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by Aloisius 5 days ago
Calling the American Revolution terrorism, in the modern sense, is a stretch. It was a war waged primarily between soldiers and materiel with the goal of ending the enemy's ability to wage war.

Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used.
4 comments
bumby 5 days ago
I’m pretty patriotic but even I can recognize some parallels. There are examples of targeting civilians (tarring and feathering loyalists, or destroying their property). If you consider the attacks against Tesla to be terrorism [1] then the Boston Tea Party would probably fit that bill as well. I’d probably consider it irregular warfare, but I wouldn’t call it a stretch for someone to disagree.

[1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv...

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tremon 4 days ago
If setting warehouses on fire can be called terrorism today, then the Boston Tea Party was equally an act of terrorism then.
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marcus_holmes 5 days ago
If Palestine Action committed terrorism then absolutely the American Revolution was a terrorist act.
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anigbrowl 5 days ago
This is massively disingenuous. If you showed up in public in the US today with a bunch of men in uniform and announced your intention of using military force to secure some perceived political rights, you'd be denounced as a terrorist by the authorities while you were still reading out your carefully drafted rules of engagement.

Here's a very recent example of public authorities describing activism against data centers as a possible vector of 'anti-tech extremism': https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...

Likewise, the proponent of a huge data center project in Utah and the Secretary of the Interior are both arguing that opposition to data centers is the result of Chinese communist propaganda: https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...

As far as I'm aware there have been zero acts of violence related to data center construction, or even threats of same.

I will be happy to steer you to work by philosophers and legal researchers on the construction of 'terrorism' as a political concept and the difficulty of cleanly differentiating it from 'legitimate' forms of violent political action.

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