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How many such people convince the jury and expert witnesses that they are?
Ted wasn't crazy. He was evil. His judgement was not impaired. He had full knowledge of the consequences of his actions and he still decided that killing was okay to achieve his political goals.
You and many others really enjoy the luxury of thinking nobody sane can just decide to start making people explode. But it is a delusion. There are endless perfectly sane justifications to kill one's fellow man and the reason it doesn't happen all the time is the one guy with the biggest stick renting it for money and nothing else.
I have a simple explanation for this and it's that you haven't looked for it. I've seen plenty of it. For those groups and all others. For the IRA, for the Confederacy, for Hezbollah, for Zapatistas, for CJNG, for all manners of people with guns and an idea.
And I must say I appreciate the core of every single instance of it. People of great evil still possess this one rare and venerable virtue: they are great.
Romanticizing armed revolt and crime is a universal cultural touchstone. And wherever you live you are most likely heir to such a hagiography, for the people who founded your own society and its righteous promise of peace and order had to be knaves of this same kind to make it happen.
His actions didn't achieve his political goals. Considering the backlash too, the net consequences of his actions might have been a negative for his political goals.
Undertaking actions contrary to your goals (even for sociopaths whose goals don't include "fewer bombing victims") is only rational if there was reason to expect the exact opposite result instead and failure is just bad luck. And yet "murdering people is bad PR" should have been an easily foreseen consequence; it was not an unpredictable outcome.
I don't really understand how you can say that. He did get his demands met, his manifesto published, his ideas heard by the world and ultimately created a huge cult following. He went from being a crank in the woods to one of the most influential philosophers of his decade. One serious people find relevant and reference to this day and not merely to denounce him. Is that not political success?
It may be unfortunate, but killing people was a very successful way of promoting his ideas, and Ellul's brand of techno-skepticism is now infinitely more popular because of his actions that it would have been without. However many caveats people put in front of saying it, I've yet to meet someone who utterly denies the man had a point and his descriptive analysis was devoid of merit. And none of those people would have heard of him if he didn't use violence.
You may have had a point if we were talking about Timothy McVeigh, who was apparently truly surprised his revenge didn't trigger a second american revolutionary war, but I do not think for a second Ted ever thought his crusade would end in his life, by his hand. It was always about seeding his ideas. Which despite the ignominious cost, was an indeniable success.
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