"Q: How would you define terrorism, because often people say one man’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter?.
"A: I would define terrorism as deliberately targeting innocent non-combatants with the aim of influencing an audience. The goal might be ‘freedom.’ But terrorists slip over the moral line when they deliberately target the innocent."
~ International terror expert Jessica Stern,
recommending 'Five Books on Who Terrorists Are'
Friday, 5 April 2019
"I would define terrorism as deliberately targeting innocent non-combatants with the aim of influencing an audience. The goal might be ‘freedom.’ But terrorists slip over the moral line when they deliberately target the innocent." #QotD
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Also from the interview: "Hoffer points out that zealots can be attracted to zealotry itself... When we see zealots switching their allegiances as if they were changing clothing, the shallowness of their extreme beliefs becomes clear.”
How would you characterise the aerial bombardment of cities during WW2, then? Or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Those aren't rhetorical questions. I'm still not sure _how_ one would morally prosecute warfare on such a scale. Or even whether it may be that to compare industrial total war to the actions of individuals or cells is to commit category error.
Fair question.
I would say the key difference is that the motivation of the terrorist is not at all to win a war and destroy an aggressor by military means, by which aerial bombardment, say, is one of those means. Whereas, as per the quotation, the motivation of the terrorist is “to influence an audience,” whether those being attacked or not, by means of unspecified acts of terror.
So it’s like asymmetric warfare too, but with that same difference.
The difference is not trivial. The very worst of these aerial bombardments was arguably the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And yet, because it brought about an end to the war, many Japanese themselves totally condemn them. Indeed: ”For those Japanese who wished for an end to the bloodbath, what fell out of the sky on those two days in 1945 were, in the words of Japanese Navy Minister Yonai Misumasa, ‘gifts from heaven.’ Hisatsune Sakomizu, chief cabinet secretary of Japan, said after the war: ‘The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by Heaven for Japan to end the war’.”
On this, I found John Lewis's article on this point very persuasive: “Gifts from Heaven”: The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945
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