Root causes of terrorism

If the majority of terrorists were from poor backgrounds, this would be a valid argument. Terrorists, however, tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, even in places like Israel where you would expect poverty and oppression to breed violence.

People join terrorist organizations because they are brainwashed into believing that all the world’s ills can be placed at the feet of America, or Israel, or the Infidels in general (substitute the appropriate groups in the case of non-Arab terrorists). Radicalization happens in the elementary schools, mosques (churches, etc.), and universities, not at the factory yard or in the government ration line.

People turn to terrorism when they think there’s nothing else they can do. —You have to cover both the politically desperate and thrillkill bored ends of the potential terrorist spectrum. Also, I think you could apply a bit of Maslow to it: turning to terrorism for essentially abstract, non-immediate goals, is a bit higher up the hierarchy than, say, one’s physical safety and security.

Wow, great question. To start with, hope takes a lot of forms. A poor Palestinian, seeing his brother killed by the Israeli “Defense” Forces and his house torn down, living in Gaza with no jobs, no food, no water, etc, could easily see no hope in life and become a suicide bomber.

On the other hand, a well educated middle classer could see that power is very tightly controlled in the Middle East. He could say that societies are fundamentally corrupt, and there is no non-violent way to change them, and decide he doe not have the military power to win by conventional means. So he could have no hope of social reform, save by terrorism. Hope is a big topic.

Alternately, you could ask not why do individuals join terrorist organizations, but why do organizations take up terrorism? Mahmoud Mamdani in “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” compared Palestinian suicide bombers to the practice of “necklacing” in apartheid South Africa. When black radicals caught a black informant for the government, the put a gasoline-soaked tire around his neck and lit it on fire. A brutal tactic, but the minority white government needed black informants to maintain control, and terrorizing them was effective in breaking that control. Mamdani points out that the black radicals gave up necklacing just as soon as other routes to achieve change were open. So terrorism can possibly be an intellectual choice when no other routes seem open.

But what is terrorism? Why does the US resort to high-altitude bombing, knowing there will be significant civilian casualties? Have the US generals given up hope of getting what they want (a smashed up enemy) at a price they can afford (very few dead American soldiers to rile up the crowds at home)? Are they in the same hopeless category? Probably.

The US has little moral authority to denounce attacks that kill civilians. When we conflate every attack against us, not just those against civilians, as terrorism, we lose our justification even more. Give this state of affairs, it’s hard to talk clearly about terrorism, but I think terrorism can be an effective tactic, is usually only tried when people can’t get what they want through other tactics, and despite all the rhetoric those who want it ended as a tactic have no place to talk.

Whoosh, wrote that as one stream of consciousness, so I’m not sure it makes sense. Sorry for the length.

If the majority of terrorists were from poor backgrounds, this would be a valid argument. Terrorists, however, tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, even in places like Israel where you would expect poverty and oppression to breed violence.

I’m not entirely sure that this is the case. Certainly terrorist leaders tend to be pretty well-educated. And the 9/11 hijackers were well-educated. But that doesn’t mean that the whole organization, including the foot soldiers and grunts who set off your run-of-the-mill bombs, are any different from the average Middle Eastern male.

It’s kind of like the military, where the officers are all well-educated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the covert and special ops people were unusually bright as well. That doesn’t mean that the military is a disproportionately well-educated organization as a whole. The 9/11 attacks were a very complex and out-of-the-ordinary mission, so it’s possible that al-Qaeda just picked its “best and brightest” to run it.

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope?

There is a great deal of hope in the world of Islam: paradise and brotherhood. Hope becomes whatever the left or the right thinks it can provide. I think it’s a trite phrase on the order of “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do.”

If the answer to Henry’s question is yes, then should we expect to see most terrorism where there is least hope – ie where people are in what’s currently the worst situation?

Beyond the obvious similarities in the activities of terrorist organizations, I remain unconvinced that these have other similarities in terms of recruitment patterns, command structures, or motivation, leaving alone the evident differences in geographic focus and reach.

My impression from news reports about al-Qaeda is that there are clear differences in social backgrounds, and very likely motivation, between the leadership and field operatives. It also seems to me that al-Qaeda has the recognisable characteristics of a cult with its own world-view that is distinctively incompatible with mainstream alternative paradigms, including that of Islam.

