PREVIEW-Episode 72: Terrorism with Jonathan R. White

0:08 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, then thought better of it. My question for episode 72 is something like, what is terrorism and can it ever be morally justified? We are joined by international terrorism expert Jonathan R. White to discuss several articles from various historical periods. You can join the discussion, get the texts, and read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:40 Jonathan: This is Jonathan White in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

0:44 Wes: John, why don't you tell us how you ended up on the show?

0:47 Jonathan: Well, I entered the field of technology lately realizing that my ipod might not start a fire. He avoided them for about 10 years. Then I discovered podcast by accident. I stumbled upon you guys just as I was teaching quasi philosophy class, introducing freshmen in the honors college to the idea of liberal education. I was rereading all the stuff that I pretended to read when I was studying history and found out that I was absolutely fascinated with philosophy and loved the way you guys approached it. Wrote you guys a fan letter and never thought I was going to be on a show with you. So this is a thrill for me. I mean, you guys are really philosophers and I want to be a philosopher. Mark, you're a rock and roller and I know CF and G7. This is great.

1:36 Wes: Yes, that's one of the dangers of writing fan letters to us. You might get recruited, you might end up having to.

1:45 Mark: So you're at Grand Valley State University, right?

1:47 Jonathan: Grand Valley State University. You bet.

1:49 Mark: Tell us what the things you do there. What makes you a terrorism expert? So government people come to you and ask you stuff?

1:54 Jonathan: Well, in my academic career, I've always tried to pick an obscure field that nobody knows anything about so that I can act like I'm an expert. And I kept changing and changing and changing to religious terrorism and it finally caught up with me. So I got interested in this stuff back in the 1970s when I was on a SWAT team on the Jackson Police Department. I had a master's in military history and terrorism seemed very close to military history. I've also been very interested in religious terrorism, how religious messages are twisted and turned into violence. I've just started studying and writing, ran into Brian Jenkins from the Rand Corporation at a conference in 1983 and asked him what should I do. He gave me a three step plan and it worked. And that became my field of expertise.

2:44 Wes: You've edited Several textbooks, right. On the subject of terrorism. These are pretty widely used for introductory questions.

2:50 Jonathan: I come from a very practical perspective. And the folks who like my work tend to be military folks, security folks and law enforcement people. The folks who don't like my work are folks on the theoretical side because I don't examine a lot of theory. For example, when we were reading article from Stanford, I looked at that and I thought, well, this is really nice, but it doesn't help me get people off the airplane. By the same token, I've written a whole lot about what they were discussing and have been amazed at how close social science and history really are to philosophy. And Wes, I confess to you, I'm really glad you guys weren't my professors because I've had a pretty exciting life. And if you guys had been my professors instead of the guy I had, I would have majored in philosophy and I wouldn't have been trekking through the hills of Pakistan. This has been okay.

3:45 Wes: And you said you've been using the podcast with your students, is that right?

3:48 Jonathan: Oh, yeah. You guys bailed a lot of them out especially. And I love the one on Voltaire when I always thought Voltaire was pretty philosophical. And the way you guys kind of took him apart, I thought, oh, well, I like you anyway. But I have one young lady who just said to me, I had no idea how to write this paper. And I listened to the show you suggested on the Partially Examined Life, and my paper came together and it did. She got an A and she's very happy. And now she's one of your fans too, right?

4:24 Mark: I just got a letter from somebody saying, I have a paper coming up. Do you want to write it for me? I'll give you $10.

4:29 Wes: $10? Wow.

4:31 Jonathan: Hey, for $10 I'll write the paper. Well, it's an academic salary. You guys know something about that. That's why you went out to make money, right?

4:41 Wes: Yes. Now we're rich.

4:44 Mark: It says you're the executive director of the Homeland Defense Initiative. What is that exactly?

4:48 Jonathan: I could really come up with a good story. I can tell you the truth, and I guess I'll tell you the truth. I was consulting with the Department of Justice, state and local anti terrorism program prior to 9 11. And after 9 11, the government asked if I would take a leave of absence. And actually they asked if they could pay Grand Valley my salary and just have me join the program full time for a while. It was supposed to be six months. It turned out to be three and a half years. I was the Dean of Social Science. And the president of the university created a position that would allow me to go out and help the federal government as well as state and local entities across the country.

He created, through our board of trustees, the Homeland Defense Initiative. They gave me the title executive Director in case I wanted to go back into administration, because executive director, Dean kind of gives you some lateral flexibility. But I actually only supervise myself. I keep getting the provost saying during my personnel review this year, I've examined my strengths and weaknesses and counseled me on what I do wrong. And I've recommended myself for a pretty good pay raise, but doesn't seem to go okay.

5:59 Mark: So you made it up.

6:00 Jonathan: In other words, I'm an N of one. Hey, I consult with the government. You know, that's what we do.

6:07 Mark: Yes.

6:09 Jonathan: Wow.

6:10 Mark: All right. Well, we have about five articles on the list. Let me just list them off. Actually, if you look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com there's a description both on this episode itself, and then usually there's a link to. For more information or to get the readings, I provide a couple paragraphs in each of these. But just to list them off, we had one by J. Angelo Corlett, Can Terrorism be justified? That's from 1996. Another recent one, Donald Black's the Geometry of terrorism from 2004. We had an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Igor Primoratz on terrorism and then some historical sources.

So one, the Philosophy of the A Brief Response to Gandhi, which is associated with the Indian nationalist Bhagat Singh, that was working at the same time as Gandhi in a less peaceful way. And then Karl Heinzen's Murder and freedom from 1853. And the beginning of. We read Carl von Clausewitz's On War from. I guess he started writing it 1816 and didn't finish it before his death. So his wife put it out 1834. So that's a big list.

7:07 Jonathan: One of the statements in Donald Black, I think is very succinct. He says that terrorism, the social geometry of terrorism, which occurs because of the modern age, we couldn't have terrorism as we experience it today in the 1850s, because of physical proximity didn't allow the upward movement of violence. But he concludes that terrorism ends up being a criminal justice matter and a quasi war. That's where I think Clausewitz comes into play. He certainly didn't write about terrorism, but he did talk about principles inside of conflict. And when I read Mao and read Clausewitz, I see a lot of the principles coming together. In what today we call terrorism, you

7:52 Dylan: just mentioned something in summarizing Black's article that is a dichotomy or question that was with me throughout reading all this stuff. The distinction between the violence associated with war and the distinction of violence associated with criminality or police actions. And my own impression is that there's a kind of continuum, both in states, as well as acts of rebellion and stuff, between things that we would call warlike acts and things that we would call criminal acts or police actions. And I think that that distinction, in trying to lay out whether it's a distinction in kind or a distinction in degree, is at the heart of a lot of these articles. And I was wondering if you could clarify what kind of difference we're talking about.

8:40 Jonathan: If we look at military force, military application, as a statement of communication and an expression of political will, trying to dominate another political entity with your own political will, war becomes a means of communication, very violent communication with horrid outcomes. I'm not suggesting it's picking up the telephone, but it's sending a message. Terrorism is a means of communication. It's communicating an ideology. It's communicating a religion. It's communicating a set of political grievances. But unlike war, which takes place inside an accepted set of international norms, terrorism takes place in the shadows within criminal law. Succinctly, not all criminals are terrorists. In fact, very few criminals are terrorists. But all terrorists are criminals because they have to violate criminal law in order to carry out terrorism. And I think that's where the dichotomy

9:41 Dylan: occurs, Maybe because so many terrorists claim political grievances against governments. It would be helpful to me to articulate why political grievances in the past and attempts at rebellion wouldn't qualify as a kind of terrorism and what the boundary between the political entities we're talking about. I mean, I have some sort of idea about it, but it seems really murky. And it became more murky to me in reading these articles, in what you just said. It really turns a lot on what we mean by political entities and legitimate entities. And in the situation you just cited, the definition of being a criminal was just being not part of the political power. And that might be absolutely sufficient, but it makes the question of terrorism sort of just, you're on the wrong side kind of thing. I'm not sure that. Well, certainly not everyone here agrees that that's the case.

10:39 Jonathan: Dylan, to answer your question, I think modernity has a lot to do with it. And Donald Black gets at that. I simplify him a lot because it helps me understand Donald Black. I think he's so profound. And it also helps my students. Looking at his article, we need three things in modern terrorism. We need an aggrieved part with the ability to travel and access to technology that can kill a lot of people. Looking at the Sepoy mutiny in the middle of the 19th century, there were terroristic elements to it, but it was against the British population that was inside of India.

Whether that's justified or not is a question of political perspective. But it was a particular type of violence. The mutineers were not going to go to London and set off a series of bombs, killing civilians around to draw attention to their cause because the technology didn't exist. And the ability to travel, not incognito, but with the mass of people who are traveling, simply wasn't there. And I think modernity brings about that distinction with modern terrorism. And all the ambiguities you talk about are still there.

11:52 Wes: Yeah. I think this gets us to some of the philosophical articles that we looked at. The question is whether or not an act of violence is targeted at, say, non combatants or innocents or whatever you want to call them. Although we did read the Corlett article which argues for a wider definition of terrorism, which is not necessarily aimed at non combatants. But I think, by contrast, Primoratz, in the Stanford Encyclopedia article, he argues for this definition of terrorism where you include in that definition the idea of targeting innocents or non combatants. So you distinguish it outright from, say, guerrilla warfare or other types of activities that are by the aggrieved party against, say, people who are considered to be perpetrators, say a military official or president of some regime or something like that.

