COMMENTARY Across the Americas, the "terrorism" charge is being leveled so recklessly by both the right and left that everyone is now considered a terrorist — which creates an atmosphere for terrorism.
I’ve had to admit a lot of things about myself recently.
I’m old. I’m overweight. I don’t know who the hell Conrad and Jeremiah are.
But the most unsettling thing I now realize I have to own up to is this:
I’m a terrorist.
According to the left-wing dictatorship in Venezuela, I’m a terrorist because I’ve harshly criticized that regime. According to the right-wing Trump administration, I’m a terrorist because I’ve censured MAGA.
Were I to set foot in Nicaragua, its leftist thug, Daniel Ortega, would likely throw me in jail on terrorism charges for once branding him “the Macbeth of Managua.” Were I in Argentina, I could be denounced by chainsaw-toting President Javier Milei, a reactionary who calls opposing protesters on the streets of Buenos Aires terroristas, because I’ve rebuked him in print.
Colombia’s right calls everyone not on the right a terrorist, and vice-versa. Cuba’s communists call every non-communist a terrorist, and vice-versa.
You. Me. Anyone who has an independent, critical thought about any government or movement in the Americas — right-wing, left-wing, chicken-wing.
We’re all terrorists.
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We used to think being a citizen of the New World meant being a participant in democracy, or at least aspiring to be.
But today our leaders have made it clear that all we proud heirs of the Asians who crossed the Bering land bridge millennia ago, and of the Europeans who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago, are actually nothing more than swarms of Unabombers.
Here's the slippery slope: once you slap “terrorist” on criminal trafficking gangs — then, hell, why not slap it on whatever you deem a threat or a scapegoat?
This week’s U.N. report on the authoritarian oppression in Venezuela, for example, confirms there is no such thing as political “opposition” in that country anymore. Only “terrorism.”
Let’s say you helped organize last year’s presidential election challenge against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Or that when Maduro stole that election more shamelessly than a porch pirate swipes your Amazon packages, you decided to join pro-democracy demonstrations.
In both cases, the dictatorship’s most brutal street enforcer, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, was waiting to welcome you, Señor Terrorista, into Caracas’ torture-filled Helicoide prison.
Orwellian roll call
This past summer, Cuba’s regime also fingered anyone who’s ever looked at it cross-eyed as terrorists — including rabid right-wing YouTube influencer Alex Otaola, who may be guilty of terrorizing common decency in Miami, but not communist buildings in Havana.
Not to be outdone in this Orwellian roll call are President Donald Trump’s own bulldogs, including Vice President JD Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
After the heinous killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk this month, Vance and Miller commandeered Kirk’s podcast mic to equate liberals and anyone who questions their arch-conservative agenda with Al Qaeda.
All liberal organizations “are a vast domestic terror movement,” said Miller, adding that the Trump administration will “destroy” them and “make America safe again.”
At Kirk’s memorial last weekend, Miller then let all non-Trump supporters know that they aren’t just terrorists — they “are nothing! You are wickedness!”
Too many on the left are also too eager to call the right “terrorists” — or have you not visited a U.S. college campus lately?
Either way, false accusations of terrorism are precisely the seeds of witch-hunting discord that real terrorists hope to sow when they commit real terrorism.
In the years since 9/11, the war on terror has made it easier to demonize an ever broader swath of groups or persons as “terrorists.”
As I’ve written before, I don’t object to categorizing, say, criminal groups as terrorist organization if, in fact, they step beyond conventional outlaw violence and employ public terror as a means of achieving social or governmental control.
Think of Haiti's terrorist gang confederation.
Even so, that brings us to a slippery slope I’ve also warned about: once you slap “terrorist” on drug traffickers — then, hell, why not slap it on whatever you deem a threat or a scapegoat?
Political foes. Undocumented immigrants. How about bad drivers?
The T-word gets tossed around so casually and recklessly today that it’s started to lose its meaning. Or perhaps it means too much.
When everyone in our midst is considered a “terrorist,” then life itself becomes a war on terror.
That in turn helps encourage the genuinely terrorist violence we’re seeing from the right wing, the left wing — but most of all the dark wing.
