The Glade 4.0

Editorial on CNN from Roland Martin that is probably one of the misguided opinions I have ever read.

Last couple of paragraphs from his editorial..

The average confederate soldier was a normal man,with normal hopes, dreams and ideas, who was caught up in a horrible situation and fought to defend his new country from the 'northern aggressors'.

Some of the Confederates were definitely in the terrorist category, using the war as an excuse to brutally murder, to strike harsh blows against the perceived evils of the north, but they were few in number.

Normally Martin has some good thoughts, I don't agree with him on everything but I enjoy reading his stuff. To me this sounds like he is taking a hard line and for some reason doesn't understand that slavery was one of the reasons for the civil war, but not the only reason.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I don't see what's so shocking about that. Our public school system is set up to indoctrinate children that the southern states were the root of all evil in the U.S. Now that the Bush administration has made terrorism the word of the day, why wouldn't the Confederates have it slapped on them? Labeling someone as a terrorist allows us to forget they're human.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Regardless of how you view the Civil War, only a total imbicile could think that the Confederates were terrorists. The whole point of being a terrorist is that you can't possibly defeat your opponent on any sort of conventional battlefield, so you avoid traditional military procedures in favor quasi-criminal quasi-military behavior. This is the antithesis of what the Confedrates did; they fought on traditional battlefields with traditional armies.

It's a stupid argument when people try to say it about the Revolutionary War and it's equally stupid here.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

GOOMH DE.

However I do agree that his opinion is probably based on him swollowing the line that all confederate soldiers were pro-slavery racists

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

He's saying it because he can pick specific incidents from the civil war where the behavior was horrible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushwhacker and ignore the traditionally fought war.

Problem is, the atrocities happened on both sides, it wasn't just a southern thing. He's being purposely obtuse and blind to make a point.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Even there, he's intentionally ignoring the fact that what the Bushwhackers were trying to do was control territory, and they were doing it because there were limited government resources in the area. They weren't bushwhacking because they couldn't stand up to the army; they were doing it because there was no Army so they were standing in for it.

They may appear similar to terrorists because of some of the things they did, but they weren't pursuing terrorist goals; they didn't have any illusion that terrorizing the other side's civilians would force the government to change policy when the two governments in question were already in full-blown war. They were really just irregular combatants.

At the time, we didn't have all these conventions about bearing arms openly, uniforms, and the like and that lack of any standard to comapre to contributed to the confusion of the authorities on both sides. Therefore, trying to impose conventions and terms that came later, like "terrorist" is of questionable intellectual honesty in the first place. However, if we want to do so as a guide to how those differentiations came about, these guys come out on the side of "irregular combatant".

Of course, trying to generalize these actions to make the entire Confederacy into terrorists is not only an absurd abuse of logic, it ignores the fact that Bushwhacking wasn't limited to the Confederacy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Back in the day, we used to call those tactics "Guerilla Warfare". That said, the US has a long history of using those tactics. Starting with the revolutionary war.

We still do call them guerilla warfare. The essential difference is that guerillas fight the opponent's military by using irregular tactics that rely on remaining hidden while terrorists skirt the line between violent crime and being a military threat, and focus on political impact. Obviously any given group can skirt the line, and that indistinctness is, in fact, part of what terrorists rely on to score political points.

As for the Revolutionary war, it did include some guerilla warfare, but the goal of the colonies was to be able to defeat the British conventionally. That gives you a definite end to the war and a credible claim to independance.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

if we want to count civil war "astrosities" we would probably have to lay in all the farmland Sherman burned in Georgia.

And all the bridges that certain men from the ohio regiment blew up with their stolen train, while wearing plain clothes.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

That's really not relevant either. No more so than strategic bombing in WWII, which was really the same thing; destruction of the enemy's ability to continue to pursue war.

People have tried to call it "terrorism" because they A) don't understand what the word means and B) want its negative connotations attached to the U.S./the Allies for pejorative reasons.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sherman's march in and of itself was not a "war atrocity", but some of his actions would have considered a war criminal today (possibly even then if not for the changes to the code of conduct to support his and Butler's actions). His attitude as expressed in letters to his wife would be considered today intention of genocide, where there an ethnic distinction between the two regions.

""extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people"

If you wanted to point out war atrocity perpetuated by the Union troops, Butler has a long list, including an order to treat southern women as prostitutes.

That is true, although it should be pointed out that Sherman didn't actually commit any genocide, although he was pretty brutal.

In either case though, neither thing can be called "terrorism" with any legitimacy. People get into this bad habit of thinking that if you don't want to call an action "terrorism" you're somehow excusing it, condoning it, or advocating it. I don't consider the Pearl Harbor attack terrorism but that doen't mean I'm cheerleading for Imperial Japan.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The attack on Pearl Harbor was the initial attack of a war, and it failed miserably. The Japanese only managed to find mostly obsolete but still in service ships at anchor, they missed the majority of the fleet they were aiming at. Because of this, the second phase the Japanese High command had planned, the invasion of Hawaii was canceled.

It wasn't an act of terror, it was an act of war using conventional methods of war. Were some people terrified, yes! That does not mean it was an act of terror.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Labeling everything terrorism, is just a politically expedient way to rouse the populace to your cause. It distracts from the fight against the real terrorists, namely sex offenders and drug dealers.

