this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Non-terroristically planting a bomb on an innocent diplomat's ship.
Was he doing that to create terror, or to kill someone?
To create terror. It was a false flag operation meant to get the Romulans to see the Dominion as a threat to their safety. The fact that the senator happened to be one of the biggest opponents to fighting the Dominion was icing on the cake, removing him was a bonus but not the main reason for doing it.
So, he created terror among the Romulans? They sure didn't seem terrified to me.
People don't have to be terrified for it to be terrorism
I don't think we see how they reacted, except that they suddenly decided to enter the war and treat the Dominion as an existential threat, as Garak intended.
So, his assassination was successful, but it wasn't terrorism.
If you completely ignore both of the valid points I just made, yes. Otherwise no.
Cloak and dagger spy shit.
Terrorism is when you try to harm the populace.
You mean like when he participated in the Cardassian occupation?
Yeah that would count as terrorizing the populace, although terrorist to me is specifically someone outside the ruling government, otherwise they're a brutal occupying army/genocidal government, which to me is worse than terrorist. Kira was a terrorist, for a just cause.
Did Kira try to harm the populace? I feel like most of what she did was more like... blowing up government officials.
It's pretty hard to come up with a consistent definition of terrorist that wouldn't include Garak, I'm just saying.
Yeah, I guess she was trying to terrorize government officials and whatever civilians the Cardassians had there. I think you could call that a populace. Just not the occupied populace.
The Cardassians were bad. But I'm not sure why it's so important for them to be terrorists.
When Stalin and the USSR engineered a famine in Ukraine were they terrorists? They definitely did it. But people usually call it genocide instead of terrorism because the balance of power is top down instead of bottom up. It's just a different word for a different bad thing.
I'm not sure why it's so important for them not to be terrorists.
I don't really want to get into that tangent, but genocide is not exclusively a "top-down" thing. There were independent militias in WWII that hunted down and exterminated Jews in Eastern European villages (some affiliated with Stefan Bandera), they were committing genocide regardless of state backing.
Regardless, Garak was involved in both (at different times in his life) blowing people up as a non-state actor to advance a political agenda, and in harming a wider populace.
To me its important to use words that convey specific meaning. If the meaning of terrorist has changed to something I'm not familiar with, I'd like to know.
I believe you that Garak engaged in non-state-sponsored acts of terrorism, and perhaps the definition of terrorism should include some state sponsored acts, like perhaps KGB-agents roughing up people, or the FBI targeting civil rights groups. Or fucking ICE doing everything they've got going on. Dang language is hard.