Breaking news: world leaders gathering in Baga, Nigeria

Strictly, was it only 20 “white Europeans” who were mourned as victims in Paris?

That Muslim cop named Ahmed who was killed by the terrorists in Paris, he was a white European? Or did he not count in the numbers because he was a cop, as faceless and nameless as a Nigerian?

The thing is, Paris hews closer than Baga to the liberal, pluralist and secular ideals we are supposedly striving towards as a conception of “progress” in civilization. This is why Nigerians are more apt to migrate to places like France and the US than French and Americans are to migrate to Nigeria. The rally was as much about the ideals of France–which is whatt the terrorists were attacking, after all–as it was about the people who were killed. It’s hard to get excited about defending the ideals of the Nigerian state in comparison, no matter how far short France’s fall in pratice. Just look a bit into how the Nigerian goverment treats gays.

We already know all human lives are equal. If you’re going to retort with that, then I expect a post from you every week about how dare we talk about terrorism or ebola when we are overwhelmed with easily preventable pedestrian fatalities on the world’s roadways, or people dying of starvation in North Korea, &c. Once you draw the differences to get away from having to write these posts, we are down the rabbit hole that leads us to a rally in France but not necessarily in Baga.

The march in Paris was the oddity not the fact that lots of people dying in a foreign country didn’t get much traffic in the news.

I have been following the Boko Haram news for three years or so and I feel like I am still missing some major piece of information about the Nigerian government response. In attacks last year there were stories about how people in villages under attack saw military aircraft circling and observing but not doing anything, or how they made emergency phone calls but didn’t see the military show up until hours after the attack. Nigeria’s military resources are small by Western standards but enormous compared with what Boko Haram can muster: aircraft, tanks, a budget of more than $2 billion per year. Is this like the “ghost soldiers” that melted away last summer in Iraq, military forces comprised of people who are there to collect pay but not perform any military service? Or what?

Was it 2000 (that number was allegedly rumor more than fact)? Or merely several hundred? In any case horrific. It is considered to be highly embarassing for the Nigerian military, which doesn’t seem to have much of an impact in the troubled north.

Partly, it is rich white people, people for which the media audience can relate to. Partly it is lack of access, getting into the Nigerian conflict zones is not likely easy or without significanr risk.
Of course it was noted a few months ago, kidknapping a couple hundred school aged girls got far far more media attention than slaughtering similar or even greater numbers.

Many good points. I would hope we could all agree that this should getting much more attention and that one of the reasons it isn’t is because the people who died were black. That doesn’t mean that the Paris attacks were not worthy of our focus, it just means that these events should get come attention as well.

It’s simply the case that the developed world regards the Charlie Hebdo attack as a tragic anomaly, and a massacre in Africa as routine event.

Thanks, Ronan(rf). I didn’t want to make my previous comment really long, but I have read about the government force abuses committed in the name of fighting Boko Haram terrorism. What’s weird to me is that government forces indiscriminately killing civilians along with terrorists in the name of counterterrorism is common, but in Nigeria it seems like the government forces are quite discriminately avoiding confronting actual terrorists.

As I understand, northern Nigeria is poorer and Muslim-majority, and this is where Boko Haram is strong. The south is Christian-majority, richer, and has most of the oil resources. The current president is a Christian from the south.

Boko Haram isn’t really hidden among local communities where they attack, the way that e.g. insurgents attacked foreign occupiers in Iraq; the usual story is “a bunch of armed strangers arrived from out of town and started killing/kidnapping.” I don’t see an economic reason why the current central government would want to keep an insurgency active. They’re not (AFAICT) trying to use Boko Haram in a proxy fight against neighboring countries, as Pakistan’s ISI has been accused of doing with terrorist groups. The recognized government doesn’t seem to be allied to the group’s domestic goals. The lack of progress against Boko Haram appears to be a political embarrassment and liability to the current government in upcoming elections.

