The dictionary will catch up:
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You can lead a horse to waterâŚ
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It isnât an empire. I donât know what you call it. Meddling in foreign affairs? The US isnât unique in doing those things, does that mean these other countries are empires too, or because their bad behavior isnât on as large of scale?
Yeah maybe. I guess if you keep misusing a word long enough, itâs meaning changes. Decimate used to mean 10% of something. And now we literally have âliterallyâ not meaning âliterallyâ.
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You should move to France, they try to crack down on that kind of thing there. Here in the US lexical shift is normal. If youâd like to try to fight it, since the use of the term in this sense dates at least to the 1800s, youâre going to have a tough battle.
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I am aware language is plastic. In this case I think it is a word used because there 1) it is a powerful sounding word, and 2) there isnât a handy substitute.
Sort of like Socialism. What many label as Socialism isnât actually Socialism. But Socialism is bad, so they use it as an umbrella, catch all word.
Might I suggest the word âhegemonyâ?
And if that sounds too friendly, we might add various adjectives to point out how it serves the United Statesâ economic interests or how itâs not quite compatible with idea of democracy.
Right. Just as the Romans werenât unique in subjugating other peoples in their time. They just were better at it.
But please, point me to the last time Austria even attempted to assassinate a democratically elected leader of a foreign country. Weâre not playing in the same league as America, but we would have a chance against Slovenia. I canât think of an example, but maybe if you go back to the time when Austria was an empireâŚ
- They have a less imperialistic outlook on world affairs than the US does.
No. That one was blindingly obvious from the start.
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Article aside, I have to say, âHow would you explain the difference between X and Y to a space alien?â gave me a little flash of insight. Thatâs how I always think about everything. No wonder I donât have many friends.
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If you are an establishment country, what you do is war. If you are an upstart, what you do is terrorism. In the first half of the existence of the USA, this country supported revolutionaries, in the second half of its existence, it supported establishment.
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Socialism is only used as a magic bad word to describe those parts of socialism that can be sold as bad, not the parts which everybody likes.
Essentially every war in history has heavily involved âviolence, against civilians, for the purpose of political changeâ.
In medieval times, the primary war-fighting method was to slaughter your opponentâs peasants and burn their crops. Hot knight-on-knight action was the exception, not the rule.
In the Napoleonic era, the French raped and looted their way across Spain for years. Meanwhile, the British were happily starting war after war after war in India, slaughtering the civilians of Badajoz and shelling Amsterdam. Also, legalised piracy.
In WWI, we have the slaughter of Serbia and Albania, the Armenian genocide, assorted British atrocities in the Middle East, commerce raiding and unrestricted submarine warfare.
In WWII, the Blitz, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the attempted genocide of Eastern Europe, etc.
Korea: mass civilian slaughter by all sides.
Vietnam: free-fire zones, Agent Orange, âdestroy the village to save itâ, etc.
Iraq: âshock and aweâ, civilian-killing embargos, bombing of sewage and power infrastructure, etc.
Any definition of terrorism that doesnât exclude ânormalâ war just emphasises the point that the difference is largely rhetorical.
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Yeah, but you see, none of those civilians died because their killers MEANT to kill them. When a city is bombed for example, the bombers are just trying to knock down buildings. Or something.
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A quick thought: terrorism is to war as vigilante is to police.
By dictionary meaning itâs accurate but unfortunately using it outside of academic or think tank type contexts, it comes off like text from a PRC or DPRK flack.
Interesting. I thought communist propaganda mainly relied on the word âimperialistâ.
But Iâm not a native speaker of English, so after learning the German word âHegemonieâ in high school history class (referring to ancient Greece), the first time I remember encountering the English word is Dan Simmonsâ Hyperion, where it is used just because Simmons didnât want to write about yet another Galactic Empire.
Nice analogy⌠it only collapses when you notice that police forces donât fight each other, and neither police nor vigilantes deliberately target innocents.
I can think of four dimensions to distinguish the various terms by:
- state-run or non-state
- open (uniform-wearing) or covert (blending in with civilians)
- choice of targets: combatants or non-combatants
- legitimacy: do âweâ think they are good guys or bad guys?
So:
state-run and open: military
state-run and covert: secret service
non-state and open: militia?
non-state and covert: guerilla?
non-state, covert and legitimate: freedom fighters
non-state, covert and illegitimate: terrorists
state-run, directed against non-combatants and illegitimate: âstate terrorismâ
state-run, open, directed against non-combatants and legitimate: âcollateral damageâ
Not sure Iâve got all the connotations right on the terms militia and guerilla.
Dimension 4 is, of course, an entirely subjective and therefore mostly useless distinction.
For state actors, the choice of targets can change whether their actions are perceived as legitimate or not, but it is not part of the definition of the terms âmilitaryâ, âsoldierâ, and âsecret serviceâ.
Non-state covert combatants are sometimes considered less legitimate than state-run uniformed military forces (even by people who consider both their enemies) because when your enemy is a state, you always know who to negotiate peace with, and when when your enemy wears uniforms, it is made easier for you to choose only/mostly combatants as targets.
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Which is why I made it âterrorism is to war as vigilante is to policeâ rather than âterrorists are to soldiers as vigilantes are to policeâ. The analogous part is in how theyâre viewed, not what they do.
Vigilantes and police, in theory, both serve justice and order. But vigilantism is socially disapproved of in most circumstances, while policing is not. This is due in large part to the perception that vigilante justice tends to be arbitrary, biased and overly likely to target the innocent. In theory, state-controlled police forces are less arbitrary, less biased and more wary of punishing the innocent.
In practice, of course, state-controlled police are highly imperfect; the claim isnât that state police are immune to the problems that plague vigilantism, just more resistant (and even that is debatable in some times and places).
Similarly, soldiers and terrorists both serve to defend one group of people from their supposed enemies, by means of violence. But, although soldiers are recognised as being highly imperfect, they are less generally condemned than terrorists, due to a perception that state-sanctioned violence is less prone to careless or malicious deployment.
Again, not immune to such abuses, just less likely. And, once again, the ethical and/or practical superiority of restricting use of force to the state is both highly questionable and extremely variable across time and cultures.
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Soviet era and early PRC for sure, âimperialist running dogâ for example, but at some point that stopped working on the Western left and the preferred term changed.
But isnât this the very sort of rhetoric which just muddies the waters rather than clarifies?
Really? Have you seen Syria lately? Afghanistan? Iraq? Sudan? Nigeria? We also set off a fair amount of conflict DURING the Cold War, itself⌠In addition to old imperial powers attempting to hold onto at least some of their holdings, they handed off some to us, and we fought with the Soviets over a number of places. The Cold War was a rather violent period, especially from the perspective of the global south. While weâre certainly not responsible for all of it (some you can chalk up to local actors or the Soviets), we did not help. Just because Europe was more peaceful doesnât mean the rest of the world wasâŚ
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Arenât you assuming that what an empire is consists of a static definition over time? The British empire was not the same as the Roman one, but they were both empires⌠concepts and ideas change over time. Thatâs called history!
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Or word play
