No, which is why I said "mostly". Incidents like Bloody Sunday and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings I would characterise as extreme violence.
I guess you wouldn't, though, since not enough people died in them.
> The bombing experienced by the South
> Ossetians ten days ago was just the militaristic punctuation of a violence
> they've lived with by existing between two nationalisms for the last two
> decades. It's more obvious and was probably more bloody, but it wasn't
> exceptional.
I wonder if the South Ossetians think there was nothing exceptional about it. I'm inclined to suspect otherwise. Anyway, the fact that violence had been going on for some time doesn't contradict the point I was making which was that the Russian response was to the bombing in particular. Clearly they could have intervened at any time citing this day-to-day violence as justification. It took the bombing to prompt them to do it. Incidentally, in response to Boddi's point, there is also no contradiction between that and it being part of a broader strategic plan. I'd assume that strategists for most states (and non-state combatants for that matter) plan ahead for how they are going to respond to such potential attacks, and do so in large part on the basis of their long-term objectives. It's still a reaction by definition if it would not have occurred in the absence of the initial attack, and in this case there's no indication that it would have.