When Terrorism and Capitalism become the same thing

The people who stand to benefit the most from panic, from the discord sown by scaremongering in both social and traditional media are richer than you. They want the same thing terrorists want: society in disarray. They want you running scared.

What is terrorism? Conventionally, it’s a term defining acts of crazed, radically ideological individuals or partisan groups perpetrated either to promote fear amongst hapless bystanders or as targeted retribution. But the term in itself is a convenient blind for the myriad aims of the acts behind it. ‘Terrorism’ is a hugely loaded phrase which conveniently removes all context from the acts supposedly carried out in its name. From the deliberate crashing of airliners and trucks into buildings and crowds, the kidnap and murder of tourists and reporters, to one-off acts of dissent or years-long campaigns of rebel resistance groups: all of these can be easily dismissed as the crackpot behaviour of lunatics when described by the blanket term ‘terrorism’, a word which suggests an agenda whose aims and methods might as well be as indiscriminate as they are inchoate. Terrorism — easy to condemn, harder to truly define.

A key way the concept of terrorism obfuscates is in how the word itself refuses to justify its subject. There is no way to applaud ‘terrorism’ when using so loaded a word as a…