Unmasking: The Accepted Face of Terrorism…

We are conditioned to see terrorism in the horrific and the alien—the masked figure, the distant explosion, the rhetoric of a foreign fanatic.

This is a comfort. It allows us to quarantine evil, to place it outside the walls of our civilized society. But this comfort is a delusion.

The most potent and pervasive forms of terror are not those that assault the system, but those that are seamlessly integrated into its operation.

The unsettling argument we must confront is that the essential mechanism of terrorism—the use of force, threat, or profound coercion to impose a will and instil fear—exists not only in the shadowy fringe but in the very bedrock of our institutions.

It is present behind every licensed gun and every army, in the cold finality of an unpaid bill, and within the sterile, locked wards of a mental hospital.

This is the terrorism of the normal, and its most effective disguise is a face of innocence and good will.

The Licensed Monopoly: Legitimacy as a Camouflage

The state, as sociologist Max Weber established, holds a “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.”

The word “legitimate” is the most powerful camouflage ever devised. It transforms violence into policy and coercion into order.

We see this in the long arc of history.

The British colonial project in Ireland was a masterclass in licensed terror. The Great Famine was not merely a tragedy of nature; it was, as historian Tim Pat Coogan documents in The Famine Plot, a policy of extermination by neglect.

While a million starved, food was exported under armed guard.

This was terrorism by ledger and economic dogma.

Later, on Bloody Sunday in 1972, that violence became immediate, as the British Army—the very symbol of legitimate force—executed unarmed civil rights marchers.

The state-sanctioned Widgery Inquiry that followed was a second, deeper violence: the terrorism of a lie. Bobby Sands and his fellow hunger strikers died to rip this mask of legitimacy away, to reveal the raw, coercive face of the state that had criminalized their political identity.

Today, we witness this same mechanism on a horrific, real-time scale.

The state of Israel, born from the ashes of the Holocaust, now stands accused by leading international courts and human rights organizations of conducting a campaign in Gaza that plausibly constitutes genocide.

The language of “self-defense” and the immediate, often indiscriminate, weaponization of antisemitism against critics serves as a potent shield.

It is a profound moral inversion, using the memory of history’s ultimate evil to obscure a potential contemporary one.

As scholars like Omer Bartov have argued, this dynamic perverts memory and silences dissent, allowing a killing ground to be framed as a necessary battlefield.

The Asylum as an Instrument of Control: Care as a Disguise for Coercion

Now, apply this lens to the mental health system. The act of sectioning an individual—detaining them against their will—is a profound exercise of state power.

The enforced administration of medication, often with life-altering side effects, is a chemical imposition of control.

This is not to deny the reality of mental distress or the potential for genuine healing, but to expose the system’s inherent capacity for institutional terror.

As Michel Foucault detailed in Madness and Civilization, the history of psychiatry is inextricably linked to the social control of deviance. The “asylum” was designed to silence what society could not comprehend.

Dr. Thomas Szasz, in his seminal work The Myth of Mental Illness, took this further, arguing that psychiatry often functions as a “therapeutic state,” using medical language to justify the coercion of those whose behavior challenges social norms.

The patient’s dissent becomes a “symptom,” their autonomy is pathologized as “lack of insight,” and their body becomes a site for enforced “treatment.”

The terror here is one of epistemic annihilation—the state, via the doctor, declares you the unreliable narrator of your own mind.

The Historical Continuum of Righteous Cruelty

This pattern is a constant in human history. The Spanish Inquisition did not see itself as a cabal of villains; it believed it was saving souls from eternal damnation.

Its torture chambers and auto-da-fé ceremonies were framed as acts of divine mercy.

Similarly, the torture and burning of witches across Europe and America was a collective, righteous purge, a terror enacted in the name of communal purity and divine order.

The perpetrators were not monsters; they were neighbors, judges, and clergy, convinced of their own moral clarity.

And in our modern world, the torture and neglect of animals within the industrial farming system represents a normalized, systemic terror of staggering scale.

As philosopher Peter Singer established in Animal Liberation, this is “speciesism” in action—a institutionalized brutality justified by the benign concepts of “economic efficiency” and “consumer demand.”

The violence is carried out by ordinary people following protocols, its face hidden behind the innocent act of enjoying a meal.

The Antidote: An Ethical Legal Framework Rooted in Justice, Not Just Order

If law is so easily corrupted into a tool of coercion, what is the alternative?

The answer is not the absence of law, but its ethical application. The problem is not structure itself, but structure devoid of a foundational commitment to justice.

An ethical legal system is not defined by its power to punish, but by its design to empower, protect, and create the conditions for human flourishing.

This vision draws from philosophers like John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice proposed that laws should be formulated from behind a “veil of ignorance”—where the rule-makers do not know their own place in society.

This ensures principles that are fair to the least advantaged. It also echoes the concept of Natural Law, which posits that certain rights and ethical principles are inherent and universal, and that human law must align with this higher moral order to be valid.

An ethical legal framework would be characterized by:

1. Procedural Justice: The law must be applied consistently, transparently, and impartially. The processes that led to the Widgery Tribunal or the weaponization of psychiatric sectioning are examples of its opposite.
2. Substantive Justice: The content of the laws themselves must be fair and rights-based. A law that permits starvation, enables collective punishment, or codifies the exploitation of the vulnerable is illegitimate, regardless of its legislative pedigree.
3. Accessibility and Restorative Focus: The law must be accessible to all, not just the powerful. Furthermore, its goal should be to restore community and repair harm, rather than merely to inflict punitive, state-sanctioned violence—a principle central to many Indigenous justice systems and modern Restorative Justice movements.
4. Checks on Institutional Power: It must have robust, independent mechanisms to hold all institutions—governmental, corporate, and medical—accountable. This is the role a functioning International Criminal Court or a truly independent judiciary is meant to play.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

The common thread of systemic terror is the sanitization of coercion. The soldier follows orders. The doctor enforces a treatment plan. The colonial administrator exports food from a starving land.

Each is a cog in a machine that has successfully framed its violence as necessity, virtue, or care.

Unmasking this evil requires us to judge systems by their outcomes, not their stated intentions.

But revelation is not enough. We must actively champion a different paradigm: one where law is not a weapon of control but a covenant of mutual respect and protection.

The greatest atrocities are not born in chaos, but in a corrupt and rigid order. The choice before us is not between law and lawlessness, but between a legal system that serves power and one that serves people.

Our survival as a civilized society depends on choosing correctly.

---

Supporting References:

Weber, Max. Politics as a Vocation.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Bartov, Omer. Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.

Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation.

Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct.