Yesterday's Diary was set on the page before news of the multiple catastrophes in the US came through, and it made no sense to create extra burdens for an already overworked production staff to change it. So it remained in place, though it must have appeared disgustingly inappropriate for the day.
But of course, there was another reason - one which remains, and must always remain, and it is this: terrorism simply cannot constantly be allowed to change our agenda whenever terrorists choose.
But it shouldn't have required events of such historical magnitude, potentially comparable with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo or the invasion of Poland by the Nazis, to have told us of the threat to world peace which comes from terrorism. We have faced this prospect for decades, our native terrorists sedulously collaborating with terrorist organisations all over the world; and though there might not be any direct link between one or other of the IRAs and, say, the Tamil Tigers, there are other links, all a mere handshake, an approving smirk, a whispered bomb recipe away.
Technology of murder
For terrorism is like a virus, mutating as it travels from one society to the next, the wisdom gained in one jurisdiction being added in a fresh twist of nucleic material before being passed on to another. So the incubus circles the globe, spreading not just the technology of murder, but broadcasting the morality of it too, each terrorist group adding its own particular contribution before communicating it to its terrorist neighbour.
We know that the earliest inter-terrorist links in our own troubles were between EOKA and the IRA in the 1960s, which shared an assurance that murdering civilians whose loyalty was in doubt was wholly reasonable. Irish history was the incubation chamber for this vileness, and the man who refined the early form of this virus was of course Michael Collins. It was he who had G-men murdered in their homes, troublesome magistrates butchered as they stepped off the tram, or law officials gunned down in their bedrooms.
No, I'm not saying Michael Collins would have approved of mass murder; I am merely stating his role in the genesis of the terrorist disease. This affliction had to go through many profound mutations before it could result in the full-blown form that we have seen in Washington, New York, Pennsylvania; but almost every terrorist organisation in existence today has acknowledged the inspirational debt it owes to the pioneering work of the old IRA.
More recently, close connections developed between Irish republican terrorists and their Arab and German equivalents. Here was a quick-brew disease indeed, a veritable New York bath-house of viral exchange, multiple partnerships invisibly but fatally connecting back-streets in West Belfast with cellars in Beirut, with presidential palaces in Damascus and Tripoli, with mujahadeen in Afghanistan, with jungle clearings in Colombia.
On and on it spread, a mere tactic of operational necessity mutating into an evil heresy which then became the end in itself. The captivating power of this filth lay in its moral liberation, which taught that one could sinlessly take armed action against lawful government and its servants; and like any virus, it survived by adjusting itself to its local conditions, endlessly contriving new forms, endlessly redefining what constituted a target.
Western media
It found apologists in the Western media, who gave extenuating circumstances for each atrocity, and thereby fatally breached the auto-immune system of democracies. Terrorists were heroes; so why not protest by terrorism? If the IRA could get away with mass murder by high explosive, by murder of the inconvenient, the tribally unsuitable, why not the UVF, PFLP, the Red Army Faction, FARC, ETA, and even Timothy McVeigh?
Sooner or later, went the logic, terrorism would terrorise its target into submission; and even if it did not, it gave its authors a wondrous sense of the greatest power of all - that over life and death.
Each contributor made its own particular donation to the virus as it passed from community to community. The consensus agreed: targets could become more general. So minor civil servants, char-wallahs, prison officers, building contractors, and inevitably, in the purest apotheosis of terror, ordinary civilians, simply for being the wrong sort of civilians, became legitimate victims, many simply vanishing for all time into midnight graves.
Refinement of depravity followed upon refinement. Martyrdom itself became a weapon, starting with the hunger-strike and ending with the human bomb. Skills were shared. The mortar technology which emerged in the land of Columba is now found in the lands of Colombo and Colombia alike, killing policemen in Newry, Sri Lanka and around the "liberated" zone of FARC.
Appeasing terrorists
Softly I whisper: the US was not entirely innocent in all this. It placed maximum pressure on the British government to appease terrorists, which London did, even putting still-armed terrorists into government, while it released their still armed-colleagues unconditionally from jail. And in its counter-productive, utterly insensate hatred for the ailing creed of communism, 20 years ago the US armed Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Afghanistan just as events in Iran were revealing the shifting balance of forces on this globe.
Finally, everything has changed, changed for all time; and the world that existed up until shortly before 9 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, USA, is gone for ever. What lies ahead is as unpredictable as what lay ahead for those who through trembling fingers tried to assess the future in August 1914 or in September 1939.
We have been truly cursed. We have survived to live in interesting times.