Matt at 7,

I don’t follow things in Africa closely but this ongoing situation and the general mess that Nigeria is in has gotten some coverage in the magazines I read. Essentially, the problem seems to be that Nigeria is a rich country but a very corrupt one. It lacks democratic accountability about how its wealth is spent and,mostly because of the corruption, its democratic process are too weak to motivate the elites to actually confront Boko Haram.

The military situation, for example, is more complicated than it appears at first glance. Yes the Nigerian military is indeed much larger and more powerful than the Boko Haram. They probably do have more than enough resources to do the job but they don’t have the desire. There’s no downside to failure for the government or the country’s elites.

Part of the reason for the military’s ineffectiveness is that most Nigerians are almost as terrified of the military as of Boko Haram. They don’t want a stronger or more efficient army. They don’t want a return to military rule. What’s more, the assumption is that in a country as corrupt as Nigeria, military rule would be no guarantee that the military would act and the assumption is that they’d just line their pockets with less restraint.

Another reason for the military’s ineffectiveness is that the soldiers in the army aren’t very well trained, they aren’t very well equipped and they aren’t very well paid except at the top. They also, for the most part, joined the army with the very clear expectation that there wouldn’t be any fighting involved. Basically, they’re neither a well trained fighting force nor a motivated one, which is why you frequently read about their avoiding Boko Haram. These guys are soldiers in much the same way that Tony Soprano’s guys with no show jobs were construction workers.

The country’s broken. The divisions between north and south, between Christians and Muslims and between the elites and everybody else are too much. Everybody’s talking about what the international community needs to do, but unless we’re prepared to send in enough troops to defeat Boko Haram, keep the factions from fighting, police the country well enough to end the corruption that’s crippling it and ultimately bring to power a government that is reasonably honest and reasonably effective, then it’s hard to see anything that outsiders can do.

Theophylact@16.
And I read today (I don’t know where to find the numbers to verify), that in the USA you are now more likley be be killed by a toddler shooting you than by a terrorist. Also for the first time you are more likely to die from a bullet than from a car accident.

I looked it up. Vehicle deaths per 100,000 have declined fairly steadily, now down to 10.7 (2012 figure). Deaths involving firearms have been roughly steady since 1999 – 10.4 in 2011, rising from 10.1 in 2010. So probably crossed over in the last year or so.

Chaz at 23,

That’s probably true but a substantial number of the non military elites are very wary of a better, more effective military. Starting in the 1960’s there’s been a series if military coups resulting in levels of corruption and mismanagement so bad that the military seems to have voluntarily relinquished power because there was no longer anything left worth stealing. Oil changed all that, which has made most Nigerians even more wary of the army.

In some ways, African countries like Nigeria remind me of the story of the gingerbread man who couldn’t run until he got hot but who couldn’t get hot until he ran. A better, more effective army wouldn’t be any less corrupt, just more dangerous and harder to dislodge from power. But without a more effective military, the clashes between Christians and Muslims, combined by the ever escalating level of atrocities Boko Haram will make Nigeria hell on earth. Certainly, it will make it far more difficult to undertake the kinds of reforms that would create a civilian government that isn’t a joke.

I don’t see any answer and certainly none that can be provided by increased attention to the situation.

Perhaps a more interesting comparison is perhaps the reaction to the 2011 attacks in Norway. 77 people, including 68 members of the social democratic youth – which is to say mostly prosperous, white, (blonde!) children – were murdered in an explicitly political (fascist) attack on immigration, “multiculturalism” and “cultural marxism”. The sympathy and outrage were enormous. Tears were shed. Flowers were strewn. But did the leaders of free world fly in to stand shoulder to shoulder in defense of racial equality and freedom of movement (“no ifs, no buts”, no matter how offensive to some people’s superstitions and prejudices…). Did they phooey.

Ingrid, I sincerely wish that the reference to the 20 white Europeans was removed: it is absolutely incorrect and borderline offensive to the memories of at least 6 of the victims which were apparently specifically singled out because they were *not* white Europeans (but rather Sephardi Jews, Maghrebi Arabs and Black African respectively).

