The Only Thing Scarier Than Terrorism Is Forgetting What It Means
August 1962. Nelson Mandela is arrested and charged with inciting workers’ strikes in South Africa (trade union action was illegal for black South Africans).
Then-British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, describes his political party as “a typical terrorist organisation,” adding that, “anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.” Fellow MP, Terry Dicks, describes Mandela as a “black terrorist.” And Mandela responds by becoming the democratically elected president and running the government in South Africa.
Despite this, Mandela remains classified as a terrorist for the next twenty-one years. In fact, the U.S. only removed the designation because issuing terrorism waivers for his state visits was getting embarrassing.
July 2025. Activist group, Palestine Action, breaks into RAF Brize Norton and sprays two military refuelling planes with red paint.
The group has a history of non-violent action against military contractors, including vandalising equipment at one of aerospace and defence firm Teledyne’s factories.
So MP Richard Dannatt (who just so happens to be a paid adviser to Teledyne), urges the government to take action against this threat to his bank accou…excuse me, to “security and the economy within the United Kingdom.”
The U.K. government proscribes Palestine Action as terrorists shortly afterwards.
November 2025. Syrian President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, attends the White House to discuss lifting sanctions on his country.
Around a decade earlier, as leader of the jihadist group, al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa vowed to fight against Western interventionism and used suicide bombings, ethnic cleansing, and various massacres to do it.
So naturally, the US government…oh, wait, they rescind al-Sharaa’s terrorist status and Donald Trump reclassifies him as a “young, attractive guy” with a “strong past.”
You’re not supposed to think too deeply about the word “terrorism.”
You’re supposed to accept that the world is divided neatly into good guys and bad guys, you’re supposed to buy into the cliches about who is and isn’t a terrorist, and you’re definitely not supposed to notice that our leaders have become alarmingly comfortable throwing the t-word around.
Politicians with blatant financial conflicts of interest can label non-violent groups like Palestine Action terrorists. And that’s all it takes for the Metropolitan Police to dutifully arrest over 2000 people, including blind men in wheelchairs and 83-year-old grandmothers, for expressing any form of support for the group (the police were so enthusiastic that they even arrested a guy wearing a T-shirt that said Plasticine Action).
Donald Trump can declare that peaceful protesters dressed as unicorns in Portland, Oregon, and 48-year-old single mothers in Chicago, Illinois, are terrorists. And that means he can ignore the objections of the governors of Illinois and Oregon and deploy the national guard to “crush violent radical left terrorism.”
And taking it to its awful, inevitable conclusion, people like Israeli Knesset Member, Amit Halevi, along with several other politicians and senior figures, can argue without a hint of shame that children, literal babies in Gazan maternity wards, are terrorists. And maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t think of a single reason to describe newborns in this way except as justification to kill them.
Because that’s what you do with terrorists, right?
You blow them to pieces in the Caribbean Sea and save yourself the hassle of due process, you torture them to death in prisons without the inconvenience of charges or a trial, you terminate them with extreme prejudice, even if it means killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians and children in the process.
And anyone who objects to this is obviously a terrorist supporter who we can deport or imprison without worrying about the precedent this sets.
But then again, maybe we should be extremely concerned, regardless of our political affiliations, when our leaders start blurring the lines between protesters and terrorists.
Maybe we should ask if the “terror” being inflicted is more significant than multibillion-dollar corporations terrified that their complicity in war crimes will affect their share price.
Maybe we should ask if part of the reason these fanatics in faraway lands can convince people to blow themselves up is that we’ve spent decades travelling to those faraway lands and blowing up their children and parents.
Because if the label is all it takes for us to abandon our moral and critical thinking, and the people who apply that label are willing to use it on anyone who threatens their power, there’s no telling if the next “terrorists” will be us.
It feels almost dangerous to admit that terrorists are human beings.
To ask if they’re motivated by anything more than murder and martyrdom. To think seriously about why they hate us or whether there’s any important historical context we’re missing.
This, of course, is one of the reasons why politicians increasingly use the label to dehumanise peaceful protestors and UN lawyers and anybody with the audacity to challenge them.
But it’s also one of the reasons why terrorism in its most violent forms persists. After all, it’s notoriously difficult to solve a problem if you can’t bring yourself to think seriously about it.
After a few hundred years, most people have come to the same conclusions about slavery as “terrorists” like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey.
Most people today condemn South Africa’s apartheid regime as unequivocally as “terrorists” like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko did forty years ago.
Most people (including most of the people who orchestrated it) have figured out that sacrificing millions of innocent lives to the “War on Terror” was not only difficult to distinguish from terrorism, but made terrorism worse.
The question is, how many lives would have been saved if they’d done that thinking a little quicker?