Terrorism: A Symptom of Government

Terrorism: A Symptom of Government:

09-05-2011

Larken Rose
Website: Larken Rose

What would drive someone to risk his life, maybe even intentionally give up his life, in order to blow something up and kill a bunch of people? It's an intellectual cop-out to just declare that "evil" is to blame, and to pretend that we don't need to understand any more than that.

As a mental exercise, consider the question of what it would take to make you resort to violence. Presumably, you wouldn't just kill people for fun, or because you're in a bad mood. There would have to be something happening that was so drastically wrong and unjust (from your point of view), and that nothing else was stopping, that you would decide that violence was your only option. Such angry desperation is, in most cases, caused by "government" action. This doesn't take much theorizing, since many terrorists openly advertise the fact that their actions are in response to some "government" military action or other "policy" that the terrorist sees as a horrible injustice. In other words, terrorism is almost always a byproduct of "government." When the proverbial "little guy" is being continually victimized by a huge, powerful, organized gang of thugs (e.g., "government"), that's when he begins to think that the only power he has left is the power to do harm.

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