Other than that, a very dry and interesting post which raises a number of uncomfortable questions.

I will say one thing though: as a French citizen, it is absolutely clear to me that the gigantic marches on Sunday were the outcome of a popular movement that started spontaneously on the very day of the attack and that the gathering of world leaders jumping on the bandwagon (and the frenzy of media attention) was the result, not the cause, of this popular movement. So even though one can deplore the fact that these horrendous attacks have eclipsed simultaneous equally horrendous attacks (in Nigeria or Lebanon) and even though the irony of Orban, Bongo and Netanyahou marching for freedom of expression and unity is not lost on me, I take heart in the idea that the largest public gathering in the history of France was a spontaneous expression of the people of France of its attachment to liberty and fraternity.

Worth noting that the Nigerian government is now saying less than 150 died (including a number of attackers). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-30788480

The Paris attacks are an outlier in terms of attention because they disrupted a major world capital over several days, with many cameras on hand in real time and (as noted above) included an attempt to essentially wipe out a whole magazine worth of journalists. Journalists were always going to cover that story. No paranoia is needed to explain why it got so much attention. It’s worth remembering that the awful massacre in Peshawar (in another looked-down-on, complicated country with an ongoing high-casualty Islamist rebellion) got quite a lot of coverage, if not quite so much as Paris. I think the problem with Baga is that it is genuinely hard to gain access to and that the facts are genuinely and seriously in dispute.

“If this had been a black news paper in, say, the US or whatever, and gunmen went in and shot them, you’d see a similar amount of news. ”

Is that why I’ve seen so many headlines about someone trying to firebomb the NAACP office in Denver last week?

As to the reporting of the ethnicities of the victims, I thought it was a good thing that I did not realise that, for example, police office Clarissa Jean-Phillipe was black until I saw her picture yesterday. It seems entirely right that the discussion should be focused on what she stood for and did (a police officer of Paris who was killed whilst on duty) rather what colour her skin was or what her gender was.

Incidentally I presume that as ctizens of France and residents of metropolitan France, all the victims (and all the perpetrators, it seems) were European, no?

AB @26
The difference is that Islamism is a much bigger deal in context than a obviously lone madman, and the response was attempt to preemptively counteract the possibility of deep fissures opening in the society (remember the background Pegida, Le Pen and a socialist president).

Context matters.

“In my reading/watching of the press, the victims were portrayed as “white/european”.”

I don’t really agree with this, at least from the reports I’ve seen. In particular the fact that the police officer Ahmed Merabet was Muslim was given emphasis (in part, I think,to draw a dichotomy with the killers, to show that the positon of ‘ French Muslims’ is complicated. Which it is.)
As much as why the French killings got more airtime than those in Nigeria, I think you could ask why attacks by Boko Haram get more attention than killings in the DRC (or, indeed, Israel/Palestine more than anywhere else)

#38 reason

The difference is that Islamism is a much bigger deal in context than a obviously lone madman,

It was three madmen instead of just one, right?

It’s tough for outsiders to do much when the government is conflicted. Boko Haram chaos keeps opposition voters away from the polling both in the presidential election. And the army is a disaster. Cameroon, which on paper should be just as vulnerable to BH as Nigeria, has an army that is able and willing to fight them.

As a Nigerian writing from inside Nigeria I can tell you exactly what’s going on. The world see the terrorists as the merchants of death but a great majority of the Northern folks see them as heroes of the faith.

Boko Haram has a very strong but silent support system among the mainly muslim North. And many soldiers in the Nigerian army are secrete members. These frsustrate the effort of the army against the Islamic onslought.

Nobody among the commenters has been able to point out the fact that sabottage in the Nigerian army and a well cordinated support system from the Islamic Jihad faithfuls in Northern Nigeria contributed in no small way in stalling the well spiritef effort of the Nigerian Govt.

These is because the west is playing the ostrich. As long as the west continue to ignore the dangerous potential of Islamic fundamentalism, these carnage will never end.

