PSYCH 424 blog

IF you were offend by the title of this blog…Good! Now let me preface that this is NOT intend to advocate violence or radicalism but unfortunately this day in age requires me to address the political correctness police or “social justice warriors” a term coined by the stand up comedian Joe Rogan. I will not dwell on the over emphasized political correctness movement of this country, however I will not ignore it is very much related or a symptom of a greater issue facing this country.

Now, if you are still reading this, I would like to explain the purpose of this blog entry, which is simply to stimulate a dialogue and shift in perspective. In my humble opinion a shift in social conscious is necessary before the War on Terrorism can be resolved. Before a solution to any problem can be determined operational definitions must be agreed upon. So, I will present my operational definition or interpretation of: The War on Terrorism. According to the United State’s FBI agency Terrorism is defined as the following:

Definitions of Terrorism in the U.S. Code

18 U.S.C. § 2331 defines “international terrorism” and “domestic terrorism” for purposes of Chapter 113B of the Code, entitled “Terrorism”:

“International terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

• Involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
• Appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
• Occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum.*

“Domestic terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics:

• Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
• Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and
• Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

18 U.S.C. § 2332b defines the term “federal crime of terrorism” as an offense that:

• Is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct; and
• Is a violation of one of several listed statutes, including § 930(c) (relating to killing or attempted killing during an attack on a federal facility with a dangerous weapon); and § 1114 (relating to killing or attempted killing of officers and employees of the U.S.).

* FISA defines “international terrorism” in a nearly identical way, replacing “primarily” outside the U.S. with “totally” outside the U.S. 50 U.S.C. § 1801(c).

My question still remains what is terrorism? Furthermore, I would urge you to read the following: http://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/terrorism

I wanted to provide the previous link to demonstrate that this is not a new thought or approach to terrorism. So, what is a definition or explanation of terrorism that I agree with?

Here is a good place to start: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/terrorism/

For the sake of time and your attention span, I will simply state there is no firm “operational definition” of terrorism, in my opinion. Now that we have hopefully reached some middle ground about the definition of terrorism or not that is ok too; we can explore war. Here is another link to a good starting point (my opinion): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

The take home message or emphasis from the previous site is the following: “War is a phenomenon which occurs only between political communities”

I will now try to synthesize the two previous concepts or The War on Terrorism and provide my opinion. I argue that because terrorism is ideology based and “war is a phenomenon which occurs only between political communities”, the War on Terrorism is fundamentally flawed. If you have followed the recent uprising or development of ISIS (how could you not) the reason there has been much debate about whether ISIS is an established “political state” is paramount in my opinion, because of what I’m attempting to explain… Legally speaking in order for the War on Terrorism to be “ethical” ISIS is required to be recognized as a “political community”.

I do not want this discussion to be driven by political disposition and morph into more of an “US versus THEM” mentality. In fact my goal is the complete opposite. I think that in order for the War on Terrorism to be RESOLVED not WON, because there is and will not be a single “winner”; we as a society must indulge or simply just attempt to adopt an opposition’s perspective, given not an easily surmountable task but necessary in my opinion before what the alleged goal of any war: Peace; can be accomplished.   I will not arrogantly speak to what the collective social conscious change must be or how it will be accomplished; rather, I think the first step is to attempt to consider another individual’s perspective or the politically charged words beliefs or faith.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2015 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.