ok so maybe i should be clearer about why i posted the oed defintion in the first place: i understand this entire thread to be rooted in a misunderstanding of what was being debated in other threads on more or less the same topic. the question of basic definition was not in question, and i think it a willful misreading to see that as having been at issue. the question was the politics of its usage. i made the argument here and elsewhere that the cateogry terrorism as the bush administration uses is it worthless analytically. i did not say there were no threats--but that this term says nothing about them and allows you to say nothing about them. the conversation about this has continued in one of the other threads. so your basic objection was already being discussed there. sorry if that was confusing--i imagine it was after a hiatus.
2. the post above was written as if it was continuous with others in the threads that were cut into by this one, so i didnt present everything i had to say on the matter here (another way of saying the same thing).
3. on the terror. i actually took a bit longer than usual on the above post because i was considering whether to say something about that or not. first thing is that many contemporary accounts of the period were written by royalist/conservative opponents of the revolution who understood it as following logically from the execution of louis 16 as a kind of cosmic demonstration of just how bad a thing that was. i could provide you with a long long list of citations for this if you;d like. the revolution freaked out lots of conservative folk. it was also seen quite otherwise by thos who supported the ideals or the policies of the revolution. the question of naming particular phases gets to the politics of writing history.
at the same time, you can see the terror as it actually unfolded as an extreme example of what happens to a state when it decides that it is beset by enemies real and imagined--you could argue that the terror followed from an early variant of the structured paranoia that is central to the administrations politics of "terrorism"---and the revolution was in fact threatened by real enemies--which it supplemented with a healthy dose of imagined correlates. every single revolutionary organization since the jacobins have tried to learn from this period what not to do. the right, which understood the whole of this as Evil from the outset, learned almost nothing from it.
the equation of the jacobin terror to stalin is not good. i dont know if this is a good place to continue this particular line of argument--i could do it at ridiculous length--maybe pm me if you want.
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I do understand your viewpoint on the current use of the word, but again I disagree with your conclusions (surprise! ) I still say that the bombings that plagued US bases and buildings and the killings of Western tourists during the 80's and 90's falls very well under the word "terrorism" even as I can understand the different motivations for the "terrorists". Some of those motivations I can somewhat sympathize with (fear of western cultural contamination, anger over Western policy in the middle east) without actually supporting the methods they use (flying planes into civilian buildings, shooting up buses, blowing up discoteques).
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we are close to agreement here, actually. i would still maintain that the category "terrorism" allows you to understand almost nothing about any of the attacks you talk about here. it lumps them together without any grounds to do so and gets in the way of trying to understand what might prompt someone to undertake such an action.
when i talk about the bush administration's use of the term, i refer specifically to their reponse to 9/11/2001, which has continued to shape its discourse. i would have hoped that i made it clear that i did not think that bush and his entourage had invented this--they didnt. they just ran with it, when presented with a chance to do so. i dont think this was something they planned--i think they simply found themselves in a position that enabled a particular set of aspects of their inclinations to unfold. the contemporary usages of the notion "terror" developed mostly under reagan--there is abundant material out there you can read on this history, should you be so inclined. have a look at "the real terror industry" sometime for a carefully documented study of this---and of the rise of the system of rightwing think tanks--and so the early phases of the formation of the contemporary right medai apparatus. edward herman and gerry o'sullivan wrote it.