…The Palestinians terror groups appear to have made the strategy of the absurd into a specialty: the sheer audacity, historically, of their most spectacular exploits seems to flout any criteria of rational behavior. However, other groups practice the same basic strategy. Human victims are not absolutely indispensable- Joseph Conrad’s Mr. Verloc was instructed only to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, the sanctuary of the modern goddess Time- but shedding blood, especially innocent blood, adds to the impression of insane violence that the primary outrage is intended to convey.
If mass slaughter is impractical, the desired effect can still be achieved by sacrificing a modest number of victims, or even a single victim, in some particularly bizarre and horrible way. At least a provisional record in the field of beastliness was set by the mysterious Spanish terrorists who, in November, 1972, invaded the French consulate in Saragossa, tied the consul to his chair, daubed him with red paint, poured gasoline on his clothes, and left an incendiary bomb in his office that went off before he could free himself. This piece of gratuitous sadism, according to the Spanish police at the time, was intended as a protest against some relatively mild restrictions the French government had recently placed on Spanish political refugees in France.
click image for source…
To understand the whole nightmare of modern terrorism, we must look at the ideological factors and acts of past terrorism, asking certain basic questions. How did present day terrorism develop? When did the features that distinguish it from earlier forms of terror first appear? What, in particular, are the origins of the seemingly lunatic but rigorously logical strategy of the absurd that appears to inspire its most atrocious manifestations?
—Pope John Paul II looks at a gift received by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat representing a nativity scene and the ” Last Supper” during their meeting at the Vatican February 15. The Vatican and the PLO signed a basic agreement on their relations, sayng both view any unilateral decision affecting Jerusalem’s special character as morally and legally unacceptable.—Reuters—
Completely satisfactory answers to these questions would entail a whole autopsy of modern civilization. In large measure, contemporary terrorism is a direct reflection of the ideological fantaticisms, the kinky intellectual trends, the decay of public and private moral standards, the flight from reason, and the general dehumanization that afflict our age. What has happened to terrorism is akin to what has happened to crime or to war. When politicians engage in drone warfare, such as the U.S. in Pakistan or Yemen, why be surprised when terrorists kill civilians as a form of revolutionary propaganda? When intellectuals make a culture of the stoned mind, why shouldn’t terrorism attract the cultists of stoned violence?
Image:http://www.israellycool.com/2012/07/05/how-reuters-see-the-legacy-of-arafat/
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…In the last four years, the use of unmanned drones to engage in so-called “targeted killing” has escalated dramatically. In Pakistan alone, US drone strikes have increased five fold during the Obama administration, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks US drone strikes .
Drones have become the go-to weapon in the United States’ “War on Terror”. The drone war’s apparent “successes” are celebrated by administration officials on a regular basis, often while avoiding the more disturbing details, such as the under-accounted for civilian death toll, the violation of international and humanitarian laws, the counter-productivity of drone warfare, and the lasting effects of such blatant disregard for human life.
It is a challenge to find an accurate count of civilian casualties, thanks in large part to the effort of the United States government to keep information about the drone program shielded from the public. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times both have filed requests for documents relating to the CIA’s drones. The CIA replied that it can “neither confirm or deny the existence of records”. This response was challenged by the ACLU in a lawsuit containing nearly 200 statements (both on- and off-the-record) made by current and former members of the CIA itself. Justice Department lawyers argue that revealing the existence of such documents relating to targeted killing or a drone program would un
“sensitive information about the nature and scope of such a program” . A federal judge in Washington D.C ruled in favor of the CIA in September, which the ACLU appealed.Read More:http://www.globalresearch.ca/drone-warfare-terrorism-with-a-bigger-budget/5316762
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