Glib & Superficial Reads

Hired Hand's favorite magazine, The Economist, is far more adept at providing keen analysis laced with wry humor than your humble G&S writers ever will be. Those cynical Brits were up to it again last week, with a special report [free online] probing the similarities between late-19th century anarchists (who knocked off 7 heads of state, including McKinley) and modern jihadists.

"Throughout history," opines the leader [subscription required],

men seized with a sence of injustice, or purpose, or hatred, or inadequacy, have resorted to bloodshed. The anarchists were not the first. They were merely particularly potent believers in violence in the furtherance of an idealistic, millenarian vision. Jihadists are too. Most anarchists, like most Islamists, were not violent. But, like the jihadists, they had their firebrands, and like the jihadists, they had an ideology that could be twisted to appeal to a certain kind of wounded utopian lacking all capacity for empathy.

Quite right, chaps.