*TERROR – dread, scare, fear deliberately caused through threats or other means of intimidation. Oppression based on intimidation, threats. From French terreur, Latin terror.
On Saturday night (17 September 2016), 9 p.m. local time (Sunday 1 a.m. GMT, 4 a.m. Romanian time), an explosion took place on 23rd Street, close to Sixth Avenue.
The Chelsea district of New York’s Manhattan neighbourhood was shaken by a powerful explosion. That is the hour at which weekend socialising starts. After a week of work, people go out to take their blessed and much-awaited slice of relaxation.
Twenty-nine people are injured in a fraction of a second, hundreds and thousands more are instantly engulfed by confusion and terror. A whole city is thrown into confusion and paralysed. The spectre of terror spread and instantaneously encompassed the minds of people and the life of that city, a life that had (apparently) followed its natural, predictable and monotonous course up to that moment.
And this spectre is spreading rapidly throughout the world through the conveyance of all news channels and social media on the planet.
Since the start of 2016 and until this unfortunate September evening, in the world we live in there have been no fewer than 949 terrorist attacks, in various corners of the planet.
Inhumane, abominable gestures that left over 8,000 people killed and millions and billions of psychological victims.
Whether it was Belgium, France, United States, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq or states in Central Africa, the map and face of terror conceived and brought to life by the mind of some creatures (because they cannot be called HUMANS) who exist in the world we live in are increasingly spread-out, hideous, atrocious and unbelievably perfidious with every second, every moment, everywhere, in a continuous, dull, latent threat in forms and ways unimaginable for a psychologically balanced mind from the standpoint of common sense logic and respect for the life of every creature created by God and allowed to exist in this world.
Whether this terror is called ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, Taliban groups or Al-Shabaab, whether it has a face or not, whether it has as its justification and motivation a serious psychological deviation calling itself “religion” or “cultural identity” or “hegemonic power and control,” it has no final logic and no mitigating circumstances for any of its victims, for the families, communities and countries in which it sows its nefarious scourge and spreads its lethal germs.
Terror has existed, in one form or the other, more or less ferocious, direct or indirect, physical or at the most serious and profound human level – the psychological level – ever since man appeared.
And will continue to exist for as long as man sees fit to live his life, desires and own uncertainties, unhappiness, mental impotence and terrors in relation to his other fellow man through universal terror as sole argument in the face of the desire to impose his supremacy, faith, unquenched and aberrant thirst for power and control.
For hundreds and thousands of years, man has been living under the spectre of the terror created by man himself, one which he feeds in a headstrong fashion, exponentially developing its diabolical valence and forms, perfecting its system and methods, pathologically feeding and strengthening its motivational abomination through attributes that are completely opposed to the facts of the reality in which we are all living, in a contrast of an unbelievable and hallucinating schizophrenic trend – peace, freedom, universal harmony, right to life, right to define the individual and national identity, the preservation and protection of life and of universal cultural heritage so on and so forth.
Throughout time, throughout thousands and hundreds of years, people lived and died fighting the spectre of terror for a better life (paradoxically) and for a fair and exact definition of universal peace and the right to life and freedom.
It is said we were born equal and free. However, from the moment of birth until the moment of death, everything that happens in man’s life, from the most commonplace and insignificant gesture, that of opening your eyes every morning and waking up in a world at balance and at peace (a dream, a utopia), to the most complicated exercise of life and survival in the world, such as that of existing under a national, religious or cultural identity, becomes an unimaginable Sisyphean effort led and supervised from the shadows by the eternal spectre of terror.
Whether we are talking about road rage, urban aggressiveness at the market or in any other context of daily life, or whether it bears the name of global financial crisis, excessive pollution, macroeconomic imbalance, xenophobia, homophobia, domestic violence or racial violence, religious fanaticism or political-diplomatic tensions between states over issues of territoriality and hegemony, terror has a single effect and an infinity of faces and is present at every moment in the mind of each of us, those who are living now or those who lived at any time on this planet.
As a person who is living at this moment and in this world, I am rhetorically wondering, asking myself, the one who observes this world and who lies under the same spectre of the common global terror, wishing and naively – or outright stupidly I dare say – hoping for a world if not close to the ideal one then at least one in which terror and suffering provoked by man would become an unfortunate accident, not a universal planetary rule and status: what is after all the purpose of terror and what is its meaning? Other than the complete desire to control power and everything that stems from it.
There is only one answer and I believe we all know it.
However, this answer does not justify nor can it whitewash from history and from the collective memory of mankind the billions of victims littered along the long, arduous and bloody path of time, the irreversible suffering, despair, dissolution and trauma inflicted on so many dozens and hundreds of generations whose only fault was that of being born into a world whose only argument for “better,” and “peace, harmony, universal tolerance and balance” was and remains, I repeat, paradoxically, terror.
Because something tells me God, the God of love and universal harmony, did not give any man on the planet, in His name and in the name of these fundamental concepts that define him, neither the right nor the exclusivist and exclusive mandate to govern or to impose his belief and personal values of any kind through terror – the opposite of everything divinity and the divine seen, found and respected in every person on this planet means and should mean.
The necessity of terror in the name of good and of love belongs exclusively to man.
What could God have to do with this sinister argument of this terrestrial drama?
