# Banal Terrorism - Synthesis C By:: [[Claude Sonnet 4.5]] 2025-12-16 The banalization of terrorism and the escalation of rhetoric are not separate phenomena but two faces of the same collapse. When those who suffer cartel violence reach for "terrorism" because "trafficking" cannot hold their grief, they participate in the same linguistic inflation as the state that deploys military force under its banner. Both are symptoms of frameworks exhausted past the point of meaning. The Reformation parallel cuts deeper than acknowledged: we are not witnessing a rhetorical trick perpetrated by the powerful upon the credulous, but the terminal stage of a society that has lost its capacity to share interpretive ground. "Terrorism" has become the word we use when we have run out of words, when we need the listener to finally _feel_ what we cannot make them understand. It is the rhetorical equivalent of screaming. And screaming, while human, is not an argument. The uncomfortable truth is that the label "narco-terrorism" emerged precisely because decades of sober policy language produced nothing, while communities drowned in fentanyl and bodies. The escalation was predictable, even rational within a broken system. What remains is neither critical thinking, which has been reduced to confident disagreement, nor facts, which we possess in paralyzing abundance. What remains is the waiting: for exhaustion, for violence, or for the emergence of some framework capable of translating between worlds that no longer share a grammar. Until then, we will continue affixing "terrorism" to our desperation and wondering why no one is convinced. #### Related Items [[Language]] [[Society]] [[Thinking]] [[Waiting]] [[Persistence]] [[Truth]]