J Thomas @42
It was three madmen trained and supplied by a global network.

Chris Bertram at 31,

That is a fair criticism. I was mainly trying to distinguish Nigeria and Kenya, which I think appear to be collapsing in on themselves in similar ways and for similar reasons from other countries in that part of Africa that are failing for different reasons or not failing at all. This was originally just an introductory sentence to a longer couple of paragraphs designed to elaborate on that and should have been deleted when I got rid of the Kenya analysis to focus on Nigeria.

Obviously, I didn’t do a very good job. Nevertheless, I was trying to put Nigeria and Kenya, which have some important similarities (particularly in terms of the ineffectiveness of their military to terrorists/insurgents),into a different category for discussion.

As I said though, I’m only spitballing really..Do you think the Nigerian govt is seriously committed to defeating Boko Haram ? Or just to do enought to satisfy domestic and internatioanl pressure ?

It doesn’t look like the government is seriously committed to defeating Boko Haram, but I was unsure because it didn’t look like there were any particular material or ideological reasons for the government to tolerate Boko Haram. The explanation advanced that the elected government is more afraid of a military strong enough to stage coups than of an insurgency afflicting the poor north seems plausible though. It doesn’t seem like there is much international pressure to deal with Boko Haram, FWIW. At least if “pressure” means material incentives.

Much ink has been spilled over Boko Haram but it doesn’t look like the violence is bad enough to discourage foreign investments yet. There wasn’t much foreign investment in the north before anyway. Most investment was in oil and gas, but chronic pipeline damage from unauthorized oil siphoning had prompted foreign producers to look to sell Nigerian onshore oil and gas operations even before the recent plunge in oil prices. Foreign oil majors are retaining offshore operations because they aren’t vulnerable to the same kinds of damage.

Onshore oil and gas production has caused a lot of environmental damage to rivers from spilled oil. Locals whose environment was despoiled have seen little benefit from oil royalties. They have taken to breaking in to pipelines to take oil for themselves since the government doesn’t share the oil wealth. This leads to occasional horrendous mass burning deaths when lots of locals are clustered around a pipeline to collect raw oil and the oil is accidentally ignited. It also makes the environmental damage worse even when there is no conflagration.

Nigeria is facing a contracting government budget since it is largely funded from oil and gas royalties and oil prices have gone down severely. The environmental damage associated with the extraction stays the same though. There are also allegations of large ($1 billion) or truly breathtaking ($30 billion) unexplained shortfalls in government accounts that accumulated past oil revenues. Officials have denied that there is any shortfall but I take their protestations with a shaker of salt.

Boko Haram has been killing people for years, largely to yawns from the West. Notice, though, the one time western nations got excited enough about them to rise up and activate their Twitter hashtags: not for a mass murder, but for a mass sex crime.

Well, does anyone know about / remember the Second Congo War – be honest …

QED

Once we begin talking about these awful murders as the act of “madmen,” we give up the potential to understand how to combat them. See WHAT TERRORISTS WANT etc. Any understanding has to begin with looking carefully at why these particular individuals made the choices they did, choices which for them made sense, and then beginning to look at what it might take to dissuade others from the same choices. Drones don’t help.

JG

I don’t agree. I really don’t care what people who slaughter children want or what their grievances might be. People who strap explosives on 10-year old girls and sent them to die in crowds of ordinary people have nothing to say that I want to hear. Nothing can justify what Boko Haram has done. They’ve crossed a line from which there’s simply no way back.

I disagree with this disagreement. It seems to be an enthusiastic embrace of a sunk costs fallacy for morality: once a party has done something truly horrible, no response but total war followed by unconditional surrender is ever acceptable. But any prolonged or large scale armed conflict is likely to include truly horrible actions from every combatant party, and “all wars shall become total wars, ended only by unconditional surrender” seems like a very unsound moral principle.

How is the Syrian civil war supposed to be concluded by this rubric? The central government and each of the major rebel factions has killed more children than Boko Haram. Is the war supposed to end in mutual extermination of Syrian factions, the empty land ceded to outside settlers of better character who never crossed the blowing-up-children line?