12:45 Dylan: And we would also distinguish essentially imperial activity that would take over territory in which most of those living in that territory are not combatants in any way, yet they're subjected to violence by the Imperial Party. I mean, everybody from Rome to variety of Greek states, to Genghis Khan to imperial powers in the 16, 17, 1800s, they're taking over territory, they're taking over villages and killing people to get them to not resist. And in some cases, those communities might be taking up arms. I guess there, to me, there are the beginnings of the whole discussion of state terrorism, which one of the articles brings up. But we're kind of bracketing that off to the side.

13:30 Wes: No, no, I think that's a good point. I mean, the Heinzen Murder and Liberty reading, which I thought was really rhetorically pretty amazing, right? But I mean, that's the kind of point that he's making, which is that you want to accuse the revolutionaries of being murderers when in fact states are built on murder. And so he's trying to eliminate all those distinctions. But I think it's a good question to say do we call. So during World War II, and this is something Primoratz brings up as well, you have the terror bombing of German citizens which killed hundreds of thousands.

So the German non combatants were directly targeted because at least initially the English thought this is the only way to stop them. Basically anything that feeds the war machine of Germany, including non combatants, must be targeted or we must demoralize the German people so much if that's what it takes to stop them. So what do we call that? Is that an act of state sponsored terrorism, one that we might consider justified or would we call it something else? I mean, I think that's a good question. Yeah.

14:34 Mark: The point is the terror part. Then Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? We'll scare the crap out of them that we can destroy your entire country so they will stop. It's pointed out that you can correct me John, but I guess so. The UN has tried to come up with a definition of terrorism just to be able to have resolutions about it and the countries won't agree because some of them want to stress this state sponsored terrorism and some want to are against anything would call their freedom fighters terrorists. The west is against any definition of terrorism that would include a so called state terrorism at all.

15:06 Wes: Like drone strikes for instance. Sure.

15:09 Jonathan: I think one of the things that it's necessary to do in the modern world is to separate a discussion of morality from a discussion of terrorism. And again, I was intrigued with the Stanford article talking about the way social scientists approached it, the way historians approached it, and that philosophers approached by asking what is terrorism and can terrorism be morally justified? I thought that was interesting because I think historians and social scientists do that too. And I think philosophers, especially after listening to you guys for so long, do the same thing social scientists and historians do.

But we're discussing morality on one hand and then we're talking about small groups of non state actors who want to target people who have nothing to do with the struggle in order to communicate a message. There are times when that might be morally correct. There are times when it is not. There are times in war where the violence of war may be morally correct. There are times when it is not. But I think, and I would leave this to you guys and your discussions and dichotomies, but the discussion of morality is a different discussion than the tactical and strategic aspects of conflict.

Terrorism is specific way of fighting, more organized than rioting and people just going amok and less organized than guerrilla warfare.

16:44 Dylan: So that to me is a useful distinction. I'm still trying to get my head around it, but it's putting a name to this activity that is often an unabashedly political action. That is, the goal isn't money or wealth. That would be ransom or kidnapping or intimidation. So that's not terrorism. So one condition of the thing that we're calling terrorism is that it has a political motivation, and another one is that it is specifically targeting in its violence people who are not strictly part of the political entity. There is an argument trying to be made that they are, broadly speaking, part of the political entity, but they are not in any way understood to be decision makers. So something in which the terrorists were bombing police stations or that sort of thing might fall on a kind of gray line that bombing a marketplace does not.

17:47 Jonathan: That's one of the moral arguments inside of terrorism. For example, Al Qaeda Central and Osama bin Laden have justified their attacks. Al-Zawahiri in particular. I'm sorry, am I name dropping now? Dog gun. I'm trying to remember all the rules. Okay, that's okay.

18:05 Dylan: I think they're pretty well known names.

18:07 Jonathan: Okay. I just want to play by the rules.

18:10 Mark: Who is this bin Laden fellow?

18:15 Jonathan: They specifically expand the target to any American. In fact, they would expand it beyond that, anybody supporting America. And ironically, they kill more Muslims than they do Americans. But. And they're looking at major targets like that. In fact, Zawahiri came to realize that inside Iraq when he sent a scathing letter to the director of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Stop killing Muslims. You're turning people against us. Michael Collins in the Black and Tan War. This was a war of the Irish Republican army against troops from the United Kingdom. Right after World War I, Michael Collins imposed an idea that he called selective terrorism.

He copied a lot of that from the people's will in Russia in the 19th century. Morally, Collins believed, you did strike the security forces. You struck the Royal Irish Constabulary at that point, which become the RUC and now is police service of Northern Ireland. You would strike the military targets. You would certainly strike Dublin Castle and the intelligence system. And that became, although operating outside the law, for Michael Collins, that became a moral activity. Certainly for the British, it didn't.

19:33 Dylan: Did Collins understand himself as to be engaging in terrorism? And is that terrorism, what we would consider to be terrorism now?

19:41 Jonathan: I think so, and Michael Collins certainly did because he called it selective terrorism. And the Irgun Zvai Leumi In Palestine, the proto modern Israelis practiced the same thing. In fact, I think it was Menachem Begin. I would have to double check. It may have been Yitzhak Rabin, I can't remember, but his code name was Michael Collins and they followed that Irish model.

20:06 Mark: One thing we haven't brought up yet is just terrorism against property, so that it might be similar acts. We're sneaking into a public place and blowing it up. But if the intent is to just destroy a bunch of property, I know that as soon as the measures came down after 9 11, then we heard in the same breath about monitoring of folks in animal rights groups and that kind of thing who might even consider themselves terrorists if not for the association with acts like 9 11, but whose methods would be to go in and destroy the apparatus that they think is causing evil. Certainly with a political goal in mind and with the idea of causing fear that this whole enterprise, whatever they're against, is not going to stand.

20:44 Dylan: I mean, everything from bombing of abortion clinics to like the bombing at UW in the 60s regarding the Vietnam War and generation of military research, that kind of thing.

20:54 Jonathan: Well, I would consider all of those acts of terrorism. It's based on a scale, but it lends itself to terrorism. And now we're getting into the pejorative nature of the definition, something I think the Stanford article also mentions. And I've written about that quite a bit just because it's so obvious and lots of terrorism analysts talk about it. One of the things that occurred in the United states prior to 9 11, if you were examining terrorism, you were examining something extremely exotic and most people in law enforcement wanted nothing to do with it.

I recall in the early 80s I called a friend of mine, a sheriff in Michigan, because I had been invited to this terrorist conference. And I said, I can bring somebody with me. You want to go? And he started laughing and said, yeah, John, as soon as I get a terrorist in my county, I'll be the first to give you a call. About three years later he called me and said, John, have you ever heard of a bunch of people who say that white people are made in the image of God, that there are mud races, and that Jews are from the devil? I said, yes, that's Christian identity.

That's one of the things that I study. He said, well, I have one in my jail and he's really disrupting things. And I thought, aha, now you have a terrorist in your jail. And so you are calling me. If you would have gone to the conference you would have known that.

22:24 Wes: So the Corlett article, it's interesting this, John, you mentioned the pejorative definition of terrorism that's generally used, and I think Primoratz in the Stanford article kind of adheres to that. Again, you define terrorism as targeting innocents necessarily, but Corlett argues that we shouldn't prejudice ourselves one way or another. We should establish a sort of neutral definition of terrorism that doesn't predispose us to say that it can or cannot be morally justified. And now I'm Looking at page 167 at the bottom where he comes up with this E Prime definition.

The definition he likes is pretty broad. I'll just go ahead and say it. Terrorism is the attempt to achieve or prevent political, social, economic or religious change by the actual or use of violence against other persons or other person's property. The violence or threat thereof employed in terrorism is aimed partly at destabilizing the existing political or social order, but mainly at publicizing the goals or cause espoused by the terrorists or by those on whose behalf the terrorists act. Often, though not always, terrorism is aimed at provoking extreme countermeasures which will win public support for the terrorists and their cause.

So there he's trying to avoid saying that terrorism is necessarily targeting non combatants or innocents.

23:44 Mark: He wants to leave open the idea that it could be nonviolent protest that still is designed, you know, so if you have a highly restrictive society and you go out and do a nonviolent protest, that's still gonna put fear in the hearts of those that don't want the, you know, apartheid was the example he gave, who don't want that to change. And so that is using terror.

24:04 Wes: He's not saying it's terrorism. He uses that as a counterexample to an author who argues so it has

24:10 Mark: to be violence or threat thereof. Yes, you're right.

24:12 Wes: Y There's an author who argues that terrorism is unjustified, Carl Wellman, and he gives a list of it's harmful, uses terror, unduly harms the innocent, is necessarily coercive, infringes rights. And in each case he gives examples to say that these things alone aren't enough to say that terrorism is unjustified. So in the case of it being coercive, well, civil disobedience is coercive. That doesn't mean it's terrorism. But that's the point, I think.

24:38 Dylan: But we would also exclude other kinds of violence by groups like, like the kkk. Lynching blacks in the south would not be considered terrorism under this definition. It doesn't seem to have the necessarily political change issue.

24:53 Wes: Well, I think it does though.

24:54 Mark: Yeah, it's trying to keep blacks down. It's the attempt to prevent political, social, economic or religious change. So it's the fact that the blacks were getting too uppity and voting and all this stuff was the reason that they were doing that. And it was to intimidate the rest of them and try to get them to move away or whatever.

25:11 Dylan: I can understand that. But how is it destabilizing the exist political or social order mainly aimed at publicizing the goals or causes espoused by the terrorists or those on behalf of who the terrorists act?

25:22 Wes: Well, Corlett makes the point that it can be for the sake of preserving an order as well. So I'm not sure why that didn't make it into his final definition there. But in the article itself, the point is that you use it for a political purpose and it can be to maintain the status quo in the face of certain societal changes.

