The Calling of Counterterrorism

In honor and memory of Michael Rogin

There may be no word in today’s political lexicon more volatile and provocative than “terrorist,” but the term itself was rarely invoked in the United States until the late 1960s. This is evidenced by the fact that, up until that point, the broad category of crimes that come to fall underneath the umbrella of terrorism (bank robberies, bombings, hijackings, thefts, vandalism, etc.) were categorized by their given names by those steadfast chroniclers of the everyday, newspaper indexers.[1] A need to track and organize the widespread unrest and variety of means, some violent, connected with Sixties social movements in the U.S. — as well as the guerrilla groups found abroad — found an efficient and exotic marker in terrorism. While its compatriot, “guerrilla warfare,” has for the most part atrophied from disuse, “terrorism” is a term that gains more weight and intensity with each passing year.

The increased political currency of “terrorism” over the past three decades coincides with two distinct dynamics in American politics: the factionalization of Left movement politics after the end of the Vietnam War and the rise of neo-conservatism and the far Right. While some historians of the ‘60s like Todd Gitlin cite the resort to violence by a distinct minority of its members as a defining moment in the Left’s decline in the U.S., few have noted that the dissolution of movement politics was aided and abetted by the Left’s association with a term with the capacity to horrify and frighten a mass public.

Although “terrorism” was used almost exclusively by the harshest critics of movement politics at the time, by the late 1990s, when fugitives like Katherine Ann Power and Sara Jane Olson were surrendering or arrested, it was common to find newspaper and television accounts blithely referring to their actions as those of terrorists. What had been political and violent had transmogrified into terrorism through the distorting lenses of time, distance, and usage, as if politics was never violent, as if valid political convictions could never propel one to violent means. Why was this so easy as the millennium drew to a close? (It would be nice to comfort oneself with the belief that political action had become more “enlightened” or “reasonable,” but even a cursory glance at the historical record makes that thought absurd.)

The answer is found on the other side of the political spectrum. As many of the activists and fugitives of the ‘60s became lawyers, professors, restaurateurs and suburban community pillars in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a different “counterculture” arose in response to the changes Sixties movements had wrought. Angered by an increasingly multicultural America, frightened by powerful centralized federal government, or propelled by otherworldly concerns, bringing them under the microscope of that government’s watchful eye, figures on the far Right had begun to, for different purposes and to different ends, organize and often arm themselves.

From the Branch Davidians to the White Aryan Resistance to the militia movements to Ruby Ridge, rightwing extremists picked up weapons as the Left laid them down. This was done more often under the guise of “self-defense” than “revolution,” but with the similar result of eliciting confrontations with law enforcement officials and federal agents. Sometimes their crimes were real, as in the assassinations of public figures they disagreed with, or feared, as in Randy Weaver’s threat to defend his land against any governmental interference, or merely speculative, as in the alleged child abuse that justified attacking the Waco encampment, but in all cases they were portrayed as terrorists, and it was the terrorist label that served to justify the violence committed by state actors against them. The political extremism of the far Right brought terrorism solidly into the domain of domestic politics in the U.S., situating terrorists inside, rather than primarily outside, our imaginative and physical borders.

The ability to name members of domestic oppositional groups and extremist figures as terrorists was facilitated, from the ‘70s through the end of the Cold War, by a burgeoning institutional discourse that viewed political violence abroad as the product not of oppositional movements with...