#59 Mitch Guthman

I really don’t care what people who slaughter children want or what their grievances might be.

That might be the most practical way to deal with things. It conflicts with my idealism.

So for example, we don’t seem to have any arabs here giving long explanations of their point of view, and we certainly don’t have any arab terrorists explaining their grievances. What we have is their enemies explaining that they are cowards and brutes who have done such awful things that the only suitable response is to kill them.

That used to be the case for native americans in the USA. Some of them occasionally fought the whites who took their land etc. And nobody told their side of it, the whites only heard what murderous savages they were, and so a lot of people believed that the only good injun was a dead injun.

And of course in the USA we hear a lot about the inexcusable aggressions of Palestinians against innocent Israelis. Of course the Israelis have no choice but to kill them back at a ratio of 100:1. They can’t let terrorists stay alive! Of course they must kill terrorists whenever they find them, ceasefires or no ceasefires. Things that in other situations would look horrible seem like simple necessities against an irrational barbaric foe, because that’s mostly the only side of it we hear.

I feel like it would be a good idea to listen at least to what everybody but terrorists want and look for ways to maximize the number of people we can cater to. If terrorists get to tell us what they want us to do and that stops us, then we are letting them control us too much. We might want to do that for other reasons, and the terrorists stop us. What they think shouldn’t be that important. But what 10% of the population thinks? That could matter a lot.

So OK, a tiny fraction of French muslim woman want to cover their faces, and it needs to be against the law because it’s some sort of religious symbol. And an even tinier fraction of French nonmuslim women is inconvenienced by that. But you don’t have to stop nonmuslim women from covering their faces! Just require all muslims to wear small, discreet armbands with a yellow crescent and star, and then it’s only the people with the armbands who can’t cover their faces! People who don’t have an armband can be stopped occasionally to show ID and prove they aren’t muslim, and then wave them on. The problem isn’t covered faces, it’s covered faces for religious symbolism. With just a tiny bit of extra effort you can make sure that only affects the people it’s supposed to affect, and nobody else.

Similarly, a muslim woman who gets a job that requires her to wear a giant panda-bear suit which covers her face and jump around on the street advertising the business, would not need to wear a visible armband because she is doing it as a duty for the job and not as a religious signal.

I linked to this piece “Unmournable Bodies” by Teju Cole in the other thread, but just want to reiterate it’s well worth reading.

“France is in sorrow today, and will be for many weeks to come. We mourn with France. We ought to. But it is also true that violence from “our” side continues unabated. By this time next month, in all likelihood, many more “young men of military age” and many others, neither young nor male, will have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. If past strikes are anything to go by, many of these people will be innocent of wrongdoing. Their deaths will be considered as natural and incontestable as deaths like Menocchio’s, under the Inquisition. Those of us who are writers will not consider our pencils broken by such killings. But that incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective liberté

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies

That article by Cole is interesting because the police officers and shoppers have been disappeared from events. The cartoonists are ideologues and the people who were killed who were not ideologues are completely unmentioned.

#65 jwl

I missed the part in the thread where people demanded the death penalty for all terrorists.

The USA and Israel both sometimes decide that people who are not in custody are terrorists, and kill them suddenly with no trial in which the suspects could present evidence in their own favor. It isn’t a demand for death to all terrorists, more a demand for death to all terrorists who have not surrendered and may be difficult to capture.

Similarly, where is the 100:1 ratio coming from? Is J Thomas talking for effect?

I am not talking for effect, but I am talking about a situation where there are two sides which might both do unethical things, but only one of them gets a hearing. They argue that the other side (typically a much weaker and poorer side, since strong rich groups can usually get a hearing) is so insanely malevolent that whatever they do in response is justified.

And so I am usually leery of the argument that the other side is so evil that they cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with but we must frustrate them in everything until they surrender, particularly when the other side does not get much of a hearing. Because that argument has been used to such evil intent before. Not to say it’s never right. But I’m leery of it.

