Terrorism Is Whatever the Elites Say It Is
Terrorism Is Whatever the Elites Say It Is
The government’s unprincipled definition of "terrorism" is a tool to stifle dissent, protect elite interests, and obscure the real terrors of the state.
This article was originally published by Current Affairs in a different form for their March/April magazine issue and online here on May 6th, 2024.
In January of 2023, as I was travelling north through Oregon along the I-5 corridor, I became acquainted, purely by happenstance, with a frontline member of what the United States empire has designated an ecoterrorist movement. “Moss” is a forest defender. Moss is her “forest” name, the names many environmentalists in the movement choose to go by in order to avoid identification with their legal names (the state has no sense of humor about such names — prosecutors point to the use of an alias as plain evidence of wrongdoing).
In her mid-forties, Moss has engaged in various tree-sits, blockades, and other civil disobedience actions to prevent logging activities throughout Oregon and elsewhere since the mid-1990s. Back then, these actions were most often carried out under the banner of the Cascadia Forest Defenders. “Those were the days of Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front,” writes Andreas Malm, “Their campaigns of ‘monkeywrenching’ or ‘ecotage’ prospered in a certain subculture that reached its apogee in the 1990s, mingling punk and hardcore with dumpster diving and veganism, spiritual voyages and holistic medicine with squatting and guerrilla gardening, fanzines with herbs.” With the initial success of what came to be known as the Warner Creek blockade, where activists prevented logging on federal land near Eugene, Oregon from 1995-1996, the movement grew its supporter base and many other actions followed. Moss went on to recruit some “more radical” Eugene-based activists to travel up to Portland to mix with the older, more cautious environmentalists who made up the movement there. “That’s probably why I was targeted,” Moss said.
Moss is accustomed to a life of solitude and relative silence amongst Oregon’s pine trees, living as she does in the hills of the Rogue Valley out of her makeshift canvas tent. But once she started relating to me her past environmentalist actions, she spoke in a flood of words, images, and feelings, speaking as someone who was longing for human connection, eagerly wanting to tell their story. “Before you, I was a river with nowhere to pour!” Moss, though thin and physically unimposing (she told me she figured out how to slip her small wrists out of handcuffs, a feat she performed while sitting under arrest in the back of a cop car), is nonetheless sinewy and strong. She has the swarthy, marked complexion of a lifelong traveler, her days mostly spent outside. Her feet are calloused over from consistently being exposed. She’s put her time in riding the rails and hitchhiking throughout the country and overseas.
Though Moss has many concrete stories of her time in the environmentalist community — often stories of failure and disappointment, with large tracts of the ancient old-growth Oregonian forests having largely succumbed to incessant logging and fires — “The tallest ancient guardian trees could absorb lightning strikes and without them the forests aren’t as protected,” she said — or of friends imprisoned, scattered with the wind, missing from the movement or now passed away — “So many of us aren’t here anymore” — she also speaks in the hazy, murky language of horoscopes and planetary movements, of new age spirituality and “energy,” of premonitions and manifestations, and, perhaps most inspiringly, of connecting and communicating with the trees. “You spend hours or even days up in a tree, trying to keep it from being cut down. It’s a communion. It speaks to you. It lets you know what’s coming,” she said. Moss spoke of an instance when she and others were guarding some trees and a group of birds flew over her. They were telling her that the cops were on their way, she said. A warning. And, of course, the cops arrived. “There’s a lot of nature’s aid that comes my way,” she said.
In 2001, mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, with federal law-enforcement’s anti-terrorism budget now swelling, Moss and others in the Oregon environmentalist movement were served with a grand jury subpoena in an attempt to identify and further criminalize tree-sitters and those who committed arson against logging infrastructure. “I was being followed by federal agents,” Moss told me, a rather common observation among the environmentalists. In fact, this surveillance was a deliberate scare tactic by law enforcement at the time in attempts to break the code of silence amongst these activists. Alleen Brown of The Intercept writes:
Armed with a list of 30 to 40 targets, the lead agent on the case began popping up in coffee shops and neighborhoods where he knew activists would recognize him. “You start to induce a little bit of paranoia,” [retired FBI agent Jane] Quimby explained. The idea was that the activists would start thinking, “Are they on to us? Are they watching me? Are they on my phone? Are they monitoring my email account?” she told The Intercept. “It sewed some seeds of doubt.”
Even well before 9/11, federal agents were “tailing [environmentalists] after demonstrations, snooping outside their punk parties, snapping photos of them in the streets,” writes the Eugene Weekly about the movement in Eugene, Oregon in the late ‘90s. Moss expressed paranoia about communicating with me over email given the years of stalking and harassment she has endured because of her activism.
It occurred to me then, as it so often does, the ridiculousness of who our government chooses to spend resources on to surveil and demonize, to forcibly remove from tree-sits and occupations, to rub pepper spray in their eyes with cotton swabs (a practice that Amnesty International deemed “tantamount to torture”), to hold in maximum security prisons, and who it ultimately labels a terrorist. Moss is, for lack of a better word, a hippy. She’s “woo-woo,” in today’s parlance. Though it’s true that she has had associations over the years with people who have committed arson (one of whom committed suicide awaiting a prison sentence), and with others who were members of the radical Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front — two groups which have been surveilled, infiltrated, and, with the FBI’s (ironically named) Operation Backfire, imprisoned into practical nonexistence — Moss herself is a floaty, though wily, tree hugger. Her favorite trees are cedars, she told me. She’s a feeler, less likely to commit an act of monkeywrenching these days than to drop some acid and take a relaxing bath in a wine barrel up in the pines. It’s a simple sad fact that most people age out of the radical movements of their youth. These thirty years after the heyday of the Cascadia Forest Defenders, their former leaders who managed to avoid prison are now more likely to be slow-moving sages, with all the inevitable aches and breaks of age, than Molotov cocktail throwing anarchists.
“What year were you born?” Moss asked me. I told her. “Ah, so you’re the year of the dog. I’m a pig. Dogs and pigs get along well. The dog and the pig were the last animals to cross the river. The Chinese New Year is today. It’s the year of the rabbit.”
This is who our republic sends well-paid federal agents to stalk and harass and serve with a grand jury subpoena: a slight, daydreamy waif with her head halfway up in the clouds and her body and soul up in the trees; a thin, thoughtful woman who has been imprisoned more times than she can count for defending the sanctity of trees older than all recorded memory; a woman who, over a couple beers, tells me about the astrological signs and makes predictions for me. These are the terrorists in our midst.
This article is an examination of why the United States labels certain groups as terrorists, how such labeling chiefly serves state ideology, and why to desanctify the lives of those we call terrorists is to ensure an unbroken cycle of violence and revenge. As we will see, this odious definitional power has been abused for generations, with horrific human consequences.
The United States has a longtime habit of labeling disparate groups of people across the political spectrum as terrorists. Domestically, that includes everyone from 1960s radicals such as the Weather Underground to animal rights activists and environmentalists, Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” protesters, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. January 6 rioters have been called terrorists by U.S. officials, and some have been given draconian prison sentences, with even nonviolent offenders being charged with felonies that can carry up to 20 years in prison. In 2020, President Trump said he wanted to label antifa as a terrorist organization. The U.S. Navy has categorized socialists as terrorists in its training materials. The FBI has labeled anarchists and antiracists as domestic terrorists; the agency’s Counterterrorism Division has labeled Black activists as “Black Identity Extremists” who are considered “threats to national security.” Someone called me a terrorist when I was marching during the 2020 uprisings. Internationally, familiar designants include Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the African National Congress — the party of now-revered anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela. Nations such as Syria, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Cuba have found themselves listed on America’s list of naughty “state sponsors of terrorism.” These are just a small selection of those lumped together in America’s rabid culture of anti-terrorism.
