Politics & Power Quote by William Blum

Blum’s line is built to commit a small act of rhetorical sabotage: it steals “terrorist” from the realm of pure monstrosity and drags it into the messier territory of motive, grievance, and blowback. That move is not an exoneration; it’s an accusation aimed elsewhere. By foregrounding “injustice and hypocrisy,” he frames terrorism less as irrational evil than as a grim, comprehensible response to power that preaches virtue and practices violence. The word choice matters: “deeply concerned” is almost insultingly calm, a deliberate tonal mismatch that forces the reader to confront how moral certainty can coexist with brutality.

The second clause narrows the target. “Often retaliation” and “action of the United States” reposition America from spectator to participant, implying causality without pretending it’s the only cause. Blum’s intent is to puncture the comforting story that terrorism arrives unprompted, as if hatred emerges from a vacuum. The subtext is sharper: if U.S. policy generates predictable retaliation, then the real scandal isn’t just the attackers, but the strategic and moral myopia that keeps reproducing the conditions for attack.

Contextually, Blum wrote in a post-Cold War/post-9/11 landscape where official narratives leaned heavily on civilizational clash and psychological pathology. His career-long project was cataloging U.S. interventions; this quote compresses that worldview into a single provocation. It functions as a diagnostic tool and a moral indictment: if hypocrisy is the accelerant, then “security” can’t be purchased solely with surveillance and missiles, because the grievance is welded to the empire’s own behavior.