Leadership Quote by William Blum

Blum’s move here is to commit a polite heresy in post-9/11 political culture: he refuses the comfort of monstrosity. The line is engineered as a trapdoor under a familiar script, where “terrorist” functions less as a description than as a moral solvent that dissolves motives, history, and causality. By insisting they “might also be rational human beings,” Blum doesn’t excuse violence; he punctures the rhetorical shortcut that makes violence inexplicable except as pure evil. That shortcut is useful. It keeps leaders and pundits from having to ask what conditions, policies, or grievances might have produced an enemy who can narrate his own acts as reasoned.

The subtext is accusatory and institutional: the omission isn’t accidental, it’s managed. “Never let slip” implies a gatekeeping apparatus that polices which interpretations are permissible on TV panels and in official briefings. Rationality becomes politically radioactive because once you grant an adversary a logic, you also admit the possibility of negotiation, self-critique, or blowback. An irrational enemy is a perfect enemy: you can bomb an abstraction without investigating your own role in creating it.

Context matters because Blum built a career cataloging U.S. interventions and the stories told to justify them. In that framework, “rational justification” reads as a demand to treat terrorism not as a metaphysical eruption but as a political tactic with inputs and incentives. The sting is that acknowledging an opponent’s reason threatens the innocence of the storyteller.