Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

I'd say "political violence against civilians", in which case we're 0-for-2 with this being neither violent nor aimed at civilians.

View on HN

How are Anonymous's typical shenanigans (dumping user databases and posting millions of people's personal data online in an attempt to "shame" the site owner) not aimed directly at civilians? It's like rigging the elevator cables in a building to fail. Sure, the company responsible for the elevator maintenance looks bad, but you also kill people.

Sure "Anonymous" has mostly remained nonviolent, but they regularly harm innocent people to attempt to acheive their goals.

Oh sure, this isn't terrorism, and calling it that is just silly.

"Political violence against civilians" isn't quite right, because "civilians" can nevertheless wage war. What happens when two nations fight against each other with the full backing of their "civilian" populations, who actively provide all of the funding and materiel to fight the war? Is it off-limits to attack civilians? Should that sort of warfare be lumped in with terrorism?

Non-combattants should be off-limits imo, yes. However war and terrorism are completely different. It's generally accepted that there may be civilian casualties in a war zone, and that is clearly not terrorism (intimidation, maybe).

Unprovoked, unilateral attacks seem to be the more traditional form of terrorism (basically using fear to try and influence behavior), in particular when performed by groups not (officially) affiliated with a specific government.

Let's take an example from history. You have a country like Britain during WWII. It is a democracy, it has elected a government which has chosen to make war against Germany. There is widespread public support for the government and for the choice of making war against Germany. More so, the civilian economy is in high gear supporting the war effort (supplying food, clothing, arms, ammunition, vehicles, etc.)

I can understand being apprehensive about violence against non-combatants, but in the above situation what exactly is the justification for excluding attacking civilians?

Well, that's a bad example because there've been dozens of papers regarding strategic bombing in WWII, and almost all of them concluded it was a failure as far as affecting production capability of the bombee, and a worse failure as far as morale.

So on the efficacy front, it didn't make sense, and on the honor front it's on some pretty shaky ground. Of course, it happened, so there's that.

It's one thing to say that it's ineffective to bomb residential neighborhoods. It's another thing to say that it's always illegitimate. Also, what about factories staffed by civilians producing ball bearings or tires?

Or, in more recent conflicts, attacking truck drivers, weapons system maintainers, UAV operators, base entry point security guards, drivers/security for intelligence agencies, etc. At the very least, this forces the military to devote more resources to force protection for these contractors; it also limits operations out with the populace, and drives a wedge between the occupying military and the civilians in which the insurgents can survive.

And also there was a lot of resistance to targeting purely civilian areas especially early on. Later on Germany did specifically terror raids Coventry for example.

But even hamburg was a major center for the support of U boats so you can see why the threat of the later Elektroboote Tpe XXI boats would put them on the target list.

Oh and my Fathers house was hit by a bomb - but they where going for the Largest Spitfire factory in the UK so it wasn't his house they were trying to hit.

Has there been a war in history where civilians were not fair game?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com