You can't be a terrorist to some and freedom fighters to others unless one of these two groups is using a bad definition of the word terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic whereby you willfully target random civilians or public property without real strategic value so as to instill fear in the general populace that they or something they value could be hurt next, enough so that due to that fear these people will put pressure on their leaders to change public policy. Either you do it or you don't do it, doesn't matter if you think the side doing it is in the right or not (though if you believe that intentionally killing random civilians is justified then you are probably a horrible person, regardless of what the cause is).
This idea that any person or group can be terrorist to some, freedom fighter or patriot to others, is an awful meme that has contributed toward the widespread confusion people have about what terrorism actually means. It's not a pejorative it's a specific tactic.
Certain Protestant-hating Catholics primarily viewed the IRA as freedom fighters. That doesn't change the fact that they're terrorists but they weren't viewed as terrorists primarily by these select few which I'm sure was the intended meaning behind the question.
All of that being said, is the IRA a terrorist organization? It's a little bit murky because most if not all of the IRA leadership actually denounced terrorism, preferring to target police, military, and political leadership specifically over random civilians or public property. Which is not terrorism. Also, if they specifically targeted Protestants in Ireland over Catholics, that could just be a hate crime, also not terrorism. However, it was definitely part of their plan to generate broad public support for their political goals, and to that end they became pretty indiscriminate about who ended up getting killed or wounded. If you rope in all of the people ever affiliated with the group, some of whom did intentionally target civilians in a somewhat random fashion, then, yes, they were terrorists.
I think you've explained it perfectly. Some people in the IRA were definitely terrorists in that they killed indiscriminately. Others were more principled. Taken together, it's possible for some people to see them as freedom fighters and others to see them as terrorists. I'd lean more towards terrorists personally. But having visited Ireland, it's almost inconceivable how they could be so terrible. The people in Ireland were absolutely charming - probably the nicest of any country I've ever been too.
I guess it just depends on whether or not you believe the entire organization should be held accountable for the actions of all those associated with it or not. Personally I believe they should, as I don't think they were aggressively distancing themselves from those who were behaving as terrorists. If they had been we could label them rogue actors. This can be a problem with any large group that lacks strong, centralized leadership.
btw, Quizmaster, the link you included goes to an article about an attack carried out by the INLA, which was a group founded by former IRA members who thought the IRA was not militant enough. Not quite the same thing and they were worse and more obviously terrorists.
Having lived with the IRA bombings in London, I find the idea of 'some say terrorist, some say freedom fighter' offensive. How is bombing the London Underground or the Brent Cross flyover anything other than an act of terror?
No, it's not. Terrorism is not best defined as "that which is scary." This is an incredibly bad misuse of the word but given that the term gets misused *a lot*... over time I'm sure it will eventually lose all meaning. I'm going to keep reminding people of what it is supposed to mean until then, though. If we defined it your way then targeted assassination, blowing up bridges, shooting down war planes, and in fact almost ANY action could be defined as terrorism.
When the Allies landed at Normandy... do you think some German agents stationed in France may have felt scared by this? Maybe the Germans manning one machine gun nest on Omaha beach looked over and saw the one further down the beach hit by a grenade. If the Germans in that machine gun nest felt terror, was it then an act of terrorism? This is just a catastrophic misuse of the term.
Tell me how you would define guerilla or partisan warfare, or armed resistance to an occupation, so as to specifically not qualify as terrorism. Because the definition I offered up differentiates between the two easily. If you can't do that, then you've effectively rendered the term terrorism meaningless and there's no need for it. Bear in mind that EVERY such action could potentially impact morale of either those in command or the rank-and-file soldiers or police force, and often are even designed to. But such tactics go back as far as recorded history goes back and have never been called terrorism until people started over applying the term recently.
So after doing some research and reading the first 100 pages of the Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, the definition of terrorism lacks any meaningful consensus. An academic consensus from 1988 appears to be the strongest attempt to define it, where many experts in the field answered various questions about the definition. The book very clearly states that this is just an academic consensus and does not define terrorism for the USA or UN. Interestingly, the US government doesn’t appear to actually have a specific definition. However, if the attack on the pentagon during 9/11 is considered a terrorist attack, then there are clearly non-civilian targets who would count as victims of terrorism. This is one of the points someone brought up in that handbook, which is pretty interesting. Anyway, I’ll just put the most definitive definition of terrorism below, and everyone can keep in mind that there isn’t a definitive answer, as much as it’d make things easier.
Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.
This definition seems to imply that motive defines terrorism, at least in part. The FLQ in Canada, for instance, kidnapped a couple politicians and killed an MLA, Laporte, to garner attention to their demands that Quebec be separated from Canada. I wouldn’t think members of government are civilians, right? It can be random, but more importantly the victim represents a class of people that the terrorist wants to victimize. So while the FLQ’s worst crime was not targeted at a random civilian, it was still a terrorist act; the goal was not violence against Mr. LaPorte, but terror against the class he represented.
And, also interestingly, I found that the 1988 academic consensus definition was pared down a bit from an early definition. The old version actually included violent acts during combat that went so far beyond the norms of combat as to instil terror. That suggests that at least some portion of the academic and field experts in terrorism believed that violating the norms of warfare specifically to instil terror is itself terrorism. That was removed from the definition, likely because including military-sponsored terrorism would muddy the definition. Anyway, long story short, there’s no official international definition accepted by everyone, but the one I gave above seems to be the most common. The UN cant come up with a workable ad hoc definition after like 50 years, so we probably won’t land on a better “official definition” on this quiz site.
If you seek to achieve goals via instilling terror, then it's terrorism. Seems pretty straight forward to me. Terror (fear of something happening in the future) is literally in the word. Seems people trying to "well actually" that definition are doing so just because they don't want to say something they could imagine supporting is terrorism given the word has such negative connotations now.
And, as is so often the case with these quizzes, I got sucked down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, and learned that "beyond the pale" (outside of the bounds of what is considered acceptable/civilized) comes from the Pale--i.e., if you went beyond the boundary or fence that delineated the English-ruled area, you were going outside the rules and bounds of "proper civilization."
I always think allowing kings and queens without the regnal number makes it a little too easy, especially on country-specific quizzes. Plenty of Kings Henry have meddled in Ireland, so it's not really testing one's knowledge.
This idea that any person or group can be terrorist to some, freedom fighter or patriot to others, is an awful meme that has contributed toward the widespread confusion people have about what terrorism actually means. It's not a pejorative it's a specific tactic.
"What Dublin brewery opened in 1759?"
The correct answer to this question is St James's Gate.
While it's often referred to as the Guinness brewery, that's just the most famous beer brewed there.
Both answers should be accepted.