25:41 Mark: Well, if you think that destabilizing existing political social order, that the KKK is addressing a social order that they perceive as blacks feeling free to just be out there living like regular folks, that is the order that they're trying to destabilize, that no, they need to be in fear and huddled down and, you know, move off to somewhere else.

25:59 Wes: I think it would probably be clear to say destabilizing or preserving. But I think you're right, Mark. You can flip it and look at it as which do you call the political order? The fact that blacks are playing a larger role in society or you know, the previous order in which they weren't.

26:14 Mark: As a variation, you could on a slave holding plantation in the older days, maybe a master might make an example of an attempted escaped slave or something to put fear in the rest of them. But would you call that terrorism according to the same broad definition? Because it's an attempt to keep that social order, keep everybody in line. It seems that once you allow that, then you're really opening yourself up to quite a lot of stuff.

26:35 Wes: That's a good point. You're right.

26:37 Dylan: I mean, black makes a distinction between terrorism and lynching and feuding and other kinds of social activities. It makes it sound like a gala or something. That's not what I mean. But at least the activity of lynching, which he might consider a kind of a mob activity, if it's done essentially on the fly, as opposed to the activity of an organization like the kkk who's maybe behaving in a slightly different way than mob activity.

27:03 Jonathan: Right.

27:04 Wes: That's a good point. Yeah. If it's merely unplanned and reactive mob violence. Yeah. Then at least for Black. Right. It no longer is.

27:12 Dylan: It seems to me like that's true for Corlett too, because there's this explicitly political aspect which I take to be meaning that, for instance, is Timothy McVeigh's case. Is Timothy McVeigh a terrorist?

27:23 Mark: Not according to Black.

27:24 Dylan: Or is he just really a pissed off guy?

27:27 Jonathan: I think with Black, keep in mind that he is talking about pure terrorism. And pure terrorism has the social geometry direction of up. It is weakness to power, and things that go in other directions are not pure terrorism. If we drop the distinction with pure terrorism and simply look at the issues, the counter efforts for the Klan and for terrorists are extremely similar. And there's a victim, a victim suffering. The victim is symbolic. The purpose of the violence is communication. So I really respect Black. In fact, I think sociologically he captures the essence of pure terrorism.

But Clausewitz also writes about pure war. And then he talks about war in the political world because pure war doesn't exist. Terrorism in Black's social geometry is pure terrorism as it exists in the world, is nebulous and messy and comes in a variety of forms. Forms. One of the ways that I've tried to solve the problem practically is to use a typology and really differentiate between types of terrorism because different types of terrorism demand different types of responses. A lot of my friends in political science criticize me because I include a lot of crime in terrorist activities.

And the reason is simple. The same thing that works against very sophisticated terrorist networks works against organized crime. I was giving a briefing in Kansas City a couple of years ago talking about how terrorist cells operate, where they function, how they draw finances, how they intimidate for investigators. And a lieutenant, or he was a command officer from the Kansas City Police Department Anti Crime Unit came up to me and said, gee, what you're telling me is this is just organized crime with political purposes. And I. Well, yes, from a practical point of view, it is.

And from a prosecutorial point of view, we're not prosecuting any of these folks for terrorism. We're prosecuting them for the crimes they commit while they're operating in whatever realm they're operating in, I guess is the

29:41 Mark: organization part necessary for the terrorism? That's what I mean. It seems like a key example of a terrorist activity would be. So you have two forces that are finally, you know, have been in conflict and are finally coming to a peace. So the two governments have said, we're going to make peace. But then there are individuals among one of the sides or the other that say, no, this is a bad piece. And they, whether it's an individual or a small group, go over and blow up their former enemy. So that's has the correct power relation. It has the correct social geometry, according to Black.

But it seems like it's almost irrelevant whether it's an individual or a small organized group as to whether you'd call it terrorism or not. It functions the same, and you'd be doing the same kind of stuff to both prevent it and to disavow it, that the government can still say, no, no, no, we really want to keep this peace. These are just criminal elements in our society that are perpetuating this absol.

30:30 Jonathan: And terrorism becomes such a pejorative term because it's in the government's interest to call opposition terrorism, and it is in the opposition's interest to call themselves anything but terrorist. So the term gets bantered around rhetorically. And again, I just like to point to the specific problem. The one you outline, Mark, is so common. Groups of extremists say, we will not have peace, Whether it's Israel, whether it's Ireland, whether it's the Basque nation and liberty. We will not allow this to happen. And so they end up targeting some of their own people.

Al Qaeda has done the same thing, and they're just trying to impose will, and they're trying to impose it violently. The pejorative, nebulous term of terrorism can be applied, but a more effective way might be to say, okay, what's the problem here? What are the aspects of this problem, and how do we approach that problem? And I freely admit that never begins to approach Black's pure terrorism. It doesn't come up with our definition or the philosopher's definition if the article was correct about the desire to have this ultimate definition of terrorism.

But one of the analysts that I respect so deeply and I will not drop his name said that academics are going to write ad infinitum about the definition of terrorism, and it will not enhance our understanding of terrorism one bit. What we need to do is look at specific problems. If you guys had been my professors, I would probably had a different answer. But having studied very practical military history, very practical religion, and very practical criminal justice, I come down in a different area.

32:13 Dylan: You brought up earlier that you had classified kinds of terrorism, and that seems to me to be giving you Some philosophical credit, an activity that Aristotle would love. And so if we start with things that basically look like terrorism by the kind of thing that we mean, roughly speaking. And our discussion here tonight has been looking at sort of canonical cases and then looking at a variety of kinds of edge cases, whether they be removing political boundaries or removing moral boundaries and that kind of thing. When you brought it up, it made me want to hear more about the kind of. Of pragmatic categories you were going to put terrorism into and to see what kind of boxes those were. And then, of course, my next question would be, what things do those boxes themselves exclude? But maybe you could just say a little bit more about how you would categorize different kinds of terrorism.

33:12 Jonathan: Sure. I was sitting around thinking about this in terms of international conflict, in terms of war, in terms of shifting war. And Immanuel Kant really led me to this conclusion when he talked about movement toward the civil state. And I would let you. I know you guys know far more about that than I do. In fact, one of my colleagues said he had seen a student write in the Metaphysical Elements of Justice. I used to use that in my senior seminar. He said, I can't understand German no matter what language it's in. When Kant talks about the civil state and he's against every form of violence, he talks about legitimate coercion to make sure that people behave properly within the civil state.

A light bulb went on for me. In fact, a philosopher friend of mine just broke down laughing when I said, this really justifies my feeling about law enforcement and justifies the way I feel about being a. Well, I'm not a cop anymore. I'm a broken down old man. But when I was younger, being a cop and she started laughing for about five minutes and I what's so funny about that? She said, well, I never heard anybody use Emmanuel to justify entering law enforcement. But if you look at the basis of the civil state, the essence of the state is the ability to use coercive force because you can't remain outside the civil state.

If you do, then the laws of the civil state are immaterial because the person existing in the state of nature can utilize any amount of force he or she wants. So accepting that the basis of the state is force was a revelation for me. Where we think in Clausewitzian terms that we are either at war or at peace. I came to the depressing but enlightening conclusion that we're never at peace. It's always in conflict. It's a question of how much conflict and the moral job of agents of the state is to use the least amount of coercive force possible to make sure that social stability and justice, not just stability, if stability is injustice.

But I'm really deviating from your question, Dylan. It fit into that big pattern. And what I did then was look everything from just social norms all the way up to wars of eradication that would take us back to the state of nature. I broke out terrorism in that spectrum, then dichotomized criminal terrorism and political terrorism and looked at the various forms of terrorist like tactics that criminals would use. And it's a small amount. You know, you have to have an organized group or a psychotic individual going on a shooting spree. I don't care if it's a man walking into a school in Connecticut or a major on an army base shooting soldiers.

The political aspects are different. The tactical aspects are the same. So I dichotomize that criminal and political list several forms of criminal all the way up to organized crime and anarcho terrorism, a very controversial term that can go into the political realm and then in the political realm found four basic groups. Small groups without foreign support, small groups with foreign support, large groups without foreign support, and large groups with foreign support. And they operate at different levels. Inside that classification system, you can develop a correlate with the level of activity and a correlate with the type of response.

Generally, the larger the group, the higher the level of activity and the more complex the response needs to be. In fact, and I'm not a favor of phrases like war on terrorism or using the military against terrorists, although there are times when the military has to augment. It would be very difficult to walk into Abbottabad with an arrest warrant, knock on the door and say, Mr. Bin Laden, we have a warrant for your arrest. Will you please come with us? The problem then becomes when do you use military like force to augment the forces of civil justice?

And it's that dichotomy. The criminal, political and within the political. Those four types of groups and then large groups with foreign support have the possibility of moving toward guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare differs because terrorists can only use terrorism as a strategy. All they can do is go out and create mayhem. Guerrillas can use terrorism as a tactic to support their guerrilla activities. And the ultimate aim of a guerrilla is to create a con and take political power. Terrorists can never do that. Terrorists can just be disruptive.

37:54 Dylan: So that right there is an interesting distinction that sort of makes clear to me how Al Qaeda would be different than the Colombian insurgents in that everything that I've ever read about Al Qaeda indicates that while being political, none of their strategy and tactics involves actually taking territory or taking over political power anyway. I guess it might become a little fuzzy in cases where they would seem to support political power, but in general, that's not their activity. They're not even like, well, except for

38:25 Wes: the Taliban in Afghanistan, would that be

38:28 Dylan: a case more like Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army?

