Opinion Warfare with words

Last week,the arrests of nine members of the Hutaree Christian sect in Michigan on charges that they plotted to kill police officers and then bomb their funerals stirred up the question again. Were they terrorists? Were they Christians? Were they just weirdos? Had they been Muslims,some commentators complained,there would have been not a moment’s hesitation at

applying both names: Islamic terrorism. “None dare call it terrorism,” wrote David Dayen at the liberal Firedoglake blog,noting that most of the major media outlets had not used the word “terrorism” in reporting the Hutaree arrests for plotting exactly that. “These are Christians,so they cannot be terrorists. Or something,” he added,with sarcasm.

But more is at stake here than semantics or petty point-scoring in the blogosphere. Political violence has two elements: the act,and the meaning attached to it. Long after the smoke of an explosion has cleared,the battle over language goes on,as contending sides seek to aggrandise the act or dismiss it,portray it as noble or denounce it as vile.

“The use of the term terrorism delegitimises the opponent,” said Martha Crenshaw,a scholar at Stanford who wrote her first essay wrestling with the definition of terrorism in 1972. “It’s not just the tactics that are discredited,it’s the cause,as well.”

In fact,accused terrorists often throw the label back at their accusers. In a recording played in court last week,David B. Stone Sr.,leader of the Hutaree group,described the government as a “terrorist organisation.” And Doku Umarov,the Chechen guerrilla leader who claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway,took the same line in a videotaped message,suggesting that the real terrorist was his nemesis,Vladimir V. Putin,the Russian prime minister.

“Any politician or journalist or any person who will condemn me for those operations,or who will accuse me of terrorism,I am laughing at those people,” he said,“because I haven’t heard that Putin was accused of terrorism for the murder of civilians.”

The word originated in the context of large-scale violence by the state: the Jacobin Reign of Terror during the French Revolution,when 16,000 to 40,000 people were killed in 13 months. The Latin root “terrere” means “to cause to tremble,” and one essential notion in most definitions of terrorism is that it seeks to frighten the enemy,as well as to inspire allies.

Over time,terrorism has come to be applied more commonly to the violent tactics of nonstate groups,often in a campaign of repeated attacks. The targets are often chosen for symbolic reasons (the World Trade Center,the Pentagon),and the victims usually include civilians. The acts of terror seek to influence an audience,ostensibly in service of a political goal.

The anarchist movement before and after the turn of the 20th century spoke of the “Propaganda of the Deed,” a phrase that captures both the violence and its purported political purpose. “They called themselves terrorists and they were proud of it,” said David C. Rapoport,a historian of terrorism and editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. With time,however,the term terrorism took on connotations of cowardice,unfairness and special brutality,whatever the larger cause it claims to serve. Today even the most brazen of terrorists generally shun the label. In a recent audio message,Osama bin Laden described Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as a “holy warrior and hero.”

Major Hasan,by the standard definition,would qualify as a terrorist. Whatever his emotional troubles,he appears to have viewed his killings as part of the larger global campaign of Muslims fighting what they view as American aggression. Likewise,though Joe Stack certainly had his personal gripes against the IRS,the six-page manifesto he left behind suggested that he was dying for the cause of freedom. True,both men seem to have been eccentrics and sociopaths. But so are many who all agree are terrorists — remember Mohammed Atta,with his creepy list of instructions for how his body should be handled after death? By choosing not just solo suicide but an attack against others,and by attaching their violence to a political point of view,they earned the label.

From the debate over word choice came the adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” a cliché already by the 1980s. “That’s a catchy phrase,but also misleading,” Ronald Reagan said in a 1986 radio address. “Freedom fighters do not need to terrorise a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organised instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people.”

Thinking of ends and not means,Reagan praised the Nicaraguan contra rebels,who had a bloody record fighting the Communist Sandinistas,as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” In the cold war contest with the Soviet Union,he armed and embraced the Afghan “freedom fighters” and their Arab allies,some of whom evolved into the terrorists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That long-ago radio address sounds naïve in retrospect in another respect,too. “History is likely to record that 1986 was the year when the world,at long last,came to grips with the plague of terrorism,” President Reagan declared. President Obama is unlikely to venture a similar prediction anytime soon.