help with late glossary entry

I have written a glossary for a new book (edited by Eddie Yuen et al) on the
anti-globalization movement - "The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to
Capitalist Globalization" - postponed but not about to go to press (Soft
Skull, NY). I am inserting a late entry under "terrorism", and would greatly
appreciate fast feedback on this most tricky lemma. I feel I am up against
the limitations of the form! When that's done, I will circulate the finished
glossary. Thanks.


Terrorism
The strategic use of systematic violence against civilians-typically by
states but also by those thinking like a state. The histories of capital
punishment, inquisitions, slavery and colonialism institutionalized terror
long before it first congealed in enlightenment form-the Jacobin use of Dr
Guillotin's machine for rational decapitation. The fin-de-siècle burst of
"propaganda by the deed" - political assassinations and incendiarism -
turned out to be just a curtain-raiser for the twentieth century which,
excepting the earlier use of famine as colonial policy, witnessed the
apotheosis of terrorism. Its emblematic instruments have been, in the
industrialized North, gas ovens and car-bombs, and, in the Third World,
disappearances and death-squads. But its twentieth century hallmark was
bombardment from the air, aimed deliberately at the inhabitants of
cities-Guernica, Dresden, and Hiroshima, ground zero of globalized atomic
terror; the policy of nuclear states is based on the Damoclean threat of
mass death, even omnicide. In political rhetoric, the epithet "terrorist" is
projected only onto others-designated enemies of the state- and, in the US,
is rapidly proliferating to implicate all resistance to capitalist
globalization, foreign and domestic; thus fast-track WTO legislation,
corporate bail-outs and environmental de-regulation are called
"counter-terrorism" measures. For the lords of nuclear arsenals to declare a
"war on terrorism"-besides being a category mistake (terrorism is an
instrumentality, not a political program)-places them very deep in Orwell's
debt.