ISSUE NO.10
ON TERROR
As pedestrians are torn from the street for wearing garments adorned with the imagery of an anti-genocide organisation, Joseph Conway discusses the deployment of terror in light of this Labour government's tyrannical crackdown on civil liberty.
July 8th 2025
“What is terror? Oversubscribed PIP work-shy disabled terror trans kids terror Palestinian terror Muslim terror clerics smugglers great replacement theories- what need is there for your fear? Fear like a soured milk to feed the children, fear like a plaster on a hurricane, fear like a natural disaster; your complexes of factories, reservoirs of terror; terror languishes in your barracks, it flies over Gaza as eyes to a missile- what do you see? Watch your surveillance aircraft hurtling over the rubble- what can you see through the smog of your terror? Children and soot, limbs and soot; are you blind to it, searching for targets? No- you are terror; you cannot see for yourself. All mirrors deny you. Go, flee from your terrorisms, point and moan at paint and flares like pin pricks on the skin of one without feeling, all feeling sacrificed on the altar of statecraft; do what you will. You know only to look at the attacks on your lifeblood, your military industrial lifeblood, and scream, but your feeling, your life has been forsaken, all mountains of great human love have abandoned the state and all of its actors- and you talk to us of terror.
Terror! Black kids texting their mates terror, brown kids getting the tram terror, activist lawyer terror, asylum seeker terror, boats and bridges, castles all over the Welsh border, Hadrian's beleaguered wall- foreign terror infrastructure ingrained into the English cosmos, stone pylons of terror, great bastilles of terror. You who know only concrete and wrath, private public partnerships and border control, who seek out capital like leeches to rid yourself of the burden of blood, who seek out death like an arrow, arrow one, arrow two, like a drone sowing bullets through inflated bellies of children. When we call death to terror, you say terror! terror! and when we call freedom from terror, you say terror! terror! when we say action against terror, you say terror, terror! You are certainly afraid, for terror is the last vestige of all lost emotion in the heart of the heartless.
All you have, terror, so much that you cannot even dream to understand it- you who are terror, like trying to touch the tip of your finger with that very same finger, you project your sin. Terror, as if each RAF base were pregnant and hungry, thirsty beyond all shame, all immodesty, almost reduced to need clamouring; as if each Elbit arms factory were a nerve end ingesting a bullet, shrapnel bursting into bone, as if terror were something intangible, some fanciful idea, some fetish. There is no talking to you. You are a state and your eardrums have caved. You are a state and your eyes are thick clumps of barbed wire. You are a state and you lie and imagine your skin has no pores, your blank mind roaring in its recesses, nothing but placid empty flesh curdling in the sweat of terror, off coloured liquid. Every fight for humanity begins with a struggle against you, you who have but other states to play with, lost children with knives in the dark seeing clearly, seeking heat.
The fight goes underground, so be it; let it learn from the soil and the roots, the worms and the moles, the decomposing and recomposing, the ever digesting dirt; let the martyrs in your prisons sink their teeth into your lining; let their mothers and kin of the suffering never cease in their longing to see their beloved return from the war against you, may this reawaken the guerilla, may the bones of your infrastructure split and may you never see it coming; electric scooters along the flight paths of your arrogance; may all your pallid windows shatter that you may feel the air on your skin, and hear that air shaking, shaking with England's new tide, to free Palestine, and in doing so free ourselves of your yoke. What is terror? May we, marching toward you, never know.
Joseph Conway is the Political Editor at The Lemming, based in Manchester. He is a journalist, actor, and Producer at Manchester Theatre for Palestine whilst hosting the monthly event Other People's Poetry at SeeSaw.