Corporate rhetoric flips the slow poisoning of the poor into an act of terror

Evidence

Khaufpur, translated from the Urdu, means “city of terror.” The city’s poorest denizens inhabit a different terror time from the terror time projected by the Kampani. When the slum-dwellers rise up nonviolently to protest the Kampani’s inaction, the Kampani, invoking the fallback international rhetoric of terrorism, demands that the protestors be tried in the very Indian courts the company itself has been evading. Back in America, the Kampani engages in corporate antiterrorist training exercises, staging mock abductions and executions of their employees by Khaufpuri “terrorists.” Khaufpuris, by contrast, face a clear and present danger of an environmental kind: an immanent and imminent terror, faceless yet physically intimate, percolating through the penumbral time of the aftermath that is also the suspended time of the illimitable in-between. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 162

Categorization

• XREF: The terror-label inversion is a startling case of who gets to define violence — ties to the definitional politics of slow violence as violence. — connects to: Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate; Manufactured external terror serves elite interests while real internal terror afflicts the poor.; Corporations frame their own reckless disasters as uncontrollable natural events to escape blame (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how the terror label migrates from victims of corporate slow violence onto the victims themselves — weaponized terrorism discourse as the latest distancing strategy.

Broader Connections

• Manufactured external terror serves elite interests while real internal terror afflicts the poor. #expands (0.90)
• Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate #expands (0.85)
• A terror industrial complex produces Islamophobia through interlocking institutions #expands (0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 736
• Corporations frame their own reckless disasters as uncontrollable natural events to escape blame #expands (0.80)
• The word terrorism became inflated as the war it names commercialized #corroborates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2431
• Ordinary decent people commit atrocities when ideologies authorize the harm #corroborates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 347