We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – we are more screwed than even I imagined The course began with the issue of definitions. What is Terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, ‘One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.’
I posed to the room: ‘Surely we can acknowledge subjectivity while being able to come up with a collective understanding of what terrorism is?’ Some 40 civil servants looked at me blankly. No?
I wondered why we were there.
The danger of understanding terrorism with cultural relativism is that it breeds moral apathy; the kind that says ‘Who are we, mere democratic, liberal Westerners to impose our morality onto others? Who are we to say our culture is superior to others?’
These are luxury attitudes. It is easy to be sat in Kings College London and feel that all cultures are equal, when you haven’t been anally raped at a peace festival by someone shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and held hostage. In the introduction to the course, labeling an organisation as terrorist was described as a problem because it ‘implies a moral judgment’. Nothing was said about why a moral judgment might be appropriate.
– Anna Stanley
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
I did not agree with this part of Anna Stanley’s article:
But the scary thing is that we get the worst of both worlds from our governing class: they enact draconian crackdowns on civil liberties in the name of preventing terrorism, while simultaneously flirting with terrorists.
A policy intended to strike with terror against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized. (OED, 1st Ed.)
I can never help hearing the voice of a certain long-defunct committee for state security in that old wisecrack. It’s a powerful meme (in the Dawkinsian sense), but also a category error. “Freedom” is a goal; “terrorism”, a policy or tactic. Freedom can be fought for without terrorism, and terrorism can be employed in pursuit of other ends. They are not simply different sides of the same coin.
True enough, but it does nothing of the sort anyway. Does the organization systematically intimidate its opponents and deliberately foment fear, as a policy, in pursuit of its ends? That may be an immoral thing to do, but the observation that it’s being done is entirely amoral.
This would be the Guardian definition of “society”, presumably. If they have millions of followers, it would seem pretty obvious to any impartial observer that society – “the aggregate of persons living in a more or less ordered community” (OED again) – isn’t particulary interested in suppressing them.
Aren’t the Guardianista types exactly those that are gung-ho for jingoistically imposing their morals on brown people in hot countries? How *DARE* the fuzziewuzzies outlaw homosexuality, they MUST accede to Western morals and standards.
Reading the above, it’s no wonder we have a Civil Service that’s not fit for purpose. It’s not civil and it doesn’t serve its paymasters.
A facile catchphrase is a poor way to begin a seminar unless the intention is to show how superficial it is. But to have it as a kind of leitmotif is shocking. And for this to be at a university is disgraceful. That the largely docile and apparently brainwashed attendees were sent there by the Civil Service indicates something rotten in our State.
I disagree that is what happening.
These are people that destroy the humanity of hostages, un-person them, destroying their pictures. They know very well what is happening.
The most important thing is that these are people think or build a self serving reality based on Marxist culture that they are so righteous that they are free to do or support any crime if it goes in the path to paradise. They are after the power of Gods. Like those who did the Gulag, the Killing Fields, the 4 Plagues, The Cultural Revolution, The Terror of French Revolution…
For them the the raping of Israelis is okay, instead the raping of Palestinians is a crime against humanity -or no raping since for some journalist-scholar said that lack of rape of Palestinians by Israelis was a sign of xenophobia – language is to be manipulated, newspeak created. That is why Palestinians life expectation of 70’s years old , increase of population is “genocide”.
The point is, context of the moment is everything that matters to have a complete discretionary moral. Only with no fixed rules power can be absolute.
One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.
This is self evidently true, the news tells us that right now. But we could also say “one man’s spherical earth is another man’s flat earth.” Just because people can hold opposite opinions doesn’t mean that they are both simultaneously correct.
@Sam Duncan
A policy intended to strike with terror against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.
But this is also self evidently not sufficient. If we can accept that words are what people generally intend them to mean rather than what their etymology would suggest, it is clear that many things we do not consider terrorism would fall under the definition you just gave.
For example, the fire bombing of Dresden or the bombing of Hiroshima were mainly done to frighten the Germans and Japanese into surrender. So too, the London Blitz was done to terrorize the British. But, irrespective of what you think of the morality of these actions they are not generally considered under the banner of terrorism.
On the other hand, what the IRA’ Birmingham Pub bombing or McVeigh’s Oklahoma city bombing are both generally considered terrorism (which is to say it isn’t a phenomenon of just the middle east.)
Of the other hand, in Vichy France often if a German was killed they’d line up a dozen innocents and shoot them to frighten the others to lay off this action. This also, while horrific, is not generally considered terrorism.
Terrorism as it is generally used means “small political groups using murderous atrocities against innocents to advance their political cause.” So I think each of these elements is necessary — a small powerless group advancing a political goal (broadly interpreted to include for example, religious/political goal) by deliberately killing innocents in a particularly public and horrific way.
