Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Terrorist: a Word Without a Meaning
In our rush to spend billions of dollars that we don't have (see 2005 proposed Federal Deficit) to defend ourselves from "terrorism," no one has adequately explained to me what this word means that justifies so much additional costs and bureaucracy. In my view of history, there has always been two kinds of bad guys: enemies in war (declared or not) and criminals in peace. But now we are being told there is a third – terrorists. A terrorist is not an enemy, they say, because they don't represent a "state." So does that mean that American or French revolutionaries or the Bolsheviks or Viet Cong were terrorists – I don't think so (at least not for the most part). On the other hand terrorists are supposedly not "just" criminals, because they have a political motivation and they kill civilians indiscriminately. So does this means that the U.S. may have been a terrorist state when we fire bombed Dresden or nuked Hiroshima in World War II – I don't think so. No, the truth is "terrorist" is another manufactured political "buzz" word to scare our money into the hands of bureaucrats. Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini and (the now reformed) Mohomar Khadafi are not terrorists, they are opponents to be destroyed or deposed in war – perhaps even war criminals, if the international courts so find. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are not terrorists, they are mass murders – common criminals that need to be hunted down and treated as such. Let's do away with the buzz words and keep things simple – it's a lot cheaper!!!

By Ray Darnell at 12:00 AM | Permalink
Category: Homeland Defense | Comments (0)