Exceeeeeept …
If … and it’s a BIG ‘if’ … because it’s not something I believe in myself … but that kinda puts the ‘if’ in perspective … IF I found myself doing exactly that then I couldn’t now swear, hand on heart, that, under those circumstances, I wouldn’t feel justified in doing so … because for me to resort to that would mean I felt my hand had been forced, leaving me no other option.
Rather than a terrorist, I might feel myself to be a (reluctant) revolutionary … even ‘freedom fighter’.
Now … it’s entirely possible that my hand might well have been forced and that I had no other option: civil war broke out, it was anarchy with roving bands of homicidal-to-genocidal maniacs roaming the countryside, looting, raping, murdering as they went … and I found myself trapped somewhere with no way out and they were only too happy to kill me and mine.
But …
What, if I were simply overreacting?
What if things were bad, sure, but not so bad that they warranted my killing people I perceived to be a threat … I just perceived them to be more of a threat than they actually were.
Either way around my actions would have been the same … either way around, my perception of the situation would have been the same … the only difference being the discrepancy between my perception and the reality of the situation.
Would that discrepancy between perception and reality make me an evil man? Would it make me a terrorist? Or would it make me a man whose anxiety, even fear, led me astray and caused me to make a terrible mistake?
No, I have no sympathy for the bigots and fascists … least of all those who go looking for trouble rather than staying away, simply ready to defend themselves, if need be … but even being bigoted and/or a fascist doesn’t necessarily make you a terrorist — and the fact that it is ‘the other side’ doing it now doesn’t mean we aren’t just as capable of behaving identically under the right circumstances.
If they’re the US equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirts, so be it, History will judge them as such and, in the meantime, those of you caught up in the middle will have to do all in your power to disempower them.
It’s a shitty time and place to be caught up in to be sure but, until I knew unequivocally that that is what they were rather than simply frightened idiots with guns, I’d be less inclined to label them all as ‘terrorists’ myself — they might not be politically motivated, they might just be simpletons and bigots fearful that the values they hold dear are in danger of being overturned by those they perceive to be (political) terrorists.
