“The American media have largely echoed this language. The storming of the Capitol, we were told, was something that happened in a ‘banana republic’, not in America. (No mention of the fact that the ‘banana republics’ of Latin America were corrupt and authoritarian in part thanks to American meddling.) The presence of raucous, overwhelmingly white militants armed with guns stirred comparisons with Nazi Germany, Afghanistan and Syria, as if the many available and suitable comparisons from American history had been declared off-limits, threats to our amour propre. What to call the mob provoked a great discussion – ‘protesters’? ‘dissidents’? ‘insurrectionists’? – until, finally, much of the liberal press settled on describing them as ‘terrorists’, the word we reserve for all that is evil and un-American, and usually Middle Eastern. The use of the T-word represented a belated recognition of how dangerous a threat the far right has become. But it was also a consoling flight from realities that Americans still find so difficult to face: a pretext instead for another war on terror, rallying Americans behind the flag against an extremist fringe. Never mind that more than seventy million Americans voted for the man who engineered the outrage of 6 January, or that nearly half of them continue to believe that the election results were false, above all those in what Trump calls ‘Democrat-run cities’ – i.e. cities with large Black populations. (In all, 139 members of the House of Representatives and eight senators voted against the certification of Biden’s victory.) A war on terror isn’t likely to be any more effective in extinguishing the fires of racism, anti-democratic sentiment and conspiratorial politics than it has been in fighting jihadism abroad.”
—Adam Tooze, the London Review of Books, 07 January 2021
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