As a result, the motivation of cults is often difficult to comprehend but we should not under-estimate the potent influence of cult paradigms upon the membership, which can be induced to behave in ways most of us find utterly extraordinary: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial4/jonestown/

A second suggestion is that we need to be aware that some terrorist organisations with initial poltical objectives mutate by increments into criminal business organizations operating protection rackets, dealing in drugs or undertaking plain armed robbery and where the original aims become no more than a convenient cover story for maintaining better public relations.

Recent historiography suggests that there was, indeed, such a person as Robin Hood although evidence is sparse as to the activities of his “merry band of outlaws” which “robbed the rich to pay the poor”, after deducting expenses, of course: http://www.boldoutlaw.com/robbeg/robbeg1.html

The extent to which Bold Robin Hood and his merry band were engaged on an egalitarian mission or a movement for liberating Saxons from Norman tyranny in medieval England rather than plain robbery is open to debate. As I recall, Bonnie and Clyde also cultivated a legend that they too were robbing the rich to pay the poor: http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/clyde/clyde.htm

An interesting cause for speculation is the way numerous movies have sought to interpret the legend of Robin Hood.

_A massive American military presence in the heart of the Middle East, after all, can only increase support for terrorism and undercut the position of indigenous pro-Western reformers._

Broken Engagement – Wesley Clark

Oh, with reference to recent developments… following on from that last paragraph, Max Hastings offers sheer hopelessness — which I suppose is what I’m describing with “those who hope to take some of the enemy with them” — as an explanation for Hamas.

From my personal experience (some members of my family were guerrilleros during the seventies), people join armed struggle because they see no other effective way for the change they want and because it seems to be effective elsewhere. Of course, those who do this are usually among the most politically active people so many of them tend to be well educated. Terrorism should then happen when a significant part of a population feels that a)the usual ways of political pressure are useless and b) violence has proven to be effective in that region recently. Of course, recruitment methods, personal motivation, etc. vary much from place to place but those two factors usually appear. The third factor (the reason political change seems absolutely neccesary at that moment) can range from an excess of hope (the illusion that the old dreams are around the corner) to complete hopelessness (revenge is the only satisfaction left).

I think vonmises nails it. Terrorists seem, across cultures and religions, to share one subjective experience: that of humiliation and disempowerment by an Other, an entity conceived of as foreign and evil.

The humiliation and disempowerment are not always real, and when they’re real they are not always material. So though terrorism is very often associated with poverty or tyranny/occupation, you also see terrorists who are quite well off and/or free. The evil, humiliating Other can be “the Man” or “the System” just as readily as it can be an occupying power or domestic tyrant.

Hopelessness and the belief that nonviolent options have been exhausted are common, but secondary, side effects.

How were the Weathermen humiliated and hopeless? The Red Brigade? Timothy McVeigh? Various South American death squads? I think this answer is a little too pat.

I think that the two key elements of terrorist behavior (as opposed to guerilla warfare) are 1) a complete contempt for human life or a thorough dehumanization of your enemies (after all, you’re deliberately killing people with only the most tenuous connection to your actual goal) and 2) a civilized enemy – one who would rather you get what you want than you keep killing innocent civilians.

Isn’t it interesting that everyone here is willing to put forward their pet political theories — but not one person can actually provide hard data.
Damn, the US sure is taking this “war on terrorism” seriously.

Let’s ask a different question, one that, perhaps, may generate more empirical answers. Has any other country fighting “terrorism” been quite so deluded in what it is doing? Certainly I think the average white South African had a pretty good idea what motivated the average ANC operative. I think the average Frenchman understood why Algerians were fighting. Heck, I think even many British understood why people joined the IRA. But Americans seem to live in this vacuum where they have absolutely no clue about how badly various other people have been treated, both in past and recently; and where they can’t seem to understand that a perfectly human reaction to being treated really really badly is to want to hurt those who treated you badly.

Again, flying my politically incorrect thesis, terrorism for the rank and file, is all of a piece with gang behavior. It’s what young, lower-class males in machismo cultures do.

Where there’s an ideology floating they latch on to it and we call them terrorists (or freedom fighters). Where soccer is a cultural preoccupation they engage in soccer violence. In the absence of revolutionary ideologies or the soccer preoccupation it manifests in urban street gang behavior.

Ideological accommodation won’t fix it. Negotiating with terrorist leaders is like negotiating with leaders of the Crips and the Bloods. if there’s anything that fixes terrorism it’s whatever fixes gang violence–and we don’t know how to fix that.

Again, flying my politically incorrect thesis, terrorism for the rank and file, is all of a piece with gang behavior. It’s what young, lower-class males in machismo cultures do.

