Terrorism needs no reason. Reasons still underpin it.

On 16 September 1920 a horse wagon exploded on Wall Street. Thirty-eight dead. Hundreds wounded. No one was convicted. We still do not know, as a matter of court record, who lit the fuse. We do know there were reasons. Flyers signed “American Anarchist Fighters” had already been dropped nearby: free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you. Five days earlier Sacco and Vanzetti had been indicted. Historians point to Mario Buda and the Galleanists. The Bureau of Investigation never closed the circle. Wall Street swept the glass, reopened the Exchange, and went back to work. The scars are still in the marble at 23 Wall Street. There is no plaque.

On the same calendar date, 219 years earlier, James II and VII died in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His only surviving legitimate son, thirteen-year-old James Francis Edward Stuart, inherited the Jacobite claim to England, Scotland and Ireland. His friends called him James III and VIII. His enemies called him the Pretender; later, the Old Pretender. That was not a mystery. It was a reason. A Catholic heir had been born in 1688; the Glorious Revolution followed; Parliament barred Catholics from the throne; the Act of Settlement of 1701 settled the crown on the Protestant house of Hanover so that this boy and every Catholic Stuart after him would never wear it. Louis XIV recognised him as king. Spain and the Pope followed. England attainted him. From that inheritance came the risings of 1715 and 1745, foreign intrigue, and a generation that toasted “the king over the water.” James himself was cautious, devout, and unsuccessful. He never sat on those thrones. The claim still produced armies.

Two 16ths of September. One unsolved bombing. One dynastic claim that never became a reign. In both cases the violence, or the threat of it, had a politics underneath. Anarchists wanted prisoners freed and capitalism punished. Jacobites wanted a king they believed had been stolen by statute. Terrorism does not require a reason that we find respectable. It requires a reason that someone finds sufficient.

That is the first half of the argument, and it is the easy half. History is full of men who killed for a pamphlet, a creed, a succession, or a grievance that would not survive a quiet afternoon in a court of law. The hard half is now.

Today we often have both the identity and the reason. Manifestos are posted. Organisations claim the dead. Intelligence services name networks. Cameras record the act. And still the convictions do not arrive, or they arrive so late that the word justice has already gone cold. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been in custody for a generation as the alleged architect of 11 September 2001. A trial date has been pushed toward 2028. A confession was thrown out because of how it was obtained. Victim families are still waiting. That is not an unsolved wagon on Wall Street. That is a known man, a known plot, and a system that cannot finish the case.

So the question is not whether terrorism has reasons. Of course it does. The question that has to be asked, without theatre, is whether terrorism is, in practice, legal.

The law on the page says no. Murder is murder. Conspiracy is conspiracy. Material support is an offence. States write statutes, fund agencies, and hold anniversary speeches. Then the machinery stalls: torture taints evidence; jurisdiction fights last decades; pleas are signed and unsigned; defendants age out; some are deported instead of tried; others serve terms that look like ordinary crime while the political costume is quietly folded away. When the identity is known and the motive is published and the court still cannot produce a verdict the public can trust, the prohibition becomes a sermon. Sermons do not deter men who already have a reason.

The Jacobites at least forced Parliament to say what it was doing. The Act of Settlement was an open choice: religion and politics over blood. You can argue with that choice. You cannot pretend it was hidden. The Wall Street bombers hid and ran. The modern failure is different again. We advertise the names and then fail to close the book.

A society that will not convict what it can identify has not legalised terrorism by statute. It has legalised it by neglect. Reasons will keep arriving. They always have. The only question left is whether the law still means what it says when the reason is already on the table.

Cakewalk, where did the expression come from? 'It was supposed to be a cakewalk' a soldier might complain, feeling a simple mission wasn't. But the word is not from war.

The soldier’s complaint is the modern meaning. The word is older, and it is not military.

A cakewalk was a dance. Enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South created it. They did not import it from Africa as a finished form. They took the European grand promenade they saw in the big house — the Grand March, the minuet, the stiff carriage of formal wear — and turned it into a high-stepping, backward-leaning, inventively comic parody. Couples dressed in borrowed or handed-down finery. They added shuffles, kicks and African-derived movement. The couple judged most elegant or most inventive won a decorated cake. That prize is why we still say someone “takes the cake.”

Exact dates and places are lost. Oral histories collected from formerly enslaved people describe Sunday “prize walks” in the quarters. Owners often watched and even judged. Many missed the joke. The ragtime musician Shepard Edmonds, whose parents had been enslaved, put it plainly: they “did a take-off on the high manners of the white folks… but their masters… missed the point.”

After emancipation the dance moved into Black community gatherings, then onto the minstrel stage. White performers in blackface inverted the satire into caricature. African American professionals later reclaimed it. Bert Williams and George Walker (with Aida Overton Walker) made it a theatrical specialty and took it to Broadway. Championship contests filled Madison Square Garden in the 1890s. The dance reached Europe; Paris had a brief “folie du cake-walk.” John Philip Sousa’s band carried cakewalk numbers abroad. The music — 2/4 march bass under a syncopated strut — fed directly into ragtime. Kerry Mills’s “At a Georgia Camp Meeting,” Abe Holzmann’s “Smoky Mokes,” Scott Joplin’s “Swipesy Cakewalk,” and Debussy’s joking “Golliwogg’s Cake-Walk” all sit on that line.

The idiom “it was a cakewalk” did not arise because the dance was simple. The strut demanded skill and stamina. What spectators saw was ease. That impression of effortless elegance is what the phrase kept. “Piece of cake” is a later cousin of the same prize-and-leisure association.

