Ashis Nandy
Five years after 9/11, there has been a narrowing of cognitive and emotional range all around. The global culture of common sense has concluded that hard-headed, interest-based terror—favoured by mainstream international relations and exemplified by the CIA’s repeated attempts to assassinate recalcitrant rulers hostile to the US—is now not terror. Terror now involves the defiance of rationality and abrogation of self-interest and is, hence, ‘cultural’. As if to prove the mainstream right, the rage of those who feel let down by the present global system and see no future within it often don’t have a specific target and are looking for one. Regimes that latch on to that free-floating anger can go far. Indeed, sometimes their targets too have the same need to search for, and find, enemies, thus establishing a psychological bond that binds them in lethal mutual hatred.
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