38:31 Jonathan: Well, let's stick with Al Qaeda first and take a look at their goals. Their goal is to create the one Islamic caliphate with their version of Islam as the Sharia, as the only interpretation of life. That simply isn't going to happen. Muslims would not allow that to happen. Every time I'm in the Middle east, my Muslim friends say, john, when you go back to your country, will you please tell them we're not like that? I know you're not like that, but that just isn't going to happen. The Taliban's goal of we want to control this area, that probably is going to happen.

And when we approach something like Afghanistan and the tribal areas in Pakistan and use the phrase Taliban, Al Qaeda, it's a great disservice because we're linking two people. It's like using Tea Party and Liberal Democrat. They're pretty well opposed to one another. But if enemies are labeling them like that, the next thing you know, Tea Party members are sitting down with Liberal Democrats and saying, that's our enemy. We need to play that a little bit smarter. But on one hand, there are achievable political goals, and on the other hand, there is a pipe dream that simply isn't going to happen.

Back to Sinn Fein, there were elements of it that had an achievable political goal and more moderate elements inside the republic, the Republican forces, that would work for that goal. In fact, Michael Collins being one, I would separate those guys from Al Qaeda. They just weren't indiscriminately murdering what they've turned in, not Sinn Fein, but what the various branches of the IRA have turned into. Now, though, very different from the struggle of Michael Collins or even the struggles of the 1960s.

40:16 Mark: Now, a couple of the readings we read, the Bhagat Singh and the Heinzen, it seemed like both of those were saying that terrorism is a legitimate tool in pursuit of revolution. And so, of course, the goal of the revolution is to achieve political power. So the Bhagat Singh was saying, look, if you take Gandhi's way, the way of nonviolence, the best we're going to get is nominal independence from Britain and we're still going to have the same vast inequality running through the Indian state. Whereas what Singh and his cohorts wanted was something like communist revolution.

40:50 Wes: Right.

40:51 Mark: It's just that in those particular cases like that, this is just a pipe dream and he was being just as deluded as Al Qaeda is. Or is this just because they're using the term terrorism differently than you are?

41:03 Jonathan: He may be using the term terrorism differently than I am. And now we're back to the idea of morality and political action and political violence in the name of morality. This is where I deeply wish, and it'll sound ironic and sarcastic and I don't mean it to. I wish I had the courage to be a pacifist. I wish I had the courage to be a Gandhi and a Martin Luther King. At some point I see the justification of violence for the protection of innocent people. I believe that many terrorists, terrorism being a pejorative term, many people with using violence for a political objective, being labeled terrorist, go through a soul searching process of justification like others do. I got that sense from the article on India and I may be interpreting it wrong, but I felt some sympathy for the guy wanting to be like Gandhi and yet understanding the point.

42:03 Wes: Right.

42:03 Mark: He says Gandhi is making use of soul force, right? Basically guilting the people in power into giving them power. Why not add physical force also to this? He says, like, you know, at least at the time, since this idea of nonviolent resistance was really quite novel in its actual political use. Singh with some justification was saying, look, this is completely unproven. Why would you expect brutal regime to just give power by guilting them? You need to scare them as well. You need to make it not worth their change. The equation of whether it's worth their effort to keep oppressing us.

42:39 Jonathan: What if it had been a different type of power? And this is not an apology for Britain, but what if it had been a different type of power, for example, Nazi Germany controlling India or Saddam Hussein controlling India. The British response was certainly not pacifistic, it was ruthless. But there are degrees of ruthlessness. I have some sympathy for that argument, although I want to be like Gandhi.

43:05 Wes: Well, yeah, I was just going to say this gets us to Primoratz and the Stanford article sounds like these arguments fall into the supreme emergency or moral disaster argument, which is a kind of non consequentialist argument that there are cases in which terrorism can be justified because the injustice or the violation of the rights of a certain group would be so extreme if you didn't engage in Terrorism. And so the example in that article is the World War II terror bombing of German citizens. And so Primoratz is quoting this guy Walzer, who says that's justified.

And again, these are German non combatants, but justified because basically the Germans were an ultimate threat to everything decent in our lives and ideology and practice of domination, so murderous, so degrading even to those who might survive, that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation, immeasurably awful. This seems to me to be the strongest argument for the notion that in some cases terrorism would be justified. So we, the English, were about to be exterminated if that's what Hitler was going to do. Probably he wasn't.

But suppose that's your argument, or more likely Hitler will dismantle our political order. That's the other kind of emergency you could invoke. I think there's a case there to be made that especially in the case of survival or resisting extermination, one can make a strong argument that if the bombing non combatants was the only way to survive for the British, then that was justified.

44:48 Jonathan: I think there are three quick points to that, Wes. One, One, when you're fighting and if you lose, you believe that your dominant system will remain, then you're willing to fight more or less within rules. However, when you feel that there's going to be ethnic cleansing or your political system is coming to an end, that your way of life is coming to an end, the rules go out the window and all types of things are justified. That's the second point. And the third point is that this neat concept we tend to place around war, that we have all of these disciplined people who behave in the proper moral manner and wage the war for truth, liberty, or however they used to say that on Superman.

Truth, liberty in the American way. The truth is when you let slip the dogs of war, you are letting slip murder, mayhem and savagery. That's the worst. You win wars. That's why I think war should always unquestionably be a last resort. It is so much more violent than terrorism will ever be, even if there is a massive incident, because wars are massive incidents after massive incidents after massive incidents. And it's so difficult to control violence. And that happens for the people who are supposed to be the good guys, and it happens for people who are the bad guys and simply don't care.

And that's a sad fact about war. But now we're back into that discussion of morality. Terrorism, when I'm looking at it, is a small group of people who threaten or use violence against innocent people for political change. That's a particular tactical problem. That's why I don't get too concerned about the definition beyond that very simple definition.

46:39 Wes: Right.

46:39 Dylan: The utility of that definition as opposed to things like war between political entities and criminality, say with the mob. Even though there might be overlap in tactics in dealing with terrorism, the utility in that definition towards understanding it would have to do from your perspective with trying to along the lines of black, understand the social forces that are at work, that maybe you could adjust to mitigate terrorist activity. And though that understanding would lead you to your own tactics, that would be different than the approaches one would use in war or using criminal activities.

47:21 Jonathan: Yes, absolutely.

47:22 Mark: Well, I'm surprised given that Corlett, I thought was the thing you had recommended as being the central paper for us to look at.

47:29 Wes: No, actually I am Wes.

47:31 Mark: Oh yeah, Wes came up with that.

47:33 Wes: There are two philosophy selections I recommend than you.

47:36 Mark: Ah, okay. All right. Because so far what I've heard out of Jonathan is fundamentally opposed to what was in the Corlett paper that no, we don't need to come up with a definition of terrorism. See, the thing that makes philosophy exciting to me at least is when you can come at the end of a seemingly rational chain of reasoning and say something crazy. So being able to say at the end of the Corlett paper. But there are actually some kinds of terrorism that are okay, you know, if you're careful, if you avoid the innocence, if you actually achieve some purpose, if you're not an idiot and blowing up things randomly, then yeah, yeah, it's fine.

Even though he said Corlett even makes a point like really, I'm just trying to leave a logical space for them to be some kind of terrorism that it is okay, I'm not actually saying that any particular historical thing that has ever occurred, it really is like.

48:25 Wes: Yeah, and this is where I thought I side with Primoratz against Corlett, having looked at these arguments, because I think it's not very interesting to define terrorism as widely as he does and then to automatically rule out terrorism against non combatants as morally wrong. Well, that's kind of obvious. The interesting question to me, I mean the really hard case is whether there are circumstances in which you can justify violence against non combatants. And that's why I've been quoting this Primoratz paper, because I think Primoratz goes through a few different possible justifications for terrorism.

You could argue that the non combatants are not really that innocent. And so for instance, that's one of the things that Bin Laden did. There's a famous quote from bin Laden where he talks about, well, United States citizens are taxpayers and so they essentially fund the acts of the U.S. government. And so they're in some sense liable or responsible, they can be retaliated against, which is an absurd conception of collective responsibility. The stronger routes to go are to look at things in terms of you either take the consequentialist route or you take the deontological route.

In the consequentialist route is to say that you look at whether or not you have increased the total well being of. I'm not sure how you define the domain here, but the well being of a society, regardless of the innocence of the victims, even if you have to sacrifice a few, that may be called for if you're going to achieve a greater good from that, that's kind of a stand up standard objection to consequentialism, right? You can come up with these scenarios in which essentially punishing the innocent is justified. The problem with those sorts of arguments is one of calculation.

Another typical consequentialist objection, which is that how do you know that this greater good is achievable and that the only way you can do that is through violence against innocence rather than other routes. And then the other question is the question of, of this higher good, which is usually a matter of dispute within the society, right? It's not like everyone agrees on this certain higher good to be obtained and then you go ahead and make that come about by any means possible. Some people prefer a different conception of the good and others prefer another.

50:41 Mark: But you just do the calculation and you objectively determine which one is good, right? You just use science, you look at brain states.

50:47 Wes: Actually, I just saw a. There was just an article today, someone looked at Twitter feeds all over the country and then they categorized them them as happier or sadder based on whether there were positive or negative words in them and assigned a number to it and then mapped that by geography, you know, the location of the person sending out the tweet all over the United States. And so they said, okay, this is the relative happiness and sadness of people all over different geographical locations. And it reads like, you know, in a very utilitarianism kind of way, like these are utils, these sort of number assignments. And then they say, well, okay, so what's the happiest corner in New York? And it's turned out to be like 72nd street and 6th Avenue, like that's the happiest corner in all of New York City.

