Max's wager

/ dave / arouet at winternet.com
Thu Oct 25 20:40:39 PDT 2001


Chuck Grimes wrote:


> A terrorist act is
> easy to accomplish, but impossible to achieve its goal.

With the possible exception of a measured, focused act that is so well disguised that it's not recognized as terrorism, as such - an act for which no one claims attribution that is perpetrated in such a way that the violent outcome, while achieving some modest, quantifiable, beneficial result for the perpetrators, is by design misconstrued by those in authority as having a more mundane origin.

The lack of recognition of the true nature of the event on the part of everyone but the perpetrators would tend to preserve the status quo to a large extent and allow for a reasonably-foreseeable outcome that would further some goal or aim of the instigators.

I guess this kind of thing, by definition, wouldn't qualify as "terror"-ism unless uncovered and recognized as such by virtue of the inevitable reaction and response, but it would still fall under the rubric of politically-motivated activity in the abstract. Of course it would be impossible to cite examples, save hypotheticals (vehicle sabotage, for instance) and failed attempts, because these acts would by their very nature be unknown to us.

--

/ dave /



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