Don't forget about capital punishment. Only the state is allowed to kill people in the name of "justice".

I don't really agree with your post. the cartoon makes no sense. I'm reading this interesting book on Latin American guerillas and revolutionary politics, which focuses on Cuba. Guerilla fighters in Cuba (the July 26 comrades, to be specific) were against terrorism-- which meant targeting innocent people. Rather, they focused their fighting on military barracks and targeted the Cuban military. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was against terrorism and forbade his comrades from targetting innocent people who had nothing to do with Batista's government.

See, what I'm saying is that-- even OTHER FIGHTERS (guerillas or freedom fighters) can consider other forms of violence as TERRORISM, while waging their own violent battles against the government.

I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.

(if not, I'd be happy to clarify my argument for you)

I'm with DIMA in finding this post to be, pardon the phrase, off-target. In addition to the comments about the cartoon, I think the discussion below it misses a lot of crucial distinctions. The police may be able to legally shoot you, but that doesn't mean that any shooting by the police is legal. Conversely, I may not be allowed to shoot people at random, but that doesn't mean that any shooting I do is illegal (self-defense being an immediately obvious exception).

With the concept of "militarism", there are quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes issues, of course: the state has the power to impose consequences on an individual because, well, that's what a state is (I wish I remembered philosophy classes well enough to use the phrase "social contract" appropriately here), but how can you impose consequences on a state? And even then, there are of course ways that we trymdash;when a state engages in "legal" militarism, other states may impose sanctions or otherwise offer consequences.

So yes: we shouldn't take it as given that blowing up a building is morally acceptable simply because a nation does it. But reading anything more general into the cartoon seems to me to be a mistake.

DIMA & Lance,

The assumption, as pointed out in the post, is that state violence is legal until proven otherwise, while non-state violence is illegal until proven otherwise. It's not that one or the other inherently is legal or illegal, but that the base assumption for each is different. It's like the difference between English and Napoleonic law. The burden of proof lies with the non-state actor to either prove state violence is illegal, or to prove their own violence legal.

If you shoot a person, it's assumed homicide until you prove it's self-defense, for example, while a cop's shooting is assumed valid until proven otherwise.

And I think that's the power we, as the members of the state, give the state. We pass off the necessity of violence, in this non-Utopian world, to an "official" actor (the state), and give that actor legitimacy to do so. With that legitimacy comes an assumption of correctness.

My personal political philosophy disagrees with this concept, but that's how I see it operating.

There's one other difference. Terrorism typically refers to targeting of civilians by nebulous groups who are not backed by a nation and cannot be held accountable. That's the chief difficulty with Al Qaeda. If it were, say, the nation of Iran who had conducted 9/11, you can hold that nation accountable. It's much more difficult to hold accountable essentially an underground business that operates more or less clandestinely in 50 sovereign countries.

That's the nutshell difference.

I often think of this in reference to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima/Nagasaki during WWII, and in the past few months (I visited Hiroshima in September), I've thought about it even moreso. Hiroshima has a memorial museum centered around the bombing, and it is quite simply the most hard-hitting, moving, enlightening building I have ever stepped into.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was considered an "act of war," so, fortunately for the American military, it escapes perception as a terrorist act. But it is really, really hard for me to see it in any other light. How 9/11 is often referred to as the ultimate act of terrorism, and the atomic bomb avoided this classification and is generally not even brought up in the debate, is bewildering; 9/11 targeted a couple of buildings and a couple of planes. The atomic bomb targeted a city. An entire city was wiped clean. An entire population was engulfed in flames instantaneously. A civilian population, too - not a military base.

I hope everyone who ever has the opportunity - especially those who defend this military action - goes to this museum. I've never been moved to tears in a museum (and I've been to other war museums) until I visited Hiroshima. It is, I believe, the prime example of state-sanctioned terrorism; and no, Pearl Harbour is no justification. What happened at Pearl Harbour was wrong too. But an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, and this was more like a head for an eye. Especially considering that following the bomb, and seeing its immediate aftermath, the American military went right ahead and did the same thing to Nagasaki again three days later. That is not an act of war. That is terrorism. It is, in fact, the very definition of terrorism: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/terrorism
And it's terrorism that worked, terrorism that succeeded in its goal. Japan surrended.

"Terrorism" has largely become a fairly useless word in trying to assess political violence objectively, because at this point pretty much everybody uses it to describe what their enemies do. It is "political violence we don't like." It's routine for Arab regimes to refer to any Israeli military action as "state terrorism." During the opening stages of the invasion of Iraq, some commentators were calling Iraqi paramilitaries "terrorists" because they were shooting back at advancing U.S. troops.

