That is answer enough for me. There are other logical ways out, though. If people on the Left really mean what they have been saying for the past four years about "raising the cost to the ruling class." then they would admit that if everyone did all he could to blow up buildings, that would "raise the cost" more than any mass organizing we will do in the next ten years. It may even be that exploding buildings helps to open consciousness. You never know whether you really want something until someone takes it away from you and you have to build it again. The old theory-practice idea would say that you don't want something unless you are building it constantly. Once the Center was gone, what reasons could you find for rebuilding it?

Other critics claim that terrorism would "antagonize" people. Does that mean that it would antagonize them more than, say, a peaceful march or even a long-haired college kid? Or is it that white people finally noticed the problems of black people only after the blacks burned down Watts, Detroit, and Newark? Blowing up buildings can show that you're serious.

The only empirical data I have are from France. I have friends there who blew up buildings in Paris during the Algerian war. It required the threat of civil war before France would withdraw from Algeria. It may take the same thing in the United States. No one knows whether terrorism will work here. No one has tried it.

There is one additional rationalization for terrorism. It is probably the most obvious. Jean Paul Sartre says that what the U.S. is doing in Vietnam is genocide. What the U.S. is doing is like what Hitler did to the Jews. It is not any less genocide because we promise to stop if the other side capitulates. It may in fact be worse because everyone has seen the pictures in his own living room. If someone had blown up the ovens at Auchwitz or Buchenwald. they would have been rebuilt or the prisoners would have been shipped elsewhere. That is no reason for not blowing them up. The Jews in Germany were caught in their own pragmatism. They did not fight back because it would have made no difference. That could be though the very reason to fight.

THE MAIN part of any defense of terrorism, however, lies in the advantages. The most important one, certainly, is the re-establishment of transcendence. Bourgeois values are inherently material. That is why, for example, we have come to laugh at religion. Religion seems to fulfill no role in the market-place or its mirror in the mind, the arena of rational discourse. Religious ritual can be important only to those who need to have abstract, transcendent belief acted out on a concrete level. For those without the need religion is without purpose. I am Jewish, but I can not watch the Communion or the Elevation without feeling my spirit begin to escape. It is all the better, when the service is in Latin and I can feel I am observing a mystery. Capitalism has smothered that spirit. It would like to have you believe that because spiritual needs are not "rational." they are not real.

The bourgeois attitude toward death is a good example. We are led to believe that we will transcend death if we are successful in this world. Most people think of life as a bell-shaped path. We have to make it to the top of something or else it's all wasted. To that end, people run for President. write poetry and play football. Life itself can be of no value unless it is used, converted into a product.

There are currently over 2000 practicing American historians. If you figure two books and four articles each, that makes 4000 books and 8000 articles from the current generation of historians. Their ranks are increasing. America has a great need for history. It must invent some way of escaping the human condition, for it certainly does not live with it. I think I agree with Leslie Whyte; history is a bag of tricks played upon us by the dead.

When there was only enough room in history for kings, then the people had to find another meaning in life. Only a pharaoh could be content to have pyramids built to his glory. Now that everyone has a biographer, or at least an autobiographer, no one needs to look at life itself.

Terrorism could help restore the understanding of transcendence. Blowing up buildings destroys the product. It destroys what was once thought to be permanent. If buildings begin to blow up all around, people may well ask for a new inquest into the permanent. People might abandon the idea of suffering through life to build a permanent monument. They might adopt the idea of enjoying and participating in the humility towards something else but oneself. This might be possible only after a socialist revolution where self could be rejected for community. Exploding buildings may help the transition.

ANOTHER of the pillars of capitalism is driven firmly into the soil of rationality. By some incredible sleight of hand, we are taught that the world is structured in some relationship to the electrical connections in our heads. And even more, we are taught that these electrical connections can have some average, which we will call the Truth, which can be discovered. I do not think that God structured the universe like man's mind. I am amazed that He would even structure man's mind as He did.

We are told continually that knowledge will make us free. We are taught to ignore irrational consequences and to put our faith in reason. Anyone who has tried to organize against the war knows that it is not the mind alone that defends the war, but the whole personality. We are fed reason in order to give an inferiority complex to the rest of our emotions and senses. What capitalism requires is a decision-maker who thinks his choices are rational.

We are trapped in a philosophical system of cause and effect. Rationality binds the mind and restricts the soul. It might even destroy the brain cells. We need to be liberated. We should be constrained no longer by possible rational consequences. We should begin to allow other emotions to dictate our actions.

One of the chief motivations for blowing up a building is the sheer malignity of, for example, the CFIA. If we may for a moment lapse into a non-rigorous use of moral epithets, we might go so far as to include the CFIA in a category of existential evil. That means that put into any context, what the Center is doing is bad. With the destruction of such evil, you may be able to endow an action with meaning. It may be, in fact, the only way to do so. What is more, if you are

living in a situation like Germany during World War II or the U.S. today, in which all of your actions contribute at least in part to the wrong side, you may be forced into terrorism. To the German living in Nazi Germany, he could only exist as a member of the human race by blowing up everything in sight. Efficacy is not an issue. That German could have blown up banks, freight yards, and missiles indiscriminately. His only proof of existence to himself would have been continual destruction.

The existential question leads into a related one. This one is more difficult to explain. As far as I can see, you can never take a relative action. If you participate in a peaceful protest against the war. you have made an absolute decision about the merits of the war. You have said that the war is, on the whole, wrong. In effect, actions always change beliefs into absolutes. There is no way to act against the war by 40 per cent. Any protest at all proves that you have decided that the war's benefits are outweighed by its faults.