Terrorism, is it possible to fight it?

[Sin]

Terrorism is full of loops and turns, but the belief that one can fight terrorism is absurd. Look at Iraq... did the Americans win? No. They just left behind a trail of dead bodies and the President decided to let it go, and there is still terrorism over there. The same thing is going to happen in Afghanistan.

I really don't understand how people are led to believe that they are winning against terrorism.

Remember that prevention of terrorism is different than winning over it.

Some one enlighten me.

[Sixiang]

Terrorism is a term used up by western capitalist governments to scare their people into supporting nationalist programs and hating people from third-world countries or those they deem to be "extremist." There is no real definition of the word. Most people seem to define it as using violence to bring about political goals or to use terror as a coercion tactic. If that's so, then Americans used terrorism to gain independence from Britain, and terrorism is being used by the U.S. government right now. The problem is that no one really knows what it is and they can't differentiate between it and other forms of violence.

Wikipedia explains the history of the term as thus:

Terror" comes from the Latin verb terrere meaning "to frighten". The terror cimbricus was a panic and state of emergency in Rome in response to the approach of warriors of the Cimbri tribe in 105 BC. The Jacobins cited this precedent when imposing a Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. After the Jacobins lost power, the word "terrorist" became a term of abuse. Although the Reign of Terror was imposed by a government, in modern times "terrorism" usually refers to the killing of innocent people by a private group in such a way as to create a media spectacle. This meaning can be traced back to Sergey Nechayev, who described himself as a "terrorist". Nechayev founded the Russian terrorist group "People's Retribution" in 1869.

[el_chavista]

... the belief that one can fight terrorism is absurd...
Think of Pinochet extermining the commies in Chile 1973, pushed and supported by "peace Nobel prize" Kissinger, or the 1965 holocaust of commies in Indonesia (at least 500,000 killed) by Suharto's militaries armed by Washington.

[FreeFocus]

In Iraq, Americans are terrorists. In Afghanistan, Americans are terrorists. The United States doesn't invade and occupy countries to prevent terrorism - considering they are engaging in state terrorism by murdering civilians - but rather to fight opposition to American hegemony. It just so happens that Islamic fundamentalists oppose American hegemony (this is something quite apart from Iraqi resistance and Afghan resistance, which are mostly nationalist).

I posit that the only meaningful definition of terrorism is the targeting of civilians for political, economic, or social purposes. Is it possible to stop that? Not under capitalism, and not in an inhumane world.

[Decolonize The Left]

As FreeFocus notes above, the first, and most important question, is what is terrorism?
Generally speaking, terrorism is the use of violence against a citizenry to evoke fear and achieve a socio-political outcome.
This outcome could be the people picking up and moving to a new territory, or the people turning to a government for help.

So when you consider 'terrorism' in this light, the biggest terrorists are the governments of nation-states, not small groups of fundamentalists. Governments terrorize their citizens on a daily basis through information control, the police and army, as well as the 'measures taken to protect the citizens' which inevitably involve the revoking of rights and privileges.

- August