The newest and most world-shaking extremity of violence and change is what I call paranationalism.

Paranationalism is any organised attempt through terrorist acts to draw attention to the evils of the status quo anywhere in the world.
It aims to destroy the root-attitudes of people supporting the formation of power and privilege - conventions so integral and fundamental to a society that even to the radical political mind the attempts seem senseless and even psychotic. This is especially so since the violent means employed usually involve the death and
injury of innocent people.

Pure paranationalism does not preach revolution, anarchy, nihilism
or ideological fantasy. It is not idealistic in theleast. Using indiscri-
minate violence against the expectations, values and questioned loyalties of Western society, its strategic weapon is violence itself.
Instead of taking on the police, paranationalists take on the politicians and society's leaders as a means of getting at the people. They know that no one can get directly to the people, who in a modern society are completely shielded from change by the mass media, the authorities and social convention.

For the paranationalist the people are as much the enemy as the objective. This seems a contradiction, but to the dedicated terrorist there are no people in the Western world, only positions. In his mind, people act out their positions. Positions have to be destroyed in people's minds for the real person, the individual, to be reached.
So the terrorists show no mercy, no compassion of the kind that conventional people in conventional positions relate to.

The paranational terrorists are a new breed of suicide fighters,
like the kamikaze warriors of Japan (whose name translated means 'Divine Storm'). To the paranational terrorists death is nothing, and living is ignoble once the evil of positions-without-people is seen.

The terrorists' motivations cannot be comprehended by the conventional mind or western attitudes because they operate at
a subconscious level; they represent a new psychological phenomenon rising out of the unconscious in man. Its only purpose is to destroy the certainty of the westernised mind.

Paranationalism depends on the stark terror and horror of its indis-
criminate actions to drive home its idea or message like a steel pin into the subconscious of humanity, through the armourplate of the enemy - the contented mass position. It aims at the individual, not the masses. Every terrorist act has a subliminal message that lodges somewhere in the human psyche where it will slowly rise to consciousness among the younger generation, tomorrow's rulers. But from the western view-
point, the terrorists' motivations, like their achievements, are inscrutable.

There is no conventional power-drive in this kind of terrorism, no personal reward apart from death. As the precursors of an approaching new culture, paranational terrorists tend to come into western civilisation from the geographical East. Where the westernisation process is most advanced and the social conscience is most likely to be outraged is where terrorism will strike most hideously and most often. But paranational terror is not restricted to democracies. As a new expression of power it is currently mixed up with nationalistic and religious struggles on every continent. It has yet to divorce itself from these conventional freedom struggles and realise its independent identity and task - as it has yet to do ist inconceivable worst.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

The first shock-waves of paranationalism, unnoticed or forgotten by the majority almost as quickly as they disappear from the headlines, represent the beginning of the end of Western Civilisation. The millennium of decline is here. It is difficult to imagine that our familiar way of life can possibly come to an end as a way of progress. The populations of past great civilisations probably felt the same. And yet all lie in dust apart from a few relics.

No civilisation seems able to visualise its successor. The time that is left is virtually no time at all. Just before the end there may be a final, brief cultural flowering, the natural result of our civilising achievements. This flowering will be distinguishable by the feeling in the individual or the society that life has reached some worth-while peak.

One day it may be said that Western Civilisation gave more men more years to live in better health, comfort and luxury - so that finally it could destroy more than if it had never existed. Whatever the means of destruction, through terrorism, nuclear devastation or some other cataclysm, the barriers that separate the different nations and peoples will fall down. They are intolerable anachronisms in a world civilisation.

Evolution proceeds on this planet haltingly, in distinct stages of time in which the process stops, gathers, bursts . . . and out of the shambles and chaos leaps the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the era, to seed a new attempt at civilisation containing that which was best of the old.