Two anons on an image board similar to 4chan discusses the topic of terrorism. The first posits that terrorism is largely futile, prompting a second anon to offer a surprisingly insightful and chilling rebuttal.
The first anon’s claim, which honestly is fairly common among the general population:
Terrorism in general is a fucking brainlet tier political strategy, but terrorism against unarmed civilians is especially so. You’re not significantly hurting any government or system, you’re not costing anybody a lot of money, you’re not killing a significant portion of a population or crucial government assets, you’re just making you and everybody even vaguely affiliated with you look like bloodthirsty retards.
https://www.e-ir.info/2014/06/22/is-terrorism-an-effective-way-to-attain-poltical-goals/ citation related, the only way that terrorism would theoretically “work” is if you were to dedicate your entire life from a very early age to infiltrating a terrorist group who you DONT align with and perpetuate a terrorist attack on behalf of a political enemy, which is obviously unobtainable LARP tier and has the moral implications of gunning down and/or killing people who you are supposedly aligned with, but the prevalence of “false flag” theories every time an attack like this happens and the utter absence of false flag theories when ever a muzzie shoots up a place shows that most people understand the ineffectiveness of terrorist attacks implicitly.
The above claim in turn elicits the following response:
Want some examples? I present you as an example of the effectiveness of terrorism.
Tell me, when is the last time you were able to express your completely normal racial feelings in public or in earshot of a leftist?
Not recently, huh?
Why is this?
Because you know that if you expressed your completely legal rights to a completely normal feeling in front of a liberal, you would likely end up the victim of a terror campaign waged by the ADL to make you jobless and homeless. If you’re unlucky, you would be physically assaulted, have your house set on fire, and maybe even be killed.
It has happened before.
So you keep your mouth shut.
That’s political terrorism and by god does it work. The ADL is a terrorist organization.
Terrorism works by making it unpleasant and dangerous to express certain political opinions. In other words, by killing or injuring some people who you may not even know, terrorists cause you to change your own behavior.
Now let’s discuss my favourite topic; economic terrorism applied to states.
You probably don’t fly a Swastika in front of your home because you know that the ADL or their lackeys would wage economic terrorism against you and that is unpleasant. Now hypothetically apply this same logic on a larger scale.
A state engages in a behavior that a group dislikes. In retaliation they do pic related every time they don’t get their way.
Sure, the government can weather a few major banks going under. Keep calm and carry on after all. But keep this up for a year, two years, three years and the calculating elites behind every government will begin making mental calculations on the costs of continuing this war.
Now let’s bring the discussion of “terrorism” down a notch and discuss the micro level again hypothetically.
Let’s simplify matters to two examples; One is a real-world historical example and the other is a potential future if things do not change.
Say you’re a bloke in South Armagh County Ireland in 1982. The British are here and so is the PIRA. You could collaborate with the British authorities. But if you do that, the Provos will almost certainly find out and blow your fucking head off if they don’t break every bone in your body first. Thus, even if you do not support Irish nationalism, even if you’re not even a Catholic, you will most likely keep your mouth shut and applaud when needed and not talk to the Brits.
I want to include another example; You’re in the same place at the same time but now you’re a British soldier. You could proactively patrol the surrounding farmlands and villages and interact with the community to gain their trust and bring these ‘orrid troubles to an end. But if you show your face outside your compound, you’re likely to be shot. If you drive around in an armoured cab, you’re likely to run over an IED and go home a cripple or worse. And if you try to live in a house anywhere in Derry, the Provos will come to your apartment, drag you and maybe your family out and shoot you. So you don’t. You keep your arse in your bunker and sulk.
That’s how the PIRA cleaned an entire country of enemy soldiers.
Now let’s imagine that someday White Americans get tired of being run out of our homes and ethnically replaced by these hostile shitskins. So one man goes to the border and starts randomly applying the same PIRA logic to these greedy, sneering bastards vomiting forth from the swamps of Mexico.
