Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line lands like a blasphemy against our craving for clean categories. “Terrorist” is supposed to be a moral stamp, not a sliding scale. By making it comparative, he forces the reader to notice what political language usually hides: violence is rarely judged by method alone, but by who wields it, against whom, and under what flag.

The phrasing echoes Orwell’s Animal Farm (“more equal than others”), an intentional bit of rhetorical sabotage. It suggests a world where the label “terrorist” functions less as description than as hierarchy: some actors get permanently branded, others get euphemisms (“special operations,” “shock and awe,” “pacification”) that launder fear into legitimacy. Keegan, as a military historian, isn’t romanticizing nonstate violence; he’s puncturing the pretense that states are exempt from terror as a tactic. The subtext is that terrorism is not an identity but a tool: the deliberate use of fear against civilians to break political will. If that’s the metric, then the question becomes uncomfortable and empirical, not devotional.

Context matters. Keegan wrote through decades when “terrorism” became an all-purpose Western keyword, especially in late Cold War conflicts and then the post-9/11 era. His provocation resists the postures of innocence that accompany great-power war. It’s a reminder that moral clarity is often a luxury purchased with selective definition, and that the history of warfare is full of actors who condemn terror while outsourcing it to their own “necessary” violence.