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Comment by willyt | Hacker News Reader

No they’d be geniuses because they would cause economic losses to powerful people a lot like how the good Friday agreement came about quite quickly after the IRA broke every office window in the finicial district of London with a truckload of fertiliser. No-one was killed and glaziers rates went up 10 times for a few months. It caused a big disruption to the financial district but most ordinary people weren’t that bothered by it. Actual terrorism, chopping peoples heads off or letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything, it just pisses ordinary people off and makes them want the government to bomb you right back.

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Which specific IRA bombing are you referring to there? If it's the Baltic Exchange Bombing, 3 people died and 91 were injured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Exchange_bombing

You’re right, I misremembered. I’m not saying that the IRA weren’t bad, they killed more people than 9/11, but they learnt that killing random people was bad for PR and adapted thier tactics to economic targets in the 90’s. I’m from London and I lived through the IRA bombing campaign of the 90’s and the various ISIS attacks of the 2000’s. The IRA made me annoyed, angry maybe but not terrorised, they phoned in warnings and thier attacks were mostly inconvenient. The 7/7 suicide bombers were a completely different intent, they were out to kill as many random people as possible, the IRA weren’t by that stage.

> letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything

Well, it terrorizes. Terror not achieving anything is a bold statement. Maybe you'd prefer to argue that it's not efficient or productive.

But who cares if it terrorises? I mean, I care if my tube train seems scarier than last week but I'm irrelevant. If the goal of Islamic terrorists is to have America or Britain change its foreign policy towards Islamic countries, I think that Islamic terrorism has achieved the opposite of that. If the IRA's goal was to change the position of the British government from 'we don't negotiate with terrorists' then the bombs that had a big impact on the financial centre of the UK had the effect of changing that policy. I'm arguing that terrorising normal people only has the effect of turning normal people against your cause, much like the Blitz which was designed to terrorise the population didn't make the British want to surrender to Germany, and when Britain did gain the upper hand, the British public were happy for the British state to visit worse destruction on German cities.

The main effect of terror is destabilisation, which is also what breeds terrorism. Islamic terrorism in Europe turns people against their muslim demographics, and most importantly promotes populism and right-wing politics in general. Those are all pretty auto-destructive things. Some normal reactions to terrorism is to alienate some demographics or to exact revenge on some countries, both of which just create more recruits for the terrorist. It makes sense if you don't take that universal-islamic-state narrative too seriously.

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