Although it may seem like a lie to you with the amount of nonsense we have heard in recent days, I assure you that there are people who, when they talk about something as serious as terrorism, do so with rigor and in a way that does not offend the intelligence. nobody cares The pity is that some togats, politicians and opinion leaders with authority are not part of this category who - it is true that with a delay of a few years - now classify the activities of Democratic Tsunami at Barcelona airport as terrorism.
That's why I'm here: giving a twist to an original concept of terrorism without terror, without weapons or attacks, without murders or mutilations that, in the city of the victims of Hipercor, Ernest Lluch and the Rambla of 2017, to someone who thought worse than I might think it was a joke in bad taste. Not to say an insult.
understand me It is possible that the facts for which Tsunami is accused were criminal, and that any prosecutor with two fingers on his forehead should investigate them as disturbances of public order more or less serious, but when he abuses the hyperbole looking for the symbolic effect associated with the label of terrorism not only bursts the seams of the law. Also those of common sense. For the same price, terrorism is trivialized in an intolerable way, as has already happened with genocide and fascism.
Manuel Cancio, professor of Criminal Law at the Autonomous University of Madrid, speaks seriously about the issue when he says that "facts like those grouped in the Tsunami case can be described as terrorism in Moscow, Istanbul or Tehran. They would never be in Berlin, Paris or Bern. And in terms of law, neither in Madrid."
And another reasonable man, Michael Burleigh, in his monumental cultural history of terrorism (Blood and Rage, 2008), puts order to the intuitions that any normal person, that is, who does not practice the thrillerism that some like so much Overcoming pickaxes, can have on this type of crime. For this reason, he reviews the atrocious chronicle that goes from the Russian nihilists to the Baader-Meinhof gang; from both loyalist and republican killers in Northern Ireland to sun-drenched coffins amid cassocks and Che Guevara readings and jihadists in the Levant.
In short, to what you and I have always characterized as terrorism: the morally sordid and criminal action of those subjects for whom the destruction inflicted on any innocent victim constitutes a fleeting compensation for a real or imagined grievance , or more abstract complaints that are the causes of his rage and his hysteria. Meanwhile, the only thing his victims have in common is that a radical, resentful loser aspires to destroy or maim them in order to move forward into a world that virtually no one wants to exist.
Therefore, defining terrorism is also a moral issue. If you want to create a legal concept that includes an atrocity, you will have to live up to a terror that is repugnant to any civilized conscience or dedicate yourself to something else.
Ben Emerson, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, at least tries, and while acknowledging that there is no internationally agreed definition of terrorism, he proposes one in which the essential element is targeted attacks in a deliberate manner against the civilian population that are serious abuses against human rights and totally incompatible with the basic principles of humanity: “In the context of an armed conflict, such acts constitute war crimes. When they are part of a generalized or systematic attack against the civilian population, they also constitute crimes against humanity". As you will understand, we are not talking about bloodless occupations of airports, or more or less aggressive confrontations with the security forces: those who refer to terror and know what they are talking about are referring to something else.
The problem of the Spanish peculiarity in the matter of terrorism is that, after the disastrous reform of 2015 (promoted by the PP and enthusiastically assumed by the PSOE: you know, "sense of State"), the unfortunate definition of our Code – a juridical nyap constructed of demolition materials shot here and there – can allow an imaginative judge to investigate for terrorism even a group of environmentalists who have the idea to release the emboldened ox.
Some warned that it could happen. Obviously, no one paid any attention to them.
