What do the terrorists want? It is still hard to understand the point of it as Hezbollah terrorists fight against a resolute Israeli nation defending its national state borders.
But back in the fall of 2005 Frederick Turner nailed it for us.
The terrorists are fighting to prevent modern democratic states from being born. They are not fighting oppressors, or representing an ethnic nation yearning to be free. Ordinary Iraqis have shown with their purple fingers what they want, and the Palestinians could do it tomorrow if they wanted. The suicide terrorists represent
the last gasp, historically, of the ancient system by which the huge majority of human beings were ruled since the Neolithic agricultural revolution.
And what they particularly want to stop is the “velvet revolution,” the peaceful revolutions we have seen all over the world since the fall of the old Soviet Union, the
nonviolent, non-ideological middle-class and skilled-worker mass movements have unseated tyrants and established democracies in an amazing range of countries[.]
That’s the way that most city people want to live and want to be governed. But the terrorists and the terror masters don’t want them to have that chance. Terror is the way that they force people back into their ethnic enclaves and the ancient culture of mistrust. It is the way that they strangle democracy in its cradle.
Turner’s idea also lets us see why the international left sympathizes, sometimes openly, with the terrorists. In their heart of hearts, the people of the left do not believe in democracy either. They only believe in a special kind of democracy, what they call “genuine democracy,” where everything is controlled by the political system. And that is not so far from the ancient system that the modern era is trying to uproot.
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