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But rb, are you suggesting that spasmodic and arbitrary expressions of violence are somehow virtuous or productive?
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uh....no.
the argument is basically in two parts:
first that i understand the types of political action grouped conventionally as "terrorism" to be reactive to particular contextual factors.
the justification, if any, for a particular action lay in the question of who is doing it (which organization, how it is structured) and why (its politics).
the move from 1 to 2, and the content of 2, indicates that central to any possible justification is not only planning but symbolic/political narrative.
so no: nothing about spontaneity in that. rather the inverse. i assume that an action that could possibly be justified ethically would have to be deliberate.
i used fanon to talk about the pathology of domination--you're right to take the next step within that framework----but that is also the place where i totally disagree with fanon and find his conception of revolutionary action as therapy (the "new man" emerging as a function of the violence itself, as if that violence was purgative) to be dangerous.
as for a committment to pacifism, i agree with pigglet in no. 47 on that.
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Lot of fucking good all this killing has done for us, yeah
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no-one likes any of this.
i dont think the question of how one evaluates such actions politically and ethically is linked to whether one likes any of this or not.
like i said, i dont think anyone in their right mind would not prefer peace to its inverse.
but not all situations allow for it.
and the root cause of this sort of violence is the systematic oppression of people.
it can become so bad that folk are able to imagine that violence is a way of asserting their dignity: pacifism assumes people already have dignity---but there are forms of domination that strip that away, such that the principle "i am a human being and as a human being i have dignity" becomes a motor for violence.
it sucks that these situations exist.
thinking about them does not make me--or anyone else who looks at them--a happier person.