Wife of convicted rancher: “I don’t really know the purpose" of the #OregonStandoff https://t.co/SjBZblp9LH pic.twitter.com/gZURjrJBOx
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) January 5, 2016
A few of my friends have been bickering on social media (what else is new?) over a fairly well-specified semantic question (that is!) namely whether we should call the people who are occupying federal facilities in Oregon “terrorists” or something else, such as militants, militia, occupiers, or protestors.
To settle this question, we can resort to more-or-less authoritative sources to tell us what “terrorism” should be taken to mean. For example, Wikipedia reports the following meaning from the UN General Assembly:
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the public…for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.
Federal law in the U.S. is somewhat narrower and more concise, at 22 U.S. Code §2656f(d):
Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.
(Probably it is no accident that the nation which burned Dresden and Nagasaki to the ground for unquestionably political purposes took the trouble to specify “subnational groups” here, but that is a whole other can of worms.)
These definitions provide some degree of clarity, but it is probably more instructive to consider the underlying psychological and social mechanisms which make terrorism appealing to certain kinds of actors, as Steven Pinker did several years ago in The Chronicle:
The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the root of the word makes clear: “Terror” refers to a psychological state, not an enemy or an event. The effects of terrorism depend completely on the psychology of the audience. Terrorists are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear. They may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke repression that will turn people against their government or bring about chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail.
Cognitive psychologists such as Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Paul Slovic have shown that the perceived danger of a risk depends on two factors: fathomability and dread. People are terrified of risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed in their effects, and poorly understood. And they are terrified about worst-case scenarios, the ones that are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (that is, the people exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from it).
[h/t Aneris23]
Turning back to the welfare ranchers in question, we can see why their actions do not constitute terrorism, at least not yet. While their actions are obviously politically motivated, they have yet to perpetrate violence in any way, much less in a way that is calculated to inspire fear in the public. Moreover, if violence does break out between the occupying forces and the rightful owners of the federal land (which seems totally plausible at this point) it will be a shootout between two groups of armed infantry who both volunteered to become combatants, rather than the sort of violence which lacks familiarity and fathomabilty, such as random mass attacks on unsuspecting civilians.
Should the occupying forces in Oregon begin to direct violence at random noncombantants, it will be appropriate to call them terrorists. Until then, they are not taking advantage of the systemic cognitive biases which make terrorism an effective means of generating panic and garnering attention.
