[Lorric]

There are no circumstances under which killing civilians to get your point across is justified. That's where I'd call the difference - under the circumstances you outlined, setting a bomb in a military base is taking the fight to the enemy combatants, and I can call these people freedom fighters. Since they can't take on the enemy in an open fight due to being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they need to resort to guerrilla tactics. But my sympathies stop the moment they put a dirty bomb in a movie theater full of kids, parents, etc. It's monstrous, and such methods will only serve to enrage the enemy country's public, enabling their leaders to treat your own country even more harshly without too much public opposition. They can blow up buses, schools, whatever they like, the other country is never just going to say "you know what, this is too much trouble, let's just pack up and leave". And terrorism isn't about that - that's just an excuse to go vent on innocents. But honestly, this was your main mistake:

Alright I'll try to invent a scenario where I'd consider a terrorist a freedom fighter.

There isn't one. Terrorists try to get their points across by targeting innocents, which renders anything they say irrelevant. It's that simple in my book.

Even when those civillians are the enemy? They're happy to send their army butchering it's way through your country and then directly benefit from the spoils? They are not innocents then.

If they truly were innocents, and had nothing to do with the conquering army, then it would be wrong to target them. The children would of course be innocents.

For terrorism to work, it needs to create fear, not rage. The average man in the street needs to genuinely fear for their life. There is only one instance I know of where I have noticed this fear: The Washington Sniper. That whole city was living in fear, and the behaviour of the people changed. I remember the footage of people cringing in fear ducking and diving around petrol stations. The hysteria as the death toll rose. Now imagine such a sniper in every major city in a country, bodies piling up every day. And no children being sniped, just adults. How long could you live with the paranoia eating away at you before you couldn't stand it anymore and would just beg them to stop?

[Scourge of Ages]

People don't think that way. If your friends start to get killed, you're not going to cry for your government to stop and give in to the terrorists, you're going to cry for somebody to kill the guys killing your friends, so that they won't be able to keep going. It's part of human nature that has been well documented again and again, and glorified in more popular media than I can count.

Besides, how often is 100% of the adult populace in favor of an evil war, like in your scenario? Maybe some are, but I guarantee that many will be against it, but powerless to do anything but stand by. How will your freedom fighters differentiate their civilian targets?

[Lorric]

People don't think that way. If your friends start to get killed, you're not going to cry for your government to stop and give in to the terrorists, you're going to cry for somebody to kill the guys killing your friends, so that they won't be able to keep going. It's part of human nature that has been well documented again and again, and glorified in more popular media than I can count.

Besides, how often is 100% of the adult populace in favor of an evil war, like in your scenario? Maybe some are, but I guarantee that many will be against it, but powerless to do anything but stand by. How will your freedom fighters differentiate their civilian targets?

Possibly. But in the scenario I described, the majority of people won't lose a friend or loved one. But there'll be the constant fear. A suicide bomber, you know what targets they prefer, you only need to worry if you're in such an area, the sniper, you could get shot in the head in your own home. You could be targetted at any moment. And they won't keep going if you do what they want.

This would be a case I've never heard of. Normally, people who go around killing civillians are bad people. And their demands are equally bad. Everything encourages you to fight them. In this case, their demands don't impact your life at all.

The majority would have to be in favour. Those poor innocents who would die would be no different to the innocents who die in the course of warfare.

[BlueFlames]

I don't think you have to be exclusively one or the other. You can be both a terrorist and a freedom fighter. Terrorism is a method of fighting a war. A terrorist is someone who practices this. The freedom fighter part is what they are fighting for. I don't know of any groups conducting terrorism right now though that I would consider freedom fighters, they're the aggressors, not the oppressed. They're not fighting for the people they're fighting for themselves. They're fighting to conquer, not to liberate.

The people who you consider terrorists might disagree with your characterization of their cause.  Moreover, when you espouse a platitude about the relativity of the definitions of "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" you forfeit your ability to define someone else's cause and the legitimacy of their methods.

To be a little more explicit about why I popped into the thread, when I did, you're trying to have your cake and eat it too.  When you get criticized about your ideas regarding total war, you try to shield yourself with the notion of a target's legitimacy being the eyes of the beholder.  When you then turn around and look at organizations currently engaging in total war, with similar rationales, you implicitly contend that there is no such relativity, proclaiming, "I don't know of any groups conducting terrorism right now though that I would consider freedom fighters, they're the aggressors, not the oppressed."

If one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, then what makes your proclamation that some state/organization is an aggressor any more legitimate or meaningful than that state/organization's claim that they are fighting against an oppressor?