51:38 Mark: Let's meet there right now.

51:40 Wes: The stronger argument for justifying terrorism comes from the. I don't think this one is without fault anyway, but that non consequentialist argument that I talked about regarding supreme emergency and more disaster, and that's the really interesting case. I know John, you sort of try to bracket out this question of justification, but this actually interests me. As Mark said, it's interesting to see if we can come to most of us sort of have an instinctual gut antipathy. Just the very word terrorism is going to conjure up the idea that it must be morally unjustifiable.

So there are cases that go against that gut instinct. And I think again, that's strong. Whether or not it's applicable, I'm not sure. But this case of the terror bombing of the German citizens Primoratz actually offers a sort of counterargument to that, which is that really the Germans weren't going to exterminate the British en masse. So that's not the emergency that the British were facing. Rather it was a dismantling of their political order and perhaps to some extent their culture. You know, there's that joke, if it weren't for the Americans, you Europeans would all be speaking German or something like that.

That it's interesting the extent to which people are thinking about their cultural identity and people are thinking about their political order when they think in these very extreme terms of emergencies that might justify killing hundreds of thousands of non combatants. And for Primoratz, that's wrong. You don't have the right. Even if you think the Germans are going to take over your country, that doesn't give you the right to kill hundreds of thousands of German non combatants to refer to which I thought was an interesting position to take because I think a lot of us would think, well, whether it's a society that's in threat of extermination or whether it's a way of life or political order or culture that's in threat of extermination, those count as supreme emergencies.

53:30 Dylan: Doesn't a lot of this turn on whether or not you understand the strategy as having worked in the way you're claiming it?

53:37 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

53:38 Dylan: They say that while we have the supreme moral emergency, therefore we can throw out rules that we have had been adhering to before, and now we're going to do things that we actually understand in some ways to be wrong. We're going to target these cities in particular because there are innocent people with an idea of Bringing the country to their knees because they just feel it's too horrible. So, I mean, there's a whole bunch of questions there. One is whether or not that was the actual strategy. It sounds like that was the actual strategy.

54:08 Wes: Yeah, that was the avowed strategy of the British. That's not up for dispute.

54:12 Dylan: Yeah, that's fine. Then the other question is, did it as a tactic work in the way that it was expected to work or did it actually work in a normal military way? You destroyed so much infrastructure that the military simply couldn't function. In other words, did they cry uncle as a society for other reasons or did it work strategically? And the other one would be, was this the only way to accomplish those goals in this way? This whole discussion is just like the torture discussion, right? And this question of extreme moral agency is the sort of case of there's a bomb, it's going to go off in 15 hours and this person knows where that bomb is.

You set up the situation so that all of us rely on knowledge that you may or may not have and also on the idea that the physical violence will compel the person to give up the goods so that you could save the world under that threat. All of which have all kinds of, in my mind, dubious justifications about the causality between those threats and the ability to extract information. It seems like it's an exactly parallel case about the effectiveness of terrorism in accomplishing the goals.

55:24 Wes: I think that's a great point. Again, it's a question of this calculation. Do you really know that bombing innocence is the only way to prevent this supreme emergence? And do we even know that in the case of Germany whether it was necessary?

55:40 Dylan: Is that the reason why there was a surrender was because Dresden was carpet bombed?

55:44 Jonathan: No, they didn't. The bombing was ineffectual. In fact, it increased the Germans will to resist. If you talk to the air Force people, they'll say, oh, it worked. When you look at the data, it didn't.

55:54 Dylan: I was going to say the same thing about Nagasaki and Hiroshima that I can imagine that the show of military might, it worked.

56:02 Wes: But I think the important question there is that whether or not we could have achieved the same result without having to kill all those non combatants.

56:11 Dylan: Yeah, well, there's also of course, the carpet bombing of Tokyo at the same time.

56:14 Wes: Right.

56:15 Dylan: I mean, there was a Dresden like bombing of Tokyo apart from the nuclear warheads.

56:20 Wes: But you know, that's a big historical dispute whether or not we could have. The common argument is that, well, so many more Americans would have died and it was necessary to drop those nuclear bombs. Who knows whether or not that's really the case? But I think the important point is that when we're in this position of calculation, I'd say it's impossible to know. And it's sort of a tendentious conclusion that, okay, yes, we must target innocence. That's the only way we're going to achieve our objectives. And as you pointed out, Dylan, it opens things up to abuse.

You can argue that there are moral emergencies where none really exist, that if I don't torture this person or bomb these innocents, then X is going to happen. But really you don't know that X is going to happen. And in the end, when you set that kind of precedent. Primoratz quotes another philosopher who says it's important that we make it an absolute right not to be targeted for killing during war if we're non combatants. Because if you don't, then you get all these abuses. People will say there's a moral emergency left and right, and you get all of this unnecessary killing.

And the only way to prevent that is to have this hard and fast rule against the killing of non combatants. And I think that's a. And the arguments, Dylan, you were making, I think those are really effective rebuttals.

57:39 Dylan: What's interesting about that is what you end up saying is that there is a underlying overarching political society that is outside of formal political states that would adhere to these kinds of. Of rules. There's an argument about torture, and there seems to be. There's an argument in terrorism here about when do you go outside those lines and say, well, as John was saying earlier that in cases of war and other cases, he gets a boundary push. The rules just get thrown out the window. And it seems to me we're articulating rules that have to do with political entities and maybe something like the laws there.

And then also these rules which maybe the UN tries to formalize and struggles with, but are more like claims about the nature of human intercourse and those kinds of more fundamental rules that it sounds to me like we're talking about as being common law rules regarding the way we interact with one another.

58:40 Jonathan: I agree with how you're approaching that, Dylan. And Wes, earlier when you said I was bracketing out. I agree with bracketing out the definition of terrorism and talking about the tactical aspects. The moral question, I think, is different than the terrorist question. And like you, that fascinates me from an intellectual point, but actually from my heart, because the practical consequences of this we can talk about the firebombing of Dresden and the carpet bombing of Tokyo. Let's talk about a drone flying over South Waziristan right now. There is the target.

This guy has. This doesn't occur in real life, but let's just make it the example. This is the incarnate terrorist, the murderer of all murderers. And you press that button, the Hellfire missile goes and he no longer can murder. But the little children that are in that area, the families that are in that area. Those bombs are equal opportunity. Well, the Hellfire missile is an equal opportunity killer. It does not discriminate. And we make those decisions routinely. That is the question of not only terrorism, but the structure of human conflict.

And now I'm with Kant. Well, Kant, no, I'm not, because he was against all forms of this. But with legends, coercion. The moral job of any agent of a state is to work for justice and to use the least amount of coercive force possible. Will there be times when we have to push that button? That's when I wish I had the courage to be a pacifist and say no. And I'm afraid, like the terrorists that I read, there are times when I say yes, yes.

1:00:38 Mark: When we start reflecting on the moral issues involved in terrorism. And I can see why you would, in the capacity that you advise, would be okay with ignoring them. Because if you're just trying to deal with it on a practical level, then making judgments about whether someone else is justified is beside the point. We've already determined this is action that needs to be, we need to take action against. So talking about some obscure historical cases or about hypotheticals or whatever is really beside the point. Of course, as a decision maker in government, you of course have a different set of moral decisions, which seems to be what we've been focusing on here for our listeners or what interests me about why I would consider ethical issues at all is because I'm very self focused and want to, you know, what would I do?

What would it, you know, so I can't. I don't think many of our listeners are Al Qaeda members or in any. Are the kind of people that would commit acts of pure terrorism in any sort of sense. But what if you just feel really strongly, what if you're a member of PETA? What if you are a member of an anti abortion group and you might really consider it as a live option of like, well, I don't want to even hurt anybody, but should we go destroy labs? Should we go destroy clinics? Is violence something that's on the table or not. And by comparison with the.

Just looking at the unknowns involved. So by comparison with the decision making from whether or not you're going to use torture or. Or the bombing of Dresden kind of operations, because you don't know if they're going to work. So as an individual, it seems profoundly rational to say, well, because there's probably some other way to achieve this goal without using violence. And there's so much that can go wrong with violence and I don't know if the violence would really work anyway. Why don't we just avoid that? So there you go. There's the whole moral deliberation involved with this issue in two minutes.

1:02:26 Wes: That's why. Well put. Yeah.

1:02:29 Dylan: Part of the problem is the way in which violence ends up being salted with vengeance in these cases. It seems to me that it's no small part of the act of violence either in war or in the case of torture that is meant to be sadistic in the most general sense. It's meant to inflict pain for sake of. Of punishment and vengeance.

1:02:55 Wes: And it's rationalized as being useful for achieving some objective.

1:03:00 Dylan: Or just both.

1:03:01 Wes: Yeah. Justice and vengeance often I think in people's minds are pretty close together though.

1:03:07 Dylan: Yeah. Except for the fact that you have, in the case of justice, the notion of doing unpalatable things. And that's sort of what we're talking about in some of this case of justified terrorism is that you would partake in an unpalatable or wrong act for the sake of some higher good. And then there would be the case of saying, well, look, violence in itself isn't wrong, it's desirable to avoid it, but that there isn't a moral judgment to be made on the activity itself. Am I right, John, to understand that that is in part the kind of direction that you go on the trying to clarify the questions by separating out the moral aspect from the sort of tactical and strategic aspect.

And on the one hand understand what kinds of terrorism are there, how do they work to be clear headed about that, let's try to purge that discussion from moral questions and questions of justice. Let's just talk about how those activities are working. And then if we have a question of morality, labor, we can have that. But let's try to get some clarity on what the activity is like.