Where there’s an ideology floating they latch on to it and we call them terrorists (or freedom fighters). Where soccer is a cultural preoccupation they engage in soccer violence. In the absence of revolutionary ideologies or the soccer preoccupation it manifests in urban street gang behavior.

No, because terrorist behavior (at least in the cases most of us are discussing) is condoned, if not outright supported, by the bulk of the population. This is in contrast to criminal behavior. Mock all you like, but the reality is that, as an earlier poster pointed out, these people really do see themselves as freedom fighters, and so do the surrounding population. Anecdotes about three individuals who exploited the chaos to engage in making themselves rich; or childish attempts to play with words and start using terminology like “so-called ‘freedom fighters'” may make the political base feel good, but do buggerall to shed light on the situation. As I said in my previous post
Damn, the US sure is taking this “war on terrorism” seriously.

“Teen suicide shows up in little epidemics here and there…” – sidereal
American Indian teen suicides in the 90’s were 4 times the national average. I just have so much trouble calling that a “little epidemic”.
–
“…once they decide to ‘be disaffected’ as it were…” – sidereal
The core posture here being barely-concealed disgust at the weak-willed scum this absurd life throws one in amongst. A feeling shared by many. Though, surprisingly enough, some of us are more disgusted by heartlessness in the privileged than we are by confusion and anger in the young and poor.
Noblesse oblige is conspicuous in its absence in the Middle East, and in American policy generally.
——
“A second suggestion is that we need to be aware that some terrorist organisations with initial poltical objectives mutate by increments into criminal business organizations operating protection rackets, dealing in drugs or undertaking plain armed robbery and where the original aims become no more than a convenient cover story for maintaining better public relations.” – Bob
Sounds like a stripped-down history of the USA there, Bob.
————
The question itself uses terminology that belongs to one side of the argument, forcing any reply into a position of tacit agreement.
Without slogging through the semantic issues it’s necessary, I guess, it’s just that the dictionary, makes it clear:
the systematic use of violence as a means to intimidate or coerce societies or governments. Doesn’t say who by, though does it?
The more accurate use, willful disregard of the lives and property of innocent non-combatants, or the intentional use of instilled terror, cuts both ways as well.
The American revolutionaries were terrorists. Or the word means something other in use than it does by definition.
Anyone who feels threatened, who sees no viable out by any other means, will consider violence, even hamsters.
The cruel arrogance of the suicide bomber isn’t quite as visible in the swagger of the currently winning side, but it’s there. Bush and Sharon have the tunnel vision and the zealot’s conviction of suicide bombers. Worse really, because their options are even now more numerous; but their wills are small, and their hearts even smaller. And their weapons that much greater

found this interesting article commenting on the above mentioned article:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:bjP2GxPBH0EJ:www.wws.princeton.edu/~rpds/downloads/paxson_krueger_comment.pdf

There seems to be an awful lot of question-begging, not to mention psycho-babbling, going on here.

The psychology of of individual terrorists, why this or that person joined up, is not really the point. Terrorism is distinguished from ordinary murder by the fact that it is the deliberate tactic of an organized political movement or entity. The important question is really why a group adopts this tactic, not “what is it like to be a terrorist?”

But of course I’ve just begged the question again. What is this tactic I’m referring to?

The usual answer goes like this: a terrorist is someone who deliberately kills civilians to achieve a political end. From the standpoint of the organized political entity that has recruited him or her, the aim is to frighten a population into abandoning their former leaders who, because of of their failure to stop the killing, will have revealed themselves as incapable of protecting them.

I am inclined to accept this as a working definition. But if we accept it, how do we classify things like the following?

–the slaughter of the American Indians.

–the bombing of Dresden.

–Sherman’s march through Georgia.

–the El Mozote masacre in El Salvador.

–the entire bloody history of the Guatemalan oligarchy’s war on the poor from the 1950’s until very recently.

–the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, of course, but even more mind-bogglingly, of Nagasaki. (One major city wasn’t enough? Really?)

See where I’m going? When you think about it, terrorism, the phenomenon denoted by the standard definition, is actually common as dirt, and those in power employ it much, much more often than the powerless.

The only reason this is not perfectly obvious is that those in power have…well, power. Power, for example, to control the “proper” or “appropriate” or acceptable use of cetain terms in articles that appear in “important” journals and newspapers. So that, for example, one rarely hears the bombing of Nagasaki referred to as one of the most egregious acts of pure terrorism ever committed. But it clearly is in the sense that Nagasaki could by no stretch of the imagination be construed as a military target.

