The real cause of terrorism

Back in the old days, as I have said, we hippies didn’t have much truck with the new left types. They were boring and we pretty much dismissed any interest in the ways of the world of politics as boring and pointless. Maybe it was when they started to draft us that we began to take an interest in politics, and by then the yippies, who were more like us had appeared, and we all became generally leftist.

I can’t say that we ever did much outside of a lot of talk and maybe a little marching, but I always had good feelings for the political types. It seemed like they were doing the hard work of the revolution, and though they sounded strange sometimes I was for them.

Then one day I picked up the paper in southern Illinois where I was working as a janitor for my CO, and read where one of their bombings had killed a janitor. A janitor? Kind of an accident, they expected the building to be deserted, but really no excuse. A janitor?

What the fuck? What were they thinking? Did they think somehow Lyndon would hear about this and think, oh, well I guess I better end the war then?

I haven’t been really satisfied with either of our definitions of terrorism, but this example was really what I think of as terrorism. This janitor was killed for no reason at all.

Of course on the other side of the world, we had our guys eating a nice breakfast, maybe writing a love letter to their sweetie and then getting into a big airplane and bombing the fuck out of people they have never met. I am talking here mainly about the bombing of Hanoi. It had no strategic interests, it was mainly to try to get the North Vietnamese to they peace table, which it never did. I suppose it was also meant to soften up the populace a bit, terrorize them as it were. There had been studies that the V2 bombing of London had not softened up the English, and the bombing of Dresden had not softened up the krauts, just gotten their backs up, but we did it anyway. So I guess those people all died for nothing.

But that doesn’t make killing the janitor any better.

Does seem to me that terrorism really begins with the use of dynamite. Only with dynamite, or some equivalent, can a small group of people kill a bunch of other people and not suffer any consequence. It seems to me that it begins with a bunch of guys, you know how we guys are, always trying to outdo each other and never wanting to chicken out on a dare. And maybe there are many things you can do to advance your cause, but most of them are boring and involve hard work, but you get some dynamite and what an impact you make.

It may be, and almost surely is, that this impact will not advance your cause, but anybody trying to point that out would surely be considered chicken.

That’s what I consider the real cause of terrorism. Boys playing with matches.