Terrorism being unnecessary

[mtbc]

I had previously suggested that in the real world one must sometimes resort to violence to solve problems. It has also been noted that terrorist is something of an irregular noun, cf. rebel, freedom fighter. I hope to find it clarifying to explore the ideas here.

It is not hard to think of difficult struggles among peoples. The British still have recent memories of flare-ups in Northern Ireland's Troubles and of intervening in the former Yugoslavia: there was Slobodan Milošević's oppression of Albanians and my impression is that in some parts at some times the oppression worked both ways (or even more ways once one includes the Croats, etc.). In everything from the Algerian War to the strife in Israel with various ethnic cleansing in Africa along the way there is a history of populations undergoing brutal suffering and not having a potent army of their own with which to defend themselves. Or, even when there has been more organized fighting, such as with the Tamils in Sri Lanka, there was great civilian suffering even in the safe zones. Unfortunately it is difficult to keep general discussion of such sufficiently abstract to avoid confusion due to exceptional specific circumstances.

One question is, if a population is ongoingly being oppressed, and they have limited conventional military means of their own, then how should they resist and try to reclaim their human rights? Was Gandhi correct? Even these monks setting themselves on fire in Tibet don't seem to make China flinch (though it still surprises me that they don't annex themselves some of Bhutan). I wonder if it is the case that the international community, those who might be able to help, typically only start to take sufficient notice and act with any real consequence only when people resist violently and at scale? The Friends' pacifism has romantic appeal to me but I do wonder if it's a recipe for getting one's population increasingly marginalized and exterminated.

Then, if violence is justified, in being necessary for sufficient attention to be drawn to one's plight, that raises the question of legitimate targets. With very limited means and opportunity, is it ever appropriate to target civilians? Even countries with powerful military means do not at all manage to prevent collateral damage: what thus should be expected of populations who have even less ability to target precisely? Here I am rather less persuaded that there isn't usually some alternative: I think the tougher issue is that of culpability. For instance, which Israelis might be legitimate targets for Palestinians? On the one hand are the IDF who, while soldiers, are not easily granted draft exemptions as conscientious objectors; on another are the settlers who, while civilians, have positively chosen to act aggressively, in many cases illegally, against Palestinian claims. (From the Israeli side there are then those who believe that disproportionate response is morally justified.) History offers us many cases wherein one could not easily choose to even abstain, as in the English Civil War. Additionally, in free democracies, what of the civilians who offer electoral support to warmongers?

My suspicion is that violence against oppressors is often necessary but that carte blanche hardly follows morally: that even given great asymmetry there is often some way to more carefully choose one's targets. If so then my principal question becomes that of what it takes to have the international community help out: if continuing to fight an unequal war suffices or if it takes true terrorism to keep one's people's plight sufficiently on others' radar, acts sufficiently morally outrageous to get high billing on our news bulletins in the West. Goodness knows we give scant attention to issues like mass flooding in Bangladesh. Given his recent death I was thinking of Shimon Peres' career and I wonder if we would have even got as far as the Oslo Accords if the the past hadn't been so horrific that the Middle East Quartet very much wanted to help enable some alternative. I am however painfully aware of the degree to which it is from a considerably comfortable armchair that I ponder these questions; I had even moved away from Manchester over a decade before the IRA truck bomb.

I should of course note that I am heartily skeptical of means justifying ends. In particular, many conflicts in the world have demonstrated how violence engenders violence: it is difficult to achieve an eventual peace when one has painful memories of the group across the table having wrought such harm upon oneself and one's family and friends, especially if their crime was simply that of being of the wrong ethnic group. On the one hand I hope that those of us outside such conflicts can be good enough at taking enough notice before they get to the stage of atrocities against civilians that terrorism is obviously unjustifiable even as an act of desperation. Maybe it is difficult for us to tread that path without becoming overly interventionist.

Comments

[mtbc]

I should add that I've been feeling increasingly cynical about third parties (like the West) being willing to do any more than feels like a conscience-assuaging well, we're trying something at least. We'll see how Putin's Russia tests us in coming years over, say, the Baltic states, but I'm reminded of how in 1938 after Austria was annexed the British Foreign Office did send the Germans a strong note of protest.