| Der Spiegel (translated by Cato the Elder) The Terrorist Understanders By Henryk M. Broder Three years after the attacks of September 11, the terror has lost nothing of its virulence, but much of its horror. Helplessly, we impute honorable motives to the perpetrators and interpret their arbitrary acts as political desperation. But what if all they care about is the joy of killing and the fun of dying? The bloody trail of the terrorists runs from New York to Bali, from Istanbul to Madrid, from Beer Sheva to Moscow. And the closer the attacks to us, the more absurd the reactions get. It's as if there were earthquakes everywhere, and instead of stockpiling food supplies, the people in the endangered regions started reading nature poems to each other. A writer recommends "more calm" in dealing with terrorism, a civil rights advocate talks of what he calls a "perceived threat" and calculates that you have a greater chance of dying during spring cleaning than of suffering harm in a terror attack, and the EU bureaucrats, incapable of putting together a common antiterror database, get upset at US agencies that would like to know in advance who is currently on the way to America. Privacy takes precedence over security. Not even the massacre in Beslan has been able to shake the liberal attitude towards terror and the terrorists, conditioned as it is by socio-pedagogical pensiveness. The dead were not yet all recovered before we already heard talk of a "dreadful act of desperation" by Chechen rebels who "can no longer distinguish between good and evil, because they believe they have been forgotten by the world." And from there it wasn't far to the conclusion that "the true culprits are in Moscow," because they deny the Chechens their boisterous nature that makes them unable to do anything other than raid theaters and schools, killing innocents and onlookers - so desperate and so helpless are they in their misery. Once again, the roles were reversed on the fly. Culprits became victims (of politics, of history, of circumstances); victims became objects of understandable violence, involuntarily atoning for the sins of the culprits (in this case, Russian policies). Unfortunate, but simply unavoidable. Just so were September 11 and March 11 already discussed out of existence: retribution for American and Spanish policies, respectively. Not nice, but comprehensible. A strange argument based on the notion of "desperation," one that explains everything - much as do "monopoly capitalism" and "globalization." But desperate people usually kill themselves, not others, except in cases of family drama or jealousy or people who run amok and go on random shooting sprees, knowing that in the end they themselves will be killed. Until now, people who ran amok were considered to be seriously disturbed, not protesters. Since September 11, however, they are presumed to have political motives - simply because they drape their death wish with a political alibi. This makes their demise the more dramatic, gives them the final kick on the way from here to eternity. What's a farewell letter to the relatives compared with the sensational effect of taking hundreds or thousands of people along with you to your death? The culture of death whose eruption we have witnessed for several years is so crazy and at the same time so absolute ("you love life, we love death!") that we are unable to explain it. But we are used to finding an explanation for everything, for unemployment, for the weather and for so-called fundamentalism. So we invent an explanation, one that is halfway acceptable by our standards, and lay it at the door of terrorists longing for death. Thus do we overcome our own helplessness and perplexity. If they have a motive we can understand, then we not only know what makes them tick, we also have the chance of influencing them. The best thing would be if our behavior were a reason for their going off the rails. Then all we'd need to do to make them stop threatening us would be to change our behavior. And already we're making an offer: We'd like to share our wealth with the poor of the world, and for a bonus we'll transform a church into a mosque. If only we had done that sooner, Mohammed Atta would still be alive, eager to participate as a partner in the multicultural dialog. But what if "they" have no other motive than the joy of killing and the fun of dying? What if they're not driven by the desire for global justice, but the pleasure of barbarism? Then we'd be in a fix. Not only because any trash can in any shopping mall could explode at any moment, but because we'd be forced to recognize that there are phenomena that we can neither understand nor influence - unless we commit preemptive suicide, to beat the terrorists to the punch. Outbreaks of mass insanity like this have occurred frequently in history: without really intending to compare, one could conceive the Third Reich as an attempt to first have a tantrum and then commit collective suicide. How desperate must the Nazis have been to commit the massacres of Oradour and Lidice? Was Goebbel's acclaimed offer of "total war" not of the same stamp as the profession of faith of the terrorists who love death more than life? We, however, are beyond that. Our models are not Reinhard Heydrich or Osama Bin Laden, but the Dalai Lama, because he preaches nonviolence even in hopeless situations. And we are proud of a "peaceful revolution" in which not so much as a state-owned coffee machine was damaged. Why don't we recommend the same path to the terrorists? Why do we impute honorable motives to them? Why do we show understanding for mass murderers who know no mercy because they act on instructions from God? Why don't we go to them and make them a fair offer: "Dear people, if you absolutely must kill yourselves, then do it. We won't stand in your way. But do it at home. All the best and every success."
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