Define terrorism

Yep. I wander off, totally forsake August, and then decide to come back with something really heavy.

Well, actually, that's a matter of perspective, if you heard me talk in real life you'd probably find I was more animated and passionate and serious about musical matters than about politics... but tonight you're getting politics. Sort of.

I am really, really sick of hearing about terrorists. I've been with my current employer for three years, and in all that time I don't think there's been a single day where the press clippings haven't been awash with stories about terrorism and about security and countermeasures. Meanwhile millions of people are dying of malaria and ice shelves are preparing to melt away, but the newspaper columns on terrorism just keep piling up.

What is a terrorist, anyway?

The word seems to have taken on a kind of self-evident quality. You label someone a terrorist, that's all you need to know about them. All hint of normal humanity and complexity just disappears. They are devoid of feeling, and have no other goal than to kill. They don't hate anything in particular about you, they just hate you because you exist. Pure, and very very simple.

Also, an awful lot like The Terminator.

I've seen the word 'terrorist' thrown about in all sorts of contexts it never used to be found in. Right at this moment I can't remember any of the specific examples, but some of them have been wildly inappropriate. Any kind of destructive tendency has become 'terrorism'.

Let's think about what the word actually means for a second. My quaint old dictionary, published in the innocent year of 1991, describes terrorism as follows:

1. The use of terrorising methods, especially the use of violence to achieve political ends.
2. The state of fear and submission so produced. [edit: eh? don't often see this usage]
3. A method of resisting a government or of governing by deliberate acts of armed violence.

Notice how there's no mention of religious fundamentalists whose only intent is to obtain 72 virgins in paradise and who achieve this by taking as many infidels with them as possible?

Terrorism was - and is - a method of achieving something else. Back then it was clearly a political goal. I'm of the view that that's still true, even if the politics has been heavily obscured by religious language.

But somehow, we're gradually being persuaded that terrorism isn't the means, it's the end in itself. We have world leaders trying to convince us that there are raving lunatics bent on killing us just because we're there to be killed. Which means they won't ever stop trying to kill us. Which means, all we can do is become smarter at stopping them - build bigger 'fences', become cleverer in catching them, become more ruthless in our countermeasures.

And our leaders, very nicely, offer to do the protecting.

If they're right - if the goal of terrorists is simply to invoke terror for it's own sake, without any further aim of altering the behaviour of the targets beyond making us act like scared rabbits...

...we've already lost.