1975
The average person rarely meets any terrorists, except those connected with the Government, and so, in our ignorance of them, we tend to think of them as bestial and inhuman. This probably does them a cruel injustice.
It is true that terrorism requires its practitioners to be unpleasant, even murderous, to other people. But their motives are invariably kind, humane and even high-minded. Indeed, few forms of human behavior more adequately express the quintessence of Homo sapiens than a terror bombing, for it satisfies the human urge to be beastly to one’s fellow man, woman and child and justifies the cruelty on the ground that it will make the world a better place.
The terrorist is a believer in uplift. He believes in the perfectibility of man and is prepared to kill you in order to improve the world for you.
Most of us, of course, have a horror of sudden and premature dispatch to the beyond, even for the sake of improving the planet, and for this reason we tend to disapprove of small-scale terrorism. This distaste is intensified by the fact that the noble cause for which we are to be dispatched often seems less than vital to us.
In fact, there is such a variety of terrorists at work these days in such a variety of good causes that it is altogether possible to be hied rapidly to the grave without even being aware of the good cause you died to promote.
If you travel to Northern Ireland you will probably know that the high-minded cause for which you are bombed at your beer is either independence from British rule or continuance of British rule, but if you cross to London the ground is trickier.
Not long ago terrorists in a passing car pumped bullets into a West End hotel, and since there had been a spate of bombings there in the cause of a better Ireland, you would naturally have assumed, had you been shot there, that it was to improve life on the Emerald Isle. In this you would have been wrong.
The police deduced that since there was a Jewish gathering in progress at the hotel, the real point of the mayhem was to promote justice for the displaced Arabs of Palestine. Thus, in your last millisecond on earth, it is entirely possible these days to be cruelly deceived about which great cause you are nobly serving by passage to the other side.
“I am crossing for old Ireland,” you might sensibly conclude, having considered the terrain, when in fact, all unbeknownst, you are actually improving the Middle East, striking a blow for oppressed peoples of Argentina, helping to end warfare in Vietnam or—who knows?—helping stop cruelty to animals in Sarawak.
When one is compelled to part with life for high-minded causes one likes to know what the cause is. It is highly unsatisfying to cross the chasm for uplift without even knowing what will be uplifted as a result.
Governments, which are far and away the most vigorous practitioners of terrorism, understand this human quirk. When they make war they first saturate you with official announcements explaining that you are to be killed for freedom, or for liberation from the coils of imperialistic capitalism, or for something equally improving, and then they saturate you with bullets, fire and bombs.
All through history, people have tolerated terrorism when its purpose has been adequately explained to them, and most people probably approve it. Probably one of the chief reasons for American resistance to the Vietnam war was the Government’s failure to come up with an explanation of which great humanitarian purpose was being promoted by the bloodshed.
Government terror is not limited to the use of bombs and guns. In places like Chile, it embraces torture to create a society purified by release from Communism. In the Soviet Union, it includes imprisonment in insane asylums to create a world where all people can approach nearer to Paradise.
In the United States, keeper of police files on citizen activities, tapper of telephones, opener of mail, one is never aware whether Big Brother Sam is watching or not, but is nevertheless aware that if one’s name is on file at the FBI, or the phone is tapped, or the mail is being steamed open at the post office, it is for a wonderful cause—the preservation of individual freedom.
Government defense of these practices is the same as the smallbore terrorist’s defense of dynamiting helpless people at the lunch counter. The cause is too noble to be lost through squeamishness. What neither government nor unofficial terrorist ever concedes is that terror, besides being so good for humanity, also fulfills some dark human yearning to give one’s fellow man the works.