I'd say if you're an Irish person Thatcher could be seen as a terrorist.

Half of England agrees with you

Yes, she was so unpopular she won three elections on the bounce.

Yeah, yeah, popular vote blah blah blah.

I'm guessing you know how daft you sound. She frequently registered the lowest ratings in opinion polls of any PM. Ever. She was for much of her time despised by the majority, regarded as dangerously idiotic by the civil service and as an embarrassment by her own parliamentary party.

Do not fool yourself into thinking she won on her own volition. She won because of external influences, at least some of which were the fault of her opposition.

For example, the same political system, we here in Canada have Harper there is no way he is popular but he keeps winning elections.

She won, like any other politician, because she was the best choice for the people at the time.

I don't think what the civil service thinks of you is of particular relevance. She may have been despised by the majority of people in the North of England, but she was (and is) revered across most of the Sourth.

Terrorist is a loaded term.

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-editors/2007/06/13/when-doe...

Margaret Thatcher almost makes me wish Hell existed.

And here we have the left's equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church.

The left sounds exceedingly reasonable then, because the right's version of the Westboro Baptists is the Westboro Baptists.

They are only right wing if you subscribe to an extremely simplistic and binary view of politics.

Yeah, but the joke is responding to a post that is saying that davidgerard is the left wing equivalent of them, so to include more nuance would have made it less funny.

But he was involved in terrorist activities. He was a terrorist.

Were the American Revolutionaries also "terrorists"? Where do you draw the line between revolutionary armies and terrorism?

I don't know where the line is exactly, but I don't think Sam Adams blew up a school bus or dozens of passers by in downtown Pretoria with a car bomb.

I believe the car bombing you are referring to was the Church Street bombing, which took place in 1983 while Nelson Mandela was in jail and Oliver Tambo was leading the ANC. I'm not sure you can really say that he bore responsibility for that attack.

Before Mandela was jailed, when he was actively leading the ANC, he was careful to target only infrastructure and economic damage, not civilians. When Nelson Mandela was arrested, they were in the process of moving from that type of sabotage toward actual guerrilla action against the military, but were still not targeting civilians. Hmm. Escalating from boycotts and economic attacks to guerrilla warfare against the military; not too different than what Sam Adams did. What the ANC did after while he was jailed did escalate beyond that, but as far as I can tell, what he did and advocated never went much beyond what the American Revolutionaries did.

From the Truth and Reconciliation report http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%202.... volume 2 page 326-7:

  In the course of the armed struggle, a number of military
  actions took place which resulted in the death or injury of 
  civilians, and where gross violations of human rights can 
  be said to have been committed, despite ANC policy to avoid 
  unnecessary loss of life. Police statistics indicate that, 
  in the period 1976 to 1986, approximately 130 people were 
  killed by ‘terrorists’. Of these, about thirty were members
  of various security forces and one hundred were civilians. 
  Of the civilians, forty were white and sixty black.

A total of 130 civilian deaths is quite low for a violent conflict over that long of a period. That's far lower than the number of civilian casualties caused by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, per year the US has killed more civilians in Afghanistan than the ANC killed in that entire period.

I don't endorse attacks like the Church Street bombing at all; I find them quite abhorrent. But you need to keep some perspective on this. "Terrorist", in many cases, is just a convenient label for particular people who we want to judge more harshly than we judge ourselves.

Neither did Nelson Mandela, if that's what you're implying.

To wit, the Church Street bombing (which is presumably what you're referring to by the Pretoria car bomb) by the MK happened in 1983. That's 20 years after Mandela was imprisoned.

Unless you have some credible evidence that he was somehow the kingpin behind all the violent activities of the ANC and/or MK during the time that he was in prison, I think it's fair to say you're wrong.

Since school busses, cars, and downtown Pretoria didn't exist when Sam Adams was alive, that's probably a good bet.

Would you call the French Resistance terrorists?

They certainly performed acts that could justify the label, but would you call them terrorists?

I'm sure the Germans would have. Which is the point really; terrorism vs freedom fighter, war vs cou, revolution vs insurgency.

It all depends which side your on.

I get that, which makes me wonder about somebody who claims that Mandela was a terrorist. What does choosing that terminology say about them? What side they are on?

They called themselves terrorists. Terrorisme was the state terror and was not an accusation, but rather a boast by the Jacobins.

edit - oops, as splat points out, I got the wrong end of the stick there by a country mile.

I think Crito was referring to the French Resistance during WWII, not the French Revolution.

Doesn't terrorism have to be again the civilian population? If the French resistance were attacking the German Army or the Vichy Regimes troops, it wouldn't really be terrorism.

They derailed their fair share of trains. There was little shortage of civilian casualties, and if they were operating in Germany, where civilians were more likely to align with the opposition, you can bet your ass there would have been more.

The lesson is that the difference between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" is not as well defined as you might think. He was a great leader.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

To paraphrase James Bond: "Some Freedom Fighters are not interested in anyone's freedom"

I'm not sure where you're going with that. Nelson Mandela was the opposite of that; he cared deeply about everyone's freedom.