The craze faded after about 1905 as the one-step, tango and foxtrot arrived. Fragments survived in later vernacular dance. The circular “cakewalk” still played at school fairs is a distant, sanitized game that has almost nothing to do with the original promenade.

The history is layered: enslaved people mocking their owners, white minstrels mocking those dancers, Black professionals reclaiming the form, white composers and socialites adopting it in turn. One historian’s summary still holds: Blacks imitating whites who were imitating Blacks who were imitating whites.

That is where the expression comes from. Not from a battlefield that looked easy. From a dance that looked easy while it was doing something else.

Administrative Justice can be weak

The three cases sit in different wars and different offences, but they share the same machinery: a commander needs an example, a court is assembled under pressure, and politics decides who dies and who is remembered.

Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock — Boer War, 1902

Harry Harbord Morant (born Edwin Henry Murrant, 9 December 1864, Bridgwater) was an English-born Australian drover, horseman and Bulletin balladist. He enlisted for South Africa, then took a commission in the Bushveldt Carbineers, an irregular unit hunting Boer guerrillas in the northern Transvaal. After Captain Percy Hunt was killed (and, Morant believed, mutilated), Morant and Lieutenant Peter Handcock shot unarmed prisoners: Floris Visser; a group of eight Boers who came in to surrender; three more later. A German missionary, Rev. Daniel Heese, was also killed; they were acquitted of that charge. They admitted the prisoner killings. Defence counsel Major J. F. Thomas argued “no prisoners” orders from above, including Kitchener; the court was not satisfied those orders were proved.

Trials ran January–February 1902. The court recommended mercy for Morant on provocation, good service and inexperience. Kitchener confirmed death for Morant and Handcock, commuted George Witton’s sentence to life (Witton was released in 1904 after a large Australian petition). They were shot at Pretoria at dawn on 27 February 1902, about 18 hours after sentence, by Cameron Highlanders. Morant refused a blindfold. Last words, as remembered: “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!” Australia was not consulted. Kitchener’s later telegram to the Governor-General said twelve murders were proved and Morant originated them. Pardons have been refused; Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon in 2012 said they did kill unarmed prisoners. Folk memory, and the 1980 film, still treat them as scapegoats for a dirty counter-guerrilla war. Guilt of the shootings is not seriously in dispute; the live argument is whether the trial was fair, whether “take no prisoners” was informal policy, and whether Kitchener needed a public example as peace talks approached.

Private Thomas James Highgate — Western Front, 8 September 1914

Highgate, 19, Shoreham farm labourer’s son, 1st Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment, was the first British soldier executed for desertion on the Western Front, 35 days into the war. After Mons and the retreat, on 5–6 September he left the line saying he needed to ease himself. Hours later a gamekeeper found him in civilian clothes near Tournan. He was reported as saying he had had enough and wanted out. Court-martial the same day: no defending officer, no witnesses from his company (they were scattered), previous pre-war absence on his sheet. He said he meant to rejoin and could not explain the civilian clothes. Smith-Dorrien wanted him shot “as publicly as possible.” Informed at 06:22 on 8 September, shot at 07:07 in front of Dorsets and Cheshires. No known grave; La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial. Group pardon 2006 with the other Shot at Dawn men. Process was the lightest of the three: hours, not weeks; deterrence first, proof second. Line officers had just watched the BEF reel backwards; one teenager in civilian kit became the example.

Private Eddie Slovik — Western Front, 31 January 1945

Edward Donald Slovik, 24, Detroit, petty criminal, drafted 1944 into the 28th Infantry Division as a replacement. After coming under fire he left twice, then handed in a signed confession that he would desert again rather than fight. Offered a deal: return to the line and the charge drops. He refused. Court-martial 11 November 1944: nine officers, under two hours, unanimous death. Forty-nine U.S. soldiers received death for desertion in WWII; 48 sentences were commuted. Eisenhower confirmed Slovik’s during the Battle of the Bulge. Shot at 10:04 on 31 January 1945 at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines by twelve men of his own regiment (eleven live rounds). He told them they were not shooting him for desertion — thousands had done that — but because he was an ex-con and they needed an example. He is the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War. Process was the heaviest of the three: counsel, reviews, theatre commander, written confession. The politics was timing and message, not speed.

What the three cases share

Decimation is the old form of the same idea: if a unit fails, kill some of it so the rest fight. Highgate and Slovik were not random lots; they were chosen because their files made the example easy. Morant was not a deserter. He was an officer who killed prisoners in a guerrilla war and then claimed superior orders. That is a different crime. Treating all three as the same “administrative injustice” flattens the distinction your draft already notes: bad officers send men to die; other officers shoot men who have already surrendered.

Politics is not an add-on. It is the point of a public execution. Kitchener needed German and Boer opinion managed as the war ended. Smith-Dorrien needed the retreat not to become a rout. Eisenhower needed the Ardennes not to dissolve into straggling. In each case the line managers — Hunt’s death and the Carbineers’ culture; the collapse after Mons; a replacement pipeline feeding a smashed division — created the mess. The courts then picked a man the file would carry.

The danger of treating desertion as a medical or political inconvenience in a total war is real. So is the danger of a court that exists to ratify a sentence already decided upstairs. Highgate’s hearing was too light to be justice. Slovik’s was heavy enough to look like justice and still produced the one death among forty-nine. Morant’s was long enough to look thorough, then finished in eighteen hours so there could be no appeal to Australia or to Kitchener in person.

That is administrative justice under fire: not Rome’s one-in-ten lottery, but a selection of the man whose death will preach. The sermon is discipline. The congregation is the army still in the line. Whether the preacher is honest is a separate question from whether the army can afford to look weak.