I'd like to hear more about guidelines for changing the definition of terrorist along with time. That should be interesting. My point is, the definition of terrorist shouldn't only be limited to "intentionally targeting of civilians". That's not a complete sentence, hence, an incomplete definition. It at least begs for a subject, and that subject should be "Civilians". IMO Civilians that intentionally target civilians or govenmental bodies, often in a stealth way, for the purpose of indiscriminate killing based on hate should be termed as terrorists. Internationally and domestically, terrorism is a hate crime, which, as an aside, is why the anti-war people take such a stance for nothing stir up more hatred than war itself. The last point is of course, open to debate.
Panda, Everyone was targeting civilians in WW2. It was not terrorism it was war. Fast forward to today.... Targeting civilians = terrorism. One caveat though, if 2 countries are at war, targeting civilians as a part of that war would not be considered terrorism, IMHO. DD
Give me a break. That's how war was in WWII. Did Germany kill any civilians when they bombed London? What about when they steamrolled France? You bet they did. This whole bit about war avoiding the civilians at all costs is part of the CNN-war era. The US passed out leaflets ahead of time before they dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan.
I agree 100-percent. If the enemy is doing it, we have every right to. "That's how it was in WWII?" Today, there are terrorists killing civilians everyday, and since "that's the way it is," they're justified? C'mon.
--Targeting civilians = terrorism.-- Ok, OJ Simpson is a terrorist as he targeted a civilian to kill. Come on, every murderer is a terrorist under that oversimplified definition. --When a country is targeting civilians in war it's not terrorism. -- I agree with it for exactly what I said, terrorism is carried out by civilians against civilians. Also, why limit it to countries, when a war breaks out among two or more factions within the same country it's still a war.
Let me clarify my position on USA dropping the H-bombs in Japan, I'm not against it, I just don't wanna call it terrorism because civilians were targeted.
after the rape of Nanking, I hope not http://www.tribo.org/nanking/ The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs tells the story in words and more than 400 photographs of the Japanese invasion of China and the sacking of its capital city, Nanking, in 1937-38. Between December 1937 and March 1938 at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the invading troops. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped; many of them were then mutilated or murdered. THE SAVAGERY OF THE KILLING WAS AS APPALLING AS ITS SCALE. Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled.
One country is good, the other country is bad. Thus lies the difference. Those two bombs saved millions of lives that would be otherwise wasted in conquering Japan with conventional means. Lives on both sides.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." - the President of Reuters "news" service, when asked why it refused to use the term "terrorist" when describing Bin Laden.
Hey yall are forgetting how war has changed over the last 50 years or so. During WWII it was accepted to bomb civilian populations as a tactic to get the enemy to surrender. I don't know if that changes anything in the argument, but that's just how war was then.
Japan likely would have surrendered whether a bomb had been dropped or not. The "bombs saved lives" argument has been made thousands of times since those horrible days, but I think we'd be naive not to acknowledge that politics and machismo played roles in the bombings. "To question Hiroshima is to explode a precious myth which we all grow up with in this country - that America is different from the other imperial powers of the world, that other nations may commit unspeakable acts, but not ours." -- Historian Howard Zinn. I'm not saying the bombings were right or wrong. But to deny the facts for myth is intellectually dishonest. Here's an excerpt from a fascinating article Zinn recently wrote on the subject: The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it "saved lives" because otherwise a planned U.S. invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure "a half million lives," and Churchill "a million lives," but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000. In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that "Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary." After the bombing, Admiral William D. Leary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the atomic bomb "a barbarous weapon," also noting that: "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." The Japanese had begun to move to end the war after the U.S. victory on Okinawa, in May of 1945, in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. After the middle of June, six members of the Japanese Supreme War Council authorized Foreign Minister Togo to approach the Soviet Union, which was not at war with Japan, to mediate an end to the war "if possible by September." Togo sent Ambassador Sato to Moscow to feel out the possibility of a negotiated surrender. On July 13, four days before Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met in Potsdam to prepare for the end of the war (Germany had surrendered two months earlier), Togo sent a telegram to Sato: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. It is his Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war." The United States knew about that telegram because it had broken the Japanese code early in the war. American officials knew also that the Japanese resistance to unconditional surrender was because they had one condition enormously important to them: the retention of the Emperor as symbolic leader. Former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and others who knew something about Japanese society had suggested that allowing Japan to keep its Emperor would save countless lives by bringing an early end to the war. Yet Truman would not relent, and the Potsdam conference agreed to insist on "unconditional surrender." This ensured that the bombs would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It seems that the United States government was determined to drop those bombs. Myth we grew up with