These greedy spics come here because they know that they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. If they also heard that Americans might shoot people crossing the border, the flood would end. Less and less people would risk entering the USA because free gibs is still not a fair trade off for death.
Even a few such instances would be enough to spook the swarm. Don’t believe me? Go ask your neighbors whether they became afraid of air travel in the wake of 9/11. Half of America was preparing for the apocalypse after the DC snipers even though they only killed a few random people in a small area. And just a few anthrax laced letters made millions of Sally Soccer-moms and Joe six-packs across America afraid of their own mail.
You’re more likely to die in your own bathtub than be killed in an Islamic terror attack. Yet ask almost anyone and they’ll tell you that they’re afraid. They’re afraid of offending Muslims because of a few people they never met were killed randomly by Muslims in retaliation for slights.
Now let’s discuss tertiary effects of terrorism. Let’s bring things back up to the Macro level but remember that this works in all cases.
Say that you’re an aggrieved group in say, I dunno, Spain or something. Say you’re Basque and the Spanish government has revoked your ethnic autonomous status and is now flooding your province with shitskins in an act of literal biological war against the Euskadi. So after years of pleading and begging for a peaceful redress of your peoples’ grievances, the Basque people get tired of having their rights trampled upon and go back to the terrorism that made them a special autonomous region in the first place.
Every couple of weeks, a large bomb is detonated outside or underneath a major bank or a politician who is responsible for this atrocity is kidnapped and murdered. This will continue for as long as the Spanish government refuses to respect Basque rights.
How long do you think it would take them to figure it out and cut off the flood? How many banks? How many airports? How much money would you want to hemorrhage before you stopped this insane, ridiculous policy of flooding Navarre with shitskins?
Now contemplate what might happen if the Northwest Front behaved like the Neo-ETA in this hypothetical exercise.
Terrorism in Spain
Sorry, I lost my train of thought due to an IRL distraction. I was talking about tertiary effects of terrorism.
Anyway, so here you are, a Basque in Spain blowing up banks. Even if you just blow up one bank, the Regime will panic because the bankers are panicking. The bankers are screaming that the System do something to stop this holocaust of bank explosions.
But the System cannot do anything to stop angry dissidents from retaliating against a policy that THE GODDAMN BANKERS implemented in the first place. So they do the next best thing: they pretend to be doing something.
That means posting extra security at every bank, at every synagogue, at every airport, at everyone’s house. Soon, every mayor and his secretary gets an armed security detail. You can’t even get your mail without going through a metal detector and being padded down like a criminal.
This is expensive and demoralizing for the Regime. It is wasteful and is one of the tertiary costs of a Regime warring against an asymmetrical enemy. In other words, being groped at the airport is one of the costs that you as a citizen pay because your government is waging a genocidal war against the people.
That’s a tertiary cost of this war. And it is apparent in your high taxes that pay these goons to grope you and in the demoralizing feeling you experience every time you have to pass through a literal military security checkpoint just to fly to a city in your own country.
Apply this to any asymmetric conflict. Myanmar, Iraq, or America. A few hundred dollars worth of explosives can compel a tyrannical regime to expend literally billions in needless and ineffective security theater. This sometimes even exceeds the actual damage that terrorism costs a government.
Generals fight wars but accountants call the shots.
I think the second anon is pretty on point. A lot of the things we do or accept in life, such as being pat down in airports or the way we self-police our speech, are the consequences to terroristic acts that occurred in the past. The effectiveness of terrorism as per his arguments also does a good job of explaining what transpired when America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the past, as well as some of the other nation’s histories that he mentioned.
He seemed hopeful for terrorism to be done to the illegal migrants coming from the US’s southern border, but for what it’s worth, the US is still stable and civil enough for that to not take place for the foreseeable future. This, though, is heavily affected by the economy and whether regular citizens can still prosper within the nation. Going off on a tangent, I doubt the same sort of violent terrorism would work as well against people with much less to lose compared to the average American citizen.
Like it or not, and I certainly don’t, terrorism does appear to be an effective and widespread political tool in the real world.
Temple of Zagan 