Members of these groups harbor distinct ideologies and motivations for engaging in a range of actions including bombings, hijackings, property destruction, peaceful protest, direct action, and civil disobedience. Labeling all of them simply as terrorists flattens important distinctions. It prevents us from uncovering the true motivations of those who engage in particularly egregious and calculated mass casualty events such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the 9/11 attacks. “One often hears that we must not consider these matters,” writes Noam Chomsky, “because that would be justification for terrorism, a position so foolish and destructive as scarcely to merit comment, but unfortunately common.”
Over the years, the U.S. State Department has maintained multiple terrorist lists, adding or removing designees often for political expediency. As we will see, the state’s definition of terror is largely provisional, certainly hypocritical, and divorced from any consistent, universal principle of justice. The U.S. tends to respond to “terror” with “anti-terror” violence of its own, which — with rare exception — tends to exacerbate the underlying problems which motivated the act of “terror” in the first place. For the U.S., anti-terrorism is a tool that perpetuates the root causes of injustice and conveniently stifles dissent at home and abroad.
The Media’s War on Terror
The mainstream media generally does a poor job of covering terrorism, failing to explain the motivations of various actors, the contexts for their actions, and the relevant history of U.S. policy. As Michael Parenti writes in The Terrorism Trap:
[S]eptember 11 had a terrible shock effect on the millions of Americans who get all their news from the corporate media…. [A]lmost all of America know[s] next to nothing about how U.S. supported terrorists have taken millions of lives in scores of other countries. The media have little to say about those acts of terrorism, and so the general public knows relatively little about them.
And as Antony Loewenstein writes in The Palestine Laboratory:
How terrorism was defined, and by whom, was rarely asked in the mainstream media in the decades after 9/11…. There is an interchangeability between terrorism experts who appear in the media to talk about the never-ending risk from insurgents big and small, deliberately conflating Hamas with Hizbollah, al-Qaeda with ISIS, and the Taliban with the Islamic Republic of Iran as if they are all the same irrational, Jew-hating force to be defeated by military means alone.
In a pre-9/11 review of the coverage in the mainstream press about Middle Eastern affairs, Daya Kishan Thussu comments on a passage from the U.K.’s Sunday Times which reads: “Should Iran, Iraq or any other country where Islamic fundamentalism hold[s] sway ever become nuclear powers, the world would move into a new age of terror.” Thussu explains that putting “both Iran and Iraq in the same fundamentalist camp despite the fact that they are sworn enemies and represent two entirely different political ideologies (Iraq is one of the most secular Arab countries) demonstrates that facts can be sacrificed for propaganda reasons.”
Taken to an extreme, such inability to reckon with nuance allows for overheated rhetoric such as when Israeli politician Yair Lapid equated the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel with Islamic terrorism, saying “we must remind the world that behind these movements [such as BDS] are the people responsible for 9/11, for the terror attacks in Madrid and London, and for the 250,000 people already killed in Syria.” This reactionary assessment came from a relative “centrist” in Israeli politics, no less.
Instead of offering nuanced analysis about such complex issues, the media often defaults to the bellicose propaganda and braindead patriotism of U.S. officials — similar to what the late journalist Robert Fisk called the “language of power” — to fill in the gaps. The U.S. was at war against an “axis of evil,” President George W. Bush said after 9/11. The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas were “an act of sheer evil,” President Biden said. “We are fighting against human animals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister, referring to Gazans in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. As such, any and all measures are allowed to be used against these unsympathetic, incorrigible monsters. Extrajudicial murder, which is not to say extralegal murder, as the empire is usually careful to dress up its assassinations with bureaucratic legalese, is the brutal, logical outcome of designating someone a terrorist, as what happened with Obama’s assassination of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year old American son. When applied to entire people’s, such as the Palestinians, such dehumanization results in genocide.
Those who speak out against such simpleminded brutality are swiftly labeled un-American. Mere days after 9/11, having watched the endless, grim jingoism spouted by American media in response to the attacks, Susan Sontag had the courage to write in print: “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” The unforgiving response to her sentiment was sadly predictable.
Though the press usually gives short shrift to any violent groups, the commercial constitution of the mainstream media means that it has a special and deep animus towards radical leftists, preferring as it does law and order (and profits) to truth and justice. Thus, the labeling of such radicals as terrorists by the state is often given quick legitimacy by a compliant media apparatus. This was made strikingly clear in Weimar Germany, as street clashes between Nazis and leftists reached a fevered pitch. The establishment press chose its predictable side. “As long as Nazi violence was clearly directed against the Communists,” write historians Thomas Childers and Eugene Weiss, “as long as the party could present itself as the victim of leftist terror — a common refrain in Nazi self-representation — it could count on sympathetic coverage in much of the bourgeois press.” The mainstream German press covered Nazi terror “especially against the left, with tolerance, sympathy, and sometimes even encouragement.” Such mainstream bias against radical leftists in favor of the far right continues today.
With the mainstream media unquestioningly joining the state in deeming something an act of terror and its perpetrators as evil, sub-human terrorists, this propagandistic partnership automatically negates any discussion of what the motivations for the act were. By the state’s definition, the aims of terrorists are illegitimate. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. We don’t ameliorate their grievances. Their grievances are, in fact, incomprehensible to us, due in no small part to the dearth of historical context given to the public through establishment media. Without a broader understanding of context and causes, there can be no hope of solving the underlying issues. With the terrorist designation made, polite society is no longer allowed to ask why the terrorists do what they do. “‘[W]hy’ is a question the media are trained to shy away from,” Gore Vidal wrote in an analysis of the case of Timothy McVeigh, considered the nation’s deadliest domestic terrorist. It’s “too dangerous” to ask why, Vidal wrote. “One might actually learn why something had happened and become thoughtful.” Similarly, Chomsky wrote shortly after 9/11: “To refuse to face this question is to choose to increase significantly the probability of further crimes of this kind.”
In Their Own Words
So to actually face this question, there are three examples of “terrorists” whose words we could learn from. One is Cathy Wilkerson, a former member of the infamous militant group known as the Weather Underground. Wilkerson was one of two survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, where a bomb-in-the-making unexpectedly went off and killed three of her fellow Weathermen. In her memoir Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman, she wrote:
Those of us in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and, later, Weatherman, saw ourselves as part of a worldwide uprising of young people working for freedom and equality. By the late ’60s, a great many young people were reeling from the rapid bombardment of many ideas—about feminism, national liberation, black nationalism, environmental destruction, and the apparent impotence of our electoral system.
In choosing the route of violence, she explains, the Weathermen mirrored the violence of the monsters in power.
I made a series of decisions, from a standpoint of rage, hopelessness, and fear, in which I accepted the same desanctification of human life practiced by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and William Westmoreland. I accepted their supposition that, in the end, violence is the only effective strategy for social change; that might makes right, despite the fact that treasuring humanity—and each life within it—was one of the values that I had fought for. I abandoned myself to the sanctimoniousness of hating my enemies.
Much less contrite are the words of Timothy McVeigh, whose motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing was retaliation for federal agent militarization and disproportionate use of force at the Waco siege (a 1993 standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian cult which McVeigh himself witnessed) and other similarly violent federal actions such as Ruby Ridge (a 1992 standoff between federal agents and Randy Weaver, a member of the separatist movement, which resulted in law enforcement killing Weaver’s wife, son, and dog). The police drove a tank through a building with innocent children inside it at Waco. Ultimately, 25 children and 51 others, including two pregnant women, were killed. In McVeigh’s own words:
[F]or all intents and purposes, federal agents had become “soldiers” (using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior.… Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. From this perspective what occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and, subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment [emphasis mine].
This is blowback. While McVeigh murdered many innocents in his attack on a physical symbol of U.S. power and oppression in Oklahoma City — 168 people to be exact, including 19 children — he was nevertheless reacting to the very real problem of U.S. law enforcement, increasingly militarized, acting all too often as judge, jury, and executioner. McVeigh’s reasoning is, to this day, little known or remembered. And it is notably similar to the reasoning given by Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 terror attacks. In a 2001 statement, Bin Laden said:
What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years.… Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins.… To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to god.… neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad…
At the time, the Bush administration asked networks to “exercise judgment” about airing Bin Laden’s words, lest he relay coded language to spur more attacks. The American people were thus shielded from Bin Laden’s express motivations.
