Terrorist Time and Time for Terror

I'm reading a book called Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, by Gary Saul Morson, and it turns out to be timely, because there's a chapter devoted to the revolutionist-terrorist personality. 

Suffice it to say that they're not like us, and yet, they rely on western dupes and useful idiots to treat them as if they are -- you know, just aggrieved people with rational and realistic goals.

The late 19th century

witnessed the birth of Russian terrorism.... Russia became the first country where young men and women, when asked their intended career, might answer "terrorist," an honorable, if dangerous, profession....

I know of no earlier society that made terror routine for everyone, celebrated "mercilessness" as a virtue, and taught schoolchildren that compassion is criminal.

Well, I know of a later one. And *coincidentally*,

Until 1964, the word “Palestinian” rarely described Arabs who once lived in Israel. That was when KGB Agents of Communist Russia created and funded a terrorist group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).... The PLO was as artificial as other effective and deadly groups communists used during the Cold War to take over Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, Vietnam, and Cuba.

Morson asks "What self-justifications do those who commit monstrous crimes invoke, what moral alibis do they seize upon, and what makes excuses persuasive to them?" As if he has never tuned into CNN or visited a college campus.  

Just like the Palestinians they sponsored, Russian terrorists "gave rise to a mythology and martyrology that conferred sanctity on killing." Their "readiness to slaughter innocent people, not just opponents, looked forward to later terrorists' dynamite in crowded public places and to Lenin's taking of random hostages..."

How are we to understand these people -- and not fall into the trap that they are somehow like us, sharing the same reality, motivations, and goals? One important point is that "The revolutionary (and terrorist) of this sort lived in a special temporality -- let us call it terrorist time..." Quoting Solzhenitsyn,  

They, the zealots, could not afford to wait, and so they sanctioned human sacrifice... to bring universal happiness nearer!

"Terrorist time led to the time of terror" (Morson). 

I'm going to skip past a couple of important chapters on The Intelligentsia and The Idealist and go straight to The Revolutionist, the latter often supported and rationalized by the former two. But

For many terrorists, goals, programs, and ideology were irrelevant. What they loved was revolutionary activity itself....

Time and again, the means for achieving a goal became the goal itself.... if at first revolution was the end and terrorism the means, terrorism soon became the end in itself. 

As it is for Hamas, who care about Jews only slightly less than their own people: "For revolutionists, aiding workers and peasants was at best secondary." Like today, there were those progressive voices  claiming that "they turned to terror only as a last resort," but this excuse "does not pass the smell test." Rather, "it is the decision to murder that leads to the justification."

Now to the main question, which is "If relieving human suffering is beside the point," why does the terrorist murder, rape, torture, and risk his life? "What motivates the revolutionist to engage in terror?"

I guess we'll get into it in the next post, but let me end by going back to what was said above about Terrorist Time. Morson writes that "Terrorists may sense themselves living in a special sort of timeless time" which he calls "living in liminality." It's definitely a spiritual state, in that it's a little like being dead while alive, and thus liberated from every quotidian concern:

This feeling of living posthumously frees him from ordinary concerns and places him beyond good and evil. He becomes a superman....

Consequences, for oneself and others, no longer matter. The present moment is all there is. Sheer liminality -- betweenness, transitionality, contradiction, and freedom from all definition -- becomes addictive....

We wonder how they can be living like rats in those underground terror tunnels, but they would no doubt find it tedious beyond belief to devote themselves to banalities such as economic development, or proper education and healthcare, or turning Gaza into a seaside vacation spot. Such terror addicts "aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil.... They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know anything else except that."

Trapped in liminality, in "never-ending preparations," they cannot create anything, let alone an earthly utopia.