All the Children Are Insane

In today's New York Times, David Brooks tries to have us drink the neo-con Kool-Aid on the causes of terrorism. This consists of disparaging anyone who might try to look at root causes. Because, in the conservative mind, terrorists are evil. Not just the generic evil we use in everday speech, but the theologic eveil which springs from the dark recesses of the universe and has no cause which is explicable to the human mind.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

If we are not to look too deeply at why people - over the long run - can be driven to such despicable acts (and who would deny that they are other than that?), then what hope is there that future generations will ever be able to avoid the mistakes that we have made? What hope is there that our children and grandchildren will be able to live in a world where nobody is so desperate that they would join in such a cause?

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

So David Brooks would have us believe that terrorism and terrorists just arise ab nihilo. Accepting that at face value would mean that there is no reason to understand - either the person, their cause or the roots of that cause. And that makes it so much easier to sell the kind of hatred and xenophobia and depersonalization which is the first necessary step to being able to kill another human being.

That is a sure recipe for future disaster.