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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat's the real root cause of terrorism: poverty or anger?
What's the real root cause of terrorism: poverty or anger?by Beenish Ahmed at Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/19/3624543/economics-of-terrorism/
"SNIP.................
“Terrorism is not just job-seeking by another name. It’s driven by deep-seated problems and personal frustrations in that society,” Keith Proctor, the Mercy Corps policy researcher who authored the report told ThinkProgress in a phone interview.
“There are millions and millions of young people living in poor and violent countries,” he added. “A very small percentage of them actually join an armed movement so [the reason] has got to be something other than poverty.”
Mercy Corps researchers spoke with thousands of former militants and militant sympathizers in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Colombia to understand what causes people to join violent extremist groups.
“Contrary to the assumption that idle youth who aren’t able to make a licit living are fodder for these [extremist] groups, what we’re finding is that it’s really about the social situations that they’re facing,” Proctor said.
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guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)as well as a sense of powerlessness. Add to these ingredients a charismatic leader into the mix to focus this anger and you have a weapon.
Many terrorists are students or former students who were radicalized in school. Think Baader-Meinhof, the Weather Underground, the FLQ in Quebec, Osama bin Laden, and many others. Most of them were not poor and some of them were middle class or upper middle class. Osama bin Laden was from a very wealthy family.
So much for non-state terrorism. Does state terrorism spring from the same roots? How are a small minority of citizens (in most countries without universal conscription) motivated to join the armed forces and be persuaded to kill others?
bigwillq
(72,790 posts)
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)we supported the Mujahideen to fight.
Now those "holy warriors" are our enemies!
No one could have imagined that.
(FWIW I am against fundie religion, which is why I'm puzzled about why we continue to support it one way or another).
PDJane
(10,103 posts)Oppression, powerlessness, indiscriminate land and resource theft, and meddling in the affairs of other people's certainly are.
Religion is a justification.
erstickendarauf
(16 posts)To commit genocide and infanticide, allowed slavery, take other peoples land/nation and resources just to name a few things commanded by their god.
Seems to me like Religion is the cause and the original source of many of mans current problems today.
I don't seem to recall how a bunch of Pagans or heathens banded together and attacked another country forcing non Pagans to convert or die, unlike the Big 3 religions which have a long proud history of it all ordered by God of course to make it A-OK.
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)etc. regimes, revolutionaries and terrorists?
The Mujahideen was created in the 1980s to fight the godless "evils" of Communism and Socialism.
Now, what a surprise, the religious nuts we created to fight the secular regimes are now our enemy!
Time to pour more blood and treasure into the war machine.
braddy
(3,585 posts)erstickendarauf
(16 posts)then you have a point then that would mean Jesus is lesser then god.
So what Sect of Christianity has this belief that Jesus and God are not one in the same?
Telcontar
(660 posts)braddy
(3,585 posts)command Christians "To commit genocide and infanticide" etc?
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)So somebody must be wrong: them or you.
But if they say they do it in the name of religion, I give them the benefit of the doubt.
It trust terrorists when they say they kill in the name of God.
applegrove
(118,677 posts)ND-Dem
(4,571 posts)"We actually focus on access to financial services as the critical element for helping to move people out of poverty", Nancy Lindborg, Mercy Corps President.[1]
Why would anyone think they'd 'find' that poverty was the problem.
Glassunion
(10,201 posts)Imagine this... Imagine a new Micky Mouse Club... Except this one allows you to feed any shred of indecency that you have in your heart. All of your sick twisted desires can not only come true, they are encouraged.
Sick fucking people, feeding sick fucking people.
uponit7771
(90,347 posts)applegrove
(118,677 posts)economically frustrated muslims in the world. So it is mostly the sick ones. That 1 - 2% who are already psychopaths. If all muslim psychopaths, and converts to islam, signed up with ISIS that would be at least 20 million fighters strong. And it is nowhere near that. So it is just a miniscule bit of the messed up who sign on.
uponit7771
(90,347 posts)... I don't expect too much from our media on that point
McCamy Taylor
(19,240 posts)So , in answer to your question, propaganda makes a person a terrorist or a freedom fighter.
Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)
justabob
(3,069 posts)You think the Nazis didn't think the resistance fighters and other partisans were terrorists? The French Resistance were "freedom fighters" to us and whatever the contemporary german for "terrorist" to the Nazis.... not such a stretch.
loyalsister
(13,390 posts)In the final scene of the film where Derek is remembering his childhood. The family wasn't living in poverty, but his dad was a working class guy with endless barriers.
The obvious scapegoats were minorities. The kid felt his father's powerlessness and dissatisfaction with his life and had someone to blame. Growing up with festering anger made him a prime candidate for neo-nazi recruitment.
