Indeed, They Did Grow up Absurd
Coser, Lewis
THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD is now being I enacted on the public scene. Letters recently sent to a number of corporations which were subsequently bombed stated that the bomb throwers were full of...
...Men who are actuated by such sentiments are not likely to respond to rational argument...
...Anything else only reveals a failure of nerve...
...Even as a few grains of sand can bring a delicate machine to a stop, so a relatively few terrorists might indeed be able to bring a modern city to a standstill...
...199 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Men are likely to engage in a politics of terror only when they feel totally cut off from their fellows, when they do no longer trust anybody, when they feel surrounded by hostile forces over which they seem to have no control whatever...
...But let us not ask that they remain unpunished for the crimes they have committed, if it is proved that they have indeed committed them...
...By all means let us see to it that they are treated with all the legal and judiciary safeguards to which they have the same right as any American citizen...
...When men resort to bomb and revolver in a democratic society in order to coerce their fellows, they do not merit indulgence...
...Recent terroristic acts, bomb scares and the like have proved again how extremely fragile are the structures that hold a highly technological society together...
...As John Dewey wrote long ago, "The principle of magic is found whenever it is hoped to get results without intelligent control of means...
...When the rage for disorder takes over, the voice of reason is silenced...
...Theirs is in effect a kind of magical politics...
...Like all executioners, they care not for their victims...
...Imprisoned in a moral universe of total negation, these young men attempt with bombs and revolvers to evoke values they do not really possess...
...That moral rot has indeed set in is painfully evident when one reads that society ladies at Leonard Bernstein's swoon over Panthers accused of murder or that Los Angeles underground newspapers make a hero of Charles Manson, the leader of a band of young people accused of killing Sharon Tate...
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...Those of us who oppose terror in Vietnam can do this with clean hands only if we oppose it at home too...
...Only when all standards of valuation are toppled do men react to terror without moral revulsion...
...Washington has shown its contempt for the young, and generally for all those who do not belong to the mindless middle of the electorate...
...One may well be aware of the depth of despair that lies at the roots of their actions and yet castigate their conduct with the utmost vigor...
...Terror on the Left is likely to generate terror on the Right, and unless we stand guard, the democratic polity will degenerate into an arena where rival gangsters will fight it out for control over the turf...
...In Cold Blood as well as Bonnie and Clyde helped define the latest twist of the Zeitgeist...
...Let us no longer be taken in by those who beg our indulgence for men whom they call well-intentioned though misguided in the means they use...
...These Jesuits of the bomb seem untouched by reflection on the relations between means and ends...
...But it would be wrong to exonerate the terrorists for what they do by pointing to the failings of the system which has engendered them...
...While protesting against a "dehumanized system" they eagerly refer to its representatives as "pigs" and "vermin," thus dehumanizing them in their turn...
...What you cannot get, you destroy—like the child that smashes the toy that doesn't do its bidding...
...The revolution of rising expectations that pervades all society has now created in some Americans the delusion of immediate gratification...
...In their desperate assaults against "the system" in general, these loving avengers seem to have the utmost contempt for human beings in particular...
...By their mindless acts they foreclose the chances of reasonable transformations...
...They seem to think of themselves as angels of death whose innocence is vouchsaved by their loving intentions...
...It would hence be mistaken to counter the politics of terror with the traditional Marxist arguments on the futility and ineffectiveness of individual terroristic acts...
...Pigs are to be slaughtered and vermin must be exterminated, and so these modern terrorists can apparently bomb and maim with a perfectly good conscience...
...and also when it is supposed that means can exist and yet remain inert and inoperative...
...And one wonders how the editors of the New York Review of Books now feel about having printed that unclean Andrew Kopkind essay about morality growing from the barrel of a gun or for having reproduced on its front page a drawing giving instructions for the making of Molotov cocktails...
...In a very real sense, these terrorist acts are symptoms of the devolution of the democratic process in recent years...
...There can be no tolerance for this "socialism with an inhuman face...
...Granted that much of what is currently happening on the American scene is ultimately rooted in the failings of a society that led many of its young to grow up absurd, we owe it to them to treat them as responsible actors...
...But to believe that such times and conditions do obtain in comtemporary America can only be the result of a delusionary system of thought...
...The arguments against such acts can no longer be conducted in terms of efficacy but rather in terms of political and moral consequences...
...That is why those of us who are committed to a politics of rationality must see in these young terrorists not only the enemies of the "system" but our enemies as well...
...THE YOUNG TERRORISTS ACT on the basis of the proposition that if you don't get what you desire, the system that denies your wants is out "to get you...
...It is these that are disastrous and need to be countered with the utmost vigor...
...Since they are convinced of the purity of their motives, they apparently feel that everything they do should be judged in the light of these motives rather than in terms of the consequences for others...
...It may very well be that such conditions are at least approximated at certain times and under certain historical conditions, as in Czarist Russia or Nazi Germany...
...We must treat them as accountable and responsible for their actions...
...Letters recently sent to a number of corporations which were subsequently bombed stated that the bomb throwers were full of loving care for mankind and therefore felt justified in destroying the offices of death-dealing corporations...
...It is plain that such acts can now be much more effective than they were under less intricate societal arrangements...
...They are desperate, and it would be foolish to deny that much of their desperation must be laid at the doors of a political situation that has been created by at least two administrations...
...Similarly, the mass media and other purveyors of the pornography of violence have surely had a part in creating an atmosphere that is conducive to benign tolerance for the most outrageous acts of terror...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
