Who’s the Terrorist Now, Baby?

I have to admit there is something attractive about terrorism. The brutal calculations, the wrongs and the rights, the deathly equation, the equalizing hand where the weak vanquishes the strong, if only for a brief moment of ecstasy. I love the idea that there are no alibis, no excuses, and no compromises for the terrorist. He knows he’s bad and he doesn’t care. He’s not even pretending to be a good guy.

It’s all about that brutal equalization of power between the strong and the weak. Only the strong can afford to fight fair. All weak parties must fight dirty or die. That’s why women fight dirty and men believe in honorable fights and rules of war. Women laugh at that. Honor in a fight! Pshaw! Rules in war? You nuts? Children fight dirty, slaves, maids, servants and beaten-down wives fight dirty. Terrorists all. Terrorists every one.

There’s something off-putting about physical terrorism in practice. Let’s face it. You have to truly have to your back up against a wall with all options run out to rejoice in the blood and guts of the enemy’s civilians, their women and children, their weakest leaks. Sure, I can understand the desperation, but I’m not that beaten down. Not yet. I pray I’m never beaten so low.

So much better than terrorism on the physical plane is what I would call Psychic Terrorism. Perhaps it is Magic. Perhaps it is just Psychology. I have no idea, but it’s a glorious force.

Our priorities are all wrong. We’ve fingered the least terrorists and made them the worst while we build statues to the worst terrorists of them all – the psychic terrorists.

There’s a poem by Philip Layton along the lines of…

Sure you guys blow up an airliner and kill a few kids.

Pick up the pieces, shed a few tears, say a few prayers, and it’s done.

Penny ante stuff, pikers, bit players on the world stage.

But us?

Look at our terrorists – Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein.

The world is still quaking.

Psychic terrorism. Now there’s a beautiful thing. I think I will conjure me up a potion of that tonite. Maybe I can rock the world just that one tiny, near-imperceptible bit.

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One thought on “Who’s the Terrorist Now, Baby?”

  1. Let’s define terrorism as the random or indiscriminate killing of civilians for political purposes. By that criteria, which were the two largest terrorist organizations of the last century? Answer: the the USAF and the RAF. They terror-bombed dozens of German and Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

    It will not do to say that a man who kills civilians for political purposes is a terrorist when he does not wear a uniform, but a military man doing his patriotic duty when he does wear a uniform. That is a conservative bias in favor of states.

    To use an analogy, if you walk down the street and four young guys beat you up viciously, that’s brutality. If four policemen do the same, then it is also brutality. The fact that they wear a uniform is irrelevant.

    I’m not arguing against the notion that states should have a monopoly of force, but they can use their force in illegitimate manners just as well as civilians. What makes force legitimate is not the uniform but the purpose for which it is used and against whom it is used.

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