How terrorism is justified, in three quotes:
The situation with the environment is not getting better, it’s getting worse. I’m not suggesting that the path of destruction and destroying everything, is the right path. But I didn’t know what to do. When you’re screaming at the top of your lungs and no one hears you, then what the hell are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to do?
Daniel McGowan, Earth Liberation Front, 2007
I never saw a reason for mass protest or wearing uniforms marching around provoking people with swastikas etc. I was and am a man of action you cannot change minds protesting like that. however you can make change with a little focused violence.
Christopher Hasson, U.S. Coast Guard, 2019
The time for words has ended. The time for podcasts has ended. The time for talk has ended. If you’re wasting your time simply thinking there’s going to be a movementarian approach to the coming problems, you think that podcasts are the solution they’re not. If you think talking is a solution, it is not. If you think politics is a solution, you are a damn fool. … The system does not want a peaceful solution, the system has prevented a peaceful solution at every possible turn. It is the system that is fomenting violent revolution, not us, and they shall now reap what they have sown.
Patrik Mathews, The Base, 2020
Three examples of the logic that underpins the decision that terrorists and would be terrorists make to reject normal politics and turn to violence to advance their cause. Organizing does not work. Protest does not work. Politics does not work.
What is left is violence. Thus, as the Italian socialist and revolutionary Carlo Pisacane wrote in 1857:
The propaganda of the idea is a chimera; the education of the people is nonsense. Ideas result from deeds, and not the latter from the former; it is not the case that the people will be free once it is educated, rather it will be educated once it is free. The only work a citizen can undertake to benefit his country is to contribute to the material revolution: conspiracies, plots, insurrectional attempts, etc. … The flash of Milano’s bayonet was a more effective propaganda than a thousand volumes written by doctrinaires.