the term “stochastic terrorism”
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You encourage people to go out and commit acts of terrorism, but you don’t ever tell any specific person to do any specific thing. Instead, you rile up large groups of people over and over until one of them eventually believes your bullshit and goes off to murder the people you’ve been ranting and raving about.
If I shoot you, Im a murderer.
If I shoot you, yelling ‘All (insert stereotype here)s must die!’, Im a terrorist.
If I go on TV and say ‘someone should shoot this guy for being (insert etc etc)’ and someone shoots you, I would have committed stochastic terrorism.
Terrorism is using terror to force a political or religious ideology. The stochastic part of the term just means that my actions have made it more likely to happen, not necessarily by my hands.
A long time ago, a King had an ongoing feud with a holy man, who kept telling everyone the King was corrupt. The King said, to no one in particular, “[Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3Fhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F)?”
His loyal knights decided to do just that.
The King’s hands were technically clean – he never ordered an attack. However, his words clearly inspired the killing.
That’s ***stochastic terrorism***. You don’t commit the attack, you don’t tell anyone to attack, but you keep talking about how necessary and good an attack would be until somebody does it for you.
Stochastic means:
>randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
So in feeding information and opinion to the public that paints a group in an extremely negative light, you’re making it more likely that someone somewhere will take violent action against that group, but in a way that complies strictly with limits on legally protected speech on your part.
If you get yourself a big audience and keep telling them how terrible blonde people are and how much blondes deserve to be murdered, then eventually someone in your audience will go out and murder a blonde person. Even though you didn’t directly instruct *that murderer* to kill *that victim*, you put the idea into enough people’s heads.
I’ll preface with: Stochastic terrorism is vague enough that people don’t even know it’s really a thing, or just an attempt on creating a causal nexus between an actor and the consequences of a terrorist act.
That’s because stochastic terrorism is by definition when someone doesn’t incite terrorism, maintains plausible deniability, and never directly become involved.
Imagine you’re a public figure, you keep drumming it up that group X or person Y is awful, that they cause harm, that they are making secret plots and that they are trying to destroy everything good in this world.
Sure, you’re being negative against them, sometimes you might even hint that the world would be better without them, but at no point you tell someone to go there and kill them. You never tell someone to plant a bomb in their car. You did nothing, yet one of your followers, completely on their own accord did just that.
Since you didn’t do anything yourself, you’ll defend yourself by saying “I have nothing to do with it, I cannot control the actions of others”. This outcome benefits you, and likely was caused because you kept beating the drums against group x or person Y, but you at no point did anything directly.
So, are you inciting stochastic terrorism? Can your activism be liked to the actions of the terrorist?
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