Reply to post: As Mad Mike says.

As Mad Mike says.

The definition of Terrorism depends on which side you're looking from. If you're a small force of rebels fighting an obviously just cause against a tyrannical government and it defends its military assets to the point where you simply can't get near them, do you give up?

One might debate about whether the widespread 'collateral damage' the U.S. Military achieves so consistently is incompetence rather than strategy; but somewhat less open to misinterpretation was the carpet bombing of German cities in WWII. U.S. emulation of Harris' strategy in Indo-China was, again perhaps, more open to interpretation - or more so, anyway, than the destruction of villages and executions of civilians which should have been tried ala Nuremburg.

While it is difficult to pin down the justification for the atomic bombings - both sides of the argument are compelling, and horrifying - I always end up supporting them. It is difficult not to see only with hindsight, something that occurred before one was born, but one must try, and I think that of what was known of the Japanese conduct at the time and the fact that the American soldiers were almost entirely not career soldiers, thus also innocent victims it came down to weighing the deaths of a few hundred thousand Americans against a few hundred thousand Japanese and Truman made the correct and understandable choice (though quite possibly for highly immoral reasons).

I'm far less convinced about the fire-bombing of Tokyo though.

Were it not also before my time, I imagine I'd have felt Mandela unfortunately justified. I was certainly pulling for the ANC back when Oliver Tambo and Desmond Tutu were regulars on British TV. I regretted the loss of innocent life and accepted that I knew far too little to be able to pronounce a verdict on the ultimate right or wrong of it, but it was obvious the IRA had the just cause, just as it is obvious the Palestinians do. As do whoever exactly it is who's fighting Assad.

I'm proud to be British for the way we stood up to Hitler (eventually), but I don't think, even as an Air Force enthusiast, I'll ever feel Dresden was as justified as Hiroshima was. Anyway, that pride aside, it does seem that if you look at conflicts both major and minor since the middle of the last century, with eyes attuned to the obvious injustices and thefts and atrocities that show quite clearly who the victims are and who according to the ethics we at least pretend to stand for, rather than through the eyes of some intellectually-impaired automaton who just swallows whatever the authorities say, repeating it ad nauseum seemingly oblivious to the hypocrisy of the argument claimed to support it, or perhaps more likely proudly proclaiming a complete disregard for morality, are the villains, Britain and the U.S. have consistently been on the side of the dictators, and in the English language the freedom fighters have been defined as terrorists.