Spirituality/Terror

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Tue Sep 25 10:00:29 PDT 2001


At 06:27 AM 09/25/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>For them, you can't do better than to make up your mind to die. No
>other man can be so effective as the man who has chosen that. If we
>had made up our minds to it, we should not have missed Chiang Kai-shek
>a while back. You know it.

I see no reason to confuse spirituality with terror. Having reached a certain point of despair/narcissism, death is far easier than life; but spirituality is never about choosing the easier path. "Man's Fate" always struck me as a lie from beginning to end. Lessing's "Good Terrorist" seemed a more honest look at the phenomena and Conrad's "Secret Agent" also provides a good anatomy -- particularly of the "intellectual" component of terrorism and of the way in which it inevitably undermines the possibility of working class consciousness. At bottom, terrorism is an intellectual fantasy of turning oneself into a weapon without suffering the degradation of doing lower class work.

Joanna Bujes



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