In November of 2023, Bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” which was published by The Guardian in 2002, was given new life by young people who found much discovery and resonance in his words, given they’d been raised on the many lies that America tells to its children. Newsweek reported that the letter went viral on TikTok, with one user saying, “It’s actually so mind-fucking to me that terrorism has been sold as this idea to the American people…. that this group of people, this random group of people, just suddenly wakes up one day and just fucking hates you…. it doesn’t make sense.” Another person said, “He was right.” After the newfound virality, The Guardian deleted the letter from its website on November 15, 2023. TikTok has since suppressed videos discussing the letter. Thus, the American indoctrination continues apace.
While the U.S. government feels the need to hide Bin Laden’s words from its citizens, some of his arguments bear striking resemblance to those made by unflinching critics of U.S. policy such as James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky. In one passage, Bin Laden emphasized the historical crimes for which the U.S. has yet to pay:
As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for — you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape [emphasis mine].
This notion of inescapable memory is similar to one of the great themes elucidated in James Baldwin’s work, namely that manufactured innocence and mythmaking are deadly enterprises. Baldwin wrote:
And the West quite fails to see the unforgivable enormity of Hiroshima — repeat: unforgivable — nor, since it believes in a history that is entirely its invention, does it have any sense of the dreadful tenacity of human memory, what that memory records, and how every bill must be paid. … I can tell you not only that my soul is a witness, but that what goes around, comes around. A people who trust their history do not find themselves immobilized in it.
Elsewhere, Bin Laden argued that the American people were not innocent of their government’s crimes. After all, Americans pay taxes that “fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq.” Americans are the ones “who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.” While the average American has little say in the foreign policy enacted at the highest levels of government, it is not a stretch to see Americans as morally responsible for what their government does in their name. Chomsky argued as such in regards to America’s dastardly 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. He wrote, “Our crimes, for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole.” We may be reminded here that some people organized a tax boycott in opposition to the Vietnam War. Happily, today some Americans are refusing to remain complicit in our longstanding crimes against the Palestinians. They understand that if we do nothing, we are as culpable as can be in Israel’s genocide. As Chomsky wrote, “we can think of the United States as an ‘innocent victim’ only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.”
What America suffered on 9/11 was “something insignificant” compared to what the U.S. rained on the heads of others “for scores of years,” Bin Laden said. His assessment is the same as Chomsky’s: “There’s no moral equivalence between [9/11] and the [U.S.] destruction of Nicaragua, or of El Salvador, of Guatemala. The latter were far worse by any criterion.”
The U.S. has a vested interest in hiding the words of terrorists from view because those words often present a vision of reality that stands in stark contrast to the official narrative. What would the American people do if they really knew what their country was responsible for? Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” is indeed an Islamist screed which calls for the imposition of Sharia Law, contains antisemitic tropes, and was written by a man who is responsible for monstrous, unjustifiable crimes. But it is emphatically not the work of a raving lunatic. The grievances it contains are well founded and should be listened to and understood. The same goes for the others. And as we will see, if the term were given universal application, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, and many of their ilk would be standing right alongside Osama bin Laden as some of the worst “global terrorists.”
Terrorizing Dissent
The equating of dissent and protest with anti-Americanism and terrorism is a consistent tactic of the state. This is the idiotic logic of the phrase, “America: Love it or leave it.” As professor Henry Giroux writes in America’s Addiction to Terrorism, “The war on terrorism has morphed into a new form of authoritarianism that imposes its own brand of terror and whose real enemy is not terrorism at all, but democracy itself.” Any deviation from the atavistic pillars of what it means to be an “American” are swiftly labeled as criminal.
Domestically, anti-terror laws have been used to infringe upon constitutional rights and to break radical movements — often on behalf of corporate interests — in what journalist Will Potter has called the “Green Scare.” As environmental and animal rights activism increased in the 1980s and ’90s, corporations lobbied lawmakers to label these activists as terrorists and suppress direct actions that targeted their companies. As post-9/11 anti-terror hysteria worsened the already widespread criminalization of these movements, industry pressure kept federal priorities on environmentalists instead of, say, right-wing extremists that they might have otherwise pursued. Dozens of Oregonian monkeywrenchers were sentenced to prison in the years following 9/11 under “terrorism enhancement” charges, a penalty that significantly increases prison time and marks those convicted as especially dangerous. Most of these monkeywrenchers were implicated by a junkie activist rat, Jake Ferguson, who agreed to wear a wire. “The level of betrayal that took place during the Green Scare and the number of hardcore activists that basically crumbled under minor pressure by the state to become snitches or informants really shook the foundations of the radical movement,” Lauren Regan, a lawyer for one of the defendants told The Intercept, “It was very, very difficult for a lot of people to organize and trust each other in the aftermath of that shakeup.”
Convicted activists have been sent to Communications Management Units, secretive and highly restrictive prison units that were created by post-9/11 counterterrorism policies. Potter draws a frightening picture of what it means for activists once they are convicted with a terrorist enhancement charge:
Those sentences not only are exacerbated by the terrorism enhancement, but it also redefines who these prisoners are. … These activists in general had very little priors. They have no serious criminal history. And yet, after being sentenced for their protest activity they can end up in medium or even maximum security facilities. They are called “red-tagged” by the [Bureau of Prisons] and “red-carded,” that means they have to sometimes carry and wear a large red card identifying them as a high-risk terrorism inmate. They’re treated differently by guards. They’re singled out. The ramifications of this from a human rights perspective extend far beyond just the disproportionate, and I would call it malicious, sentencing of these protestors. It really redefines them.
Corporations have long worked hand in glove with law enforcement to stifle dissent against their business practices. The fur industry provided lists of names of known animal-rights activists to the Justice Department. Enbridge, a fossil fuel company, gave funding and tactical advice to Minnesota police departments to protect the company’s oil pipeline construction. Fossil fuel corporations have gathered dossiers on activists and suggested specific criminal statutes for prosecuting them.
In recent years, the prison penalties have become more severe for resistance to environmentally destructive projects, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline near Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas. In 2016 and 2017, two Catholic Worker activists, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, set fire to pipeline construction equipment and burned holes in the pipeline using welding torches. In 2017, 84 members of Congress wrote a letter to the attorney general pressuring federal prosecutors to charge pipeline protesters with domestic terrorism. (Those Congress members had received a combined total of $36 million from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of lobbying to criminalize environmentalists.) Ultimately, Reznicek and Montoya were both given terrorism enhancements. Reznicek was sentenced to eight years in prison and Montoya to six years. The enhancement, which was written into law a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, has become a popular tool for prosecutors.
In another recent example of opportunism by the state, the January 6th riot was used to give billions of dollars to the Capitol police, congressional hearings were weaponized against the rioters, draconian sentences were passed down for dubious “sedition” charges, while members of Congress and influential thinktanks called for even more anti-terrorism legislation. Members of the Council on Foreign Relations called the riots of January 6th a “textbook” example of domestic terrorism and, in a stunning use of identity politics, argued that the Capitol rioters should be charged as terrorists because not to do so would allow “the attackers [to] avoid the shame and judgment so often placed on violent extremists of color.” By this reasoning, black radicals are disproportionately labeled as terrorists, so we ought to even out those numbers by…..labeling more white people as terrorists. Brilliant. This is the only logic that the threatened establishment is capable of.
