Fighting Words

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

wmccomninel — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:13:14 GMT

disigny:
wmccomninel: I applaud your levelheaded posts. But you must realize that any productive discussion about what to do about it, is going to break some eggs: I fail to see any way to prevent "Terrorism" and "War" that doesn't involve serious ideological reorientations, such as making killing people illegal in a World Wide sense. At present, of course, war, terrorism, torture , etc. is not illegal; if it were, soldiers wouldn't be doing it. Presidents would not take the chance that they might be prosecuted for it. This is a very difficult thing for most people to imagine, that a President be limited to the same powers as the Mayor of a large City, for example. disigny

First I would note that I am not advocating a particular position regarding the use of force or what could be defined as torture nor am I condoning all such actions, my aim has been to merely acknowledge that certain forceful actions do in fact exist in our world and that the legal framework surrounding such activities is ambiguous at best and contradictory when looked at more closely. The relationship between the justice systems of individual nations and the ‘international justice system’ is particularly problematic (not just regarding the use of force or torture but as AIG has demonstrated also in finance and business too). Even more amazing to me is the troubling disconnect which exists between America’s criminal justice system (think FBI) and the loosely constructed legal framework used to provide national security (think FISA). The foreign/domestic dichotomy is a real nuisance for our courts; since we swear to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic when we serve our nation it is a perennial problem which must be addressed. We are yet to do that in a clear way. Also note that a city mayor has no such burdensome responsibility to uphold the Constitution and to defend America.

I do not imagine that our own President ought to be restricted to only those powers of a city mayor but I do recognize that any President must be constrained by our Constitution and also by the coordinate powers of the Congress and the Supreme Court. Vis-à-vis the ‘international justice system’, whatever that may in fact be, our President has even less well defined powers or more to the point, limitations placed upon the powers available to them. I heard on the TV news last night that our former President may need to be concerned about visiting foreign nations because he could be subject to being charged with crimes from his terms in office and detained. The authority and jurisdiction to do such a thing is not clear.

Few people even attempt to understand the nature and extent of these fundamental and crucially important issues regarding legitimate political power and most people reduce their own arguments to the least common denominator and engage in quibbling about which derogatory terms to employ about their politicians and other un-elected partisans (aka terrorists, dissidents etc) or else they simply engage in ad hominem attacks upon one another.

It is a rather hopeless legal and political mess. It does seem to favor lawyers who aspire to become President though (Clinton, Obama) since lawyers are the only ones who understand the legalistic nonsense which obfuscates the core underlying issues. Poor Bush was just too honest or too innocent of the lawyers’ ways or both to stay out of hot water.

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

disigny — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:49:32 GMT

wmccomninel: I applaud your levelheaded posts. But you must realize that any productive discussion about what to do about it, is going to break some eggs: I fail to see any way to prevent "Terrorism" and "War" that doesn't involve serious ideological reorientations, such as making killing people illegal in a World Wide sense. At present, of course, war, terrorism, torture , etc. is not illegal; if it were, soldiers wouldn't be doing it. Presidents would not take the chance that they might be prosecuted for it. This is a very difficult thing for most people to imagine, that a President be limited to the same powers as the Mayor of a large City, for example. disigny

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

wmccomninel — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:20:24 GMT

fozzy:

"TERRORIST (from the Darryl dictionary) noun - a person who uses violent actions to further a political point"

So when U.S. soldiers (people) use violence to further a political point (democracy) they are "terrorists"? Perhaps the Sophists were onto something...

Why quibble? On the battlefield there are no Sophists, there are no Terrorists, there are only the quick and the dead. On the wall where I worked in Iraq someone had written, "Only the dead know the end of war - Plato".

The real question is why, if America is presently engaged in no less than two active wars as I hear about on the news, are so damn few Americans actively engaged in actual warfare? It is so much safer for them to quibble. And for the journalists who stir the pot quibbling pays their bills for as long as they have a following (its called writing potboilers). Never mind the price which others must pay for your hobby of avoiding responsibility and playing parlor games with euphemisms about the most serious problems of our time.

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

fozzy — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:49:51 GMT

"TERRORIST (from the Darryl dictionary) noun - a person who uses violent actions to further a political point"

So when U.S. soldiers (people) use violence to further a political point (democracy) they are "terrorists"? Perhaps the Sophists were onto something...

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

fozzy — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:49:31 GMT

"TERRORIST (from the Darryl dictionary) noun - a person who uses violent actions to further a political point"

So when U.S. soldiers (people) use violence to further a political point (democracy) they are "terrorists"? P

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

wmccomninel — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:41:05 GMT

sawmonkey10:
It's all semantics, isnt it? The fact that Hitchens is calling these assholes terrorists instead of dissidents seems to be lost on you. TERRORIST (from the Darryl dictionary) noun - a person who uses violent actions to further a political point. Nuff said?

