Terrorism

This is something of an obession with the NEWS these days. Terrorism is the attempt to gain the upper hand by terrorising the civilian population of the enemy. I thought I’d draw up a graph of significant global terrorist atrocities to illustrate. The area represents the number of people killed in the attack.

Some disputes here. I’ve used the approximate local authority German figures for the allied attacks on German civilians. Wikipedia displays the allied figures. One must ask how the allies determined their figures except via the German emergency service causalty records.

The other dispute is the meaning of “terrorism”. Google currently displays this definition: “the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Hitler would welcome this definition! He never authorised any violence and intimidation against Nazi Germany and so the allies were clearly terrorists. Since politics is the process of challenging and replacing “authorising bodies” this is obviously a bogus definition… shame on you Google (you are definitely under the thumb of your authorising bodies these days.) The tradition definition, and actual meaning of terrorism is given above.

The conclusion here is that violence and intimidation against civilians is a central part of modern warfare and it was pioneered by the Europeans in WW1 and WW2. Ending terrorism will prove to be complex since everyone uses it.