Last week, New Zeeland was rocked by a mass murder, motivated by white supremacy and religious fear. A man stormed through two mosques, firing indiscriminately through the crowds. Killing, as of the time of writing, fifty people. The world calls it an act of terrorism.
Debates in the States follow, forming around how people perceive terrorism. About the fact that most deaths in terrorist attacks are perpetrated by white supremacists or domestic nationalists. Not the dreaded jihadists that the American war machine has made their public enemy number one. A war machine that spends unprecedented resources on targetting remote extremists abroad. Not to mention murdering domestic citizens without due process.
In the domain of the eastern dragon, the Chinese empire is hard at work to suppress and dismantle the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in the Xinjiang province. Amnesty, the UN, and Reuters, among others, report that over a million people have been detain to ”re-education camps” across Xinjiang. China indignantly answer international criticism about their Uighur incarcerations by claiming that they are fighting Muslim extremism. Jihadism. That this, the persecution of the ethnic group in what was once known as Chinese Turkmenistan, is a Chinese ”war on terror”.
In the beginning of the 20th century, the anarchist was the public enemy number one. Revolutionaries and political dissidents were hunted down by governments across the world. Their acts did not define them as much as the label. As soon as one was stamped with the epitaph of ”anarchist”, your actions became irrelevant. Same thing carried on during the McCarthy communist hunts in the States. The fire brand with which you demonized and marginalized your enemies had then become ”the communist”, rather than ”the anarchist”.
Today, it’s ”the terrorist”.
But as we can clearly see, the intentions of this term, this brand, is not the same as its meaning. Or its definition: ”Inciting political change through violence and the threat thereof, causing fear and terror”.
The brand ”terrorist” serves no other purpose than to stigmatize. To trivialize whatever reasons the individuals may have for inflicting violence upon the world. Equating them with raving madmen. Lunatics. Rabid dogs without rhyme or reason. You don’t have to like them, or sympathize with them, but calling a violent belligerent a ”terrorist” has become nothing but a pointless slur. A slur popularized in modern discourse by the rotting hegemony of the United States of America, a nation founded on the principles of violent insurrection and political change through fear and might.
For there is no discernable difference in practical terms between the ”terrorist” and the ”political revolutionary”. Which is why I think the term should be scrapped. At least in its modern use. For it offers us nothing that the much more refined concepts of ”supremacist”, ”fundamentalist”, or quite simply ”revolutionary” already gives us. And the primary reason why all of those potentially disparate qualities have been rounded up under the umbrella slogan of “terrorist” is for sovereign powers to use it as an excuse for persecution and wanton murder.
Nation states will always have enemies. Civilian and otherwise. So long as we have nation states, those states will want to remove threats to their existence. This is nothing new, and will not change any time soon. It’s fine! But we, the citizenry, do not need to listen or regurgitate the nation states’ rationalizations and excuses. Whether we agree with their behaviour or not, we should always be wary of their efforts to legitimize their actions by trying to control the narrative.
The Christchurch massacres are a tragedy. Just as the Nice truck attack of 2016 was a tragedy. Or the great turning point for the current age of warfare without borders, the World Trade attack in 2001, for that matter. But by marginalizing the intentions, reasons, and people behind those attacks, by stigmatizing them as terrorists and vermin to be snuffed out by any means necessary, you let the people in positions of power to weave straw men out of those tragedies. Making use of them to validate their predations upon the world and even their own citizens. Turning these supposedly hallowed events instead into travesties.
And both the victims, the survivors, and the world at large deserves better than that.
/Sebastian Lindberg 19/3-2019
WastedWords 