It is hard to react rationally to events such as yesterday's massacre in Spain. Rationality and morality are the two qualities that most distinguish man from beast, and those two qualities are the very ones most renounced by actions such as these. First and foremost on a global scale, the attacks were an assault on what it means to be human. And that is true regardless of whether the culprits turn out to be ETA, al-Qaeda, neither or some combination thereof. While Spain has been one of America's foremost allies in the war on terrorism (a competition that unfortunately is not as tough as it should be), the meaning of the massacre would be true even if that were not the case. Ultimately, searching for the "reason" behind the attacks, or behind the choice of targets, is the very definition of pointlessness. For reason is nowhere to be found except in the struggle against such events, and their perpetrators. The war on terrorism is not a "clash of civilizations;" it is a clash between civilization and barbarism, between humanism and nihilism. The existentalists could only dream of something so meaningful (it is no wonder their intellectual descendants are disproportionally on the wrong side of this struggle).

As today's NYT editorial states: "We are all Madrileņos now." To be human, we have little choice.