I AM occasionally reminded of that childhood refrain: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.” However, the truth is that words can often cause far more lasting damage.

Consider ‘terrorism’. It first entered our vocabulary in the second half of the 19th century when various groups of European anarchists and nihilists sought to pull down the existing order in order to replace it with their version of utopia. These activists placed bombs in European cities to create terror, and even though the actual damage they did pales into insignificance when compared with the present levels of mayhem, they did succeed in terrifying millions.

Terrorism came to mean the act of targeting unarmed civilians to further a political agenda. This wave of violence culminated in the fatal attack on Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that triggered the First World War. These tactics were revived by Japanese and European underground factions that fought the capitalist system by waging a campaign of kidnapping and murder. These methods were also employed by Palestinian groups that emerged to fight Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. In Ireland, the IRA bombed civilian targets in its struggle for an Irish state.

In the early eighties, the Tamil Tigers became the world’s most lethal non-state group of fighters. In the Philippines, a Muslim group began fighting for freedom, while Chechens fought to free themselves of the Russian yoke after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And closer to home, freedom fighters battled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, while Kashmiris, with Pakistani help, fought for independence from India.

All these groups had clear, specific political goals, and conducted clandestine operations against the states they opposed. It was not until the emergence of Al Qaeda that a truly transnational kind of underground movement arrived on the scene. The Islamic State is a logical extension of the global jihad.

But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, all resistance movements, despite the validity of the causes they were fighting for, fell under the grab-all definition of terrorism if the fighters happened to be Muslims. Suddenly, countries facing national struggles had an opportunity to crack down under the cover of the ‘war against terrorism’.

However, as we have seen, this surge in state violence only generated a fiercer reaction. As Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the Edward Snowden story in the Guardian, wrote recently in The Intercept:

“The very policies of militarisation and civil liberties erosion justified in the name of stopping terrorism are actually what fuels terrorism and ensures its endless continuation.”

As the two recent fatal attacks against soldiers by Muslim converts in Canada show, the very use of the word ‘terrorism’ causes a wave of fear. After all, two murders, while tragic, would not normally bring a country to a halt. But in the wake of the second one in Ottawa, the city was in lockdown for hours while speculation went on about the number of ‘terrorists’ out there.

The term ‘terrorism’ now evokes the image of hordes of jihadists at the gate. And yet the targets of the attacks in Canada were uniformed soldiers, and the accepted definition of a terrorist is a person who kills unarmed civilians. Another thing people in the West forget is that their countries are at war, and sooner or later, their enemies will find ways of striking back. None of this is meant to condone what happened in Canada; the idea is only to explain the causation at work here.

In an attempt to clear up the semantic confusion that surrounds the use of the term ‘terror’, Tomis Kapitan, a professor of philosophy, wrote recently in The New York Times:

“Historically, the rhetoric of terror has been used to by those in power not only to sway public opinion, but to distract attention away from their own acts of terror. Yet, to the fair minded, the attempt by governments to justify bombardment of residential districts, schools and hospitals in the name of fighting terrorism is outright hypocrisy. Government forces have long provided outstanding examples of politically-motivated violence against civilians, the very thing they allegedly oppose. Claims about not targeting civilians ring hollow when it is quite obvious that high-tech explosives are aimed at buildings known to contain civilians.

“If what is insidious about terrorism is its callous disregard for civilian lives in pursuit of political goals, why is there not an uproar about state terrorism? Why do so many reserve their venom for people whose destructive capacity pales in comparison with those who command tanks, artillery and warplanes?

“It is easy to lose sight of inconsistencies in wartime hostilities. Instead, the emotional impact of language tends to triumph at the expense of accuracy and fairness…”

Kapitan goes on to add: “This is not just a strategy of the United States government. For decades, Israeli leaders have used such language in their attempt to discredit Palestinian nationalism and deflect attention away from their own policies in the occupied territories…”

So basically, by applying the terrorist label, the state ducks the need and responsibility to examine the demands and causes of armed groups opposing it. The Pakistan army under Yahya Khan called the Bengali armed opposition ‘miscreants’, treating them as bandits who had to be hunted down. This label was then applied to Zia’s opponents in Sindh during the anti-government MRD movement in the eighties.

George Orwell created the concept of ‘doublethink’ in his dystopian novel 1984 to describe the manipulation of language to brainwash the population. Modern governments use similar techniques to create fear and ensure a citizenry that asks no questions while authorising vast military budgets and agreeing to the erosion of their own liberties. As we see, words are more potent than mere sticks and stones…

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2014