A few weeks ago Barbara Sutton gave a talk on campus called “Gender, State Violence and Living Room Terrorism: Lessons from Argentina.” I’m feeling lately like I haven’t picked up the radical feminist torch in a long time. This is the talk that handed the torch back to me.

Barbara focused on Argentina in her talk, but I’m going global. I figure if America really is the watchdog of the world, and we can handle bringing democracy and Jesus to all the dark places on the map, we can also handle crisis control on a large scale. After all, we are fighting a war against an idea, not a person.

So about this War on Terror. We’ve been in it for five years now. We’re sticking pretty much to the Middle East, having decided that some places churn out Terror better than others.
Let’s start there. Because that is blatantly untrue.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of terrorism. State-sanctioned terrorism, and living-room terrorism. Americans practice both every day, by nature of being at war and using torture as a means of combat. Torture is a tool of terrorists. We cannot possibly succeed at fighting an idea that our military leaders defend in court regularly as legitimate means of conducting battle.

So there is our state, sanctioning terrorism like their lives depend on it. (Oh, wait…)

Living-room terrorism is domestic violence. It’s the tactics used by men and women worldwide to dominate their families or partners through threat or execution of violence. And no one is fighting a war against it. Abusive parents do not fall in the Axis of Evil.

I am not necessarily saying they should. I don’t think a man beating his wife or girlfriend should hang for war crimes. Maybe get his hands chopped off. But not hang. I think, much bigger than any one abusive relationship, domestic violence needs to enter our vocabulary as a form of terrorism. Because that’s what it is. That’s ALL it is.

Living-room terrorism in Barbara’s talk stretched beyond a nuclear family unit to include the abuses suffered by women at the hands of military men. Argentina has had some experience with the concept. Between 1976-83, the years of military dictatorship in Argentina, 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’ for anti-government suspicions. Note the use of WERE disappeared. To be disappeared is different than to disappear: one implies action was taken against you that resulted in your sudden, permanent absence. The other happens to doves in magic shows.

Just about everyone in Argentina knows what happened to the 30,000 disappeared citizens. It is not comparable to a magic show unless the doves are shot in midair after being released. And again, no war against it. Punishments against perpetrators of disappearances or torture have been lifted repeatedly over the last 15 years.

Now we have seen living-room terrorism. Either the state is perpetuating it, or it “cannot interfere with domestic affairs.” Yes, that is what the police would say to a severely beaten woman who called the second after her husband leaves. It would not be possible for anyone to explain to me why that is. But it’s true. It’s terrorism, and it’s blatantly ignored.

Excuse me if I get confused sometimes about what we claim to be up against in Iraq. Is it terror? Or is it not-white people with guns who live on top of oil we really, really, want?

Because there is plenty of Terror on American soil that could be battled instead. It would cost billions and billions of dollars less, it would require no tanks and no bombs and it would maybe make this country look less like a bunch of wife-abusing hypocrites. Not to mention it would save the lives of countless men, women and children who live right now in fear of being beaten by people they love.

It’s much too late to say we never should have taken on Terror in Iraq in the first place. But it is not too late to consider deeply this banner under which our troops are crusading. War on Terror. Think next of the places in the world, and more importantly the places in this country, that experience acts of terrorism daily. What will it take to bring the war home? 30,000 more?