In practice, educated elites almost never apply words like “terrorism” to themselves, any more than the European conquerors of Africa, South Asia and the Americas were inclined to think of themselves as “savages.”

However, this has always seemed to me an illustration of “It takes one to know one,” as the link below seems to illustrate.

http://www.newsoftheodd.com/article1003.html

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope?

No. People join terrorist organizations because of institutionalized injustice.

Or perceived institutionalized injustice. But, of course, perception is reality.

“Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.” – from review of Imperial Hubris at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1242639,00.html

Any comment?

When a large enough group of people can’t find a mechanism to air grievances and negotiate a compromise

Hmm. I suppose that would “explain” a lot of history — the Islamic conquests, the Crusades, the Nazis… And now the Islamists. What sort of “mechanism to air grievances” do you propose we provide? What sort of “compromise”?

“People join terrorist organisations because of lack of hope.”
Gearge W. Bush — Prime Time interview 24 June 2004

Someone thought that sinking the Rainbow Warrior would be effective. They were wrong – I haven’t heard anyone say that it was effective after the fact.

The more I think about it, the less inclined I am to subscribe to the hopelessness = terrorism theory. No one is setting off bombs in the US or Western Europe to try to bring about sharia law here (yet, thankfully), and that’s a cause that motivates terrorists elsewhere and is hopeless here.

It’s only when you think that if you kill enough people that you’ll get what you want, and you value the life of the people you’re going to kill little enough that it’s worth it, that you go out and blow up a hospital. Or a police station.

People become terrorists because it’s more fun than being a married, job-holding consumer with a 50-yr mortgage. I’d become one myself if I could think of anything in today’s world worth hating.

_Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope?_

Well, no one else has, so I’ll put forward the diametrically opposed hypothesis: the root cause of terrorist upswings, at least in the last few decades in the West Bank, Beirut, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now in occupied Iraq, is just exactly _hope_. The perpetrators are playing to win.

With the long view (Saladin, etc.) and a tale of historical inevitability to counter present tactical weakness, “hopelessness” means “hunker down and quietly rearm,” while “hope” (new hospitals, bin Laden tapes, handshakes on the White House lawn) is a call to prompt direct action.

Time series graphs showing the Oslo (Israeli/Palestinian peace process) terror spikes are available on the net; the equivalent graph of, say, MWh of electricity delivered to Iraqi civilians over the last 52 weeks, against US soldiers and Iraqi civilians blown up, would be extremely interesting. My intuition is that it would support my hypothesis: if you want to set the Sunni triangle ablaze, just keep building schools and plumbing.

In 1978, General J.M. Glover, a UK army intelligence expert, wrote a Top Secret report, Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends, which assessed the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and what could be expected in the future. (Source: Tim Pat Coogan, “The Troubles,” (Roberts Rineheart 1996) pp. 210-211)

The following exerpts from Glover’s report have some bearing on subjects discussed in this thread:

“Our evidence of the calibre of rank and file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses members with some care. The active service units are for the most part manned by terrorists tempered by up to 10 years operational experience.”
[…]

Trend and calibre: The mature terrorists, including…the leading bomb makers are usually sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are constantly learning from their mistakes and developing their expertise… PIRA’s organization is now such that a small number of activists can maintain a disproportionate level of violence.”
[…]
“[T]here is a substantial pool of young Fianna aspirants nurtured in a climate of violence, eagerly seeking promotion to full gun carrying terrorist status, and there is a steady release from prisons of embittered and dedicated terrorists . Thus though PIRA may be hard hit by … attrition from time to time, they will probably continue to have the manpower they need to maintain violence during the next Five years.

“Leadership: PIRA is essentially a working class organization based in ghetto areas of the cities and the poorer rural areas. Thus if members of middle class and graduates become more deeply involved they have to forfeit their lifestyles Many are also deterred by the Provisional’s muddled political thinking. Nevertheless, there is a strata of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organization.”

Bears repeating

“Nevertheless, there is a strata of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organization.”

As the report was passed from hand to hand amongst the UK and the NI elite, indignant sputterings started to emerge behind closed doors and from other dark recesses and skeletoned closets, in the UK, and voice of unknown sources began putting it about that Glover was way too effusive in his admiration for the IRA.