I'm guessing that very few people actually think of themselves as terrorists. They see themselves as fighting a war on behalf of some (perhaps only notional) organization or entity that they think of as a state or nation, even if it isn't recognized as such. Most organizations that are labelled as terrorist have fairly well-defined military-style command structures.

When you commit an act of political violence, people are going to die. When your side does it, you tend to forgive those deaths, or at least see a larger framework in which the killings helped prevent some larger-scale negative outcome. It's an act of war. When the other side does it to you, you see people you identify with dead and buildings that look like home to you in flames. It looks like a terrorist act. It doesn't matter whether the high explosives were delivered on the tip of a missle or were wrapped around some religious fanatic's waist.

To put it another way (and apologies for the multiple posts, but I just thought of a somewhat clearer way to say what I'm trying to say) discourse about terrorism is a way to shift descriptions of our enemies away from their goals and political beliefs and to their tactics.

Think about much of the discussion about al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11: they were cowards, they struck us by stealth, etc. But, I mean, would there have been a *good* way for al-Qaeda to commit politlcal violence against the U.S.? If they had declared themselves an army under the command of the Taliban government of Afghanistan and somehow built missles that struck only military targets (like, say, the Pentagon) would Americans have said, "Oh, that seems fair"? Similarly, many labeled Israel a state terrorist during the most recent war in Lebanon; but would there have been *any* military action Israel could have taken against Hezbollah missle batteries that would have resulted in Arab commentators saying "You know, that was proportionate"?

My point is not that al Qaeda or Israel were justified in the action they did take. My point is that there's this whole fairly nonproductive discourse that arises around any political violence that gets in the way of discussing the actual root issues -- the political differences between the warring parties. We strive to label our enemies "terrorists" as if that will be the end of the discussion and we'll "win" if we can make the label stick.

GREAT POST!! A+. This is Precisely the convo i was having on "murder" vs "killing". She objected to the word "murder" being used for the "killing" of non-human animals.

GREAT POST!! A+. This is Precisely the convo i was having on "murder" vs "killing". She objected to the word "murder" being used for the "killing" of non-human animals. Because the word "murder" by its nature, only refers to violating the personhood of human animals. Not non-human animals.

I guess it goes to show how powerful words are. That nothing exists until you call it what it is, give it a name...

Social contract theorists from Hobbes to Locke to Rawls have argued that forming a state involves giving up our individual right to commit violence and to settle disputes. We give these rights up to the state, which then has the right to use violence (and coercion in general) to protect the state. It is rational to leave the state of nature and enter the social contract because when everyone retains their individual right to act as they please, none of us have secure rights. Social contract theorists differ on whether they think these state rights are absolute. Hobbes believed the state of nature is so horrible that it's rational to give absolute power to the sovereign. Locke and Rawls believed the state may only legitimately exercise its power within constraints, including consent of the people governed, respect for basic human rights, and morally justifiable action. If their arguments work, then there's nothing wrong in principle with the idea that the state can legitimately engage in coercion that we may not engage in as individuals. However, if the state itself is illegitimate, or it exercises its power in illegitimate ways, then of course its actions can be questioned. That's where just war theory comes in as a way of delineating when acts of war are legitimate. Just war theory requires a formal declaration of war by a legitimate representative of a state (such as Congress), and it requires that the war be engaged in for defensive reasons only, and only after other alternatives have been tried. These requirements clearly set Hiroshima/Nagasaki apart from 9/11. However, just war theory also requires not targeting civilians; in my opinion, that implies that no use of atomic weapons can be justified by just war theory.

Derrick Jensen has wrote a lot of interesting stuff around this issue. I recommend Endgame (Part One) and A Language Older Than Words. Or, for convenience, here's a recoding of him explaining his case against pacifism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e75I4ysssoA&feature=related

This reminds me of an old saying...
History is not determined by who is right, but who is left.

Slowwpoke just did a comic on this the other day.

I really want to read all the comments but, alas, no time!

I'm fascinated by ideas like this. This idea of the 'monopoly of violence'. In Australia we do not have (at least not in my state, and I'm pretty sure it's nation-wide) capital punishment and our police officers are not allowed to shoot people without huge repercussions. Even a police officer seen as being 'violent' is not really accepted.

