Student protesters are terrorists!
NWU students are fascists, Rhodes Must Fall are fascists, the EFF are fascists.
As a Pessimism of the Will executive editor said to me, wouldn’t it be more historically grounded to call them terrorists? After all, it’s a usefully meaningless concept that could easily serve as a vehicle for everyone to project their preconceptions. Oh, they’re ideologically rigid, favour direct action over reasoned discussion, intolerant of dissent, and use violence in public space as a tactic to disrupt normal operations? If that is sufficient for a charge of fascism, then fascism can be applied to almost any militant group in history and the charge loses its bite. On the other hand, terrorists are, famously, whomever we say they are, so throwing the word around doesn’t risk depriving us of a conceptually rich analytical term.
The problem is that terrorism is a very broad category, but it does carry connotations of relative powerlessness, or at least a sense of asymmetry. A rigorous definition might well include state terrorism, but that’s hardly the popular definition. (Are drone strikes terrorism?)
Calling violent protesters terrorists risks making them sound oppressed rather than agents of majority prejudice, which I take to be the submerged premise of the fascist label.
And as pointed out by the aforementioned Exec Ed, “if you spell it out, you’re kinda forced to realise that they’re mostly disadvantaged students at opposition with authority and not the government’s secret police in charge of identifying and stamping out dissent.”
Of course, fighting the system neither makes you good nor not-fascistic. Golden Dawn have perpetrated acts of terror.
What that asymmetry does mean, though, is that whether or not you are a terrorist depends very much on who is in charge of the labels. In a real sense, you are good or bad, politically speaking, because you have or have not been designated a terrorist. Fascism is a tighter concept. You are not bad because you’re a fascist, you’re a fascist because you are (relevantly) bad.
Terrorism, like violence more generally, may or may not ever be justifiable. But whether we call the students terrorists or fascists, the question of whether the students’ tactics are legitimate or not can’t be settled be assigning arbitrary labels. Calling them terrorists at least shows more respect to language and to basic facts.
South African political argument follows a kind of reverse Godwin’s law whereby we must eventually invoke Nelson Mandela. So let’s go ahead and remind ourselves that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. We might also (less properly) call the students of the Soweto uprising terrorists. Now what?
