Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

8

8 (p. 38) he launches his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but ... slaying twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine.... Had he blown all Madrid to atoms, ... not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory, ... themselves also: Unfortunately, Shaw here seems to sympathize with Morral’s terrorist act (see note on page 37); at the least, he refuses to judge it as something worse than stupidity: The deaths of twenty-three innocent people and the injuring of ninety-nine others provoke him only to note that as participants in a repressive and exploitative capitalist society, they along with everyone else were guilty of allowing that society to continue its evil. It is an abhorrent view. And if it does not sound strange to our ears, that is because we heard this explanation of terrorism often enough after the terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.