima was one of several bases where the ENTIRE japanese popoulation was going to be trained to be suicide defenders. Not just the men but the women and children as well. Nagasaki was a major communications site, the hiding place of several generals, a Zero factory and the beginnings of a nuclear pile experiment.

As a reason for choosing those two cities, that's all BS invented after the fact - and ludicrously irrelevant, if you stop and think a minute: the civilians were being trained for suicide, therefore you kill them? The Japanese were supposed to be getting ready to begin to maybe build a small non-bomb reacting pile somehow for some reason, therefore you drop an A-bomb on the whole city?

The only extenuating circumstance for Hiroshima and - worse - Nagasaki, was that the US was in fact at war, and hadn't started that war exactly. If that is enough to justify truly horrific and large-scale terrorism, then justification may be possible.