Barbelith Underground > Switchboard > There is no death...only pipe bombs

Okay, I'm gonna write this, and just deal with the fact that someone is going to look at me funny.

Other forms of political violence suggest one option. Organizing cell structures for purposes such as assassination, sabotage and destruction of strategic resources. Egression and movement into guerilla tactics suggest another. All of these skills have been successfully applied in the past by resistance fighters...although the current state of relative peace means that govts have plenty of manpower resources to track such activities, information technology has ironically generated a communication system where neither side is likely to intercept the intelligence of the either, and the knowledge and equipment for the creation of rudimentary ordinance is no longer accessible by those in need.
Nonetheless, damage to the military or economic infrastructure could lead to strategic gains towards an end, whereas terrorism rarely achieves a specific end, nor spreads a message. Strategic action, in second-order perceptions, is seen as desperation on the part of the rational; the continuation of protest when dispuation has failed.

The basis of terrorist theory is that attacks against the "public," rather than strategic targets, will generate fear as well as create doubt in the minds of the constituent public about their willingness to allow their government to continue in a set of practices that provoke terrorism...in theory. The power and use-value of terror tactics...highjackings, random bombings, even vandalism and harassment lies in the stochasticity of application...that such an event could occur at any moment, to anyone. This factor also brings the threat of violence into the close interpersonal sphere...the fear is not of abstracted others being hurt, but of perservation of the self and ones close affines.

This is, however, a double-edged sword, as the afterimage of September 11th demonstrates - there is an equal likelihood that a terrorist action will produce a emotive, violent defensive reaction on the part of the subject. America got poked once, and the result has been a cognitive shift to justify any action that protects "us." This system of emotive judgement is a thousand times worse in Israel. Many *rational* intelligent people have blind spots justifying the actions of the Israeli government, and their logic incorporates the very terrorist activities of the Palestinians that are supposed to serve as some sort of deterant. Also, there is an emotive construction of terrorism itself...the planned chaos of terrorist activities is often initiated as a product of a sense of moral outrage carried to its final conclusion. Often specific tetrorist actions are initiated as punishments for a corresponding action by the target. Even if this is not the case in the mind of the individual actor, it has certainly become the second-order analytical description of how these events start. Terrorist action as seen as a marker of irrational decision-making.

To summarize and state more clearly, terror tactics, and in particular non-strategic bombing, are "bad" because:

1) In historical record, they have consistently failed to achieve the intended results, regardless of the context where applied, and in fact often escalate issues, and thus have little military value.
2) Often act to confabulate a message of protest or resistance by introducing strong self-preservation reactions in the global public ("it could have been me" empathy) and greatly complicating international intervention by introducing a martial complication to the possibility of negotiation.

Im not done yet...more later.