Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a thoughtful, historical essay several thousand words long on the Huffington Post. The piece is a concise history of terrorism, or rather, of the modern chapter of terrorism, beginning in the nineteenth century, when political dissidence was first expressed as violence not just against the state but also citizens. The culprits then were anarchists, the pince-nez and mustachioed kind whose bombs really were big round iron balls with fuses, just like in the cartoons. Along the way, the article draws a convincingly qualified parallel between the extremists and reactionaries of yesteryear and today, and between the morale of both stories: blunt repression always makes it worse.
At first I thought: well, if the Huff Po can produce writing like that, maybe this unpaid blogger free-for-all isn’t so bad after all. Then I realized that reason the piece is so good is that the writer, Johann Hari, is a wunderkind political columnist in England. And the fact that he chose (or had no choice other than) to contribute a moderate-length essay to the Huff Po rather than a magazine that can pay him (and where such writing might stand out as something worth reading) only sends me right back to my suspicious concerns about Huff Po. Nevertheless, I guess it’s nice that such thoughtful work can find it’s place alongside Tara Reid’s plastic surgery scars.
