Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

We’ve all wondered how a terrorist can inflict such murderous cruelty on innocent people. But the terrorist has his logic. The terrorist will defend his actions by citing past abuses his people have suffered, and in the mind of the terrorist his means are justified by the ends he believes will be good. The terrorist always sees his actions as a response to previous violence and perceives his actions as primarily defensive. René Girard says, “the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal ... The aggressor has always already been attacked.”[16] This is the defense that ISIS and Al-Qaeda give. And isn’t this precisely how President Harry S. Truman justified dropping two atomic bombs on cities full of civilians? Truman’s argument for killing 200,000 people was no more sophisticated than that we were attacked and atomic bombs brought a good end. The winners get their face minted on money and the losers get tried for war crimes, but it’s all the same logic.