Severe penalties have also been levied against protesters of Atlanta’s “Cop City,” a sprawling, $109 million police training facility which has destroyed parts of the Weelaunee Forest, one of the city’s largest green spaces. In March of 2023, dozens of people attending a Weelaunee Forest music festival organized by protesters were swept up in a mass arrest and many were charged with domestic terrorism. This sweep occurred shortly after property destruction had been carried out against nearby construction equipment for Cop City. An Intercept headline explained the absurdity of the situation, in which authorities sought to link festival attendees to the acts of vandalism: “Atlanta Cop City Protesters Charged With Domestic Terror for Having Mud on Their Shoes.” In separate incidents, other protesters have been charged with terrorism for things like “trespassing on posted land,” “sleeping in the forest,” and possessing “a climbing harness and rope.” At an Atlanta City Council meeting in 2023, Micah Herskind, then a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, summed up the situation:
We’ve seen sweeping repressions, mass arrests, overzealous criminal prosecutions and over 40 people have been charged with domestic terrorism, many for things that amount to no more than criminal trespass…. Charging protesters who are part of a social movement with domestic terrorism is a dangerous sign of where things are going when it comes to police repression of our movements.
On the animal rights front, authorities have used the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) to target activists. The law criminalizes as terrorism any action that is carried out “for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise.” One need not even be directly involved in actions to be targeted for arrest. Consider the case of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). SHAC was a 15-year campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, a research company that conducted experiments on animals in ways that can be reasonably be described as torture. SHAC organizers tried to pressure companies and individuals who did business with Huntingdon to end their ties with the company. These pressure campaigns involved letter writing, phone calls, protests, vandalism, and intimidation of company employees. The group also ran a website that disseminated news of such actions. SHAC activists were charged and sentenced to prison for “encouraging and publicizing radical tactics” — not for actually carrying out any of the actions.
Potter himself was involved with SHAC. FBI agents visited Potter at his home and demanded information on his fellow activists. If he refused, he was told his name would be added to a domestic terrorism watch list. “Beliefs that motivate [animal rights] activists were presented as this ideological threat to core concepts that underpin what some people think it means to be an American,” Potter told The Intercept, “— defense of capitalism, a religiously aligned state, defense of industry, the belief that humans are exceptional.” To array yourself against such neoliberal values of the state is to be an incorrigible anti-American, if not an outright terrorist.
Similar state terror tactics have been used against animal-rights groups such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), whose members have carried out successful animal rescues from factory farms and the documenting of horrendous conditions and cruel slaughtering practices. So called “ag-gag” laws, lobbied for by industry, have increased penalties for these kind of direct actions. The original language proposed in these laws would have deemed documentation of slaughterhouse practices a terrorist act.
In another case, two activists were sentenced under AETA for having freed 2,000 minks from a fur farm in 2013. One of those activists, Kevin Johnson, wrote: “The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act achieved its intended outcome. When the distinguishing feature of a ‘terrorist’ is simply an ethical concern for animals, such concerns become marginalized, and voicing them becomes dangerous. What remains is silence.”
It was America’s anti-terrorism hysteria in response to 9/11 which helped result in the passage of the PATRIOT Act, ushering in a new age of mass surveillance, indefinite detainment, torture, and presidential kill lists. And the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, as part of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, marked the beginning of two decades of costly wars in the Middle East. Far from an “emergency measure,” these laws have been perennially renewed by Congress and are now deemed the unalterable normal.
Before 9/11, though, an earlier act of domestic terror first led our nation down the path of constantly looking for terrorists inside our toilet bowls: the Oklahoma City bombing. Following the bombing in 1995 (which several media outlets initially blamed on Islamic terrorism), Congress passed the 1995 Rescissions Act, which gave emergency funding to “anti-terrorism initiatives.” (This legislation had the added effect of increasing tensions between environmentalists and loggers in the Pacific Northwest with the inclusion of the notorious “salvage rider,” a provision which allowed for the clear cutting of federal forestland without having to do an environmental review if the land had suffered a forest fire. Thus, people would sometimes deliberately set fire to forests so that logging companies could harvest the timber, which the law implicitly incentivized. Conveniently, the FBI somehow could not catch arsonists who enabled forest harvesting, nor whoever bombed Earth First! activist Judi Bari, but the agency had no trouble catching environmentalist arsonists who targeted logging infrastructure.)
Later, in 1996, Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, adding new tools for the criminalization of domestic terror. The law established the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list, a designation made by the State Department, and allows for the criminalization of anyone who gives “material support or resources” to those on the list. (As we will see, the determinations made for who gets put on the FTO list are far from impartial.) The law also created the aforementioned terror enhancement charge later used against Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek, as well as many other environmental activists caught in an FBI dragnet in the early 2000s.
Many critics have pointed out that the state has a long history of disproportionately targeting leftwing activists compared to more violent rightwing extremists who are responsible for the preponderance of ideologically motivated murders in the U.S. One former FBI agent summed up the reasons for this rather well, saying that the rightwing is not the enemy of industry: “You don’t have a bunch of companies coming forward saying I wish you’d do something about these right-wing extremists,” he told The Intercept.
During the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Era, the FBI explicitly prioritized anti-war activists and minority movements for disruption and sought to suppress the emergence of a revolutionary “black messiah.” As Alleen Brown of The Intercept writes, “…many of America’s foundational values — Christianity, individualism, gun rights, and white supremacy — align with those of right-wing extremists.” One activist pointedly said to Brown: “No shit the FBI doesn’t like to go after right-wing groups. They’re on the same team.”
The state is never impartial. Here we may be reminded of the fact that the U.S. police state, though it certainly has infiltrated (and been infiltrated by) right-wing militias and fascist organizations such as the KKK, it has never yet orchestrated the government assassination of a prominent right-wing figure. But it certainly has assassinated left-wing figures, perhaps most prominently Malcolm X and Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton and his compatriot Mark Clark, all potential terrorists in the state’s view. The state, despite its rhetoric, always chooses sides. So should we.
This alliance of state, corporate, and right-wing interests has been true for generations. During WWI, labor organizers and anti-war activists were all targeted by violence from right-wing militias such as the American Protective League. The state rarely prosecuted cases of pacifists being tarred-and-feathered or union members being lynched by these militias, often because police members were themselves involved in carrying out the violence (a trend which continues today). In the case of the American Protective League, its members were officially sponsored by the Department of Justice to carry out widespread spying, espionage, sabotage, and violence against dissidents and organized labor.
With the outbreak of WWI came perhaps the most foundational and enduring text for America’s culture of rabid anti-terrorism: the Espionage Act. “Wars are always an excuse to restrict freedom of speech,” writes historian Adam Hochschild, “…and it happened on an ominous scale in 1917.” With the passage of the Espionage Act, ostensibly meant to target foreign spies during wartime, the state instead targeted anti-war dissenters exercising their right to free speech. Any and all “seditious” speech, ranging from calls for pacifism to communist revolution to even casual opinions about the German army executing sound strategy on the battlefield, was all equated with anarchy, anti-Americanism, and terrorism. During this time, Kate Richards O’Hare, a stalwart rhetorician who ran multiple times for the U.S. Senate under the Socialist Party, said that America’s mothers were being used as nothing more than “brood sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.” For this, she was sentenced to prison. Many such others joined her.
During the war, the Espionage Act was used to ban some 74 American periodicals from the mail, mostly leftwing publications. Socialists, labor organizers, immigrants, simple anti-war activists, and even a group called the Friends of Irish Freedom were all surveilled, harassed, deported, or sent to prison for years. “Of the more than 2,000 cases the government prosecuted under the Espionage Act,” Hochschild writes, “only ten would involve people accused of being actual German agents.” This number does not include the hundreds and perhaps thousands of others who were jailed under copycat state-level sedition laws. With the one-two punch of the Espionage Act (and the later Sedition Act) as well as the “Palmer Raids” against labor organizers, the most radical and effective activists were silenced, among whom was Eugene V. Debs, the most popular socialist politician of the day. These anti-dissent laws empowered the most reactionary elements of the society and effectively quashed any militant antiwar efforts that posed a serious threat to President Wilson’s ability to prosecute the war and consolidate corporate power. The Espionage Act is still on the books, and its same authoritarian blueprint, sadly, continues through to today.
