Comment by hilbert42
4 hours ago
What is left when all other options are exhausted?
The American War of Independence, French Revolution and English Civil War were acts of terrorism.
Were those acts justified? Not if you're the ones who were initially holding the power.
Calling the American Revolution terrorism, in the modern sense, is a stretch. It was a war waged primarily between soldiers and materiel with the goal of ending the enemy's ability to wage war.
Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used.
I’m pretty patriotic but even I can recognize some parallels. There are examples of targeting civilians (tarring and feathering loyalists, or destroying their property). If you consider the attacks against Tesla to be terrorism [1] then the Boston Tea Party would probably fit that bill as well. I’d probably consider it irregular warfare, but I wouldn’t call it a stretch for someone to disagree.
[1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv...
If Palestine Action committed terrorism then absolutely the American Revolution was a terrorist act.
This is massively disingenuous. If you showed up in public in the US today with a bunch of men in uniform and announced your intention of using military force to secure some perceived political rights, you'd be denounced as a terrorist by the authorities while you were still reading out your carefully drafted rules of engagement.
Here's a very recent example of public authorities describing activism against data centers as a possible vector of 'anti-tech extremism': https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Likewise, the proponent of a huge data center project in Utah and the Secretary of the Interior are both arguing that opposition to data centers is the result of Chinese communist propaganda: https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...
As far as I'm aware there have been zero acts of violence related to data center construction, or even threats of same.
I will be happy to steer you to work by philosophers and legal researchers on the construction of 'terrorism' as a political concept and the difficulty of cleanly differentiating it from 'legitimate' forms of violent political action.
The french revolution was terrible and made every single person in france worse off. It is the exact evidence that shows that even in a revolution restraint is still needed.