Trying not to use the word "Terrorism"

"Both sides are right, but both sides murder.
I give up. Why can't they?
I must not think bad thoughts." -- X, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"

Merriam Webster defines "Terrorism" as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion." By this definition, a government or an official army might be just as easily judged as "terrorist" as the non-governmental groups that more commonly get labelled as such.

In the last fifty years, the American press has been more apt to use the word if the perpetrators purport to be Islamic. This is in spite of the fact that no sane Muslim would see acts of random violence against civilians as in any way following the dictates of their religion. Nevertheless, an incident such as the San Bernardino attacks is easily labelled as terrorism in the U.S. press, while the equally barbaric recent murders in Portland perpetrated by an anti-Muslim attacker are less likely to be labelled "terrorism" despite the fact that they were clearly motivated by a man using intimidation as a means of coercion.

In Maurice Walsh's Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, Walsh quotes Dan Breen of the "old I.R.A." as saying that his companion Sean Treacy convinced him that murder was necessary if one wanted to start a war. And so the Irish War of Independence started with the ambush and murder of two Royal Irish Constabulary policemen in 1919. Walsh goes on to quote Breen's well-known regret that it had been only two murdered, and not the expected six. This action was condemned by the Catholic Church and by many fellow Nationalists, and yet it achieved Breen's and Treacy's aims. Do we call this action terrorism or war?

The provisional I.R.A. bombings of "Bloody Friday" in 1972 fit any definition of terrorism and were freely called as much in the press. But what about the actions of British paratroopers during the Civil Rights/Anti-Internment March earlier in that same year that came to be called "Bloody Sunday"? When the soldiers used real bullets on the protestors was that not "the systematic use of terror... as a means of coercion"? Too often, the word "terrorism" is only used when those not in power do terrible things, while terrible things done by the powerful are, at most, "crimes."

In Northern Ireland, even parades could be seen as a means to instill fear and coerce obedience, a notion that can be baffling to our students when they look at the negotiations before the Good Friday Agreement: "Parades? What's so bad about parades?"

In South Africa's Apartheid Period (which we teach just prior to teaching about the Troubles), police murders of protestors were seen as "police brutality" at most, while black paramilitaries were commonly referred to as "terrorists" as can be observed in the T.R.C. testimony of police officers documented in the Bill Moyers documentary Facing the Truth. The T.R.C. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) offered amnesty for previous crimes as long as the perpetrators told the truth about their crime and proved that the crime was "politically motivated" by the circumstances of the Apartheid system.

The 1980's Los Angeles punk band X was right to fret about murder by those who see themselves as "right." Murder is wrong. Murder is terrorism. We need to get out of the habit of ascribing that word only to certain types of murder and not to others.

In helping students look at the Irish situation both before and after partition, I try not to use the loaded word "terrorism" at all while at the same time supporting a message that the murder of civilians for any reason is wrong.