Of course, the misuse of the terrorism label is not a strictly Western problem. In India, under the rightwing Hindu Nationalist rule of Narendra Modi, Muslim Indians, long the targets of violence from Hindu extremists, have been increasingly demonized as anti-government terrorists. In 2020, with mass sit-ins being carried out by Muslims, a right-wing politician incited his followers to use violence against them, drawing on hateful, caste-based rhetoric: “Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal? We will have to teach them a lesson.” In the onslaught, 53 people died, most of them Muslims. Few of the attackers were charged with violence. Instead, protests by Muslims have been deemed “seditious” and “terroristic.” Dozens of high-profile Muslim student activists were charged after the attacks “with a slew of offenses, including murder, sedition, and, not long after, terrorism,” writes The Intercept.
Critically, the criminal overreaches that the U.S. has exercised in its War on Terror have been used by countries such as India and Israel to justify their own breach of human rights. America’s global drone strikes and its uses of rendition, torture, and assassinations have been explicitly cited to defend Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians and India’s recent assassinations of Sikh expatriates planned or carried out on U.S. and Canadian soil. Thus, America’s incorrigible state of lawlessness, defended as “anti-terror,” has birthed a global regime of murder and chaos.
The notion that anti-terror policies are often abused by the state to stifle dissent is built not only on such facts as these laid out above, but on an overarching understanding that what the state deems to be lawful activity in general is a product not of justice, but of political ideology. As people come to understand the foundational injustices of their state, as the veil is lifted, the state, instead of addressing the underlying problems, labels such people undesirables and resorts to a terror of its own. This is one of the key reasons why the state’s official terrorist lists should be viewed with skepticism. In the same way that we understand the law in general to be a product of ruling class consensus that chiefly serves to protect ruling class interests and not public safety, so are the specific laws criminalizing terrorism.
The Official Definition
The U.S. defines terrorism, both in international and domestic forms, as “violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States” and “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.” On the surface, this official definition seems a somewhat reasonable formulation. If applied universally, as laws should be, there would be little here to object to. But problems with this legal definition arise immediately if we turn our focus to the violent actions of the U.S. and its allies. From Central America to Africa, from the Middle East to East Asia, the U.S. and its proxy forces have carried out immense campaigns of violence directed against civilian populations in order to secure Western interests. America’s official definition of terrorism can remain coherent only if it is understood to apply to our enemies and not to us. As Noam Chomsky notes: “If the US is unquestionably authorized to bomb another country to compel its leaders to turn over someone it suspects of involvement in a terrorist act, then, a fortiori, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others are entitled to bomb the US because there is no doubt of its involvement in very serious terrorist attacks against them.”
This willful hypocrisy serves U.S. interests quite well, and it must be validated and given legitimacy by political and intellectual elites through mainstream media, scholarship, and think tank reports. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank based in Washington, D.C., analyzed ideologically motivated acts of violence and defined domestic terrorism as “the deliberate use—or threat—of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact [emphasis mine].” With this, the establishment makes itself clear: states, specifically our state and our allies, are exempt from the definition of terrorism and therefore have a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence.
The Western nations, those “self-declared enlightened states,” Chomsky writes, “which have the power to determine norms and to apply them selectively at will,” have demonstrated over decades their capriciousness in who they define as terrorists or terrorist states. Let us turn to some revealing examples.
Shifting the Definition for Our Own Interests
In 1979, Congress passed a law regulating commerce with foreign nations and included stipulations regarding states that are deemed to be sponsors of terrorism. With this and other subsequent laws, the State Department has the authority to list nations as state sponsors of terror if they “have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” Once a nation is put on the list, the U.S. can levy unilateral sanctions against it and other nations or individuals who do business with it, including banning weapons sales, restricting foreign aid, and prohibiting any financial transaction between a U.S. citizen and the designated governments. Two states which have appeared on the list provide useful insight into how the list is politically weaponized: Iraq and Iran.
The original 1979 list included Iraq for its support of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and others. At a key moment, the U.S. would remove Iraq from the list.
In 1984, a few years after the Iranian revolution overthrew the CIA and MI6-installed Shah, the embarrassed U.S. State Department added Iran to the state sponsors of terrorism list. With the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), the U.S. decided that stoking the conflict would be to its benefit. Thus, Iraq was delisted as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1983, allowing the U.S. to provide weapons and logistical support to Iraq, including help in chemical weapons manufacturing (illegal under international law) and key U.S.-supplied intelligence which facilitated Iraq’s gassing of its Kurdish population. Additionally, as exposed in the Iran-Contra Affair, the U.S. secretly supplied Iran with arms during the conflict. Thus, by playing both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. violated its own law against doing business with a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 (after Saddam Hussein thought he received the go-ahead from his American ally) would the U.S. again add Iraq to the state sponsors of terrorism list, thus giving the U.S. carte blanche to wage war and levy harsh, murderous sanctions against Iraq. When it comes to matters of geopolitical hegemony, the U.S. has no qualms about redefining nations as sponsors of terrorism simply to suit its own interests, though not without blowback. The many premature deaths of Iraqi children that resulted from U.S. sanctions were explicitly cited by Bin Laden as motivation for the 9/11 attacks.
A similar cynical dynamic is apparent with how the U.S. has treated the aforementioned MEK, an Iranian militant group which opposes Iran’s revolutionary government. The MEK was deemed a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 1997, so anyone who gave material support to them was criminalized. As noted by many, the MEK is a bizarre, cult-like organization that is deeply unpopular within Iran. It has carried out suicide bombings and assassinations in Iran, targeting Iranian scientists and government officials, and has killed a dozen or so Americans. In 2012, after a successful lobbying blitz (terrorist groups can lobby Congress apparently), the MEK was removed from the FTO list. Since then, high profile right-wing Americans such as John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani have given paid speeches at MEK events where they have voiced support for regime change in Iran, making it clear they see the MEK as a promising proxy force to stir up trouble, just like the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan before them. Again, never having gotten over the successful Iranian Revolution, the U.S. has played with its own anti-terrorism laws in order to demonize and destabilize Iran without regard to fairness or any objective notions of what constitutes terrorism.
The law which instituted the FTO list contains within it a loophole for just this kind of capriciousness. The law states that a terror group may be removed from the list “at any time…. if the Secretary finds that…. the national security of the United States warrants a revocation.” Under the law, “national security” is defined as “the national defense, foreign relations or economic interests of the United States” (emphasis mine). Never mind whether innocents are killed — U.S. economic interests can always take precedence over consistency, justice, and human lives.
The PKK
In contrast to the state’s cynical vacillations with the MEK stands the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey. The PKK has consistently remained on the FTO list since the list’s inception for two main reasons: their ideology and their stated enemies. The PKK was founded as a “revolutionary socialist” organization, two dreaded words for the capitalist United States. The group’s general aim is to establish Kurdish autonomy, with their chief opposition being the state of Turkey, a key NATO member with a long history of oppression against its Kurdish population.
Since its founding, the PKK has harmed few if any Americans. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has assessed that the group poses a “minimal threat to American citizens or government personnel,” citing its good working relations with the U.S. military, and the NSA described the group as a “third-tier terrorist organization,” unworthy of the resources the agency devotes to higher tier groups.
Despite the FTO designation, the U.S. once considered the PKK and other militant Kurdish groups as key bulwarks against the threat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, with the Pentagon funding PKK-affiliated groups to the tune of tens of millions of dollars year over year, in direct opposition to Turkey’s misgivings.
While the U.S. again violates its own anti-terror laws by giving material support to an FTO group, the U.S. nevertheless keeps the PKK on its FTO list mostly to appease Turkey, a key NATO ally. U.S. officials pay lip service to Turkey while still supporting the PKK materially. Joe Biden even equated the PKK with ISIS, saying “there is no substantive difference” between the two (never mind little quibbles of ideology, such as the PKK being founded as a Marxist-Leninist group, shifting to something more like anarchism in recent years, and having many women in its ranks who engaged in armed combat against the repressive, atavistic ISIS members fighting for Sharia Law). The U.S. and its client states have little curiosity or patience for such nuance in regards to their declared enemies. This is the kind of brain rot that happens when every militant group is sweepingly labeled as terrorist. If the Turkish regime ever starts defending notions of national self-determination and sovereign rights to their natural resources, you can bet your ass that the U.S. State Department will be looking for ways to moderate PKK leadership, delist them as an FTO, and get some Stinger missiles into those guerillas’ hands.
