Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s confusing you
Is just the nature of my game

- The Rolling Stones

You don’t want to look. Some doors, you think, are better left shut tight. But it’s still there. It’s just hiding, waiting.

We’ve been telling ourselves that it disappeared a long time ago. But deep down you know that’s a lie. Just because something is unseen, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

And worst of all.

You know that we’ve only increased its power and inevitability by keeping it shut away. Only made it angry. Despite not being able to see it, you can still feel it stir as its breathe flutters over the pages of the news and flickers across your television screen.

As our economic system teeters on legs which seem thinner and more brittle every time a stoic bespectacled official comes forward to rescind a guarantee of solvency, as the stock market fluctuates madly, and as the prospect of armed international conflict between forces with enough firepower to depopulate the face of the planet several times over grows in likelihood – the unnerving certainty that something terrible is about to happen has slowly been slipping out of the shadows and into the everyday events happening right in front of us.

The precise nature of what’s coming is difficult to pin down exactly.

But it’s not like humanity is about to stumble across something that we’ve never seen before, that’s without precedent in our collective history of visiting violence and terror upon each other. Because everything that occurs can, if your perception is tuned to hearing it, be perceived as an echo of the past.

Terrorism, as we think of it now, immediately summons images of the collapsed buildings, bombed-out buses, and deathly brown eyes leering through slitted masks. But these memories disguise the rational nature of the complex forces that coalesce as the deaths of innocents. And they do nothing to trace out the deep and inescapable historical roots of every explosion.

But when there is no real meaning behind an explosion, it won’t end up meaning much at all. Even so, sometimes what physical damage is done hardly matters, as the means of an attack can magnify its impact well beyond reality. Through misdirection and confusion, an attack can still accomplish its intended ends and live on long past its fires.

To understand terrorism, we must return to the past.

Back across the footsteps of the world’s most ancient revolutionaries and the first true Assassin to the banks of the Jordan River, where the history of violence has flowed in unison with time. To the deepest canopied rainforests, over the bloodied sands of Africa, into pedagogical explosions muffled at the turn of the century by weary Russian snow – yet still echoing across the media every time we are gathered by horror in front of our televisions.

Because it is only in the stories of our past that we can begin to find the answers to what is happening to us now.