I guess the next question is Is Terrorism necessarily an evil?

I think generally Terrorism relies on specifically targeting non-strategic, non-military targets for its psychological effect.

Targeting occupying forces with unconventional means, has long been a method of resistance of the populace and the primary method by which an oppressed people casts off the opressors; by making it too costly to hold the terratory. By that argument, casting off military forces could be viewed an attempted to 'control territory'

I think in general, military forces cannot engage in terrorism. They can commit other crimes, including those designed for 'shock and awe' or the destruction of morale, or other attempts to demoralize (or exterminate or ethnicly clense) but terrorism specifically referrs to the targeting of civillians by non-military forces.

States can SPONSOR terrorism, but regular military cannot be terrorists, even though the crimes are similar.

(bombing civillian areas by military forces, even deliberatly, while henious I would not define as terrorism. even though the effect is the same if some guy drove his car bomb in the area) -- they're both crimes, arguably equally bad if the death toll is the same. But one is act of terrorism, the other is a military action designed to create terror.

Both reprehensible. I'm just not sure I'd apply the Terrorism label to it.
--YMMV though

Essentially, yes, you're on the right track, although targets that are strategic can still be the targets of terrorism. An oil refinery, for example, is a valid strategic target, but attacking it for political purposes is still terrorism.

That's where it gets a little trickey; it requires understanding the motivation of the attackers. If the motivation of our imaginary refinery-bomber is, say, to reduce available fuel oil for naval ships and thereby weaken the ability to combat piracy, he's not really a terrorist; he's essentially a guerilla fighter, or possibly just a really really bad criminal.

On the other hand if he wants to blow up the refinery in order to drive up oil prices (or even just create fear) so that the public will demand that the government leave pirates alone, then he's a terrorist.

Of course, those two goals aren't mutually exclusive, and knowing which goal he has (or whether he has both goals) requires a good understanding of his larger goals, the context he's acting in, and some significant guesswork. Often the best indicator of whether he's a terrorist is, does he make a big public pronouncement claiming responsibility and threatening more? If he does, the answer is most likely that he's a terrorist because you need people to know you did it to make them afraid of you; you don't need it if the physical damage itself is the goal.

A terrorist knows that people, especially Western people, like the military to stay out of law enforcement. Therefore, he wants to be too tough for a purely law-enforcement solution, but not so tough that the populace will demand the military be used against him unequivocally, or if he is, he takes care to mix himself into the population so that the use of the military can later be portrayted as heavy handed or brutal.

This is where most of the problems with terrorism come from. People want a nice, bright dividing line between cops and soldiers. Terrorists rely on the inability of the cop to be a soldier, and the clumsiness of the soldier in attempting to be a cop to shift attention away from them and onto how the government is dealing with them.

You are correct, though, that a regular military, and even an organized irregular one, cannot also be a terrorist. If they engage in terrorism it's a war crime, atrocity, or something else, but it's not terrorism. Terrorism requires at least nominal independance from the interests of a state; otherwise the word becomes so broad as to be useless as people apply it to any and all state actions they don't like.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

where would you say Privateering falls? Its often targeted at civilian targets (or commercial though sometimes military) its by non-military or irregular forces, and can be designed to create fear and disruption, but its more for tactical goals (deprive a nation of commerce, prevent goods or military hardware from reaching destinations etc)

I guess the next question (or perhaps this needs a thread of its own-- what constitutes a legitimate target in your book.)

It falls into the category of "obsolete and irrelevant"

Privateering was possible back when we had wooden ships and a merchant ship and a warship were largely interchangeable just by adjusting the number of cannon and the nature of the crew.

In modern times a merchant ship cannot act as a warship with any hope of survival. Sure, it might score a few sinkings or something, but it would rapidly be located with modern sensor systems and equally quickly sunk. It would be totally unworthy of the expense and trouble to make it.



That's an exceedingly tricky question. It depends largely on the nature of the conflict.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Dude, shut up. It falls into the category of "awesome." You're obsolete and irrelevant.

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The Dude abides.

Tell you what. You go get yourself some sort of cargo ship and try to make it into a warship.. sort of like this. In fact, you can even get yourself some exocets or something like that, since it isn't WWII any more.

Of course, putting 6 inch guns on it didn't make a merchant ship into a warship in WWII when it went up against this and putting Exocets on a merchant ship won't make it into a combatant.

These idiots found out what happens when you attack a warship, and they attacked an FFG-7 frigate which doesn't even have its missile launcher anymore! They still got their asses sunk. What do you suppose will happen when something like this comes after your privateer?

Or maybe one of these?



If you're a government and want to raid commerce in the modern era privateers are a waste of time when you can just use one of these:

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Piracy is alive and well in africa.
A) you're comparing it to the modern US navy. Most the world doesn't have one.

B) Small gunboats seem to be having reasonable success at piracy. Privateering could use a similar model.

Yes, its foolish to be attacking a modern warship, but against similarly balanced powers, (3rd world) I would assume that Privateering is still a valid option

Of course the whole point is not if its a valid tactic with even a reasonable chance of success: But wether privateering could be classified as terrorism. (Even historically)

Privateering would work just fine if done properly. If you leave no witnesses then your ship blends into normal commercial traffic. It'd essentially be a smuggling operation with a smash 'n grab tactic.

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