i feel, as a young adult in the this country, that my views of terrorism have been shaped to the idea of a senseless act of anything that causes mass hysteria and a national bonding is known as terrorism.

I feel, as a young(ish) adult in this country, that my views of terrorism have been shaped by the IRA and the Northern Ireland conflict. Even at the height of the IRA "terror campaign" of the eighties and early nineties, there were still plenty of people -- perhaps a majority of people -- in Britain who just didn't know the extent to which the mechanisms of state in Northern Ireland oppressed the Catholic minority. (The Patten report, for instance, described the Northern Ireland police as "falling far short of the human rights standards to be expected in a modern democracy".)

So I've ended up with the idea that terrorism is often not a disease as such, but a symptom of other underlying societal problems. Democracy is all well and good as a way of preventing a minority from repressing the majority, but it doesn't help in a situation where the majority is repressing a minority -- especially if the media too is largely run by "the majority". Terrorism doesn't in itself solve those sorts of problems either, of course, but sending a message that there is a problem is sometimes the difficult first step towards finding a solution.

That's why I don't think that a (presumably) rich bored white male playing a first-person shooter with innocent people's lives, deserves to be dignified with the name of terrorist. He's not repressed. He's not sending a message. He's just a criminal.

enough untouched oil in alaska to run our country for many many years and were worried about the effects any actions in the middle east will have on our economy. i think that, unfortunately, it takes loss of life before anything gets done, and that saddens me.

What saddens me more is when loss of life causes people who don't see the big picture, to try and cure the disease by suppressing the symptoms -- which just leaves the actual problem to get worse and worse. So the British government initially dealt with Republican terrorism by pouring more militarised, predominantly Unionist, security forces into Northern Ireland (and, whether officially or not, supporting Unionist paramilitaries). And the Spanish government deals with Basque terrorism by outlawing the Basque political movement. And the US government deals with Columbine by training teachers to "profile" misfits rather than worrying about why dominant cliques create misfits in the first place. And the US government (again) follows a Middle-East policy of supporting petty dictator A versus petty dictator B according to oil and defence-industry interests, calling it democracy (who won the last Kuwaiti general election?) and backed by an electorate who, to paraphrase the Disposable Heroes, think the Middle-East means Tennessee but know a low gas price when they see one. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The only positive thing I've got to say, is that every media pundit in sight was saying, after Tiananmen Square, that global media in general and the Internet in particular were beginning to mean that totalitarian governments couldn't get away with that kind of stuff any more. Perhaps eventually democratic governments will realise that they can't get away with it either.

Peter