The 1980s terrorism label served to crush leftist political opposition.

Evidence

In its simplest sense, terror is about manufacturing fear. The War on Terror seeks to manage this fear by making the categories of friend and enemy coherent (Anidjar 2004). Throughout the 1980s, U.S. foreign policy established terrorism as acts by organized groups against particular kinds of democratic states. The term ”terrorism” was instrumental to the Reagan–Bush mandate to construct terrorism as an enemy of the state and the dominant paradigm of foreign-policy intervention (Collins 2002). Defining terrorism in this way made it advantageous to eliminate political and social opposition, most often in the e√ort to quash leftist movements. Using the language of counterinsurgency inherited from colonial military strategies, terrorism was easily interchangeable with low-intensity conflict and counterterrorism to propagate rationales for warfare and build consensual support among the U.S. public. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 241

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: how a term (‘terrorism’) became a fungible instrument for quashing domestic leftist movements, interchangeable with counterinsurgency language inherited from colonialism.
• DEFINE: Establishes the definitional claim that terror is, at base, about manufacturing fear — a generative definition against more institutionalized ones.