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In Defense of Terrorism

THE ONLY reason I wouldn't blow up the Center for International Affairs is that I might get caught. But the desire is there. As it is for the 7094 computer, the Instrumentation Labs, and the Center for International Studies at M.I.T., draft boards, army bases, the Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol, New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Harvard University. I would probably remove the authentic examples of Egyptian and Sumerian art from the Semitic Museum at the Center first. The copies, though, should probably go.

The Center is a good example. If everyone woke up one morning and found it gone, who would miss it? President Pusey? Robert Bowie? Maybe a couple of others, for sentimental reasons. Most people don't care about

The Center, and anyone who knows anything about it wishes it didn't exist.

What has happened to our generation is that we never got what we wanted. We've only been led to believe that we have. Capitalist production has created desires which it has, for better or for worse, satisfied. In the same process, however, the things we really wanted, and needed, were set just above our reach. They were either labeled fantasy and psychosis or were put on TV so that we could receive the pleasure vicariously.

We have come to believe that any desire that has not been created can not be satisfied. That is what they would like us to believe. The market place has become like a Woolworth's in a small town. What you can't get there, you don't get.

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This is why many of us took so long to believe seriously in the necessity of an American withdrawal from Vietnam. That was the first time we had wanted something without first being told to want it. Professor Landes is fond of saying that our generation wants' everything quickly because we have always received everything we want. I think he has misjudged the phenomenon.

Many of us know now what we want. Or at least we know what we don't want. We don't want the war or any part of the society that made it. We may not even want any part of the whole civilization. It might be necessary to go back two hundred years and start again.

The point is that modern philosophy, maybe since Marx has taught us the necessary correlation between theory and practice. You don't really believe something unless you are acting for it. We want to abolish the Center, for example, but we don't know how. And so we have an irreconcilable tension in our existence all the way from breakfast to bedtime.

Blowing up a bad thing will relieve much of that tension. So that the preceding sentence doesn't become evidence for any of the rampant psychological reductionism theories about radicals, it should be pointed out that the psychological problems most of us have are very directly capitalism's fault. In fact most of what you could blow up in this society is a cause of at least a few people's psychosis.

It is from this point in the argument that most of the rebuttals start. We will examine a few.

THOSE who agree with everything up to this point will say that the chief activities of the Center could move easily from Cambridge to the Pentagon. That is a good argument. I will even help refute the tenuous reasons that the Center finds for remaining at Harvard. They say that they need the library, the faculty colleagues, the intellectual community, and the money. All of that is doubtful.

In fact as long as I am setting up some kind of a theoretical framework. I might as well begin to argue from it. The arguments that follow need a preface, however. I may have learned only two things in my four years at Harvard. The first is that an equally intelligent, rational, and valid argument can be made on all sides of any question from any and all premises. The second is that those arguments have no relationship to anything but themselves.

To make this more clear. I will affirm that I do not think there exists any argument that can justify American foreign policy. The point is that arguments based on reason and the valid laws of discourse can prove anything within their system. It is the feeling I have in my stomach against the War that matters. Any argument in favor of it does not.

From what I have said, though, I think one could argue that it would be good for the Center to move to the Pentagon after we blew it up in Cambridge. We would then be able to blow it up again. Each time, a little of the classified information would be lost and a few of the people would quit from anxiety or frustration. Like a big animal, it would begin to die from the limbs.

The next major argument concerns tactics. I will admit that I have never understood tactics. They have always seemed to me a way to forget about getting from one place to another. The argument says that blowing up buildings does not organize anyone. I will respond that blowing up buildings is not intended to organize anyone. It is intended to blow up buildings. Those people who want to organize should denounce those who blow up buildings. They could claim that someone from Nepal did it.

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