And our army in other countries, getting involved in other people's wars, are rarely depicted as being involved in violent activities.

However the US is frequently depicted to us Australians as being war-mongering and violent. The impression given is that Americans love violence and love their guns, even when we frequently here news stories of young children killing each other with their parents' guns.

I'm not personally saying that this is the case - I'm pretty confident that it isn't - but this is how the US is often represented in Australian media. The election of Barack Obama has gone a long way towards improving how Australia sees the US, but there is still the 'redneck american' image that comes to mind as soon as someone mentions the country.

Of course as an Australian I'm well aware that the US probably doesn't care in the slightest about our opinion of them and it really doesn't mean anything in the end (we're not big enough of influential enough to be any kind of 'threat') but still..... When I see posts like this one where you talk about accepting violence as if it's an every day thing I'm reminded of the stark differences between Australia and the US.

There's the old anecdote:

A pirate Dionides was brought before Alexander the Great. Alexander asked him why he had arrogated to himself the empire of the seas. Dionides threw the question back, "why do you yourself sack the earth?" "I am king," said Alexander, "while you are only a pirate." "What matters the name," replied Dionides. "The business is the same for both of us. Dionides ravages the ships and Alexander the empires. If the gods had made me Alexander and had made you Dionides, perhaps I would be a better prince than you would be a good pirate."

Which is often retold as "Because I have only one ship, I am called a pirate. Because you have a great navy, you are called an Emperor."

Also,

Soldiers kill as part of their jobs. This is simply “keeping the peace” or “following orders.”

Obligatory link to the Nuremberg Defense.

The interesting historical perspective here is that during feudal times (hence the word), it was expected that if someone wronged you, you would extract your own revenge. So if Bob stole your cow or called you a bad word, you were expected to beat him up. Of course a societal expectation of "measured" retribution existed - you couldn't stab someone to death for not sending you a christmas card. Though in some societies, a bad enough insult was enough to justify a killing. (This is called the Faustrecht, the "right of the fist" in German. Unfortunately, English Wikipedia has no info on any of this, so I'm going to link to the German terms, for what good it may do.)

Feudal arrangements were in part arrangements of protection where a feudal lord would promise to employ violence on your behalf in exchange for your loyalty / goods / services.

So peasant Bob had to work on the duke's fields for two days a week, but in exchange, if peasant John stole one of his cows, bob could ask the duke to come 'round and beat John up.

But there was a power imbalance between Bob and the duke, so as time went on, each generation of peasants had to spend more and more time working the duke's fields until he they became serfs - slaves of the duke in all but name.

These feudal arrangements extended up several layers - the duke would be in an arrangement with the king to protect him from the aggressions of other nobles, and the king might be in an arrangement with the emperor.

Obviously, such feuds could be pretty disruptive, which is why feudal lords soon started to declare "peaces" limited to a particular time or space to allow official business and trade to occur. If someone broke the peace by using violence, they would be considered to have wronged the feudal lord, even if normally, their greivance was legitimate and their violence accepted.

For example, any person travelling to or from meeting the king was under the protection of the king, to stop them from being assassinated while travelling. (Känigsfrieden)

Peaces were also usually declared inside and in the vicinity castles to prevent fighting there. Anyone with grievances had to "take it outside". (Burgfrieden)

During a peace, grievances would be mediated by the lord who had declared the peace.

As the medieval period drew to a close, it became more and more apparent to some rulers that having a permanent peace would be much preferrable. The first attempt at this was the ewige Landfrieden declared by emperor Maximilian I, which declared an eternal peace in all the emperor's domains, effectively outlawing the old feudal way of resolving disputes. However, it was widely ignored at the time.

Eventually, the conception of an universal peace did take hold, and modern society is built on it. Private individuals may no longer use force to resolve disputes, but must appeal to the state to do so, as the state has a monopoly on violence.

Hence, "the peace" in phrases like "keeping the peace" is the peace of the land that has been layered atop of the original feudal "right of the fist".

As an aside to this (already massive - sorry!) comment, it's interesting how much gangland imitates a medieval feudal system. By running with a gang you agree to do certain tasks (eg selling drugs) for the leader, but you are afforded a degree of protection, in the sense that people know the gang will avenge one of their own. This suggests that in a vacuum of state power, feudal relations spring up naturally, as they can readily evolve out of existing social structures.

