I was reading an article about a new group called Global Majority formed to promote peace when it struck me how stupid "war on terrorism" sounds. I mean, what if it said "terrorism on war", why should that be any less acceptable? From the perspective of those engaged in "terrorism" (an ill defined and much debated term) they are simply fighting a war against someone else's war against them. They don't have billions of dollars and a uniformed army marching into battle - even if they could afford one they would usually have had their asses kicked or more likely blown off and handed back to them on a plate.

Its true that some terrorists are fighting for a minority opinion - but certainly not always. And sometimes its just other peoples colouring of that opinion as good or bad that leads us to care about them or even bother to label them as terrorists or not. If the oppressed people of the Darfur region in Sudan started suicide bombing, sniping and laying improvised bombs against the gangaweed militia would we declare war on their terrorism? Probably not. More likely we'd (in this case I'm using the "American we") hail the righteous freedom fighters in Darfur and perhaps slip them a few millions and some truck loads of weaponry. Were the French resistance fighters in WWII terrorists? The Nazis must have thought so - if the term was in common parlance then I'm sure they would have been labeled with it. So why then are the Palestinians terrorists and not freedom fighters?

Surely its because they are using violent means against violent means. But why is that other brand of violence against violence - war against terror - not also judged a bad, nay evil thing?

Some people will tell you that the war on terror is not a violent one. Why then the hundreds of millions spent to invade and occupy Iraq? Ditto in Afghanistan? What of the planned permanent detention of people at Guantanamo, purely because they expressed continuing ill will against the USA (a "crime" that hundreds of millions across the world are surely guilty of), is that non-violent act? If you detain a few hundred people in a remote place that's okay, but what if a few thousand, or few hundreds of thousands, or millions? When does a non-violent safety measure against a state of mind become violence against a state of people?

You see there are so many shades of gray and so little, if any, black and white. It depresses me that this as all been simplified, dumbed down for consumption of the non-thinking American masses as "war on terrorism" - which also just strikes me as bad grammar as well as being pretty darned close to an oxymoron from my point of view.

If you want to pit something against terrorism how about peace? Yes to me peace against terrorism sounds a whole lot better and who knows, as some have discovered (e.g. the British), it may take a lot longer but ultimately when the terrorists are fighting for a widely back point of view, it is much more likely to succeed in bringing about peace instead of just more war.

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