1:04:16 Jonathan: I live in two different worlds, the academic world and the world of practicality. And as one person said, and a disclaimer, I love the FBI. I like working with them, but they are not the most intellectually reflective People in the world. And I can't talk about moral reflection too often with them, but at the university I talk about it all the time, which leads to an interesting dichotomy among my colleagues because the guys on the anti terrorism team think that I am the world's worst liberal who belongs on MSNBC with his own television show. And when I return to the university, they think I've just gone out somewhere and whack terrorists and they don't want anything to do with me.

I got a buddy in Michigan State, he said, it's like, to quote my favorite philosopher, George Costanza, it's worlds in collision, Jerry. We live in these two different worlds. But it is that moral dilemma that really haunts my soul and is the nature of existence. Because the university to me is what you guys do. And that reflection, even flippantly, I think that adds to intellectual discovery and self reflection. And the key is the best lecture I ever heard as an undergraduate. My favorite professor had been at a military history conference in France and they had been talking about the firebombing of Dresden.

He stood up and made an impassioned speech about how he had condemned it. And his friend, a French historian, said, come with me, let's go on a bike ride. And they rode out of the town, rode to a countryside and rode to a field. And the French professor said, do you see this field? Yes. It's a nice looking field. Yes, it is. Well, it wasn't always a field. There was a church here. Oh, really? Yes. And the Nazis came and took the people in this village because there had been a terrorist, a resistance incident. They put all the people in the church, locked the doors and set the church on fire, shot anyone who tried to come out.

And he turned to my professor and said, you condemned the firebombing of Dresden. I condemn that. We didn't do it to every German city. Now our professor looked at us and said, I still condemn the bombing. But I realized something very profound that day, that as an American, relatively safe, who could discuss these things intellectually, I could afford to be moral. That lesson has stayed with me, I think, many times. Our perception is, we come to that conclusion in the Stanford article, that we're really under threat when that is a social perception and we need to take a breath and maybe the threat isn't as great as we think.

Look at the number of people. Oh boy, am I going to get myself in trouble with the nra. Look at the number of people who have been killed since the beginning of this year. This is coming toward the end of February who have been killed with firearms in the United States this year as compared to the number of people who have been killed by terrorism. Maybe it's time to take a breath.

1:07:40 Mark: We've long since alienated anyone who attempts that. They stopped listening a long time ago.

1:07:48 Jonathan: Oh, boy. The guys on the team won't listen to this. I tried to get them to listen. They said, hey, that's really deep. Okay. My students listen to you all the time.

1:07:56 Mark: No, you can recommend the Lacan episode that we.

1:08:04 Dylan: Well,

1:08:07 Wes: I would wait on that one, see how that turns out.

1:08:12 Mark: Your problem is with the jouissance of the other.

1:08:15 Wes: Yes, it's going to be interesting.

1:08:18 Dylan: John, can I ask you a little bit about. You've been doing this kind of work for a long time, and your work bridged the 80s and 90s. You admitted that work in terrorism was in a kind of backwater. And then, of course, we had 9, 11, which resulted in a fundamental change in the way we arrange our armed and civil forces to put that front and center. And it's also been 12 years since that event. And it seems to me there's been an evolution of thought about the reaction to terrorism and understanding it. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the various kinds of transformations you've seen in. In public life and in academic life, and then also maybe a little bit about what you see as the live discussions going on right now about terrorism and its role and how we deal with it.

1:09:11 Jonathan: Well, one of the things that I think I've seen is an awareness. I recall sitting in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2001, and the counterterrorist team was talking the Department of Justice training, well, what is our next phase? What are we going to talk about? And I raised my hand and I said, well, you know, there are a lot of issues coming out of the Islamic world, a lot of issues in the Middle east, and I think we should really be aware of those. And everybody looked at me and said, nobody cares about the Middle east, okay? And then that changed on September 11, unfortunately.

And there has been an awareness of that. And I'm also amazed. Those of us who studied terrorism in the 80s and 90s and then the number of terrorist experts that have come out in the 21st century, it's just phenomenal how quickly everybody became a terrorism expert. But there is an awareness now, and I think there's an overemphasis. What I think some people understand is that there is a change in the nature of warfare Mark I sent an email kind of discussing this. After the Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648, the Europeans developed a different feeling about war.

It wasn't formal, they didn't write it down. There weren't referees who came out and enforced it. But there were a set of rules. And those rules said, one, we're not going to fight about religion again. It's too deadly. Two, we're going to accept war as normal. Three, we will fight limited wars for limited political objectives. They'll be ruthless, they'll be global, but nobody's going to be destroyed. We'll just sign peace treaties and ship things. That was the norm from roughly the Treaty of Westphalia from 1648 until the French Revolution. There was a profound transformation with the French Revolution and the structure of conflict changed.

We moved to an idea that war was abnormal. Therefore, we mobilized everything to fight war, to end war. The nation was in arms. We moved to total war. Clausewitz wrote, with this atmosphere, both understanding Gustavus, Adolphus and Frederick the Great of the limited war period and understanding the necessity for the German point of view, for Germany to unite as a nation, to stop the French national. Of course the French were thinking the opposite. But we enter an age of total war and that lasts until the end of the Cold War. Right now we have kind of a total war mindset.

But the world has changed. Nuclear weapons have made the world unsafe for war. We have what? One author whose name I will not drop, but he's absolutely brilliant. If I was going to say it, it would be Thomas p.m. barnett, but I won't because I know we don't drop names. He argues that there is a new map for the Pentagon. There are the have nations, the lesser included, and the people who are living day to day actually to see if they are going to live through the day fighting is going to take place within these three economic zones. His argument is the next big one isn't coming.

We're in for a lot of little ones and the way to encounter that is to encounter it holistically with military policy being minimal force and maximum economic and human development. That doesn't get a lot of parlance among many warriors, but he's popular at our war colleges and I think that's the biggest shift. But right now we don't understand that. And I made a joke about the gun lobby that it was going to be angry with me after this show. But we're not talking to you guys do. But for the most part we're not talking to one another in the Country.

We're screaming at one another and not listening to what the other side says. This is just another problem, terrorism, and we can handle it. Some people are getting that, Dylan. That's the big transformation that I see. Some people at the top do understand that many people still have yet to get it. It's one of the reasons I love teaching so much. Hoping that maybe by touching what you guys are doing, I think is so important in teaching because maybe by listening people will expand a little bit and think those magic words that are so hard for professors to say.

I might be wrong about this and have the ability to discuss and expand. Black ends up very hopeful saying that oh, the global community brings us into closer contact. Contact. I hope he's right. I've also studied military history, so we'll see.

1:14:33 Mark: Right? Yeah. He had a thesis in there that the whole social geometry has to do with, as you said, the ability to be physically proximate while socially very far away. And so as communications and transportation continue to increase, then pretty much the social distance will be reduced over time. Pretty much they'll be westernized come down to. To so that terrorism has a built in time limit according to him that the very conditions that enable it to take place bring about its destruction.

1:15:05 Jonathan: As long as I've made the right mad at me, let me make the left mad too. Yes, that peace dividend of the 90s that has really paid off for us.

1:15:16 Mark: One of the things I understood, I mean from what you already said before about that the state is founded on force. I mean this is, I think it's ridiculous, but I see where they're coming from in the NRA response that one of the functions of being able to have a weapon in your home is just like Hobbes says, no matter what you give up for the social contract, you can't give up the right to defend yourself if the government comes to kill you. And if the state is ultimately founded on force, then there's always that possibility that that will happen. And so one of the philosophical points that the gun lobby will make is that we have to be able to defend ourselves. Hey, what if the government doesn't like assault weapons? Why don't they get rid of their assault weapons first? Is this even worth bringing up?

1:15:58 Wes: No, no, no. This is interesting.

1:16:00 Jonathan: If we look at the second amendment and that whole shift in warfare of the Napoleonic period and the role of the National Guard and well regulated militia, I think we really need to look at that historically and not as the right of individuals to have firearms. The Supreme Court hasn't. The Supreme Court has said no, that's the right of individuals to have firearms. And then on a personal level, let me be in complete sympathy with the nra. If we go back exactly like the founders of our country, the writers of our Constitution and the authors of the Bill of Rights, they can have all the flintlock single shot muskets they want. I'm happy to let them do that. And I, by the way, as a gun owner, I have one, I sure do. Well, what if the government comes after me?

1:16:50 Mark: Well, then you can take out the first soldier, only the first one because then you'll be reloading for the Prussians.

1:16:57 Jonathan: Could, if he's good, he can do

1:16:59 Dylan: it in 15 seconds. The fastest I've ever done it is a minute, so takes a long time.

1:17:07 Mark: It is relevant to terrorism because it comes down to should the government have the monopoly on it, the monopoly on physical force force. And I'm kind of okay with that myself, but if the political situation was quite a bit worse, then I might feel differently.

1:17:24 Wes: Right, right.

1:17:24 Dylan: Is it that the government has the monopoly on physical force or does it go to the question of what we mean by a right to revolution and stuff like that?

1:17:33 Mark: It's the same question.

1:17:34 Dylan: I don't know, saying that you have the right to defend yourself, say, say you have certain limited kinds of gun ownership or the right to defend your yourself, that would mean that you don't say that the government holds all the cards with respect to violence, with respect to legitimate. You don't have to go so far as to say that the only people that ought to have guns are members of the government. Right. There's a whole wide range of legal possession and legal use of force that would be acceptable to extraordinarily avid gun control people. It's not like gun control advocates are saying everybody ought to give up all of their guns. That's not the predominant argument. Argument.

