Pure evil

The Assassins of the eleventh and twelfth centuries murdered prominent figures among their enemies, caliphs, viziers, sultans and leaders of the Crusaders, Anarchists were opposed to centralized states and advocated voluntary associations. In their opposition to the state they murdered prominent political leaders. They advocated violence against their opponents, murdered Tsar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of France, E,press Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, President William McKInley of the United States, King Carlos I of Portugal, and others. They committed these murders in the belief that such acts would enable them to achieve specific aims. But planting bombs in the Brussels airport, and in a Brussels underground station had no such clear aims. Belgium is not at war with the Islamic State, Belgium is no enemy of Moslems, there is nothing that could possibly have been achieved by these murders. How could anyone imagine what was in the minds of the perpetrator. The number of Islamist militants in Belgium is very small. 451 Belgians had travelled to the Islamic State. Most lived in a small enclave of Brussels. How could they be persuaded to blow themselves up, commit suicide for a nebulous cause with no attainable goals. To understand this one has to fathom the meaning of evil. It is much more than the dictionary of it, morally wrong, bad, or wicked. It is a destructive act without motive or benefit for the perpetrators, executed without regard to the welfare of other human beings. The London underground murders, the Paris murders at a rock concert, the September 2001  attacks on the World Trade Centre, and the 2002 Moscow attacks at the Dubrovka Theatre are twenty-first century phenomenons unprecedented in history. Perhaps the aerial bombing of cities and civilian targets during the Second World War created a mindset that made such indiscriminate slaughter permissible.