New Dimensions In Terrorism

     I wish I could honestly say I was surprised by this story:

     Jacksonville police said a van crashed into a Republican party tent where volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Jacksonville police say a driver intentionally crashed a van through a tent where Duval County GOP volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Nobody was injured in the 3:45 p.m. incident at the Walmart Supercenter, 11900 Atlantic Boulevard, near Kernan Boulevard in the Sandalwood neighborhood, Lt. Larry Gayle of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office told reporters at the scene.

     Several Duval County GOP volunteers were working at the registration tent when a white man in his early 20s driving an older — possibly 1980s — brown van pulled up toward the tent.

     He then drove through the tent, endangering the lives of the workers and damaging the tent and tables, Gayle said.

     The driver then stopped, got out of the van and took a video of the scene before he “flipped off” the victims and fled, Gayle said.

     ...but I wasn’t. And before we get to the “Fran” part of this tirade, add the above to this story:

     Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution. “Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”

     “Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     My juxtaposition of the two is more than a mere Curmudgeonly caprice, I assure you.

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     Allow me to ask you a question whose answer you think “should” be “obvious:” What is terrorism? That is: What are its genus — the superset of phenomena to which it belongs – and its differentia — the characteristic that distinguishes it from the other elements in that superset?

     There’s disagreement about the genus. Many people would say that terrorism must include violence, or at least a credible threat of violence. Indeed, most well-publicized acts of terrorism do include violence. But others – myself included – argue that terrorism is defined entirely by its object: the inducement of terror in a targeted population. That end need not require violence, or a threat of violence to come.

     An act of terrorism is one that is intended to terrorize: to create terror among its targets. Nothing else really matters.

     But why would anyone want to terrorize anyone else? Why, to get the people in the targeted group to comply with a particular agenda: i.e., to do, or not do, some particular thing. There may be real-life Jokers out there who just like to terrorize people for its own sake, but for our present purposes we can neglect them.

     To terrorize a man, you must target something he values greatly. “Temporal terrorist” Smith would target Jones’s life, his health, and his loved ones. But while such terrorists are relatively well known and understood, they’re not the only variety. “Spiritual terrorist” Davis would target the fate of Jones’s immortal soul.

     The unidentified Jacksonville driver mentioned in the first cited story, who employed violence to silence or scatter Republicans, conservatives, and Trump supporters, is a temporal terrorist. Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, a.k.a. Pope Francis, is a spiritual terrorist: i.e., he has implied that unless you support his political prescriptions, your immortal soul is in danger of damnation. Granted that Bergoglio’s threats require that his targets be Catholics, but that’s an awfully big target group: about 75 million Americans and over a billion persons worldwide.

     In both cases, the terrorist is using terror to induce compliance with an agenda. Both are evil, though Gentle Readers may differ on the magnitudes involved.

     Bergoglio is not the first of his kind. There have been others, including several previous popes, of whom the same could be said. If you believe in the bifurcated afterlife of the Christian creed, then anything that endangers your prospects in that life is a tremendous threat: a terror. And all too many preachers, aware that their flocks look to them for wisdom and guidance, have used that terror to induce compliance with an agenda for which there is no basis in the Gospels of Jesus Christ.

     For a supposed Christian leader – indeed, the highest such in all the world – to resort to terrorism to promote an entirely non-Christian agenda is a crime that beggars my powers with words.

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     I’m not the first to say this, nor is this the first time I say it: Christianity is the Gospels. All else is commentary by fallible men. Some may have been divinely inspired. Some may have been articulating the principles of the Gospels in a fashion we didn’t grasp before they came along. But only what is entirely consistent with Christ’s teachings in the Gospels may we defensibly call “God’s will for Man.” The root of it all, as I have written many times before, lies in the Two Great Commandments:

     But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I have resisted the calls to label Jorge Bergoglio an anti-pope...until now. I shall do so no longer.