The Root of Terrorism

[dream_weaver]

 

M. Northrup Buechner Excerpt: Collectivism Causes Terrorism

October 1981 issue of The Objectivist Forum, entitled "The Root of Terrorism."

Terrorism is the attempt by private gangs to scare a population into social change by wanton violence and murder. Evil on that scale occurs only as the result of powerful social-ideological forces. [...]

In surveying the terrorist gangs around the globe, one fact cries out for notice that is never noticed. Without exception, the terrorists are collectivists. [...]

The collectivist does not see murder as murder. [...] [C]ollectivists think nothing of slaughtering individuals, by the tens and hundreds when they are out of power, by the millions when they control the state.

Any plain thug who mindlessly brushes aside the rights of others can find a moral sanction in collectivism. [...] [Collectivism] turns violators of individual rights into cultural heroes.

However, most terrorists are not just criminals who have seized upon collectivism to justify a pre-existing desire for murder. The evil of collectivism goes much deeper than that. Collectivism not only sanctions terrorists, it creates them. They spring from the philosophical and psychological debris of sacrifice, sacrifice that collectivism not only sanctions, but requires.

Private gangs can range in size and scope, from neighborhood group of hoodlums to the mafia and cartels engaging in criminal activity and beyond. At some point, it may not even involve an official membership to act on its behalf, be it a copycat, or using a group that is out there to rationalize it ultimately.

I woke up this morning and ran across this cartoon. It was originally published July 23, 2015 by Allen B. West.and is being recirculated in the light of recent events. Barack Obama woke up back in 2008 after the election and had to be saying to himself, "Pinch me. I can't believe I'm actually the President of these United States."

Four years later, and a repeat performance at the polls, he finds himself in what I think Ayn Rand aptly describes in For The New Intellectual as one who postures as an intellectual, in his case, not a frightened zombie, but simply something frightening. His narcissistic side ever trying to turn the executive branch back into a monarchy it was intended to replace as an elimination of such despotism.

Back to the gang members, another passage seems to fit the most recent event in California better, from The Comprachicos:

The modern comprachicos have an advantage over their ancient predecessors: when a victim was mutilated physically, he retained the capacity to discover who had done it. But when a victim is mutilated mentally, he clings to his own destroyers as his masters and his only protectors against the horror of the state which they have created; he remains as their tool and their play-thing—which is part of their racket.

The advice she offers in the same article for those who would effect a social change is as follows:

[R]ebel against the ideas of your teachers. You will never find a harder, nobler or more heroic form of rebellion. You have nothing to lose but your anxiety. You have your mind to win.

Sometimes it seems that the strings attached to Obama's limbs should be visible. Clearly, though metaphoric, the strings that were attached to the limbs of those knuckle dragging neanderthals in California, certainly left a tangled mess.