1:18:13 Wes: Right.

1:18:14 Mark: Well, the guns that would make you a serious threat to police officers say.

1:18:18 Wes: It's a really tricky question because yeah, in a way it's another question of technology. I'm reminded a little bit of the Marx episode. We were thinking about how societies change as you get more kinds of technical leverage with Marx who are thinking about that in relation to work. But here it's a matter of technological leverage in relation to the kind of destruction you can do. And the NRA isn't arguing that people ought to be able to have tanks. And they're not arguing that based on the same, same principles that gun control advocates Use to argue that people shouldn't have an AR15 assault rifle.

I think that's what it's called because a single deranged person can do so much damage, including terrorist activity, but to innocent populations. But the problem is that the same sort of technological leverage that would give you some sort of chance against resisting, say a tyrannical government is the same sort of technologies, technological leverage that would allow you to do so much damage. So it's a tricky question where you have to say, well, how much firepower do people actually get? How do we balance the actual damage that guns do? And we know that for the most part people aren't successfully defending themselves with guns and they're certainly not resisting a tyrannical government.

And the last time they resisted a so called tyrannical government, that was a civil war and that didn't work out for the South. So there's no guarantee that because you have a bunch of weapons lying around that you're going to have much of a chance against the government anyway or that your cause is going to be just. But in the meantime, guns do all sorts of damage because you get angry at your, you know, I'm thinking of the Pistorius case in South Africa. Yeah, girlfriend and you have a gun for protection. And protection. And I'm angry at my girlfriend sort of fuse mentally in that moment of madness.

So people are doing all sorts of damage with these guns, with this wager that maybe one day they're going to be able to successfully defend themselves against a tyrannical government. I think this is related to our terrorism question because it comes back to that question of calculation that we touched upon, you know, the supreme emergency example, where we're saying we know this is the only way to prevent a supreme disaster, whatever it's called, the only way to do that is to kill innocents, or the only way to protect ourselves against the government is to have this firepower on hand when really nonviolent methods and political activity and believing in the public good and going out and doing good things in society so that the government doesn't turn into this tyrannical beast that's arguably more effective.

So it comes down to a question of whether you have this idea that violence is your only way out or whether you think that nonviolent methods can actually be quite powerful. And as Corlett pointed out, quote unquote coercive in a sense. Violence and coercion are not identical. They're coercive, nonviolent methods that are quite effective.

1:21:04 Dylan: Well, thinking about course of nonviolent methods. In our earlier discussion about Gandhi and Martin Luther King a little bit, and then the issue of technology, I've often wondered how important it was that we had a burgeoning global communication system for the success of Gandhi's nonviolent activity. And then maybe even more so, Martin Luther King's success. This success depended upon a kind of social distance that black refers to, that people who were not directly in those communities could see in a visceral way what was happening and be witness to it, and then that as citizens of those communities could inflict pressure on it. So that there was a kind of broadening of the public consciousness of that political power that made that nonviolent activity effective.

1:21:55 Mark: Soul force amplification.

1:21:57 Dylan: Yeah.

1:21:58 Wes: Yes.

1:21:59 Dylan: So without the film of people being fire hosed on the side of the streets in Birmingham or people being water cannoned in India and police officers beating people with batons, that without that, that it just would not have been effective. I have a hard time imagining that nonviolent protests would have been effective for the Aztecs. Right. Would a sit in have worked for Montezuma? I don't really think so.

1:22:26 Wes: Well, they tried to run away and that didn't work. So I don't think.

1:22:29 Mark: Yeah.

1:22:29 Dylan: This dovetails into the question of. John was saying that there are important aspects of terrorism that are a consequence of modern and having to do with changes in the kinds of communication and the kinds of firearms available and the possibility of large scale destruction by relatively small groups. So Spartacus in his slave revolt isn't really doing terrorism because he's having to kill people one sword at a time. And it's a kind of insurrection that is distinct from terrorism. Even if he goes and kills the prelates and hunts down members of his family, that's not quite right in the category.

1:23:06 Wes: When I said nonviolent coercion, I wasn't just thinking of civil disobedience, although, sure, I'm thinking of getting involved in government at some level or being a citizen. To go back to our Aristotle episode, the idea that simply being a citizen and performing certain citizen duties, that there's a force to that, there's an effectiveness to that, and it's a better insurance policy against bad government than a gun. That's the idea. And it isn't always the problem with all of this. There really are these extreme cases where a genocidal maniac is on the loose, but it's much rarer than. Well, I don't want to say how rare it is.

1:23:43 Dylan: Well, it's rare. But it's also the case that the claim that the Jews would have overthrown Hitler and prevented Hitler from rising if they all had a couple extra guns in their house is so outlandishly ludicrous.

1:23:55 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point.

1:23:56 Dylan: It defies any kind of logic any more than the notion that. Let's just take the hypothetical case that the United States government goes apeshit crazy and starts rounding up people into concentration camps and sending them all to Alabama or something like that. Right. You're gonna stop that with a couple AR15s in your house? It's a whole different order of problem. I think it's disingenuous to the people who are involved in those conflicts themselves. And it's a kind of tortured misreading of history. It seems to me you would be a much stronger ground if you said something.

Something like, well, you had sort of the crazy person argument that I'm going to defend my house against crazy people. Which is also doubtful because the data seems to show that while being both unlikely, is also not the case that people successfully defend themselves against crazy people either, even if they have guns. But the whole idea that the United States government, the Second Amendment, supports armed insurrection of the government itself seems a bizarre reading of the Constitution.

1:24:53 Jonathan: Well, George Washington marched through Pennsylvania with Alexander Hamilton and, well, Henry Knox didn't make it. He stayed up in Maine. But they had something to say about folks who would engage in insurrection against the United States as they marched into Western Pennsylvania and put down a rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion. I think you're right, Dylan. I also think that getting back to terrorism, we have become such an arms dealer for the world, and that's somewhat disingenuous. So let's say we shut down our arms production factories. There will be plenty of nations who will. We can make some money and they would step in and fill the void.

1:25:29 Dylan: Yeah, we're sort of getting in some ways a whole new moral question in talking about arms dealing and stuff like that.

1:25:35 Jonathan: Yeah. If I may just share a quick story. This is really deviating from the topic, but so many times terrorism is related back to religion in this age. I think we have more of an understanding of Islam in this country than we did 10 years ago. But there is such a commonality. And I know we don't talk about religion too much on this program and we don't drop names, but I was working in the State Department Anti Terrorism Assistance Program. That's what they call so many government acronyms in Islamabad and the Federal Investigative Academy there, which has subsequently been bombed and it's a very dangerous place.

But the first day in the academy, the imam who was assigned there came up to me. A big burly guy put his arm around me and said, you are my older brother. And I said, yes, I believe we're all brothers. And he said, no, I'm not explaining this right, my English is bad. You are my older brother. And I reiterated, yes, I believe we're all brothers. He said, no, let me explain. You are a Christian, right? Yes, yes I am. First came Jews, then came Christians, then came Muslims. We worship God. You are my older brother. And I thought, being deeply ecumenical to the point where I embrace humanist, philosophers and just about everything else, I thought, you know, my world is pretty sad when I look at terrorism.

And that was a moment of hope. And I would like to think Don Black is right. I respect the daylights out of his intellect. I think history points against his arguments at the end. But I do hope that he is is right about somehow a world community coming together. We'll see. I say cynically, but I really want to believe that he's right.

1:27:21 Mark: Well, and putting on the contrast between the policy decision making world and the academic world, I'm really glad that folks like you are involved in advising people, because in an academic setting you can actually do these sort of thought experiments. The proposals can be a matter of actually rationally evaluating various options. As opposed to, like you were saying, if you're at one point in the political space spectrum, the argument about guns is not about, well, what are the legitimate interests that people have for guns, and then how much guns should be allowed or not allowed to fulfill that.

It just becomes purely slippery slope arguments. Right? Well, as far as the NRA is concerned, whatever state the guns are at right now, we just can't let any more prohibitions come in. Even if there was a reason to outlaw tanks and machine guns, if currently tanks and machine guns were not outlawed, they would still be with equal force saying we should not outlaw tanks and machine guns for private citizens. You know, it's just wherever things are currently, and that's the way I think most political factions on all sides operate, is with a certain, I won't say just sheer irrationality, but that the positions argued for are not a result of rational deliberation so much as political calculation of trying to slant the entire debate in your direction as far as possible.

So just the fact that there are academics involved advising the government,

1:28:38 Jonathan: I find hopeful. See, that's why you guys should have stayed. You would have been Wonderful, wonderful. But you're doing great stuff now, so don't worry about it. And I love the exchange of ideas. I do think that's the human hope. If we just would talk to one another.

1:28:57 Mark: There's a sentiment right at the beginning of the Heinzen Murder and Liberty article that I just wanted to see what people thought about. I mean, it really starts off very pacifistic. That don't say, oh, capital punishment is one thing and murdering is another. They're all the same. They're all taking a human life. It's all horrible.

1:29:13 Jonathan: Horrible.

1:29:14 Mark: Humanity must absolutely condemn all killing. Since she refers all hostile conflicts among men to the tribunal of reason and not to that of force. She is therefore only consistent if she designates every voluntary annihilation of the life of another human being with the condemnatory term murder. Her only endeavor can be to abolish murder. Yet so long as murder offers the only means for the attainment of this object, humanity is also compelled to draw the sword. Sword. And to become the murderess of the murderers. If one man is permitted to murder, all must be permitted to do so, particularly those who practice it for the annihilation of the murderers by profession or by the grace of God. So it starts off in this very dovish thing and says, well, but since we live in an imperfect world that's built on blood and force, then we have to do it too. That's just the way it is.