I always get a kick out of abstract discussions of violence. A metaphorical kick, not an actual one btw. Anyway, one story that encapsulates this whole problem rather well is the Darfur crisis. Lots of words have been spoken in the UN about it and Bush even officially called it a 'genocide,' but was it ended swiftly and decisively? Obviously not. Why? The same reason that a whole lot of atrocities go unchallenged: Word definitions. The treaty mandating the US to act if genocide was determined to be occurring somewhere in the world was a serious political problem for the US in Darfur thanks to China's strong presence there, so we re-interpreted the word "act" to mean "appeal to the UN for some kind of resolution. Or investigation. Or something. Whatever." (I'm paraphrasing).

The same bullshit goes on day after day while bodies keep getting bulldozed into ditches en masse because the people lacked the power to define what was happening to them in a way that would have brought them some help. In a nutshell, they lacked the power to make their definitions STICK. I come back to that point a lot because it really is that simple; anyone can call anything anything they want, but the word or definition that sticks is the one that defines the reality and that is a function of force, even if you have photos that imply a different word would better describe a situation. The importance of labels is probably why nascent oppressive regimes tend to kill off the intellectuals (that, or they get sick of hearing all the nonsensical quibbling about the illusory difference between "terrorism" and "war").

This kind of thing even annoyed Confucius back when he tried to rectify the names in vain, so it's probably not going to go away anytime soon. Meanwhile a bunch of stuffed shirts sit on their butts over at the UN, in the halls of Congress, at the White House, The Hague, or even in an SUV on the way to the Mall keep playing this tired old shell game with words while bullets keep flying, machetes keep hacking, and bulldozers keep covering. In the end it's still the same scorched wasteland whether everyone wore a uniform and did it together or were all self-motivated independent contractors, and it's a problem we best figure out how to deal with before it starts happening in our own cities (which is not too far off IMO). It's much less abstract when it's in your front yard, and I can assure anyone reading this that seeing ultra-violence up close and in-person makes everything else disappear and settles all disputes about nomenclature. But then you go talk to someone who hasn't confronted reality so directly and it's right back to the same old bullshit; "Well, can you prove the State supported the death squads?" (but if you can, you're probably already dead).

For most people, it's a really disconcerting feeling when they first begin to accept the idea that there's really no difference between governments and gangs, war and genocide, patriots and terrorists, or us and them (fortunately it gets easier after a while). I'm a firm believer in using lethal force for self-defense or to stop insanity like the Darfur genocide, but as long as the discussion remains hijacked by players who have self-serving agendas and the power to define the words we're using then I don't expect to see anything change, at least until the day the abstraction kicks in our front door and becomes way too real for comfort, but at that point it's way too late for words.

I'm a pacifist, but I will say this: The first things to be attacked in war are communications. Traditionally, this meant communications complexes, radio, tv, papers, whatever. So I think the farther we distance ourselves from our perceived enemies in the advancement of modern warfare, the more ways we find to insinuate things into our everyday language (which is the most important communication outlet that exists). We aren't face to face with this anymore. The Redcoats aren't coming and we aren't fighting our cousins in some civil war, so it's easy to forget that our 'enemies' are just as human as ourselves.

It's gone on for hundreds of years, but with the world shrinking as fast as it is now and more access to worldwide communications, it seems that reinforcing the differences between "terrorists" and "war heroes" is the only way to effectively keep people from realizing that they're basically one and the same, from a human perspective. It's just another form of communications manipulation, and it's nothing new.

Acts of war and acts of terrorism often have very similar outcomes and intentions - and are both unmitigatedly, unquestionably awful.

That being said: I was taught that "terrorism" (when removed from the meaning that it unfortunately has today of “political violence we don’t like" - well said, jfruh) is actually any act of violence meant to shut a country down by instilling fear. This is why Bush was able to say "if you don't travel or go shopping, then the terrorists win." If our economy had shut down because people were too fearful after the 9/11 attacks, then the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks would have had their goals fulfilled, by the traditional definition of terrorism.

On the other hand, a war is supposedly meant to reach a resolution between two forces, either by moving one side or the other to crumble and be taken over, or by moving one side or the other to open up to negotiations.

Also, I think that "terrorism" carries a connotation of an act perpetrated by an individual or a relatively small group of individuals ("relatively small" being as compared to the population of a country). An act of war is typically carried out by one country against another, or by one side of a divided country against another (as in a civil war). When the U.S. was attacked by Al Qaeda, it was considered terrorism; if we were attacked now by Afghanistan, it would be considered an act of war.

Great cartoon! 

"without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies" - Augustine

cool

Alexander the Great was also behind it.