No, not really. I was in Iraq in 2004 playing soldier and those incoming rockets and mortars were not mere semantics to me. Now I'm home in the USA (OK, actually I have been homeless for over two year now) and I am trying to comprehend the disjoint between the realities of our world and the crap which I see and hear the media spewing; and even more incredible to me is the way that the public eats up the slop and the political Kool-Aid like they were hamburgers and cold beer at a Fourth of July picnic. I can see that mine is doomed to be a minority view.

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

sawmonkey10 — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:07:23 GMT

Should have said agenda.

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

sawmonkey10 — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:06:04 GMT

It's all semantics, isnt it? The fact that Hitchens is calling these assholes terrorists instead of dissidents seems to be lost on you. TERRORIST (from the Darryl dictionary) noun - a person who uses violent actions to further a political point. Nuff said?

Re: Dissent over the usage of dissident...

wmccomninel — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:58:55 GMT

Your post is thoughtful and well researched and written (I did not confirm your references but will take your word for them). Yet I still find a shallowness to the enterprise of ‘parsing’ such as the Clinton administration bemoaned even while they were perfecting the technique (What is ‘is’?) http://www.slate.com/id/1000162/ . Arguing over what is the ‘best’ euphemism to deploy or even about why all euphemisms are bad is worse than not arguing at all. Why not employ your intelligence and resources to the underlying problems which are being subjected to such euphemistic and offhanded dismissal?

It is self-serving to demonstrate how clever you are while not using your abilities to redress legitimate grievances in the public arena. It is the responsibility of democratically structured societies to engage in significant debate over the pressing problems of their times, even those problems which are perennial or recalcitrant. Resorting to catch phrases and euphemisms only makes the statement that the author is comfortably glum about business as usual, something which I regrettably expect from Mr. Hitchens but see no useful reason for his readers to emulate too.

Dissent over the usage of dissident...

fozzy — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:33:09 GMT

I am afraid the Mr. Hitchens may have been led astray, even if by so esteemed a source as the Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps he picked up a very old edition. At any rate, the description of various armed groups, revolutionaries, terrorists, etc. as "dissidents" is not uncommon since the end of World War II. Hitch may want to believe that there has been some kind of agreement that the term dissident refers to "only attitudes, not actions", but that does not seem to be the case, OED or not.

Take a look in Hansard (the record of Parliament). There in 1946 you will find the term "dissident bodies" used to describe what are elsewhere called "terrorist groups" such as the Stern Gang and Irgun. In 1950 there was the prospect of fighting "dissident forces" in Fiji. In July of '55 there was talk of Aden "disturbances" being caused by armed "dissident tribesmen." In 1957 Mr. John Profumo (!) defended the British bombing of Danaba, Aden, on the grounds that "dissident tribesmen" had attacked an English patrol. In '56 armed Africans were said to be carrying out "active dissidence." In July of '57 there was concern that "modern arms" were reaching "dissidents" in Oman. In May of '58 there was concern that US arms were reaching "dissident forces" in Indonesia. By 1963 "dissidents" in the Congo were wreaking havoc. And so it goes....

None of the noted groups was pacifist, or even peaceful. They were clearly not just engaging in theoretical non-belief in majority views --- they were killing people and blowing things up. And they were being called "dissidents" by British leaders (MPs and Government Officials) of various stripes long before the recent application of the term to an IRA subgroup.

Is "dissident" such a bad descriptor? It is not mutually exclusive to "terrorist". Just because a newspaper uses only one descriptor, that does not mean that no other descriptors apply. Once everyone learns that the IRA is a "terrorist" group then that descriptor becomes redundant. It might be more informative to call them a "dissident" IRA group to emphasize that they disagree with the majority view of the IRA --- not that they are pacifist dissenters. After all, if all IRA are terrorists then some descriptor other than terrorist must be come up with differentiate sub-groups.

Times change, and language changes with it. Words that can be used as euphemisms are sometimes also valuable or have specialized meanings (within, say, political science). For example, most of what we today call "terrorist acts" were once called "outrages" by the British. But you can be outraged by a lot of things, and over time terrorism came to imply a political goal behind the violence and thus be a more specific descriptor of action by political groups (as opposed to ordinary "outrages" by hungry mobs, etc.). And just as one man's terrorist can be another man's freedom fighter, even the 'negative' connotations of the words themselves can be in dispute. In the 1970s there were vocal Jews in Israel who ranted against calling Palestinians "terrorists" because the word had a positive connotation, at least to those who had engaged in or supported Zionist terrorism. For example, a book title like "The Lady was a Terrorist" was considered laudatory in 50s Israel. Look at the evolution of -- and battles over -- the adjectives "conservative" and "liberal" in political discourse. The two words twist about one another like DNA over the course of centuries. Who is to say precisely by whom (or when) the correct definition was applied?