Musings.
I am debilitated. Watching the coverage of the Madrid attacks this morning just sickens me. I was sickened on 9/11, by the IRA bombings of Warrington in 1993, by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, by the Oklahoma City bombing, by Klingenhoffer's murder aboard the Achille Lauro, to name a few.
What is this vile human proclivity to murder innocents? What warped notions possibly can grab such hold on people that convinces them that innocent strangers' lives are worth sacrificing (and sometimes one's own life)?
And then I ask, well, what is the fundamental moral difference between terrorism and how civilized countries have institutionalized the use of war to assert their will? Is a cause worth the sacrifice of young people on both sides because we're right and they're wrong? Isn't that what all the terrorists think too?
I am not a pacifist. There are indeed just wars, and I bemoan the fact that innocents get caught up in them. I think multilateralism is the true determinant for which wars are just. If we can't convince a majority of the world's governments that a cause is worth sending young men to kill and be killed, then a society seriously needs to question whether its justifications for war are any sounder than those of its target. Any other use of war as a political vehicle is just institutionalized terrorism.
I also observe that terrorism appears to be cyclical in nature. I think the present cycle started in the 1980s when Reagan rolled up insane deficits and focused on the increasingly bankrupt Evil Empire &trade as the target of all that military spending, while funding and training the contras, stepping up the death squad activity in El Salvador, trading weapons with the Ayatollah to help his prestige at home, and for the most part not responding to the Beirut massacres and Lockerbie bombings set the stage for a new definition of terrorism as being "the death of civilians in a manner not consistent with the goals of multinational corporations."
