Once again, I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read Eric Frank Russell's magnum opus
Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an
agent provocateur
on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to
collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an
overreaction by the authorities:
"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.
"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the
survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost
control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through
a window and started buzzing around his face."
"It nearly happened to me once."
Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an
ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength
negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of
irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it.
Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car
into a heap of scrap."
………
"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it
looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men
temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one
small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge
machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect,
continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall,
the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an
armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."
Terrorism is not about winning, it's about making us destroy ourselves, or as DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS says, "Chaos is Job Won."
1 comments :
It's good to know that I'm not the only one who still reads Eric Frank Russell!
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