From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Sat 16 Nov 2002 - 14:46:15 GMT
Thanks for the undcp lead, Wade. I hadn't heard of them until your email.
I have been going around and around on how important it is to define
'terrorism.' No definition that I have assayed generates general agreement.
Sometimes it is because my government friends don't want to admit the
possibility that the Us or other States might be considered terrorists in
any of their activities. Others may disagree because of their different
concepts of 'terror.' Would a wife-beater be a terrorist? Would a
policy-maker who threatens harm to foreign populations, or domestic ones?
The more I probe the language, the further I am from a satisfactory
definition. I distrusted the 'war on terrorism' language from the first
moment Bush launched it, but only came to understand the depths of
linguistic weakness when I probed this nominally simple matter of
definition.
In running into this difficulty though, it got me thinking about the
cognitive structures that lay behind the language, and that has proved
immensely fruitful, so it has not been a waste of time, at all.
Cheers to all,
Lawry
-----Original Message-----
From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
Jeremy Bradley
Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2002 6:03 AM
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: The terrorism meme
At 08:03 AM 15/11/02 -0500, you wrote:
>
>On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 07:57 , Lawrence DeBivort wrote:
>
>> The US gov't definition of 'terrorism' excludes acts by States, which
>> means,
>> if one accepts the definition, that States can engage in terrorist
>> activities (as many have, e.g. the death gangs in central and south
>> America)
>> without being called such.
>
>There is no working definition of terrorism, at present, in the world.
>This from http://www.undcp.org/odccp/terrorism_definitions.html is an
>attempt.
>
>- Wade
That's not far off mine Wade ;~>
Jeremy
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