The first time I awoke to the abuse of language in the use of the word “terrorist,” it was in 2005 in Chile, where Mapuche activists protesting private companies openly stealing and destroying their ancestral land were being prosecuted by the government under anti-terrorism laws, and sent to prison for 10 years.
(On a side note: at the time, I was appalled by what I felt was an unbearably harsh sentence for relatively minor offenses. Now, living in the USA, I almost find myself thinking the government of Chile was lenient. For what I see in terms of sentencing in the USA, even the 14 years spent in a dungeon by Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo – my childhood reference for inhumane imprisonment – seems, in comparison, a piece of cake…)
To go back to the main subject, I wish people would stop overusing and abusing words such as terrorist and terrorism. “These terrorists” this and “those terrorists” that.
Are the goat herders in the Middle East that the government is actively droning terrorizing you? Do you wet your pants and have trouble sleeping at night thinking about them? Do they disrupt your daily life? If not, well, it might be time to admit that they are not terrorists to you.
On the other hand, don’t you think children in that region are terrorized by the American killer drones? That they cannot sleep tight at night and that they wet their pants when they hear one of them flying overhead? If so, then American drones, and Americans by extension, are terrorists to them.
The war on terror is truly a war of terror and it is worth asking ourselves who is terrorizing who in the world right now.
In this country, I feel like Americans are more likely to be terrorized by SWAT teams storming into their homes on the lamest excuses and keeping them at gunpoint, than by any foreign enemies the government has been making up for far too long.