They always seem to be from the same list of bad actors. They Kill Because They Like It

They Kill Because They Like It by Claire Berlinski - City Journal

Turkey’s Marxist terrorists strike again—this time, against America.

4 February 2013

Americans seem surprised that the February 1 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Marxist—specifically, by a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or DHKP/C. But no one in Turkey was remotely surprised. This diagram suggests why Turks recoil when asked about the hard-left militant groups here. They’re no joke, despite their names, which call to mind nothing so much as the Judean People’s Front scenefrom Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. For reasons yet to be properly explored, these groups don’t appear to know that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. They are ideologically pickled in aspic, dedicated to a Marxist-Leninist revolution that happened nearly a century ago and failed brutally everywhere.

Many conspiracy theories circulate about these leftist groups. (The reason so many Turks are conspiracy theorists is that there are so many actual conspiracies in Turkey.) Some hold that rogue elements of the state or hostile neighboring countries sustain these organizations so that they can be activated, when needed, to cause chaos. These ideas are neither entirely implausible nor entirely logical, but it is certainly true that European countries have been slow or altogether unwilling to extradite suspected members of these groups, which has done little to dampen Turkish suspicions.

A theory currently making the rounds in Turkey is that the embassy bombing was a warning from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to stay out of Syria’s ongoing revolution. The idea can’t be ruled out, but the history of the DHKP/C suggests that it would need little encouragement from Assad, or from anyone else, to commit this kind of atrocity. They do it, as Dirty Harry would say, because they like it. (Why they like killing themselves in the process—they’re known for suicide bombings—is a larger mystery. They are Marxists, after all, and one presumes that they haven’t been nourished on visions of the 72 collective farms awaiting them in paradise.)

The Turkish state’s workings are opaque, but it was nonetheless clear several weeks ago that something involving the DHKP/C was afoot. ...

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