Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's confusing you
Is just the nature of my game
-The Rolling Stones
Windows as far as a half-mile away are blown out, a crater roughly three-dozen feet deep and twice as wide is blasted into concrete, and the seismic force of the blast gets picked up on sensors several states away. A bomb made from fifteen-hundred pounds of dynamite has enormous destructive potential. In 1995 the American heartland was gutted by a bomb of only one-third that yield.
The attack on Oklahoma City used a bomb equivalent to just over five-hundred pounds of dynamite that collapsed over half of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. That explosion killed 168 Americans and sparked a wave of fear that burnt across our nation's media and seared itself onto our national consciousness.
But fifteen-hundred pounds of dynamite doesn't necessarily pack all that much of a punch. The sheer force of an explosion, or of any attack, can be mitigated by the circumstances surrounding its occurrence.
When there is no real meaning behind an explosion, it won't end up meaning much at all. Even so, sometimes what physical damage is done hardly matters, as the means of an attack can magnify its impact well beyond reality. Through misdirection and confusion, an attack can still accomplish its intended ends and live on long past its fires.
To understand how the physical effects of a massive blast equivalent to fifteen-hundred pounds of dynamite that just kills six people and closes two buildings for a few months could still create the perception that a lethal and highly-trained operative who embodied a threat to America's very existence was on the loose – we must return to the past.
Back across the footsteps of the world's most ancient revolutionaries and the first true Assassin to the banks of the Jordan River, where the history of violence has flowed in unison with time. To the deepest canopied rainforests, over the bloodied sands of Africa, into pedagogical explosions muffled at the turn of the century by weary Russian snow – yet still echoing across the media every time we are gathered by horror in front of our televisions.
Because it is only in the stories of our past that we can begin to find the answers to what is happening to us now.
i i i
As our economic system teeters on legs which seem thinner and more brittle every time a stoic bespectacled official comes forward to rescind a guarantee of solvency or an earnings report, as the price of oil fluctuates madly because of incomprehensible malignant influences, and as the prospect of armed international conflict between forces with enough firepower to depopulate the face of the planet several times over grows in likelihood – the unnerving certainty that something terrible is about to happen has slowly been slipping out of the shadows and into the everyday events happening right in front of us.
The precise nature of what's coming is difficult to pin down exactly.
But it's not like humanity is about to stumble across something that we've never seen before, that's without precedent in our collective history of visiting violence and terror upon each other. Because everything that occurs can, if your perception is tuned to hearing it, be perceived as an echo of the past.
Terrorism, as we think of it now, immediately summons images of the collapsed buildings, bombed-out buses, and deathly brown eyes leering through slitted masks. But these memories disguise the rational nature of the complex forces that coalesce as the deaths of innocents. And they do nothing to trace out the deep and inescapable historical roots of every explosion.
In the broadest sense, one thing that "sets terrorism apart from other acts of violence is that terrorism is carried out in a very dramatic way to attract attention and create an atmosphere of fear that goes far beyond the actual victims of the violence."1
But there is much more to it than that.
"Terrorist" has been the label used for insurgents, rebels, ideologues, guerrillas, militants, extremists, heads of state, commandos, and anyone else who uses a violence that is novel or unexpected and who is inspired by an idea he holds more dear than his own life. This is a troublesome over-application, and so categorizing terrorists by their form of violence is imperative both to understanding and defusing the threat they pose.
Modern Islamic fundamentalists are not on to anything new. They are simply finding their own way to manifest forces that have existed as a part of war and violence since recorded history began. Self-expression at its most horrible. By violently placing these forces in modern circumstances they gain the sheen of novelty.
They shouldn't.
When forgotten precedents are brought into the present the sinister mystery of what's occurring now fades away.
Figuring out exactly how the proverbial shit will go down is a matter not only of identifying the forces and concepts that were at work as past societies spiraled horribly towards entropy, but also coming to terms with our own shortcomings and mistakes. The bloody road we will travel on is one that has been well-taken before us, the road is not what's different this time.
What's different this time is us, the traveler.
And so it is by tracing the path of one man we can begin to unravel the complexity, depth, and interwoven nature of a threat that is as misunderstood as it is sinister. Terrorism, today most noticeably manifest as Islamic fundamentalism targeted at the West, at times threatens to consume the fabric of our society with an insatiable explosive fury. This threat, of modern fundamentalist terror, is far from new or unprecedented. It is nothing more than the continuation of an ancient war by modern means.
However the path of just one man isn't enough to lead us to complete understanding of this phenomenon. It's just a good place to start. He leads you down a rabbit hole that is strewn with innocent bodies, the blood of prophets, and the timeless hatreds that have so often thrown human societies against their neighbors' throats.
His tale can provide the beginning of a trail that stretches across epochs and empires and leads to each of our doorsteps. Understanding what we've come to know as terrorism requires following all the twists and jumps in the narration of his story, and accepting temporary confusion at unexpected leaps between eras.
Like the most effective acts of terrorism, patience is required – it'll all be tied together in the end.
Just one man's life can tell a story which can be linked to almost all of the myriad and seemingly disparate forces now being leveled against the West by an implacable enemy.
And the holes his story leaves empty will be filled with the help of those who came after him and those who came before him. In examining his story some of the shadows cast by modern Islamic extremism become illuminated to reveal both truly insidious monsters and, just as often.
Only our own skittish imagination.
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