We are told by the media that state violence and terrorism are fundamentally different. States occasionally kill civilians, but such killing is described as collateral damage – a by-product of good intentions and pursuing legitimate objectives. In this article, Oliver Adelson argues that we should collapse the distinction between state violence against civilians and terrorism, rejecting both forms of violence as illegitimate ways to achieve political ends. In his pamphlet ‘The Civil War in France’, Karl Marx addressed charges of barbarism levelled at the Paris Commune for its execution of hostages. Pointing to the Prussian practice of taking innocent men hostage ‘to answer for the acts of others’ and the bourgeois army’s re-establishment of the long-abandoned custom of shooting defenceless prisoners in 1848, Marx arrived at the following conclusion:All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgi…
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