Colonial Tongues, Stolen Breath
No Word Is Innocent When Empire Holds the Pen
While reading today, I came across this quote:
“two words that have become so broadly applied as to render them effectively meaningless: terrorism and antisemitism.”
It stopped me—and not because I agreed.
Audre Lorde
“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
— The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
Because it reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of how empire weaponizes language1.
The words "terrorism" and "antisemitism" have not lost their meaning.
They have been weaponized.
Julia Penelope
“Language is power, in ways more literal than most people think. When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality.”
Terrorism was never neutral.
From the beginning, it was a word crafted by empires to criminalize Indigenous, Black, and colonized resistance2.
To call someone a "terrorist" has always been a way to justify mass violence: to call freedom fighters criminals, to erase revolts against conquest.
From Algeria to Palestine to the Trail of Tears, "terrorist" was the label slapped on anyone refusing to bow to empire3.
Frantz Fanon
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
— The Wretched of the Earth
Antisemitism, too, has been co-opted.
Anti-Jewish hate is real—and must be confronted.
But today, "antisemitism" is too often invoked not to protect Jewish lives, but to shield Zionist genocide4.
It’s weaponized to silence Palestinians, Arabs, and anyone who resists apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing.
It’s used to criminalize grief, to exile dissent, to bomb hospitals, to starve children—all while screaming "safety."
Noam Chomsky
“Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.”
To call these words meaningless is itself a violence.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”
— Decolonising the Mind
It’s an act of erasure—a severing of language from the blood it helped to spill.
It erases the brutal harm they have wrought: the wars justified, the villages burned, the peoples disappeared, the children starved under sanctions, the uprisings crushed under the banners of "security" and "safety."
It erases the ongoing devastation they continue to unleash:
the Palestinians bombed and starved,
the Indigenous water protectors branded terrorists for defending sacred rivers,
the refugees demonized at every border they did not create5.
Words are not just air. Words build cages. Words build graves.
Toni Morrison
“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
— Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993
If you can speak casually of "meaningless words" without seeing the rivers of blood in their wake, you need to check your fucking privilege.
Because your ability to shrug off these words as "meaningless" is built on never having had them used as a weapon against your survival.
If you have never been branded a "terrorist" for fighting for your land, your family, your breath—
If you have never been accused of "antisemitism" for demanding that your child not be buried under rubble—
then you do not get to claim these words, mock them, or "reclaim" them with empty, edgy bullshit like "at this point, 'antisemite' just means good person."
George Orwell
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
— 1984
You are not reclaiming power.
You are standing on corpses and calling it freedom.
Language carries histories.
Language carries wounds.
And if we do not wield it with clarity and responsibility, it will be wielded against the most vulnerable every single time.
Martin Luther King Jr.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
— Speech at Grosse Pointe High School, March 14, 1968
Language hasn’t become empty.
Empire has hijacked language—and weaponized it against the very people it was supposed to defend.
Angela Carter
“Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”
We have to be sharper.
We have to name what is happening:
Words are not innocent.
"Terrorist" means "anyone who resists colonialism."
"Antisemitism" is manipulated to shield apartheid and genocide.
When words are used to cage, kill, exile, and disappear entire peoples, it’s not accidental.
Steve Biko
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
It’s strategy. It’s warfare.
Language must not serve empire.
Language must liberate.
Mohammed El-Kurd
“Language, if we can dominate it, can turn our anonymous whispers back into thunderous declarations.”
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
On language as colonial control:
“Imperial power works not only through military conquest but by producing knowledge and language that renders the colonized subject as inferior and threatening.”
(Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978)
On “terrorism” as a colonial label:
“The term ‘terrorism’ has historically been deployed to delegitimize struggles against colonialism and occupation, reframing anti-imperial resistance as criminal violence.”
(Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 2012)
On the Indigenous resistance being criminalized:
“Native resistance has been systematically criminalized, with Indigenous people portrayed as insurgents or threats to settler colonial authority.”
(Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 2014)
On the weaponization of “antisemitism”:
“Accusations of antisemitism have increasingly been mobilized to suppress legitimate criticism of state violence and occupation, conflating critique with hatred.”
(Judith Butler, The Charge of Antisemitism, 2007
On the political management of life and death:
“Colonial power defines whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are invisible, shaping the very conditions under which life can be lived or extinguished.”
(Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2003)