Reply #25: Well, we have two groups of terrorists in the world at the moment. [View All]

[Kutjara]

Group One are the real ones who, for whatever reason, have a grievance against 'us' and wish us harm. Group Two are our own leaders who use the threat of Group One to justify the most outrageous violations of basic human rights and the wholesale dismantling of the principles on which our system of government is based. Personally, I'm far more concerned by Group Two than Group One.

The problem with the current situation (and other terrorists scares like it) are that we are rightly suspicious of Group Two and their motives. It therefore becomes difficult to give credence to anything they say. The current plot may very well have been real and imminent, but we will never know. That's the real crime: these things directly affect our lives and we will never know the truth about them. Or we will never know that we know.

So we fall back on 'Negative Capability' (which was first coined by Keats, not Fitzgerald), the need to neither believe nor disbelieve. A superposition of possibilities is all one can entertain when the truth is so completely out of reach.