This was not terrorism. It was nihilism

Why? This versatile little word is tirelessly employed at the times when people are confronted with horrors or tragedies for which there are no logical explanations and no correct answers. The bereaved of Beslan, quite naturally, want an answer to this question. Profound and existential, it is asked most desperately at times when random, inexplicable nightmares descend. In other words, at times when there is no answer to why.

Why? This versatile little word is tirelessly employed at the times when people are confronted with horrors or tragedies for which there are no logical explanations and no correct answers. The bereaved of Beslan, quite naturally, want an answer to this question. Profound and existential, it is asked most desperately at times when random, inexplicable nightmares descend. In other words, at times when there is no answer to why.

In the case of Beslan, and in the case of all terrorist atrocities, there is never an answer, not at a personal level anyway. The perpetrators are linked to a cause, but the victims need have had no involvement with opposing that cause. The targeting of children at a school indeed suggests that for the terrorists who planned the Beslan atrocity, it was important that their victims had the smallest possible knowledge of, or involvement with, the cause they purportedly espoused.

The events inside Middle School Number 1 were designed, above all, to confound logic. Terrorism is by definition randomly brutal. But this latest massacre, more randomly brutal than any before it, surely goes beyond terrorism, and becomes sheer nihilism. In recent years, terrorists have even become cavalier about the political ends they expect their actions to achieve. Those who besieged this ordinary school changed their demands as time went on. Their political ambitions were hazy, generalised and all too abstract.

Insofar as they had any of the latter, their actions have further damaged their cause, rather than advancing it. They have attracted attention to the situation in Chechnya, but the publicity is so adverse that many people who had previously felt sympathy will no longer support its demands for full self-determination. They have further closed down the possibility of a political solution, rather than advancing it. All they have inspired is worldwide condemnation and repulsion.

It is as if the media attention has, in itself, become the end. Those who planned and perpetrated this monstrous deed must have calculated that it would eclipse the abhorrence felt against any previous attack, even 11 September 2001, and that as such it would become a focus of the world's media to a greater degree than any previous Chechen outrage. In that respect the Chechen terrorists have aided Vladimir Putin greatly. He wishes to tie Chechen terrorism to al-Qa'ida terrorism. The magnitude of this attack and its vast, inhuman ambit, has done the job for him.

Now, at last, the ongoing Chechen situation is moving into the media spotlight as it never has before. In more powerful terms than ever as well, it is being practically linked into a wider pattern of terrorist activity around the world. Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, an Arab television executive, has pointed out that: "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslim." His brave statement of the obvious - that the radical preachers who infect young Muslims with a hateful radicalism must be tackled - has been heralded as a breakthrough statement. The press is full of rhetoric about how things could be different after Beslan. Yet already his words are being co-opted into the same old debate in the Western media, whose battlelines were drawn in the emotional hours after the 11 September atrocities.

Perhaps some of the thousands of friends and relatives mourning their lost loved ones will find comfort in the conventional answers that they will be offered by the world's media. These, despite the complexity of the issues raised by such huge, escalating, calculated massacres, fall into two main categories. Each new insight or piece of information is grabbed at by commentators feeding their own agendas like a tank full of hungry fish.

One is that this latest atrocity happened because the West is soft on terrorism and always has been, that the West is too bound up in political correctness to recognise the Muslim threat, and that the West is too heavily freighted with idiot liberals who are too eager to understand the motivations of suicide bombing terrorists and not eager enough to condemn them.

The other, of course, is that Western - and Russian - policy, born out of rampant self-interest, has created generations of young people so brutalised by the privations heaped upon their people that only acts of extreme nihilism can encapsulate and express their impotent anger. All sorts of other issues, relevant, helpful, vital, come and go. But ultimately, in the world's press, the commentators are mainly locked in a self-absorbed political battle over whether left or right is best.

The people of Beslan want to know why their community was targeted, why their children were killed, why local and national government was unable positively to intervene and halt the process of this campaign of terror. Some of this, much of it, will be pieced together. Lots of it will be the creation of accident or circumstance. Much of it, as Putin has already conceded, will prove to be the result of institutional failings in the Russian body politic.

But none of it will come as close to answering the basic question as the bleak explanation given to Margarita Komoyeva, a physics teacher who was released by one of the hostage-takers the day before the standoff reached its terrible climax. "Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours."

In other words, there is no political motivation behind these attacks. They are conceived out of vengeance alone, and out of a vengeance that becomes more insatiable as each cycle of violence is completed. The political struggle that spawned the acts of terrorism has become decoupled from the violence, which has become an end in itself.

The use of children and young people, this time most blatantly of all as victims as well as perpetrators, is of key significance. The fact that children are now sought out as both terrorist and terrorised is a sign of how far away from reason and debate and logic those who battle for their vengeance have become. This can be seen very clearly in Palestine, where in the camps children are inculcated with little other than hatred for Israel from very early in their young lives.

There is now little other identity for Palestinians, other than their miserable history over the decades since the British Mandate ended. The children are used as propaganda vehicles in this pitiful way because none of this is mature or political anymore. It is beyond politics. It is childish, hunkered down in an arrested stage of development where right and wrong is not yet understood. It is nihilism.

The nihilists want chaos. "War without end" is what they choose for themselves, again and again. They themselves are disengaging their actions from politics, safe in the knowledge that in this way they attack the possibility of a political solution.

It is time to start listening to the doves of the Muslim world and undertaking the political processes that they know to be necessary. By listening instead to the hawks of the Christian world, we are playing into the hands of the nihilists, and delivering to them the children of the world. This, in their sick pathological world beyond reason, is just want they want. If we all believe that we shouldn't give in to terrorism, than we should stop giving in to them on this.

d.orr@independent.co.uk

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