I used Israel as an example where that has happened. But I don’t want to argue the details, because in my experience it has turned into an unapologetic example of my point.

[parody]
“Zionist apologists tend to claim that Israel is 100% right and Palestinians are 100% wrong.”

“That’s because Israel is 100% right and Palestinians are 100% wrong.”

“They argue that Israel must not compromise because Palestinians are their implacable enemies and will use any advantage to hurt Israelis.”

“That’s because Palestinians are Israel’s implacable enemies and will use any advantage to hurt Israelis.”

“They say that Palestinians are collectively insane and anything they do to them is justified, and so they are implacably inimical to them.”

“That’s because Palestinians are collectively insane and anything Israel does to them is justified. We must never let down our guard, we must never give them a chance to hurt us.”

“So Israel destroys any real chance for a Palestinian economy, and bombs innocent Palestinians hoping to kill terrorists among them.”

“You sound antisemitic. Like you think there are innocent Palestinians! You blame us for killing palestinian children, but they raise their children to hate us. When Palestinians decide they love their children more than they hate Israel then there can be peace. We will stop our legitimate defensive attacks against them after they prove they have stopped hating us.” [/parody]

Kind of like the old burlesque routine.

“I say, you have a banana in your ear.”
“I can’t hear you! I have a banana in my ear.”

But it’s harder to see the humor in it when it turns deadly.

#69 MPAV

Oh J is not bound by silly things like facts or evidence. He is beyond those.

I am not beyond facts and evidence.

I am beyond good and evil.

It’s different.

(Sorry J Thomas – I couldn’t resist )

Anyways I think the Nietzsche discussion was a couple of posts down.

Rakesh @75
I don’t quite understand this sentence:
“Greater state capacity to promote inclusionary economic growth, diversification and social protection will also have public health benefits, because poverty is the primary cause of poor health.”

Why does having a bigger government combat poverty? Ultimately to combat poverty two things are needed (that possibly in some circumstances conflict with one another) – increased production and fairer distribution. Just increasing the size of a corrupt government doesn’t help with either. What is needed is better government (and I’m not sure that the size of the government is much related to quality either way).

#72 ZM

(Sorry J Thomas – I couldn’t resist )

Quite all right, neither could I.

So, they are all human beings, fine. But the killer claims he was radicalized by Abu Ghraib, then proceeded to kill French policemen and Orthodox Jewish grocery shoppers, and assist in the killing of cartoonists. France opposed the war in Iraq and had nothing to do with it. France isn’t involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan. So what is the chain of reasoning, precisely? Upthread the claim is that one should understand the reasoning.

J Thomas, why didn’t you just say #68 to start? Your point isn’t about specific claims, so you shouldn’t put them in. You aren’t willing to defend or even really explain where your specific claims come from, so take them out. I’ll also note that a large part of #68 is you arguing with yourself about a point that only you made.

So what is the chain of reasoning, precisely?

The reference to drone strikes was in Teju Cole’s piece, I believe. His point was that some of these deaths are mourned, some of them are not.

If you’re asking what the murderers’ chain of reasoning was when they carried out their attacks I doubt that anyone here can tell you and I wouldn’t expect it to be very coherent, but I did see one of them quoted as saying that he’d been radicalised by hearing about Abu Ghraib.

Phil, who posts here sometime, would probably be able to give an idea about the complexity of the radicalisation process (i hope he doesnt mind me linking to his blog, but..)

https://gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/wip-3-should-we-counter-radicalisation/

I’d be surprised if something like ” hearing about Abu Ghraib” works as anything bar a post hoc justification, or at least one part of a bigger story, but am open to correction.

Yes.

#80 jwl

But the killer claims he was radicalized by Abu Ghraib, then proceeded to kill French policemen and Orthodox Jewish grocery shoppers, and assist in the killing of cartoonists. France opposed the war in Iraq and had nothing to do with it. France isn’t involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan. So what is the chain of reasoning, precisely? Upthread the claim is that one should understand the reasoning.