Palestine and Israel
Perhaps nowhere is the terrorism double standard demonstrated as nakedly and consistently than with the intractable Israeli occupation of Palestine. As Daya Kishan Thussu writes, “Despite its violations of U.N. resolutions and international law in its routine attacks on Arab lands, Israel has never been characterized as a ‘rogue’ nation or a ‘terrorist’ state[,] the phrases routinely used to refer to the enemies of Washington.” Stacks of books (and articles like these ones here) have been devoted to this particular subject, so a few demonstrable examples should suffice here.
In a recently released report by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Palestine Legal, the authors find that anti-terrorism laws in the U.S. have, from their inception, been targeted against supporters of Palestinians. They find that “the earliest mention of ‘terrorism’ in a federal statute, in 1969, dealt specifically with restricting humanitarian aid to Palestinians and inaugurated a pattern of rendering Palestinians synonymous with terrorism.” Since October 7, pro-Palestinian protesters have been accused of giving “material support to Hamas,” a criminal act, and pro-Palestinian student groups have been banned from college campuses.
In 2006, when Hamas, considered an FTO by the U.S., was democratically elected to majority seats in the Palestinian Authority, the Western world, that sole purveyor of global democracy, collectively lost its mind and shouted “No! We didn’t mean democracy like that!” Congress quickly passed a law barring any aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it demonstrated “progress toward purging from its security services individuals with ties to terrorism, dismantling all terrorist infrastructure and cooperating with Israel’s security services, halting anti-American and anti-Israel incitement, and ensuring democracy and financial transparency.” Likewise, the “Middle East Quartet” composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, issued a statement, saying, “A two-state solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel’s right to exist, and disarm.” Wait, what? So that means Israel also needs to renounce terror, accept Palestine’s right to exist, and disarm? Yeah fuckin’ right. Netanyahu’s own party platform specifically denies support for a Palestinian state.
Looking at the question of civilian casualties between Palestine and Israel, a clear double standard arises. Three years after the Palestinian elections, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the people of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of around 1,400 Palestinians, of whom 1,172 were deemed civilians, including 342 children. Hamas responded with rocket attacks that killed three Israeli civilians. Later, in 2014 fighting, Israel killed 2,202 Palestinians, of whom 1,371 were deemed “non-hostile.” In the same fighting, 68 Israelis were killed, five of whom were civilian. Based on these numbers alone, Hamas is better at avoiding civilian casualties than the Israeli Defense Forces are. The U.N.’s 500-page Goldstone Report concludes that Operation Cast Lead was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population” and that “the repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians appears to…. have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers.” We had to destroy the village to save it. Kill anything that moves. We’ll show those human animals what happens when they vote for Hamas. Collective punishment rules the day.
Israel is a routinely belligerent nation that has bombed Egypt; bombed Jordan; bombed Tunisia; is currently bombing Syria; and invaded, occupied, and subjected Lebanon to state terror and aided mass torture there throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Israel regularly assassinates Iranian civilians. It is carrying out the longstanding occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, starting with the 1947 Nakba. Yet “Israel has the right to defend itself,” goes the common refrain of Western elites. Meanwhile, every rock thrown by a Palestinian child at an Israeli armored vehicle is considered an act of international terrorism. A vote for Hamas is a vote for terror, while a vote for the genocidal right-wing Israeli party currently in power is a vote for democracy.
Such hypocrisy is to be expected when the laws that define terrorism are written by and for powerful interests. Because of its unwillingness to truly understand the forces of terrorism, the U.S. government knows all too well that its power to denote who is and is not a terrorist is, in fact, the ability to fashion convenient and unarguable enemies in comportment with its “national interests,” which are, emphatically, not the same interests of the nation’s people, but instead that of the ruling class.
Notes Towards A Universal Definition
All of this being said, how should we define terrorism in a sense that is separate from state ideology? “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” is a cliché that is only partially illuminating and, therefore, also partially occluding. To use this phrase is “glib and evasive,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “because the ‘freedom fighters’ are usually quite willing to kill their ‘own’ civilians as well. But then, so are states.” With this, Hitchens lays out two important facts about terrorism. 1) Terrorists kill civilians, even their own kith. 2) Also, states kill civilians, even their own. This means that terrorism is not the strict provenance of non-state actors. This means that states can be more than merely “sponsors” of terrorism, using “surrogate mercenary forces,” as Michael Parenti writes, to carry out “death squad terrorism,” but in fact terrorists themselves.
This kind of understanding is certainly not a popular one. If you ask someone to imagine a terrorist in their head, a likely formulation will be an image of a dirty, bearded guerilla fighter, not a clean head of state in suit and tie.
If we instead understand terrorism as a tactic, it follows that any group, regardless of their nationhood or relative power, can carry out terroristic acts. One need only casually glance at the litany of terroristic acts committed by the U.S., just in the last one hundred years, both domestically and abroad — and at how the rest of the world views these acts, ranging from genocide, bombings, invasions, coups, assassinations, and theft — to grasp the truth that states can indeed be terrorists just as surely as underground extremists can. And working through proxies, as Western states often do, with Central American death squads being one notable example, does not absolve the state of those crimes by proxy. As Freddie DeBoer put it: “That defense doesn't work in a court of law if you get someone to kill your wife, and it doesn't work here.” When the CIA and the Pentagon arm anti-Assad jihadists in Syria, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of civilians by those jihadists, the U.S. is just as culpable for those murders as those who pulled the trigger.
While this broader understanding of terrorism does not necessarily help in narrowing down who a real terrorist is, for nearly all states and armies use terror tactics, it does help us to realize that all such states are hypocrites when they condemn terror.
The term “terrorist,” Susan Sontag writes, “is a more flexible word than ‘Communist.’ It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war [on terror] will be endless — since there will always be some terrorism…that is, there will always be asymmetrical conflicts in which the weaker side uses that form of violence, which usually targets civilians.” Here again, terrorists tend to target civilians. But in Sontag’s formulation, the tactic of terrorism tends to be used by the side with less militaristic strength. While it is true that a weaker party to a struggle may use guerilla tactics to bog down a stronger armed force, the notion that the weaker side is more likely to target civilians with terroristic violence, as Sontag suggests, is dubious at best. Sontag’s definition of terror again leads us down the path of viewing only non-state actors, or the relatively powerless, as terrorists, while similar violence carried out by stronger nation-states is, by definition, not terrorism. The indiscriminate rockets launched by Hamas are terroristic. The indiscriminate (American funded) bombs dropped by Israel on Gaza are defensive.
If we accept that the tactic of inciting terror in civilians can be used by any entity, a definition of terrorism that stops there is quite broad indeed. By way of narrowing the definition, Hitchens wrote: A terrorist’s “chief targets must be civilians and noncombatants (not always the same thing), and there must be a political reason why they are his prey. His cause must be a hopeless one. He must be without a realizable manifesto, program or objective. In other words, violence must be his end as well as his means.”
With the question of violence raised, it may go without saying that definitions of violence itself can be quite disparate. Is looting violence? Is systematic starvation violence? Where is the line of legitimate self-defense? Andreas Malm, author of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, downplays the supposed violence of private property destruction and offers a stricter, more politically neutral conception of terroristic violence. Decrying the terror enhancements that Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek received, Malm writes, “If terrorism is to have any analytical substance, its core definition must be the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror…should we also label [Montoya and Reznicek] terrorists? On this definition, it would be risible.”
Adding another wrinkle to the definition, Hitchens cites the example of the Irish Republican Army: “I was more than once within blast or shot range of the IRA and came to understand that the word ‘indiscriminate’ meant that I was as likely to be killed as any other bystander…However, at no point in this period did I fail to remind myself that the then British policy in Ireland was stupid and doomed and — much more important — open to change.” Hitchens concludes: “Terrorism, then, is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.”
