From an article in The Irish Times
Jun. 5th, 2017 08:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mlknchz"But we also have to acknowledge the plain fact of resilience. The stuff that people tend to say in the aftermath of an atrocity – that London, Manchester, Madrid, Paris, Brussels or New York will never be the same again – is well meant. But it’s not true. And saying it only feeds the narcissistic delusions of the terrorists. It is what they want to believe, and believing it justifies in the zealot’s overheated mind the cruelties he inflicts. The truth is that places recover with shocking alacrity. Even after the mega-terror of 9/11, New York quickly went back to being New York.
It’s much, much harder to terrorize a population into submission than official and unofficial purveyors of mass violence always think it is. Normality isn’t a fixed state but a spectrum with a remarkably wide range. Terrorists are contemptible for many reasons, but one of them is the stupidity of not knowing this. They try to magnify themselves with epic acts of cruelty. In the end they are diminished and defeated by the strange ability of human beings to step around the pools of blood, keep going and forget."
What we forget was that the London blitz, Hitler's attempt to terrorize Great Britain into surrender by attacking the citizens of its capitol, failed for exactly this reason. People got up the next morning, shook off the dust, cleaned up the debris, mourned the dead, and went back to their lives. The resilience of human beings, and their capacity to just keep going, is nearly infinite.
It’s much, much harder to terrorize a population into submission than official and unofficial purveyors of mass violence always think it is. Normality isn’t a fixed state but a spectrum with a remarkably wide range. Terrorists are contemptible for many reasons, but one of them is the stupidity of not knowing this. They try to magnify themselves with epic acts of cruelty. In the end they are diminished and defeated by the strange ability of human beings to step around the pools of blood, keep going and forget."
What we forget was that the London blitz, Hitler's attempt to terrorize Great Britain into surrender by attacking the citizens of its capitol, failed for exactly this reason. People got up the next morning, shook off the dust, cleaned up the debris, mourned the dead, and went back to their lives. The resilience of human beings, and their capacity to just keep going, is nearly infinite.