Spooking

Just read an article in the NYRB about the (partly Chechen) background of the Boston bombers. All a bit depressing in that I was left with the impression that while some signs were there, no amount of spooking was likely to enable one to haul them in before the event without hauling in an awful lot of innocent people with them and one would need an awful lot of concentration camps to handle them all. Exactly what someone else, possibly Simon Jenkins, was saying in the Guardian a few days ago.

And while these bombers had been given a handy cause in the war on the axis of evil, we will probably never know whether they would have latched onto something else - the maltreatment of donkeys or newts or something - had they not been given this handy cause. Maybe we just have to learn to live with occasional atrocities and try not to overreact to them. Or to feed them with too much publicity. And to remember that while atrocious, they are usually on a much smaller scale than some other kinds of disasters; they need not threaten the fabric of life as we know it (in the west).