I think the word deliberate is also important here. For example, during WWII the French resistance often blew up places, such as restaurants, where German soldiers frequented. However, there was often collateral damage. One may argue that the Germans were not innocent, but the collaterals were. However, we generally don’t consider this terrorism either. It is also why that Israel did in Gaza was not terrorism.
Now, of course, the propagandists would like to redefine “terrorist” to mean “opposing government policy” and it might mean that one day. But for now, I think that is broadly the definition, and I think it can probably be carefully assessed objectively on these criteria.
This has always been the silver lining of our troubles here in Israel – when the considerable contingent of Left-Liberal Jewish dreamers strays to far from the unforgiving realities of the mideast, buses start blowing up.
It sucks to be the canary in the West’s coalmine, but there is Divine mercy in being slapped awake early.
Mainstream Israelis have been trying to vote our way out of Oslo for almost 3 decades – since the buses started blowing up… the “one man’s terrorist…” line no longer works here. Especially now – the past 3 months have cleared the vision of the remaining True Believers.
One of my guilty pleasures since the October 7th attack has been to sample the sermons and symposia posted to Youtube by “liberation theology” Reform Jewish congregations… some of the larger American liberal temples have hosted survivors and family of hostages from the kibbutzim (which were also hard Left peaceniks until the attacks – that’s why they hosted a rave on a Jewish holiday…)
These people are suffering painful reality whiplash and the moral/philosophical version of decompression sickness. It’s sad watching them try to hang on to elements of their old identity and worldview.
But it’s better than continuing in delusion…
This is not true.
No-one thought the Germans would be frightened into surrender in 1945. If they hadn’t surrendered by then, they weren’t going to.
Dresden was a rail hub and industrial centre. The Allies were at a point where they no longer cared about civilian casualties to Germans, they just wanted the war to finish. So they took the way that would cost them the least lives. But the aim was not terror. The aim was to starve the German war machine of all industry and transport options.
The alternative was allowing the Germans to have any factories they wanted in Dresden, because being a lovely old town is was not a legitimate target. That is as silly as it sounds. You don’t get “free areas” when you start a war. You don’t want you lovely towns bombed — then don’t start a war.
The Atomic bomb thing is tricky because of later concerns about nuclear war. At the time it was just a big bomb, and did no more damage than a fire raid on Tokyo did.
Should the Americans have risked a million casualties invading mainland Japan instead? More if not accompanied by a concerted bombing and starvation campaign. Because that was the alternative. “Liberals” today would be weeping how millions of Japanese civilians were killed when there was a bomb that could have ended it all for far less damage to both sides.
@Chester Draws
The Atomic bomb thing is tricky because of later concerns about nuclear war. At the time it was just a big bomb, and did no more damage than a fire raid on Tokyo did.
I’m not at all saying I think the Hiroshima bombing was the wrong thing to do, in fact on the contrary, I think it was the best of a lot of horrible options. But for sure its purpose was to scare the Japanese into surrender… and it was one of the main reasons that the Banzai charge, Seppuku over dishonor Japanese did surrender. My point is that it was not terrorism, even people who thing it was not justified will generally agree to that.
King’s College was created as a Conservative answer to the radical University College London. UCL – set up to push the ideas of Jeremy Bentham – 13 Departments of State controlling all aspects of life, humans just being machines without souls (including in the non religious Aristotelian sense), with no rights because they had no personhood – we have no personhood according to Bentham, as with Hobbes and Hume before him, no real “I” – no real self.
King’s College is still supposed to be one of the less bad places of higher education – so if it is this corrupted by Moral Relativism and by anti Western hatred, and it clearly is corrupted – as are the Civil Service and all other institutions (public and private), then Perry is correct.
We are screwed.
It strikes me that the world would be a much, much better place were someone to go back in time and eradicate the Russian Empire in its cradle.
So much of this BS derives from the Russians and their mania for espionage; the entire Palestinian situation was almost entirely a creation of the KGB. The Soviets supported and encouraged terrorism around the world, going so far as to transport explosives and weapons for said terrorists in their diplomatic pouches.
If you have any doubt about their support for such things, do note what happened when the Berlin Wall came down: The sudden cessation of terrorist activity world-wide, due to the equally sudden lack of external support for it. Took years for the networks to work around that lack…
Russia has contributed virtually nothing to the world, when you balance things against the crap they’ve encouraged or outright ginned up out of nothing.
Imagine a world absent the nihilism of their loonies; the same anarchistic types that killed Alexander II and ended the reforms of the Russian Empire spread their madness out across the world, with much greater reach once they’d gotten the entire government on board with them once the Bolsheviks took over.
World would be a better place without them ever having existed, is all I’m saying.
Start killing bureaucrats because of who they are and what they do and they’ll understand very quickly what is or is not terrorism.
One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist
A freedom fighter is by definition fighting for freedom.
Fighting to impose a religious apartheid, where women are property, gays and Jews are exterminated, and slavery is legal, is not a definition of “freedom” by any sense.