Kevin Drum, who is one of my favorite daily reads, has a very peculiar post today. The subject is whether Joseph Stack (the crazy IRS bomber guy) is a terrorist. Now, this is not a question that interests me at all, and I’ve actually been ignoring the debate. But I read Drum because I figured he might have some kind of spin on it. Turns out the answer is yes, but not in the direction I was expecting:
Stack doesn’t really have a policy he wants changed. He’s mad at the government, he’s mad at paying unfair taxes, and he’s mad at the turns his life has taken. But if, instead of killing people, suppose he had been holding them hostage. What would his demands have been? Repeal of Section 1706 of the tax code? That’s about the closest he comes to saying something specific.
“Jews out of Palestine” is a policy grievance. Ditto for “abortion is murder,” “freedom for Tamil,” and “Jim Crow forever.” But all Stack has is a vague and inchoate rage caused by his feeling that he’s been screwed by the IRS and nobody is willing to help him. Calling that a policy grievance is to strip the word of all meaning.
That’s a really bizarre thing to say. First of all, it’s not like anarchists don’t exist. Anarchism is a perfectly legitimate ‘political’ doctrine, even in the very constricted terms that Drum is trying to establish. Of course, the evidence suggests that Stack wasn’t an anarchist but instead was simply a seriously anti-tax dude. Which aligns him quite well with the (admittedly fairly extreme end) of what we’re now calling the Tea Party folks.
Drum asks what his demands would be. This seems pretty obvious: “repeal the income tax.” “Eliminate social services paid for by tax money.” And he’d probably want an assurance that no one would pass the Fairness Doctrine, too.
Drum also calls attention to another part of the FBI terrorism definition: “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” Drum’s comment about this one: “Is he talking here about more killing of civilians? Or is he hoping that other people follow his lead and kill themselves, with the numbers eventually getting so big that the “American zombies” wake up? At best, it’s unclear. He’s certainly not trying to inspire civilian fear here (he wants them to wake up, not give in), but beyond that it’s hard to say.”
This is exceptionally strange. The guy attempted to kill a bunch of IRS workers. It doesn’t seem very hard to read into that: “IRS workers should fear for their lives.” In the same way the people who murder abortion doctors are clearly intending to terrorize a population. I can’t tell if Drum just didn’t consider this, or if he thinks that IRS workers aren’t ‘civilians.’ I hope it’s the former.
Now, if you want to say that it wasn’t an act of terrorism because you have a problem with the label itself, that’s fine. That, in fact, is pretty much why I found the whole debate about this so pointless in the first place. Calling something ‘terrorism’ is purely a matter of emotional manipulation and I’d prefer if we could just discard it entirely. But if we can’t, I’m not really very interested in finding out that people are going to use the term to serve their pre-established purposes.
But if we want to pretend there is such a thing as an objective definition, it seems pretty difficult to exclude this guy. Degree of premeditation doesn’t really seem like a very relevant calculation here.