Terrorism

[fpb]

One thing in which I did not share the emotions of other people who posted on the Russian school massacre is surprise. A lot of people seemed bewildered, as though this represented something new in their lives. I have every sympathy for this reaction, but I cannot share it. Growing up in the seventies in Italy made you familiar with the worst kind of political violence. On August 2, 1980, Fascist terrorists murdered some eighty people in the main railway station in Bologna, as they were going on their holiday. That was only the worst of a long, long series of acts of violence from Fascist, Communist and Mafia terrorists. Those who remember those days are not surprised by any depth of abjection in political violence. And, incidentally, anyone who is idiotic enough to be nostalgic about the seventies (and seventies nostalgia is a growing industry) was obviously never there.