Demanding the impossible at gunpoint. Though this formulation opens up our understanding, which is not to say sympathy, for violent groups that are fighting for a proximately winning cause, it still has this problem: who determines whether a cause is reasonable, just, and capable of being achieved? Armed, revolutionary Marxists aren’t exactly behaving like their cause is impossible, and their sympathizers would say that the revolutionary Marxist cause of rupturing existing social and material relations is both achievable and just. But the capitalist state certainly tries to make their revolutionary cause impossible and labels militants as terrorists from the word “Marxism.” Moreover, justifying violence for an achievable goal opens up another avenue for ugly hypocrisy. As Noam Chomsky points out, the U.S. is not likely to allow others besides them and their allies “to carry out large-scale international terrorist operations if their goals are likely to be achieved.” How would you like it if a foreign army murdered your whole family but achieved their goal of “promoting democracy” in the process?
Problems with subjectivity and the choosing of sides are continually vexing in questions of violence. It should be noted that even as certain groups and individuals resort to the terroristic killing of innocents — perhaps the only metric most would agree ought to be included in a definition of terrorism (but we don’t agree on who qualifies as innocent) — killing innocents has not historically prevented any and all sympathy for the perpetrators. The tribe that you identify with tends to determine your sympathies, or lack thereof. The Irish Republican Army had public support from certain members of the Irish community in Boston, Massachusetts, for example, as well as no little amount of sympathy from certain (enlightened) Englishmen.
Despite such persisting issues with the definition, “terrorists are those who kill innocents to further an unreasonable cause” seems a reasonable formulation. If this be our metric, then nation-states — those entities which have the consequential power to call a terrorist a terrorist — have absolutely abused the term “terrorism” for political ends in truly capricious and unprincipled ways, and they are quite guilty of the same crimes of terror themselves.
Criminals at Large
Of course, there have always been conspicuous absences from America’s terrorist lists. As Michael Parenti points out:
[N]either the Clinton nor Bush administration ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a U.S. oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
Similarly, America has always treated the oil-rich Saudi Arabia with kid gloves, “despite the Saudis’ devastation of Yemen, the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and even suspicions that parts of the royal family funded Osama bin Laden,” write Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick in Except for Palestine, making it clear that “human rights are not the primary predicate for U.S. policy in the [Middle East].”
In Latin America, we find the case of Pinochet’s Chile, responsible for (with CIA support) the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende as well as Operation Condor, a project of international terrorism carried out against dissenters to the fascist Chilean regime. Condor operatives went so far as to bomb a former official of President Allende’s leftist government, Orlando Letelier, while he was driving with his young American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, D.C. Both were killed. This killing of an American on U.S. soil was insufficient to ever warrant putting fascist Chile on the state sponsors of terrorism list. “On September 11, 2001, I happened to be working with a friend from Chile when I learned the shocking and terrible news about the planes slamming into the World Trade Center,” wrote anti-war activist Peter De Mott, “My friend commented, ‘You reap what you sow.’ He was remembering September 11, 1973, when a US-backed coup in Chile killed its democratically elected president; bombed the presidential residence; tortured, raped, and murdered thousands; and sent many (including my friend) into exile.”
Likewise, though Nelson Mandela and other members of his African National Congress party were on a U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008, the murderous government of apartheid South Africa never joined any such list. Irish Republican Armies have been, and are, considered FTOs, but the U.K., with its roving paramilitary death squads in Ireland, never joined America’s list of terrorist states. “Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless string of terror attacks,” writes Patrick Radden Keefe in Say Nothing, a book about The Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland. He continues:
These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanized by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services. All those bright lines that bureaucrats and legal scholars draw to delimit the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, those boundaries that are meant to separate order from barbarism, had been transgressed. “We were not there to act like an army unit,” one former British officer who served in the [Military Reaction Force] later acknowledged. “We were there to act like a terror group.”
I could go on with such examples. This may suffice here. Any casual look at the history of U.S. foreign involvement, from Central America to the Middle East, Europe to East Asia, yields a clear pattern of cynical support for “our” terrorists — “freedom fighters” being the preferred term — and unremitting cruelty for any terrorists that don’t serve our interests. Thus, in all the official State Department lists, you will never find some of the worst terrorist offenders.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
“We all know who the real terrorists are — the whole world does,” said Tim Lewis, an Oregonian environmentalist, in response to terrorism enhancements being handed down to environmentally-motivated arsonists. “The only people who seem not to are the judges and the court system.” (Lewis’ words seem prophetic today, with radical animal-rights activists being acquitted by juries for rescuing dying animals from factory farms, a “crime” which they are clearly, technically guilty of.) But some of the greatest terroristic actions in our society are not the most obvious ones.
I do not argue that we ought to adhere to a more stringent definition of terrorism in general. I am sympathetic to a definition of terrorism which includes the myriad ways in which workers and dissidents are terrorized by the capitalist state, not through outright physical violence necessarily (though this certainly occurs — is it not terrorism when the state sends armed men to put down student uprisings, as what happened with murderous consequences at Kent State, and what is currently happening against student occupations for Palestine? Is it not terrorism when the state sends armed men to quash striking mine workers, as what happened with the Battle of Blair Mountain, or the Ludlow Massacre?), but through the slow and inexorable accretion of little tyrannies that deprive us of the means for living a healthy life, that keep us in line, that keep us afraid of struggling to change our “social system of mass cruelty” in the words of China Mieville.
With our globalized economy, workers in every sector have been robbed of their bargaining power and terrorized out of their freedom. People living paycheck to paycheck can’t just quit their shitty job any time they please in order to find a different but equally shitty job. The resultant loss of income can be ruinous. With an anemic social safety net, workers are terrified of demand something better. People cannot participate in a supposed free-market economy when they’re too sick or too old to work anymore. With the influence of big money on our politics, we have been robbed of the official mechanisms by which we could effectuate change. As private equity vulture capitalists run roughshod over our communities, buying out public services and driving them into bankruptcy to make a quick buck, as economic precarity becomes a reality for more and more workers, and as poverty itself becomes more and more criminalized, our belief in better lives and the will to secure this for ourselves and our children is driven out of us through intimidation, learned helplessness, and terror.
So many of us are now living precarious lives. As Matthew Desmond describes it in Poverty, by America: “Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing— and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.” Denied is the key word. By a complex web of dispossession, those with power are able to consolidate their wealth and privilege by exploiting us, depriving us of the means to live healthy, fulfilling lives, and terrorizing any attempts to change our conditions.
The signs of this sneaking, terroristic social violence are all around us. The East Palestine train derailment and explosion, which covered the small Ohio town in a deadly toxic cloud of chemicals, happened because of the deliberate deregulation of the railway industry by the state. The small community was torn apart as neighbors with differing views on the disaster began to turn on each other. “Before this happened, the town was your model town. It was very closely knitted, people look after their neighbors…it’s not quite like that now,” said East Palestine resident Chris Albright. “It’s not as neighborly. There’s a lot of accusations from different sides.” Albright’s wife, Jessica, said that people who haven’t experienced health issues from the toxic explosion are telling others to “just suck it up and move on.” After the explosion, the government-run EPA downplayed and covered up the extent of the toxicity in the water and in the air, telling people it was safe to return to their homes. “My daughter’s nose bleeds every time she goes in the house,” Jessica Albright said. Instead of paying to make the residents of East Palestine whole, railroad company Norfolk Southern has spent nearly $2 million lobbying congress to avoid passing stricter railway regulations. No one has gone to jail for this.
