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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"? Terrorists, as I understand the word, are people who aim to instill fear in a civilian population by way of violent acts in order to extract political concessions. What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for, what are the violent acts, and what civilian population do they instill fear in? I would have thought that drug smugglers simply smuggle drugs because they want to earn money. This makes them regular financially motivated criminals. If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry. If anything, the US is more suspect of something meeting the definition of "terrorism" here: the best explanation for this sort of double-tap attack seems to be that they seek to instill fear in other would-be drug smugglers.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights; Americans generally can and will murder them with impunity, and in return it naturally can't really be helped that Americans may not expect baseline civilised treatment from them either. As someone who has many American friends and relations, I therefore begrudgingly accepted that they should be kept separate from people in that class, and I couldn't for example expect them to join me in travelling to those countries (so e.g. my long-standing wish to travel to Iran may not be realised together with my American SO). It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans - the geographic proximity is greater, the entanglements run deeper, and the affected countries and peoples hold more social and cultural value. More importantly, why? What did the US actually gain from killing the shipwrecked here (as opposed to picking them up and sending them to a POW camp or whatever), or blowing up the desert weddings in the past? Do you all trust your government so much that you just assume it has good reasons to do what it does, even if the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

What concessions are drug smugglers aiming for

"Don't resist our lawbreaking, interfere with our operations or inform on us to the authorities."

what are the violent acts

See here.

and what civilian population do they instill fear in?

See here.

Apart from that, and also responding to @JTarrou above, as much as this is something few want to say out loud, but until now there has been a general tacit understanding that since 9/11 at the latest (if not since the founding of Israel), Middle Easterners are a special class that in the eyes of the US does not really have human rights;

I fundamentally disagree with this characterization. The middle-east wars were sold with pseudo-white-man's-burden arguments, and opposed over concerns of their harmful effects on the locals. Neither represents a lack of concern for the human rights of middle-easterners.

If the US government blew up the getaway car of supermarket thieves, and then methodically shot the survivors around the crash site dead, this would also result in an outcry.

To the extent that we tolerate supermarket theives, we do so from the belief that they are only occasional theives and might yet amend their ways and rejoin productive society. Those who make victimizing others a fundamental part of their identity and way of life are not productive targets for this type of forebearance.

I mean, what makes terrorists special?

The origin of a ‘special category’ of criminals was pirates as hostis humani generis, followed by slavers in the 19th century, and terrorists after 9/11. Adding narcotraffickers doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

In what sense are drug smugglers, if we grant that they in fact were for the sake of argument, "terrorists"?

Drug cartels are designated as terrorists at least according to us.gov. This link contains reasoning behind adding them earlier this year.

Isn't this a case where the US should be granting letters of Marque to hunt stateless vessels in international waters? Offer a bounty for each kilo of drugs returned and let them keep any oil they capture.

I think that originally, narco-terrorist referred to people who made a fortune dealing narcotics and then started using violence for political ends, e.g. in Columbia.

This is basically not a thing in the US. Any drug lord with two brain cells knows better than to pursue political goals by blowing up people on US soil. None of them want the Bin Laden treatment, after all.

I can see how the terrorist label would apply to some in the narcotics trade (e.g. the Mexican cartels), but here it really doesn't seem applicable -especially if, as the Trump administration seems to insinuate, the drug trade is indeed backed by the Venezuelan government. What political ends do they need to achieve by fear if they are already in power? (Mind you, the rule by fear that is implied by deterrence/the government monopoly on violence is usually exempted from the definition of terrorism unless you are a particular brand of anarchist.)

What if the goal was to destabilize the US? Andrew Yang used to argue pretty convincingly that Trump's 2016 election was only made possible by the Opioid crisis destroying communities.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid), and fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico? Now, you could argue that cocaine played a role when the US elected a TV personality president, given its use as an "act confidently in front of a crowd" drug, but...

(...and well, "destabilizing" does not meet the standard definition of terrorism either. Do you think Russia would be right to outlaw everyone involved in VoA/RFERL in the medieval sense too? Every kinetic war is "destabilizing" in the most straightforward sense; would "destabilizing=>terrorism=>give no quarter" then be a fully general argument against any ius in bello?)

fentanyl supposedly comes from China by way of Mexico

It comes from Canada, too.

I thought Venezuela is mostly for cocaine (not an opioid)

Allegedly, the vast majority of US cocaine comes from Colombia, not from Venezuela.

Venezuela has weaker rule of law, transshipment wouldn’t surprise me.

It does not seem like a good prospect if this class were to be expanded to Latin Americans

There isn't a Latin American ummah. Brazilians aren't going to care very much if you blow up Venezuelan drug dealers.

the immediate consequence is that in large parts of the world you may be picked off the street and justifiedly hauled off to be tortured and killed?

US foreign policy has caused bad blood in South America for at least half a century, but as far as I'm aware this hasn't led to revenge killings of American tourists being common. I'd be much more worried about the local criminal population than righteous pan-Latinx avengers.

There's a difference between "bad blood" (even on the level of sponsoring coups and what-not) and "you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you". I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals, in the way they do with Middle Easterners.

I don't think that even during the darkest years of the cold war there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Yeah it’s not like the Reagan administration had a school in Georgia where they taught Latin American right wing death squads how to torture and murder people. Oh wait they did. Latin America is already well aware that America has no baseline rules of conduct. This boat stuff is absolutely tame by the standards of the 1980s.

Yes, during the Cold War extrajudicial executions in Latin America were largely outsourced from the USFG to local governments.

"you, personally, can not assume there are any baseline rules limiting what the US government would do to you"

That's a weird expectation. There's no baseline rule limiting what most people would do to you if doing so was necessary to achieve something they deem sufficiently important.

I don't think that [...] there was much to suggest that Americans would directly engage in lawless killing or torture of average South Americans to further their goals

Is it better to get tortured and killed by an American proxy than by Americans directly?

Do the several hundred civilians killed during the US invasion of Panama count as average South Americans killed directly? Should they consider themselves lucky if they weren't killed lawlessly?

How is killing suspected drug traffickers on the high seas supposed to be an escalation here?

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