We've been through this before. Dictionary definitions of terrorism tend to be amalgamated from official government definitions, which are crafted to suit their own purposes. The press is no better, since journalists these days bend language to frighten people into buying more newspapers.
The best definition I can offer is a synthesis from all these sources, run through the logic of linguistics:
- Terrorism is a form of extortion. It is the use of violence of military style, scope or magnitude against civilian targets, in order to terrorize the civilian population into supporting a cause so unpopular that there is no peaceful way to garner that support.
Note that the
targets must be civilian; attacks on military targets may be insurrection, civil war or guerrilla warfare, but they are not terrorism. The attack on the WTC was terrorism, but the attack on the Pentagon was not. The Madrid subway bombing was terrorism, but the attack on the U.S.S. Cole was not. PLO shelling of Israeli villages is terrorism, but its attacks on Israeli military outposts are not. IRA attacks on random bystanders were terrorism, but attacks on police stations were not. Military personnel, including police viewed as occupying forces, civilian employees of military installations, government officials, etc., are legitimate military targets. Timothy McVeigh might have gotten away with being called a libertarian extremist freedom fighter if he had only killed the employees of some of our most unpopular government agencies in Oklahoma City, but by carelessly killing their children he became a terrorist.
Note that the
perpetrators need not be civilians. Terrorism may be used by governments, even by military forces, so long as the
targets are civilian.
Therefore, the greatest act of terrorism ever committed was by the U.S. armed forces in wartime: the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The military infrastructure in these cities was not significant enough to warrant such disproportionate use of weaponry--squandering the only two nuclear weapons the U.S. possessed! It was generally believed (rightly or wrongly, but that's a topic for another forum) that the Japanese government and military would never surrender as a matter of honor; that the country would keep fighting a losing battle until the last four-year-old girl was gunned down while charging a batallion of U.S. Marines with her dead daddy's beat-up samurai sword. In addition to our government being uncomfortable with the notoriety of committing true genocide and destroying most of Japan's cultural artifacts in the process, the cost in American lives would have run into the millions.
So our government decided to try to
terrorize the Japanese civilian population into petitioning their government to surrender--a cause so unpopular in Japan that there was surely no peaceful way to gain support for it. Showing them that they were fighting an enemy with no sense of honor seemed like a good way to snap them out of their own honor-based death spiral. And the cause was deemed worthy enough for the U.S. to actually
become a nation with no sense of honor.
It can be argued that the most unfortunate aspect of the nuclear terrorism against Japan
is that it succeeded. No other major act of terrorism has ever achieved its goal of extorting a civilian population to support an unpopular cause. (Correct me if I'm wrong, anybody?) But today, every terrorist can point to the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent unconditional surrender of Japan, and say to his skeptical countrymen, "See, terrorism can work! It worked for America!" We had forgotten about the Law of Unintended Consequences: "You can never do just one thing."
Terrorism is extortion. It's the mobster burning down a restaurant so all the other restaurant owners will start paying his protection money... writ large.
