In the wake of Eliot Rodger, a revision. Initiated by this, from chaunceydevega's excellent diary on aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome:
When an "Arab" or "Muslim" American kills people in mass they are a "terrorist". When a black person shoots someone they are "thugs". When a white man commits a mass shooting he is "mentally ill" or "sick".
Revised because, when I wrote this previous diary on what we call certain things, I did not cast my net wide enough. I can and I will now.
This is how I began a diary in July 2012:
Yes, terrorism. Gay-bashing and hate crimes are useful terms. [So is the catch-all phrase Violence against Women] They're very descriptive, and they have specific meanings. But if you remember the opposition to hate crimes legislation, it's that someone killed in a hate crime is just as dead and that the hate crime enhancements are, well, unnecessary. If we start to make it clear that the violence that is inflicted on gay people or Muslims or religious buildings or innocent people at the hands of a guy with a lot of guns or, for example, Dr. George Tiller, isn't just assault and battery or arson or murder, it's terrorism, MAYBE we can move the needle on the public perception of events.
Before you read the rest of this, surf on over to Chrislove's harrowing diary, Horrifying: "Fag" spray-painted on OK gay man's car, then blown up, and you'll see why I'm writing this now. Follow me below the great orange cartouche, please.
No matter WHO commits the crime. Why did I define it this way? First, I went to a dictionary site:
Here's the Merriam-Webster definition: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. Interestingly, when I accessed the Merriam-Webster page today, the first of three trending words was terrorism, although they used a different definition of terrorism that involves groups (which made me wonder who Merriam-Webster was trying to serve). If lookups for "terrorism" spiked the day after the shootings in Aurora, that means we're part of the way there for emphasizing "means of coercion" as what terrorism does.
Yes. The day after Aurora. Another aggrieved white man saying "Don't think you can be secure anywhere."
The problem is fourfold. First, an emphasis on the group nature of terrorism (what Merriam-Webster tried to do) allows us to misidentify domestic terrorists as lone wolves, just as we saw going on in Aurora. Second, "gay-bashing" is very rarely associated with coercion, although the underlying message of gay-bashing is "We don't like your kind and we don't want you around here." Third, "hate crime" is considered the result of (to be gentle) bias or (to be honest) hate-filled bigotry. The hate crime is committed within the mind of the person who commits it. Fourth, it allows us to look at violence against women as something motivated more by sex than it is by power, which is a dangerous trap we can fall into. Besides, lists of domestic terrorism, as chaunceydevega pointed out, generally consist of crimes committed by radicalized Muslims. We need to do some historical investigation here.
And so I did. I looked at the so-called "lone wolf" theory, the way they try to differentiate the aggrieved and entitled white man (like Timothy McVeigh, who almost NOBODY wanted to describe as a terrorist) from the Muslim "terrorists" and the black "thugs", and I looked at the politics of gay-bashing and the terrorist nature of hate crimes. I concluded that diary this way:
Thus, let's just start calling these homophobic, racist, xenophobic and anthrophobic acts terrorism, and, while we're at it, acknowledging that rape is about power, add terrorism to the terms we use to describe that too.
I know, exercising my own white male privilege by adding rape as an afterthought. That's why this revision is necessary too.
Not an afterthought now. This particular incident has the lone wolf hypothesis written all over it. The first person who comes to mind, in fact, is Anders Breivik, manifesto and all. A google search shows that the BRITISH media have no problem calling Breivik a terrorist - the BBC, in fact, calls what he did "Lone wolf" terrorism but then says this:
"Lone wolf" terrorism represents a tiny - if less detectable - fraction of terrorist attacks.
Less detectable? Or is this an unwillingness to identify lone wolf, single assaults fueled by aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome as terrorism because, well, white men? American media, not so prepared.
Here's TIME,
carefully making a distinction:
As Norwegians seek to understand what happened, a few details about Breivik are emerging that suggest he sought to make his rampage more similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, in which 168 people were killed, than to the al-Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
But I digress here.
Of course, violence against women is coercive. As Susan Brownmiller wrote in the introduction to her book, Against Our Will, Men, Women and Rape (1975),
Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. (h/t Susan from 29)
A google search turns up the phrase "patriarchal terrorism" but really, why did I need to search? Television, especially procedural cop shows, provides REALLY good examples of how battered women have been terrorized by men they live with. And then, a diary about exactly that inspired by another diary that tried to defend men in the wake of the events in Santa Barbara showed up and is on the rec list, as is a terrific diary about the #YesAllWomen hashtag as I write this. We don't have to go any further than
this courageous diary by Susan from 29 and
this wonderful diary by cai to understand that violence against women, the kind that silences women out of fear that there will be retaliation, is coercive and thus terroristic.
I don't think that expanding the use of the word "terrorism" to cover bias crimes fueled by racism, homophobia or misogyny will strip it of its meaning either. We all know what it means, and it seems to me that using it this way will bring the nature of these crimes into sharper focus as ways of restricting the freedom of subaltern people that are used by men suffering from entitlement syndrome.
UPDATE, 5/26/14, 8:15 AM: Obviously, this is not what I expected. So a question. Why is it so important to LIMIT the definition of terrorism?