The people of Flint, Michigan had their water poisoned with lead and other toxins because of the deliberate and secretive actions of the state. The city assured Flint citizens that the water was safe to drink, despite vocal concerns. To this very day, ten years since the start of the crisis, the water in Flint is unsafe to drink. No one has gone to jail for this. What of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster? An estimated 764 workers died from inhaling silica dust when drilling a tunnel in West Virginia for Union Carbide, though likely many more perished in the years after. Company doctors lied and said the sicknesses were not due to the dust. Management forced sick workers, paid only a few dollars a day, to continue working in the toxic environment at gunpoint. The state never brought charges against the company. Just in the past few years, multiple instances of slavery have been documented in the U.S., with agricultural workers locked in cages and forced to work without pay under threat of deportation. All of these people, simply, were terrorized by an uncaring corporate state.
This culture of terrorism serves to “domesticate the aspirations of the majority,” in the words of Salvadoran Jesuit priests whose country had suffered devastation at the hands of U.S.-sponsored terrorist groups. When workers rise up, they are beaten, shot at, thrown in prison, and called terrorists. In this way, not only are our lives materially worsened by the whims of the elites, but even our very hopes for something better are terrorized out of us. This is not freedom. It is slavery.
The capitalist state need not use the force of the gun to inflict terror and mayhem on us. As sociologist Frederick Engels argued in The Condition of the Working-Class in England:
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
Although I decry the state’s designation of nonviolent civil disobedience and protest as terroristic, thus bringing to bear the full weight of the draconian U.S. criminal justice system, I decry the state designating such activity as terrorism not because it is an overly liberal use of the term “terrorism,” tout court. I decry it because I have chosen a side, just as the state has chosen a side. “I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind,” wrote George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, “but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
I, too, know which side I’m on. We all should.
We ought not idealize or whitewash any group that chooses to engage in the poison of violence, lest we find ourselves becoming apologists for war crimes. “Many of the twentieth century’s most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes,” wrote Susan Sontag. “My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice — of course, I don’t want to choose — I choose truth.” We should also choose truth, itself a form of justice. But if a particular group, even a violent one, identifies its enemy as a capitalist state, precisely because it is capitalist, I know which side I’m on.
Weeks after 9/11, Craig Rosebraugh, a spokesperson for Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, made a statement to Congress saying:
If the U.S. government is truly concerned with eradicating terrorism in the world, then that effort must begin with abolishing U.S. imperialism. Members of this governing body, both in the House and Senate as well as those who hold positions in the executive branch, constitute the largest group of terrorists and terrorist representatives currently threatening life on this planet… If the people of the United States, who the government is supposed to represent, are actually serious about creating a nation of peace, freedom, and justice, then there must be a serious effort made, by any means necessary, to abolish imperialism and U.S. governmental terrorism. The daily murder and destruction caused by this political organization is very real, and so the campaign by the people to stop it must be equally as potent.
In perhaps its cruelest form of terror, the U.S. maintains the largest inmate population in the world, incarcerating around 20 percent of the world’s prisoners. Jack Gilroy, an anti-war activist, was imprisoned in a work camp during the 9/11 attacks following his demonstrations against the School of the America’s, a program at Fort Moore (formerly Fort Benning) in Georgia, which has trained hundreds of U.S.-backed, right-wing Latin American soldiers who went on to terrorize, torture, and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people. The military program gave lessons on torture and executions in its official training manuals. While in prison, Gilroy was interrogated by guards asking him what he and his associates thought about the recent 9/11 attacks. Gilroy wrote about the hypocrisy of his imprisonment:
The deep irony of it all was that I — along with 23 other [activists] — were at that very moment in prison because we had tried to stop the teaching of terrorism by the United States government to Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas. And here I was, the only non-felon in the whole prison camp, yet the only one under suspicion for possibly being sympathetic to the 9/11 attackers!
My fellow workers, mostly young blacks, felt they were the victims of a war, the so-called War on Drugs. Many of them had already served five or more years with many more years of confinement ahead of them. None of them were violent; in fact, prison camps do not accept inmates with a record of violence. “I know what terrorism is,” said one man. “It’s sending me to prison for 19 years, keeping me from my family. It’s not being able to see my little girl go off to school and not being with my boy when he goes into high school.”
To add to the list: in 1985 police dropped bombs from helicopters onto a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 11 people, five of them children, and leaving 250 people homeless as the city let the fires burn; the cops beat Rodney King half to death on the streets of L.A.; the cops murdered George Floyd in front of the whole world (“It was horrific,” a longtime Minneapolis resident told me, “Everybody knew George”). These are just some of the shocking instances we remember. The roll call of the dead and destroyed at the hands of our state, just amongst our own citizenry, is too vast, deep, and unimaginably horrifying for a true accounting. The lives we have destroyed abroad are much more numerous.
When these people organize themselves to try to protect their communities, they are demonized as unpatriotic traitors whose acts of self-defense are characterized as unjustifiable, in contrast to the wholly justifiable wars of aggression and profit perpetrated by the state. What are we to do when our government is the terrorist, but points the finger at us? What to do when, as Henry Giroux writes, “Americans live in a society where ever-expanding segments of the population are being spied on, considered potential terrorists, and subject to a mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits”? The extent to which the ruling class is not controlled by or representative of the demos is the extent to which the demos is justified, and indeed duty-bound, to destroy the ruling class, and thereby restore principles of democracy. This right of the people to alter or abolish their government, then, in the rulers’ eyes, is an illegitimate right to terrorism.
The terror we’ve unleashed against the underclasses, marking many of our brothers and sisters from birth — their parents, gazing into their children’s eyes, worrying what, I can’t imagine, awaits their precious issue — is a terror that, as James Baldwin wrote, “has little to do with one’s specific fears for oneself: it relates to Dante’s I would not have believed that death had undone so many.”
For precisely how long a society can keep up this state of affairs, where Western citizens, or rather, those who think they are citizens, are forced, in the name of anti-terror, to sacrifice not only their own dear civil liberties, those things which they are taught make their country better than all the rest, but are even forced to give up their very human faculties of trust, community, cooperation, and regard for their fellow men, thus bringing them to the level of jackals, all in service of an imperialist project which they have no say over and, indeed, which they materially benefit from very little if at all (did my minimum wage get raised because of the Afghans vaporized in an instant?), will be just as long as the Western conscience fails to recognize that its fate is inextricably bound with the fates of the least of these, our brethren.
The fanatical anti-terrorist attitude in the U.S. maintains a vicious cycle of violence and oppression. So long as we manufacture everlasting enemies, so long as we permanently menace entire peoples, the whole of our society will be under threat from both within and without by that same menace we think to be our salvation. Is it any wonder that as we cover up our nation’s crimes by demonizing those who lash out against us, as we continue to ravage the Holy Lands, watering the sand with blood, and as we consign our own citizens to pauperism and tyranny, that these people, these future terrorists — representing at once our shameful history, our very living issue, and our future legacy — are running up behind us with a knife aimed squarely at our back?
In the summer of 2020, as we were marching in the streets with a surprising mass of people, wet heat radiating from the asphalt, lines of cops in front of and behind us, fleeting and untrustable notions of revolutionary promise flowing through me, visions of a society that cared for its people, a state which served the demos instead of murdered them, and a world free from the everyday indignities of scraping by just to put money in some fat cat’s pocket, the crowd I was walking with passed through a line of stopped cars heading the opposite direction. A man stuck in his car, waiting for us marchers to get out of the way, opened his window as I walked by and, with an inside-voice, almost to himself, exasperated yet daring, said: “Terrorists.”
I know there were certainly those amongst us that day who would have responded to the man, yes, we do mean to terrorize. Just as our black brothers and sisters have been terrorized for lifetimes, for generations, for all living memory. “Now you talk about terror,” sings the black blues musician Willie King in his song “Terrorized,” written shortly after 9/11. “What about poor me? I been terrorized, all my days. Happenin’ all my days.”
Now you call us, we outraged marchers in the streets responding to what we see with our own eyes and feel in our own hearts every day, terrorists. “FUCK YOUR COMFORT,” was one of our consistent chants during that summer. We proclaimed —loudly — for that summer and after, if we can’t make lasting change, whatever that means, we might as well inspire some terror of our own. “No justice, no peace,” is not a chant that necessarily promises justice. It certainly promises no peace.