Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 18:56:08 -0500 From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com> Subject: [lbo-talk] Re: LBO-Talk = Outliers (What Do The Iraqi
Resistance French and Jewish resistance groups in WWII? From what little I know of them, they didn't hesitate to attack civilians whom they suspected of collaborating (or was that not case? I'm not sure) or butcher soldiers. And weren't there terrorist actions by North Vietnamese commies against
South Viet Nam and its citizens, as well as the US troops?
These things may have occurred, but that was not my point. My point was that the terrorism I spoke of is not liberaratory in itself, and that if a measure of liberation was achieved then this was despite such incidents not because of them. As for killing soldiers, well that is not part of my definition of terrorism. I call that self defence. Let me give you an example of terrorism in my home town. Just prior to the change of regime in South Africa, the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress suddenly embarked on a spate of terrorist activities, targetting particularly those places where racial mixing was taking place, like the St James church in the street where I was living at the time and the Heidelberg tavern near where I live now. They burst in and sprayed the worshippers and drinkers with automatic weapon fire and lobbed in grenades. Many were killed or maimed. What was the contribution of this to liberation in SA? Less than zero in my view - it was just an expression of a dehumanised mentality that saw blacks mixing with whites as something ideologically unacceptable and hateful. I think that the terrorism we are seeing in Iraq (I'm NOT talking about the killing of American combatants, which leaves me cold, I have to say) is of the same order. Tahir