The first recorded use of bioweaponry took place in 1347 when Mongols catapulted plague-infested carcasses into the walled city of Caffa, which was a Black Sea trading outpost for the Genoese in the Black Sea.
Some historians think ships returning from there to Italy was how the plague that was running amok in Asia was introduced into Europe, starting a pandemic of the black death that killed on the order of 25 million people.
More recently, more than a decade ago Al-Qaeda was known to be trying to figure a way to get someone into Africa and infected with Ebola, then get them into a major US city before they became symptomatic with the mission to spread their bodily fluids by every means possible.
An estimate places the number of Irish killed by the British since the conquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell in 1649 at 11 million. During the potato famine, bumper harvests of agricultural crops for export to Britain were guarded by British soliery. (It’s controversial, rather a forbidden topic, because a number of the soldiers were actually Irish.)
We became terrorists. That is a designation for non-state combattants who use terroristic tactics. When the Dresden Firestorm took an estimated 300,000 lives of non-combattants, the official state-wielded terror was justified because “they voted for Hitler”, even though very many were German-speaking non-citizen refugees fleeing the Russians.
There seems to be an immportant disctinction, between approved state-wielded terrorism and unauthorized non-state terrorism. A faction of the Kurds are sponsored in Syria by the U.S., they threaten the sovereignty of Turkiye and Iran, and so are a designated terrorist group. Various leaders of a certain middle-east country whose name we dare not pronounce were former terrorists with a strong streak of organized crime. The dumping of tea into Boston harbor could be construed as a “terroristic” act, even though the American Colonials had evidence from purposeful support of starvation by British authorities—oh wait, was that in 1770 or in 1943?—that they were going to get a raw deal from the government of King George III if they didn’t make trouble first.
It isn’t just a matter of perspective. If you are an innocent family and you are driven beyond the point of desperation, you can easily end up a terrorist yourself.