Terrorism? Where do we stand?

Written by: Lindy Nolan on 20 July 2025

 

Across occupied Australia, First Peoples have first-hand experience of terrorism. In Yuendumu the NT Intervention’s $100-million-spend on remote police stations saw a $7million police centre built before a single home was upgraded. It was a direct line from that to the slaughter of Kumanjayi Walker.

Before the damning inquest report was released, police assaulted and killed Kumanjayi White in Mparntwe Alice Springs, where the court and police centre tower over all other buildings. 

Yet, despite crushing grief, family leaders Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves and Samara Fernandez-Brown radiate dignity and defiance. 

At one point during the Intervention almost $80 million was spent on surveillance and removal of Aboriginal children compared with only $500,000 to support their families. 

Currently it costs the NT over $3,600 per day to imprison each young person. In 2022-23, 71 young people, as young as ten, were imprisoned. 93%  were on remand, 94% were Indigenous. On any night, between  44 and 59 young people  were in jail. That’s about $67 million per year! Yet, pitifully-funded programs to keep them out of jail largely survive on volunteers. It’s the same across the country. 

Last month public outrage caused the cancellation of a conference of first responders in Parramatta with Walker’s killer, Zachary Rolfe, as guest speaker.  It’s not about one or even many racist cops. It’s about a state apparatus of terror, the iron fist of military, police and jails, behind the velvet glove of deceit and so-called democracy. 

Terror spreads more widely as government complicity with US imperialist-Zionist genocide shakes peoples’ belief in ‘democratic’ lies. As Palestinian children, doctors, teachers and journalists are terrorised and massacred, here, eyes open. Here, resistance also grows against Segal’s fascist proposals, against laws to demonise protest, against the smashing punch to a female legal advisor and the trumped-up trial of journalist Mary Kostakidis, which aims to terrorise other journalists to self-censor or lie. Support Mary Kostakidis here. 

Killing innocent people

The Concise Macquarie Dictionary (named after a British Governor of the NSW colony who used terror against First Peoples) states terror means ‘1. intense, sharp or overpowering fear. 2. feeling, instance or cause of intense fear. 3. a period when a political group uses violence to maintain or achieve supremacy,’ and terrorism means ‘1. the use of terrorising methods. 2. the state of fear and submission so produced. 3. a method of resisting a government or of governing by deliberate acts of armed violence.’ All but the last meaning fits how Australia is ruled against most First Peoples, like a glove.

Language is constantly changing, with old words disappearing and new ones appearing. Meanings change over time. There’s also a difference between the dictionary meaning – the denotation – and what a word has come to mean in social usage – the connotation.

Today the dictionary meaning of terrorism has become secondary to the word’s new connotation. Across most of the world, and definitely in Australia, ‘terrorism’ is almost universally understood to be the killing of innocent people. The key word is ‘innocent’. But there is a secondary connotation – that terror usually comes from a small group of people.

Excitative terror or unstoppable mass movement?

The Red Brigades of Italy, the Baada Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army called themselves Maoists, as did a section of the Weathermen in the USA. They were small ultra-left terrorist groups in the 1970s, whose members were rightly outraged by the horrors imperialism created across the world. 

Rather than having faith in the masses, these groups believed in what’s called ‘excitative terror’, the belief that ‘red terror’ comes first, that it will unite the oppressed masses and dominate enemy classes. Only then (they believed) the struggle of liberation is possible. They paid a terrible price for this mistake. All were isolated from the masses, were jailed or murdered by the ruling class, or forced into hiding. Their organisations were crushed.

Though they didn’t have the ease of electronic word searches, they knew the word ‘terror’ –appears in some of the hundreds of volumes of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Marxist-Leninist-Maoist works.

It appears four times Mao’s A Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan from 1927. The Report’s introduction includes these words: “For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China's central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.” 

The huge, unstoppable mass movement of the peasants, not excitative terror, was key. This thread of reliance on the masses runs through all Mao’s writings, all his actions. He called them ‘our God’ saying with them, the Chinese party could remove the mountains of imperialism and feudalism. (Mao, The foolish old man who removed the mountains).

The highest stage of struggle

Armed struggle is the highest stage of revolutionary action, but it can’t be manufactured from thin air. Little groups, or even big ones – no matter how dedicated – can’t magic it into existence. 

In Where do correct ideas come from? Mao said of struggle, ‘Generally speaking, those that succeed are correct and those that fail are incorrect, and this is especially true of man’s struggle with nature. In social struggle, the forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because their ideas are incorrect, but because, in the balance of forces engaged in struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to triumph sooner or later.’ 

This is the case with First Peoples.

For 150 years they waged armed struggle. Its flame was eventually extinguished. But again and again, First Peoples resisted, no matter how crushing the circumstances. Forbidden language was whispered. Ceremony was practised despite enormous risks. 

In 1988, First Peoples announced, ‘We have survived’. It was a clarion call of unity and defiance. Like the Palestinians facing genocidal US imperialist and Zionist attacks which aim to terrorise all opposition, to crush resistance worldwide, they will one day triumph. They will remember the brutality inflicted. Their potential allies are growing in number and knowledge from each horrific blow they witness inflicted. But not all are active. Many feel powerless. We must help change that. We must help people understand their own collective strength. 

Lenin stated, “Oppression alone, no matter how great, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation in a country. In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way”, that the ruling class must be in deep crisis at every level, and that suffering has reached such intensity that the masses are drawn into action. (Lenin May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat)

Whether it succeeds or not, depends on organisation among and of those masses. 

Our party supports revolutionary violence by the masses in such a situation, to overthrow such a ruling class. We want that ruling class to feel the terror of the masses in action to overthrow their terrorist system.

We disdain to conceal our views and aims

Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party celebrated the intense fear of communism and communists haunting the ruling classes. It opened with these words, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.’ 

The Manifesto concluded, ‘The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’

177 years later, after huge struggles, setbacks and changes, we stand by those words. We serve the people. 

 

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