At some point in past years one of them said he was radicalized by Abu Ghraib.

I don’t think it’s so valuable to understand the reasoning of dead terrorists so much as that of potential terrorists.

And really, it isn’t so much that we should understand potential terrorists because they are a threat, so much as we should try to understand everybody who has serious concerns. There’s a moral hazard when we pay extra attention to people because they’re violent. I suppose we could balance that some by killing them, but better not to start it in the first place.

The point of the post is well taken.

So far as the attention that the West pays to Boko Haram and that it has paid to the terrorist attack in Paris, I think the difference lies in the function of the attention, and the difference in function is tied to factual differences between the two.

The function is to affirm certain central values of a society following what many perceived to be, in one aspect, a violent attempt to intimidate against the protection of those values. Viewed this way, the attention is how Western societies signal their continued allegiance to a shared value, and how they continue the formation of collective identities, or parts thereof, in a manner consistent with the past. So condemnation here is actually a form of action in the psychological and ideological domain that terrorism targets.

The atrocities of Boko Haram, like many elsewhere that receive even less attention, by contrast are not an attempt to intimidate Western states. They have little to do with Western states. They are horrific, but they do not attempt to contest sacred ground in the West by means of intimidation. Condemnations regularly follow the atrocities, but the people committing the atrocities don’t care what we have to say, and neither do the victims (unless we were making backed promises to help).

However, the atrocities have drawn – from the US at least, and probably from other nations as well – more concrete efforts to help. For example, the US military had been engaged in training and equipping certain Nigerian military units to fight more effectively against Boko Haram. Yet last December the Nigerian Government ended the program early, apparently out of anger that the US did not approve the sale of Cobra helicopters to the Nigerian Government (either on the view that Nigerian forces couldn’t use them or on the view that Nigerian forces couldn’t be trusted with them). The situation is obviously far more complicated, and the simple act of condemnation does little for anyone. Nor would an assemblage of world leaders meeting in Nigeria to condemn Boko Haram have much point if it were not attached with much more concrete, and controversial, action.

I suppose the point I’m fumbling towards is that the assemblage in Paris had more consequential impact than would a similar assemblage in Abuja, which would by itself have no impact at all. Factual differences between the situations drive the difference in reactions.

J. Thomas at 88,

Correct me if I’m wrong but, pretty much by definition, didn’t the dead terrorists start out as potential terrorists who then became terrorists before finally becoming dead terrorists?

#92 Mitch Guthman

Correct me if I’m wrong but, pretty much by definition, didn’t the dead terrorists start out as potential terrorists who then became terrorists before finally becoming dead terrorists?

Sure. OK, I’ll spell it out in more detail.

I figure most people are potential terrorists, though there are some who would never do that under any circumstances whatsoever.

Of the potential terrorists, some will become — call them incipient terrorists — given the right circumstances. I will assume that those circumstances include both personal and global elements. Like, there’s an arab tradition that some boys get tremendously depressed when they fall in love with a girl (maybe almost sight unseen) and then circumstances arrange that they can never marry. They waste away and maybe commit suicide. I hypothesize that some of these might be willing to suicide for a good cause, if a good cause appears for them. Personal. There could be other personal reasons. Also, people are more likely to do terrorism when they have a burning political issue that they believe they cannot address peacefully. So for example lots of French people took up terrorism when they lived under occupation by the Germans. The Germans gave them no hint of sovereignty, and took people perhaps more-or-less at random for slave labor, and people felt they had no better way to express their opposition.

In democracies lots of people believe that political violence is unacceptable because they do have a peaceful alternative. And if they don’t have a majority on their side, then what they need to do is go out and get a majority on their side. That is starting to break down as people decide the deck is stacked so thoroughly against them that the peaceful alternative has no chance, but it has been a big help for a long time. Meanwhile people who have lived under autocracies don’t have that idea nearly as strongly. Particularly with censorship they can’t find out well whether a majority is on their side, all they know about are the people they trust enough to tell the truth.