1:30:02 Jonathan: That's the way the arguments go so many times.

1:30:06 Wes: By the end of it, he seems to be positively. You know, he's telling these little anecdotes about poisoning people and doing. And he's practically reveling in the violence.

1:30:16 Mark: Yeah, right. This was 1853. And he's rejoicing about like, have you heard of these new things, bombs? This is awesome. You could be one guy and you could take a whole army.

1:30:27 Wes: Yeah. He moved to Kentucky, Right. And he started a newspaper in Kentucky. Kentucky Heinzen.

1:30:33 Mark: Yes. Interesting biography there.

1:30:36 Wes: Yeah. He's a brilliant rhetorician. You have to give it to him. Some of this reminded me rhetorically of Nietzsche, actually.

1:30:43 Jonathan: I never thought about that. You're absolutely right, Wes. I've been reading Heinzen for years, and you're absolutely right. There's a connection there.

1:30:52 Mark: And we'd be remiss if we didn't bring up somewhere in this discussion his main point of reference in talking about terrorism, which is the terror in the French Revolution, which now we all look back on as this horrible thing. But even that I didn't realize that they actually themselves, Robespierre and them called it the terror and said this is justified. We need to as Heinzen said, if you dethrone the class in power and then you just let them all live and you just have some sort of reconciliation, like they're just going to come back in power two years later, you know, you have to actually kill them, every single one of them, and scare the crap out of anybody that would dare to bring back such a regime.

And just the fact that that was so a form of state sponsored terror, even though it's only a state that only recently became a state because it only recently performed a coup, was that is the paradigm case historically that comes to us of what terrorism is, of its origins.

1:31:50 Wes: Yes, only the dead do not return. I think he was thinking there of they tried to exile Napoleon and Napoleon came back.

1:31:58 Mark: Right. And I guess on the flip side, some people reacted negatively to our Marx episode recently because we didn't, we weren't specific enough in condemning him. And I think specifically the part that is objectionable, the part that people want us to stand up and explicitly condemn, is the revolutionary part of it. And then how that of course played out in the Russian Revolution and other places like that. So this topic comes right to that, both the Bhagat Singh article and this Heinzen book. Coming from that perspective of if you take Marx seriously, then it's not that much of a step.

I wouldn't want to impute this to Marx himself, but to say, well, it's part of the necessary historical progression that all the bourgeois are going to be killed. And so, I mean, isn't that very similar to Bin Laden's logic right now that we are the rich bourgeois and so we are all by necessity guilty and need to be overthrown for the sake of, of some greater goal. And I think when we were actually discussing Marx, we were sort of taking for granted that that's an absurd position. So there's no need to specifically condemn it. It's too stupid to bother condemning.

1:33:04 Dylan: I guess it brings me back to the discussion we had earlier of categorizing terrorism is that the strategy and the tactics that Al Qaeda uses, even if they have a kind of a vowed political agenda, is different than the Bolshevik or the US revolutionaries. It seems to me that they're, at least by their tactics and strategy are not political revolutionaries of the same order. And in the same way they almost take themselves out of that category by their own activity. They don't even want to try to be legitimate revolutionaries. If I could put it that way.

Take Syria for example, example. There's a set of revolutions going on that involves certainly nastiness and atrocities on both sides. And most of the world is against Assad's government. But you have political entities fighting it out violently in at least a civil war, if not just outright war. It seems that the tactics of Al Qaeda and the strategy there is just completely different in that way. They've sort of abdicated a fundamental political role as even attempting to be legitimate political.

1:34:16 Jonathan: On returning back to that concept of a new map for the defense, the Pentagon's new map of the haves, the eastern nations that are doing well, the Western nations that are doing well, and the economic bloc that they form, the lesser includeds and the have nots. The appeal of radical ideologies is extreme in the have nots. And the worst thing in the world is, is an open opportunity to join and become part of a global community. Economically. The worst thing in the world for the bin Ladens or the Zawahiris because it threatens their very narrow view of reality.

We have so many different levels of reality in terms of conceiving the world. The caliphate isn't going to happen. I don't know that it's going to happen by a massive alliance of Islamic nations that would be such a long shot. The idea that a small group of radical people can impose this on a majority that doesn't want to have it is just absolutely absurd. Looking at violence like Syria, which deals with a whole host of other things aside from the so called jihad, the misuse of the Islamic term by the Al Qaeda types, they'll go to anything because there's a vacuum and there's a power for them to operate.

That's where our defense, and I don't mean defense in terms of sending military supplies, I mean a comprehensive strategic, intellectual, economic, humanistic defense backed by power. I think that's where the west could make a difference in the world if

1:35:59 Mark: nobody has anything else. Thanks so much, Jonathan for joining us.

1:36:03 Jonathan: Well, thank you guys for getting me back into plato and boring Mr. Aristotle and other things. And what a delight to listen to you. And I don't think I'll write anybody a fan, although I did write Bernard Cornwell a fan letter once thanking him for his Sharpe novels. Maybe he'll ask me to co author

1:36:23 Wes: one of them with him.

1:36:24 Jonathan: But this has been a real joy. I just appreciate what you guys do and I do know you help my students. And if I was still dean at Grand Valley, I'd be talking to you very hard about hey, you want to come and live up in the snow? Two of you do already.

1:36:39 Wes: That's right. Thanks for coming on. It was great having you.

1:36:44 Jonathan: Thanks for saying my book was good. I appreciate it. Not everybody does.

1:36:48 Mark: Well, yeah. Anything else you want to.

1:36:50 Jonathan: Anything you want to plug, Please buy several copies of the 8th edition. I don't care if you read it, but my daughter went ahead and got her PhD and has such an enormous student loan. I would appreciate buying the book so I could help her out.

1:37:04 Mark: What's the name of the book?

1:37:05 Jonathan: Terrorism and Homeland Security. Oh, gee, that really is a plug. I didn't mean. Well, Terrorism and Homeland Security. As long as I plug, I'll plug.

1:37:12 Wes: You can name drop your own book

1:37:15 Jonathan: and by the Prussian Army. It has typos in it and nobody ever reads it, but that's my favorite one.

1:37:20 Mark: And as the author, you could have insisted that we actually read that book. And yet you didn't.

1:37:25 Jonathan: So I was afraid you'd fall asleep during the show. I didn't want to that to happen.

1:37:30 Mark: Next time we're gonna do something a little different. We're gonna discuss what is philosophy and why should you do it. And our reading will be nothing because we're just gonna talk out of our asses and you'll like it. We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since our last recording have included Laurie McClory, love rhyming names, Melissa Kutner, Philip Cherry, Eileen Stryker, Rosa Angeloni, Gary Kraut, Kramer, Josh Hounshal, Ashutosh Habu, Chris Hill, and Andy David. Now, some of those people are some of the people signed up for the yearly membership in our PEL Citizen site, which allows you access to a lot of bonus content and study groups.

We have a Facebook group, we have Twitter, we have the blog partiallyexaminedlife.com that we'll try to post articles related to this episode and other interesting things in the weeks after this is released. So go subscribe to that.

1:38:31 Wes: Thanks, John, for coming on. It was great having you.

1:38:34 Jonathan: Good night.

1:38:34 Mark: Now, any closing thoughts by anybody?

1:38:38 Dylan: I thought the readings were a pretty interesting selection that anybody who took the time to go look at them would find them appropriate to the topic. It's also interesting to have somebody who fall somewhere in between academic and policy and practical. I thought it was refreshing in that respect.

1:38:57 Jonathan: It's good, I guess.

1:38:58 Mark: I'm glad you guys had the appetite to engage in some of this. What, more traditional, More talk show political discussion? Because I Came in with no appetite for it. If he wasn't so serious, I would have said at the beginning. Just because I saw some of the comments people put on the Facebook page and the blog.

1:39:15 Dylan: Yeah, they freaked out.

1:39:18 Mark: Yeah, pretty much. If you're expecting righteous indignation from us about anything just in advance, fuck you. I'm like, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna get mad either about drones or feel like I have to pound my chest and condemn Al Qaeda or whatever.

1:39:32 Wes: Not the purpose of the show. Watch Fox or msnbc.

1:39:36 Jonathan: Yeah.

1:39:37 Wes: People want that immediate, easy little gratification of someone moralizing about something obnoxious.

1:39:44 Dylan: Yeah.

1:39:45 Wes: You know, for whatever accusations we, you know, people have leveled against us for being liberal or whatever, we avoid that moralization thing. You know, condemning Marx or, you know, feeling the need to condemn Marx or say, no, Marx is the greatest thing.

1:39:59 Mark: No, it's just so tiring. It's. And so I feel that same way. I might have raged against Lacan in the abstract when doing some other things in the past, but now I'm just like, just talk about the reading. Don't. I'm even bored enough of objectivism bashing that I think I will behave myself on the Ayn Rand episode much better than I would have.

1:40:21 Dylan: We'll remind you of that. We'll remind you of that, Mark.

1:40:26 Mark: All right.

1:40:28 Dylan: Good night, guys.

1:40:29 Wes: Night.

1:40:29 Mark: Thanks. Bye. Eyes. Setting on the radio look at the blue.

1:41:32 Wes: Night falls hard at the sea as

1:41:34 Mark: the guilty sleep like milk on records are harder it's cold and George Bush is wearing silk.

1:41:48 Wes: Max to lose his pizza to the

1:41:51 Mark: president of the chain hold on to steering wheel as napalm falls like. Thousand. Sam.

1:44:26 Jonathan: Come on. Come on. It.