The Top Secret study, according to Coogan, was “captured in the mails by the Provisionals and, after study by IRA intelligence, published in the Republican News, the IRA newspaper.”

Ironically, one of the criticisms was that he made the IRA look like it knew what it was doing, when that wasn’t the case at all, as everybody with an ounce of sense knows.Right?

The Top Secret study, according to Coogan, was “captured in the mails by the Provisionals and, after study by IRA intelligence, published in the Republican News, the IRA newspaper.”

The thing I don’t get is why, if suicide bombing is religiously sanctioned and is such a sure ticket to martyrdom, one never finds the leaders (or even deputy leaders) of Hamas or Al Qaeda or their ilk doing the holy deed themselves, or even encouraging their sons to do it in their stead.

From this, I take it that either (a) you don’t consider Hizbollah as one of Hamas’ “ilk”? (Of course, it’s possible that the pro-islamofascist Jerusalem Post is engaging in disinformation here in reporting the death of the Hizbollah leader’s son.)

or (b) you have no idea what you’re talking about.

(In point of fact, I think (a) is correct – I’m convinced based on the evidence I’ve seen (and could easily be convinced otherwise, since I do not much like them or their ideology or think their current influence is a good thing) that Hizbollah is not engaged in terrorist activity or offering terrorists anything beyond propaganda and “moral” support. However, I doubt that that is the point that Mr. Fergal is arguing).

Personally, I’m beginning to think Eric Hoffer had it right in The True Believer:

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

“Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden…We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?”

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves – and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

Jonathan Edelstein,

Re. Abb1’s opinion that: The fact of existance of a large enough group of individuals (i.e. “terrorist organization”) who feel outraged by what they view as institutionalized injustice – this fact itself certainly is a manifestation and a proof of institutionalized injustice – by definition… When a large enough group of people can’t find a mechanism to air grievances and negotiate a compromise – that’s institutionalized injustice

I thought I had squelched that nonsense with my earlier reply: Hmm. I suppose that would “explain” a lot of history — the Islamic conquests, the Crusades, the Nazis… And now the Islamists. But I guess his sarcasm detector (as usual) wasn’t working.

I find it vaguely amusing that people have covered both Hamas and the Weathermen in the same discussion. The two are so fundamentally different as to make any connection nonsensical. The Weathermen were an extremist sect of perhaps dozens, Hamas is a mass movement with huge popular support. The Wahibbist radicals were fringe characters like the Weathermen until converging events (Soviet provocation, massive American support and Saudi money) turned them into a potent force complete with it’s own recruitment centers, fundraising operations, training camps and weapons suppliers.

The concept of a War on Terrorism is rediculous, but of course it really is a war on Politically Relevant Terrorism, i.e. terrorism that has some popular support.

Terrorism seems simply to be about power. As other people have pointed out, various US actions fit the bill of terrorism. The US general avoids it and tries to keep conflicts in a purely military realm. This is not from some high-mindedness, but rather because we have the strongest military. When the military isn’t enough, as in the recent case of Fallujah (the Marines could not go in and “clean out the terrorist” without taking unacceptable casualties), the US is perfectly willing to use artillery and air power, despite knowing these will cause hevy civilian casualties.

The US claims the dead civilians here are accidents, but that is nonsense. They were knowlingly killed as part of an attempt to break the resistance in Fallujah. In this case, as in any terrorist act, the dead civilians are not the goal in themselves. They goal is the change in power, in policy. In each case the willingness to kill civilians to achieve that policy is comperable.

So when terrorists are said to be hopeless, it is that they have no hope of achieving the change they want by other means (either by the ballot box or by slugging it out with the 1st Armored Division in the desert). Terrorism is always an attempt to magnify strength. It is only relevent, though, when it has brought popular support, and thus a certain sense of hopelessness (lots of people wanting change but not getting it) must in effect be their. Both the hopelessness and the terrorism are the result of wanting change, neither causes the other.

But it’s not really coincidence that the War on Terrorism happens now. The US won the Cold War, and has been on top of the world for a decade. In a large sense, the Terrorism we are Warring against is the violence of the weak against the strong. In other words, the US, stronger than any nation, than any political force currently out there, is attempting to prevent the situation from changing. We like the structure of the world right now, and the War on Terrorism is at it’s heart a war to prevent the rule from being changed to something we’d find less favorable. It is a war to keep the channels of power as they are.

I’m a little bit suspect of attempts like this to stop history. I frankly can’t see how the War on Terrorism can end in anything but disaster.