So the main objection to political violence is that they might be caught and tortured and their families could be punished for their crimes. And there’s the despairing feeling that no matter what they do it can’t be enough.

Once somebody has become an incipient terrorist, he might possibly do violence all by himself, or more likely he won’t until he joins an organization when he meets people he trusts enough. Political violence tends to be action *against* more than action *for*. People are so upset about the things they can’t change that they do something destructive. They don’t have a clear idea what to do after they have won. They have no expectation of living to see victory. They might find themselves in an organization whose goals after victory don’t match up well with theirs, and it doesn’t matter that much.

It’s complicated how it works and any of my guesses could be off for lots of cases. I could provide documentation that backs them up some, but it’s a fuzzy topic and the data is not definitive.

It looks to me like the most obvious preventive measure is to persuade people — most people — that they have global alternatives that can work. If they feel oppressed, look for ways to help them feel less oppressed. (It helps to not *actually* oppress them, but that isn’t really enough since it matters more how they feel than what the reality is.) If they want something in particular, persuade them they have a way to attempt getting it that’s fair, and that if they fail it’s due to their own failings and not that the method is wrong.

The more *potential* terrorists you can persuade to stay nonviolent, the better. But we need to do this with potential terrorists — practically everybody — and not so much actual terrorists. Actual terrorists are examples where we have already failed. It could be worth analyzing why we failed in those particular cases.

But we don’t want that to be the routine. “Your vital concerns are being ignored. The way to get attention is to first do terrorism to show you are serious and then when the media notices, announce what you want.” That is moral hazard. But the censorship alternative, don’t report what they want even if they become terrorists, that won’t help much. It gives more people the impression that the game is rigged against them.

tl;dr If you want people not to do political violence, persuade them they are not being oppressed. In general, it’s easier to persuade them of that before they become terrorists than after. Try to persuade *everybody* that they aren’t being oppressed. Muslims are only the issue d’jour.

I think Lynne (#79) is dead on the money. The importance of any given tragedy to a person is directly proportional to how close the victims are, where closeness is a mixture of family, friendship, personal exposure, geographic proximity, nationality, similar culture, similar appearance, similar wealth, etc.

Expecting that we find all other human beings are of equal value is unrealistic. There’s a billion to one difference from family to utter stranger, and probably near a 10,000 to 1 from same nationality/culture to utter stranger.

And this applies to us CT readers as well. We certainly don’t view human beings of equal value.

My example is that I suspect that nearly all of us here are part of the vaunted 1%, which has a global household income cut-off of US$48K (last time I checked). Obviously we are greedy the bastards who deserve to have most of our income above that level taxed, and given to the truly needy.

Yet I doubt most of us here are sending most of our income to the those needy, and don’t feel morally obligated to do so, despite our tremendous, almost obscene, wealth.

Why? Because we’re *not* wealthy in relation to the people who count to us – those who are close to us.

Closeness counts. To world leaders and to *us*.

Does this natural tendency exonerate us from responsibility to those who are not close to us? Absolutely not.

But rather than sneer at those at the moral turpitude of those who are merely slightly down the scale from ourselves, we should be approaching this with the understanding that we are fighting human nature to be better people. People don’t naturally come to our position – it takes education and understanding. And we are only barely better than those we chastise.

I think a little more humility about our attitudes and a little more understanding of those who don’t share our attitudes would bring us a lot closer to reality, and make us a little less tribal.

So to the original topic: What I take out recent events is not “We believe that killing Africans is less immoral than killing Europeans”. It’s “Killing Africans is less important to us personally than killing Europeans”.

How do we change this? Well, we change it only by small degrees. My best guess – increased immigration.

But here, I’d be careful. Our reaction to 9/11 is a salutary lesson as to what can happen when we *do* feel heavy personal loss due to terrorism. Increased closeness is a good thing, but it’s not without costs as well.

Closeness counts. To world leaders and to *us*.

As a reply to the OP, this really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.