how can we _know_ that protesting is not terrorism [*h]
specifically, if we weren't allowed to define the difference between protesting and terrorism using violence.
this question is more difficult than it seems.
usually, terrorism is always defined on the basis of a horizontal attack. if _terrorism_ is not violence to human beings, then it is an act of destroying material objects that seriously resembles violence.
and yet people go around claiming that completely peaceful protests are terrorism
one could say that this is nothing more than a rhetorical strategy to attempt to define neutral things into being bad things
but if that were the case, how did this particular usage of language even come to be and happen? even when the world is not "logical" in the rationalist sense, there is always some causal logic for why something happened versus that thing not happening. there had to have been some particular series of events that caused people to associate nonviolent protests to terrorism, or no person in the world would actually have ever started spreading around this usage of the word _terrorism_.
this is what it means to do historical materialism. to realize that because our world is physical, everything that happens ultimately has to happen because of connections between things, and even things that don't seem to make any outward sense always do have to make sense when you look closely in order for them to have even happened.
no thought is truly arbitrary. nearly every thought anybody has ever had has occurred because there was some actual resemblance or connection between the things being connected.
even when a human being attempts to think of two things that are utterly unconnected, that person thought of the new association _because_ of some prompt that caused them to think of two things that were unconnected, which to anyone documenting the history of that particular set of images would then become part of the overall meaning of said hypothetical non-metaphor. because someone was given a prompt and thought of penguins and bananas, penguins and bananas then become one possible signifier for the process of thinking of two unrelated images, and whenever anyone thinks of the dissimilarity between penguins and bananas they will think back to the day some Bryan East in south Ontario weighed the evidence and came to the decision that there was no meaningful association between penguins and bananas. no thought is truly arbitrary.
what is the association that even makes it _possible_ to refer to a nonviolent protest as terrorism
is this a case of Bryan East in south Ontario randomly thinking of penguins and bananas?
arguably, it is not, because terrorism is much too specific a word to come up randomly. why terrorism? why not call protests avocados, car washes, or hurricanes? there are a great number of ~~words~~ nouns in the English language, and if you were to pick any of them randomly, there is a rather low probability you would end up with _terrorism_. the particular choice of this highly-specific word much more resembles signal than noise.
so what exactly is generating the signal? what process is able to discern that protests are nothing like pineapples, yet are somehow more similar to terrorism? how can we really know that protests are nothing like a game of bridge, nothing like a snowstorm, yet they definitely ought to be compared to terrorism?
one of the few obvious resemblances between the two is Vegeta effects.
terrorism is always a horizontal attack, whether people are talking about some concept of "foreign terrorists" claimed to be attacking the United States because they hate the United States, or "stochastic terrorists" who come from a particular subpopulation within a larger population and attack when they get especially angry at other subpopulations. but there are other kinds of horizontal attacks we could use to get a clearer picture of what horizontal attacks are: take an ordinary case of burglary which is purely about some specific individual trying to obtain a specific material object. the first thing you will notice is that the horizontal attack is _unexpected_. nobody typically plans for a crime to occur exactly tomorrow or exactly in two days, or for a totally exact number of crimes to occur each year. a crime is almost always experienced as an unexpected event — an unpleasant surprise. in this sense, every attempt to prevent or stop crimes is an attempt to make people more predictable. if you truly could not predict anybody's actions, then you would never know if somebody was spontaneously going to ~~commit murder~~ break into your house and steal your TV. anybody alive could do it if it was the case that people were truly unpredictable. thus, every law that exists is an attempt to enforce a certain standard of predictability.
from this point of view it is finally possible to see why Tories would keep trying to compare not just militant phenomena but _every single nonviolent protest_ and _every single progressive movement_ to crimes. crimes happen unexpectedly. protests happen unexpectedly. burglars randomly appear and try to forcefully enact a particular will or arrangement of things onto the world. protests randomly appear and try to forcefully present a particular will or arrangement of things to be accepted or else. even when a protest becomes nonviolent, it is still threatening because of the sheer fact there is no way to control its content. protests are like a giant Vegeta effect. and Vegeta effects are scary. whenever there is a Vegeta effect, epistemologically speaking you do not necessarily know when that particular entity intends to stop or when it intends to spare you. because Tories cannot will what protestors do, they become terrified that nothing they do will ever be good enough to appease the movement from continuously protesting, wrecking, trying to claim power, pushing out people that threaten it, and determining who is and isn't human. Tories tend to believe that Marxist party-nations are nothing more than one big Vegeta effect, and that the development of "Stalinist regimes" is nothing more than the process of people coming together to become increasingly unpredictable and incomprehensible until nothing makes sense. of course, if one had any idea what ideologies were, this concept would seem laughable, because anybody can predict the actions of a particular Social-Philosophical System by researching and learning about that particular Social-Philosophical System's ideological content. a Marxist party-nation does not throw people out of positions for the sake of it; every one of these events operates according to particular models and principles. however, in lack of correct models of other ideologies, every single one of them becomes scary. because Tories refuse to learn proper models of how ideologies and movements operate, they are forced to assume that any movement anywhere could spontaneously commit atrocities as the only possible defense against said hypothetical events.
there are not trivial solutions to this. any number of people might say that merely educating people could solve the problem, that offering people education about civil rights movements could stop people reacting to nonviolent phenomena so violently, yet each time events unfold it would seem like every single attempt at the slightest bit of education causes people to reject education and overall continue behaving with the same animosity. it would seem that the barrier between Tories and movements is much higher than anyone thinks it is, to the point that almost any attempt to educate Tories becomes considered part of the same giant enemy Vegeta effect. the surface assumption would then be that Tories appear to consider _all progressivism_ not part of the Tory population, making every progressive movement a separate nation's activities.
this is also the problem with United States strike movements: none of them become big enough to do anything more than split the population with a small event horizon and generate a Vegeta effect, causing the whole discourse to become about how the surrounding population will appease the strikers and get things back to normal, rather than how the strikers will change the entire population. the strike movement tires of not being able to do much more than not cooperate with society, and it dies. then the strikers, just like civil rights protestors and any other localized movement, begin trying to invent democulture to justify why a small group of people really should inherently be able to change the actions of a large population just because it's dissatisfied and angry. but democulture never seems to succeed in and of itself because it always hits a wall at Vegeta effects; any particular subpopulation marginalizing the democulture movement has some particular material cause for not changing, which a democulture movement generally does not have the power to unwind purely by ordering it to change.
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