ABSTRACT
Over the centuries crusading ideologies, whether secular or religious, have offered humans an array of visions that promised deliverance from the torments of historical existence. Sometimes these visions masked schemes for exploitation or pacification-hence, the potency of the Marxian dismissal of religion as opiate. To set foot on the future is risky business. As the Chinese say, “nothing is harder to predict” than the future. It seems especially problematic to be bold in the imagination at this time. One of the liabilities of oppositional violence of a random, disruptive character is that it generally cedes the normative ground to the governing process, almost no matter how unjust and repressive. Terrorist tactics, besides being almost always morally unsupportable, create a political climate supportive of state violence. If official structures are unable to deal with social problems in a successful manner, they may adopt wildly implausible schemes or seek to provide implausible justifications for their persistence in a discredited mode.
