Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock is not a terrorist. That’s not because you or anyone is a racist for thinking only darker-skinned Jihadists are terrorists. “Terrorism” is a bureaucratic contrivance, as in, The Global War On Terror. It means nothing, but apparently provides legal justification to enforce American global hegemony with military strikes on “supporters of terror”. Of course it doesn’t. It’s artifice. Naturally the public wants to see the charge of terrorism applied equitably to all mass murderers who terrorize the public. Like they want to see police brutality applied liberally to white crime suspects not just black. Like they want to see children charged as adults when the media is fomenting their anger.
Terrorism is a semantic contrivance. It’s how we denounce US adversaries and their desperate means to counter our asymetric military superiority. Our bombs don’t terrorize, their hand delivered bombs do. The Nazis accused resistance fighters of being terrorists.
“Hate Speech” is another contrivance. Priests used to be allowed to burn parishoners for it, priests called it blasphemy. Secular indignants avoid calling it heresy. The Enlightenment was supposed to mark the west’s transcendance of the fear of heretics. Hate Speech is how Americans dismiss unsavory opinion. Fortunately the courts have struck down hate speech laws for what they always were, violations of the First Amendment, but the concept is still a litmus test by which the public wants to pin the ears of irritating speakers.
Likewise the term “genocide”. THAT’S a crime only other nations commit. And only when retaliation suits our agenda. After Rwanda, the UN contrived that charges of genocide mandate international action. As a result, genocide doesn’t mean genocide unless somebody wants to invade. Oil interests are currently eyeing Burma.
Terrorism, hate speech, and genocide are real things, but they are real offenses of which our government is far more culpable than you, or the random deviant individual white male mass shooter.
Does it matter then, if individuals are accused of terrorism when the state is not? I’ll offer you two examples of other contrivances. Conspiracy and racketeering. Both are heavily trafficked by our corporations and government, but easily applied to people whose enterprise authorites want to deem criminal. I just witnessed the trial of two legal reform activists, charged and convicted of both counts. When the law applies to you and not to those enforcing the law, it’s time to stop cheerleading for the prosecution.
Stephen Paddock terrorized, but who do you really fear now that he’s dead –another random white man with too many guns? I’ll wager you’re afraid of the too many guns, their too wide availability, or the purveyors, who keep assault rifles legal in the US to obfuscate the mass manufacture of guns for international arms trafficking. The weapons industry terrorizes.
Judged by intent, the common wife beater is a terrorist. No question, but see? The distinction is unhelpful. How about we call Stephen Paddock a SNIPER. He was that. The Route 91 concert venue was his paramilitary free-fire zone. Paddock may now hold the world record for most American citizens sniped, but his feat pales as uniformed North American white male snipers go.
And that record number is not usually reported with the phrase “by a single slayer” and in a lot of partisan accounts Wounded Knee and Sand Creek and Little Ouachita get kicked under the rug. It could spiral out of control and really already is, just from that grammatic/semantic omission. The Trail of Tears, any battle of the Civil War, Little Bighorn, the Alamo… And it somehow makes a distinction of what defines “shooting”. The truck used to maneuver the fertilizer bomb in Oklahoma City or the firebombs used in Waco could be defined as Improvised Artillery which is the epitome of the word ‘gun’. Making threats with or without being followed by actual violence is called Terroristic Threats and is a felony. Except when The Donald says stupid shit like “Yeah, I’ll bomb the fuck out of them”. Other people’s kids, eh? Or my favorite because the Local Concentration Camp guards say “That’s not a threat, it’s a PROMISE!” Pigs are immune from prosecution. Not official, de facto. Which opens anew the floodgates of police killing civilians.