Terrorism and Rationalizing Evil
Over the coming days, weeks and months, society will try to understand, explain and rationalize the murderous atrocities that the Tsarnaev boys committed in Boston.
It’s fine if we try to figure out what reasonable safeguards, if any, society can implement to prevent such barbaric catastrophes.
In the Old West, evil got its due with no rationalizing
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But it is critical that in trying to find an explanation for why people resort to such violence, we do not conclude that their acts, and similar ones that occur throughout the world every day, are somehow justified and rational acts. They are nothing more than pure evil, whether motivated by a conscious decision to do wrong to advance an agenda (“we’ll bomb them into political submission”) or the inability to decipher right from wrong (“the dog made me do it”). When all is said and done, there is no mathematical formula, algorithm, arc of the covenant or the like that can explain let alone justify murder as being anything other than a wrong that is unacceptable to civilization.
Moral relativists are, at best, confused when they equate bombers who detonate themselves in crowds of civilians with the minutemen of our American revolution or similar patriots of revolutions that fought for the dignity and freedoms that rightfully belong to human beings. At their worst, such apologists are aiding and abetting, if not instigating, such barbarism.
Such exercise in moral relativism occurred right after the Boston bombings when Richard Falk, a special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council and professor emeritus at Princeton, wrote a ridiculous diatribe blaming the “American global domination project” for terrorism. Sadly, he is not alone in the halls of academia and elsewhere.
Given the clear-cut wrongness of terrorist acts and the existential threat they present to a forward-moving civilization, the perpetrators, whether they be those who carry out the actual acts or instigate them from a mosque, an ostensibly god-fearing church or a KKK hall, must be shown the gallows post-haste, lest there be no one left but them.
I.M. Windee
