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interesting...thanks for that.
i would have thought the bolsheviks would not count as a terrorist organization given their internal organization....clear inside/outside distinctions, well-articulate command systems etc. maybe the mensheviks, social revolutionaries and anarchists would have been, though. strange what this distinction leads you to once you start sorting things.
the budget remark was mostly about making a distinction between a modern-style bureaucratic state and older types of bureaucratic organization. it was (another) instance of trying to use shorthand and muddying things up in the process. the main thing that distinguishes modern state forms from earlier ones is budgeting and all that budgeting requires in terms of information-gathering and colating. budgets are a kind of prompt for a state form geared toward a type of permanent surveillance....these are quite different from the type of centralized administration under louis 16....at any rate, things get murky here typologically.
i am just not so sure about grouping the french terror as you do.
the devil is in the details.
maybe that is why i write too much.
on whether a soldier can be a "terrorist": it seems like you are addressing problems like those which came up during the nuremburg trials in trying to work out whether you can hold bureaucrats accountable for atrocities committed by bureaucracies and how you go about doing it. if i follow you correctly, it seems that you would argue that individuals within a bureaucratic apparatus could be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity, but they would not for that be "terrorists"--which is fine---but i am not sure i see the force of the argument.
more generally, it seems like we are creeping into the strange world of "concept history" (there is a german expression for this, but i am blanking on it right now) which is interesting as a way of tracking shifts in usage, but confusing when you try to turn that history onto usages in the present.
maybe underneath this lurks the good mr. wittgenstein's problem with the notion of meaning. a cardboard cutout version of his position: there is only usage. the idea of meaning assumes that all features are simultaneously present--meanings are kind of platonic forms, then--they do not fundamentally change across time--they may acquire new features or predicates, but if you are focussed on meaning, you simply tack them on to the manifold of others. the strange thing is that this focus on meaning leads you to assume that all features that have been associated with a word are simultaneously operational in each pattern of usage. i dont think that is the case.
the current uses of the term terrorism seem to come from the late60s=early 70s--groups like baader-meinhof and the red brigades in particular (to a lesser extent the weather underground in the states) which indulged in a variety of tactics designed to shake the legitimacy of the state by demonstrating the hollowness of its claims to provide security, etc.---these were leninist-style organizations that adopted direct action tactics, and so link back to the version of anarchism embodied by folk like bakunin.
the actions were on the order of blowing up symbolic buildings, robberies, kidnappings, etc...these actions were getting a ton of press around 1972, when the black september group carried out its attack on the israeli olympic team in munich.
i think that this is how the term surfaced in the west again and slid into the context of describing political actions carried out by palestinian groups in particular. timing rather than substance.
there is a difference between terror as a revolutionary tactic and terror as a term in public discourse, however: in the former, it is a type of political act; in the latter, the same term refers to the surface features of an act and functions to undercut the idea that it is politically motivated.
from this point, i tend to agree with chomsky, edward herman et al on the present uses of the term "terrorism" and their effects.
i think the category state-terrorism was worked by chomsky as an inversion of the dominant usage. he compiled the various features that characterized teh dominant usage of the term and argued that these same features could be applied to illegitimate state actions just as easily as they could to anything else. i would see this as a political move on chomsky's part rather than as an analytic point. i agree with the politics behind the move, however: it does function to highlight the arbitrariness of the terrorist/not terrorist distinctions you find in the dominant ideology/media apparatus (the example of the contras is a good one here)
i think this is more the field we are stuck in than is the field that you are arguing for.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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