Terrorism Defined

The pen is mightier than the sword. This is true; every action is preceded by an idea, and every idea started as words. The sword has no power without the pen, or the spoken word in absence of a pen. In this age of extreme individualism we're all allowed to have our own ideas, our own truths even, our own "alternative facts", which sounds cool and could even be argued for on scientific and philosophic grounds, but has lead to a loss of meaning; we're no longer interested in big questions, for big questions are bigger than the self. We no longer ask: what does it mean to be me, what is my place in the whole, for the self has become the whole.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

We're losing grip on reality in this era of covert solipsism, for reality is literally everything we can all agree on is real; this is what makes the Scientific method the supreme empirical method of defining what's true and what's real. Beyond that we simply need reality to be real to function as a biological entity that needs to successfully navigate and interact with the very real environment to survive. We need reality to be shared if we want to survive as the social creatures we've evolved into. Our ability to communicate hinges on that shared reality being replicated in every individual mind; we would do a poor job indeed if we were to plan our shared future based on the unique model of reality created in each mind, we wouldn't be able to agree on anything at all.

It goes without saying that my reality is slightly different from yours, dear reader, and I, as well as many scientists, keep an open mind regarding the possibility of being a brain in a vat because strictly speaking it's true that only one's mind is sure to exist, that's not my point here. The point is that we NEED to believe we share the same universe to merely function, just like we NEED to believe we have at least a modicum of free will to hang on to our very important sense of having agency. You know I love to dabble in these ideas, but it's important to understand that it ultimately doesn't matter if nothing is real or if free will and the self are mere illusions of consciousness; we NEED them to be real to get along and not die.

Like I said in the introduction though, our era is marked by a loss of a sense of a shared future, let alone a shared fate. "Fate" is by definition directed by events outside a person's control, an idea that holds very little ground among people who've been told over and over again that they themselves are the sole captain on the ship of their lifes, with only their own navigational skills to blame if they get stranded before reaching treasure island. Well, my dear fellow captains, stop blaming your own navigational skills if you feel stranded in the journey of your life, for we're only alone in our minds. In the real world we're connected to everyone else and everything else, and we all help steer each others' ships through the stories we tell, the ideas we share, the conversations we have and the things we agree on together. And we NEED to agree on things, if not on the reality that is, than at least on the reality we create with and for each other through communication, primarily done with words.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
_{source: Wikipedia}

Which nicely loops us back to the beginning: words, their power and their meaning. The quote from the Bible, John 1:1, is just one of many that indicate that reality is created with words, a deep truth even I as an atheist subscribe to, as our shared reality, the one we need to believe in so badly, is truly created by the meaning of the words we tell each other. "Terrorism" must be in the top 100 of most used nouns in recent news-reporting, and is one of the words that prove in modern history how powerful words are. The war on terrorism has been a war on our minds, a remodeling of the world between our ears. In that war, just like in any war, the first casualty was truth. Like in any war we've been told lies about the enemy. The objectives are undefined on purpose; this war has deliberately been kept open-ended, in our minds as well as in the real world, by not defining what a "win" would be. Through this process of endless lies in promotion of an endless war, the word "terrorism" itself has lost its meaning, and we've collectively lost sight of who the real terrorists are.

Recent polls in America show that a slight majority of the people approve of Trump's assassination of Iran's top military general Soleimani; this is fairly reflective of the reporting I've seen in the mainstream press where everyone, regardless if they support or oppose the action, agrees unanimously that Soleimani was a bad person at best and an outright terrorist at worst. Soleimani doesn't fit the definition of the word "terrorist", and his actions were not "terrorism". If we look up the word in Wikipedia, under the heading "modern definitions", we find:

There are over 109 different definitions of terrorism. American political philosopher Michael Walzer in 2002 wrote: "Terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, to spread fear through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders".
_{source: Wikipedia}

Soleimani didn't kill innocent people, not as far as I'm able to know. He trained people to fight against American soldiers, who are, I'm sad to say, not innocent. He didn't kill at random to spread fear, but organized very targeted attacks against enemy combatants. What Trump did was illegal and unconstitutional. If we take the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations' definition of terrorism, "the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives" (source), we can safely argue that Trump's targeted bombing of Soleimani IS terrorism. You won't hear this on TV, but I like to keep it real, so there you are; Trump is the Terrorist In Chief, as were many American presidents before him, Bush and Obama most recently. Don't let their rhetoric model your reality any longer, ignore their words just like they've ignored your demands, their promises to you. Next time vote for a real person, one that's proven over and over again that he's not the usual puppet-material and won't bow to the demands of the "moneyed interests". You know who he is ;-)

_{Jeremy Corbyn Shreds Trump's Illegal Assassination To Hostile Media}

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