| ▲ | Aloisius 4 hours ago | |
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. | ||
| ▲ | bumby 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
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... | ||
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
If Palestine Action committed terrorism then absolutely the American Revolution was a terrorist act. | ||
| ▲ | anigbrowl an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |
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. | ||