Snow Leopard
(348 posts)kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)vengeful. ISIS ...at least the leaders are made up of a lot of those Bathists military we robbed of a livelihood when the US dispersed them after the US invasion. ISIS is made up men and women who watched as their families, including women and children, were slaughtered by invading foreign troops, their homes destroyed, there plush historical sites and antiquity demolished and looted. ISIS is made up of disaffected Sunni and Shia and many non-religious displaced persons who were merely trying to live their lives until the apocalypse named USA and UK coalition came their way. They are not as many as FOX would have you believe...but the base from which they can draw and replenish is massive as the west continues to grow it for them.
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)The leading 'thinker' of Islamist extremism -Qutb- became radicalized not by witnessing colonial rule in his native country, but when he was sent to live and study in the US and found the freedom of the American Way of Life something abhorrent.
It's time to stop systematically blaming the West and realizing the medieval doctrine of Islam feels threatened by democracy. When muslim extremist in London wear signs saying 'Democracy, go to Hell', they are NOT sayin 'Colonialism, go to Hell'. That's overinterpretation.
Extremists realize democarcy and Sharia are antithetic, and they want theocracy.
Sunni/Shia, ex-baathist problems are just wood to the preexisting fire of religious extremism.
CJCRANE
(18,184 posts)because they see the results of "spreading democracy" (sowing chaos) on the one hand and supporting totalitarian dictators on the other.
These two systems are shown to be disasters and the "Caliphate" offered as the solution.
Most of the recruits are teenagers and young people so they don't know the history that you talk about, but they see the photos and actrocity videos from the neocon era which radicalizes them. A lot of them are already criminals with violent tendencies so it doesn't take much to tip them over the edge.
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)Religion + reaction to dictators + outrage at idiocies like Bush/Iraq
OneGrassRoot
(22,920 posts)I realize this is a bit of a circular discussion...religion, terrorism, socioeconomics. Many things factor in, no doubt.
Since religious zealotry and extremism has been in the world forever, unfortunately, do you have any thoughts as to what it is that fuels such zealotry - or who succumbs to it the most? With ISIS we see it's mainly younger men; and the young women seem to be enticed by promises from these young men. Youth is a huge factor here.
And that frightens me because -- and please bear with me here as I explain this more -- I see a similar potential, though certainly not as radical, in the growing group of young men in the US who identify as rather hardcore libertarian.
Any ideology has the potential to create zealots, imho. Now, I do not believe religion is a factor for today's younger libertarians, but it certainly is for many of the older strict constitutionalist types. The Constitution seems to be their holy text.
I see a similar righteous fervor growing in many of the libertarian, Second Amendment advocates. It isn't steeped in any particular religion, but it has the same vibe to me. Obviously I don't feel the people of whom I speak compare to ISIS.
Yet any self-righteous extremism has the potential to be very, very destructive -- and any ideology can become like a religion to those who follow it. I'm curious what your thoughts are about such extremism and who is at risk of falling into it, and what cultivates it.
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)I am not an expert in the field of sociology and braiwashing, but I read from different sources that the best authoritarian brainwashing techniques are those which involve each and everyone.
It goes like this: in Soviet Russia or maoist China, authorities would point out that lots of everyday citizens would outdo each other in singing the praise of the regime, apparently without prodding. The catch is that anyone (A) seeing someone lukewarm not actually proactively singing the praise of the regime (B) was expected to report on that traitor, B. Failure to turn B in entailed the risk of oneself, A, being reported by someone else, (C), to the authorities for insufficient reaction when witnessing B's coolness toward the regime.
Same for Islam: If you are a muslim by birth in a muslim country, thinking by yourself about the incoherence and violence of the Quran is an extreme sport. Mentioning your thoughts would be suicide. Hence the collective hysteria against people facing fake charges of sacrilege in Pakistan: if a reasonable muslim tries to reason the mob, he can be called an enabler of blasphemers = a renegade = an apostate = death sentence.
In short, that's what I was trying to tell people mentioning external sources of anger (dictators, colonialism, Bush, poverty)
While these reasons might and do exist, they are blind to the power or religious brainwashing.
As a cause of danger in itself, independently of all other factors.
whatthehey
(3,660 posts)The more of the following overlap, the more likely you are to see terrorism:
Poverty and little chance of escape
Belonging to a historically or currently marginalized group
Lack of education
High degree of religiosity
Extreme political or ideological views
Tribalist culture
Now not all terrorists have all of these. Our old boogeyman Bin Laden has near zero of the first 3 for a start. But greater extents in some categories cover for lack in others.
There is near zero cases of properly defined terrorism by comfortable majoritarians in a secular cosmopolitan society, and the few that spring to mind like the Unabomber had extreme ideological views to a great degree.
To pretend that ANY of these is entirely incidental or innocent however, and it's almost always religion where this whitewashing attempt is aimed, is just fantasy nonsense. If somebody is willing to blow themselves up for Al Qaeda, or shoot doctors for Operation Rescue, it's a dead nuts certainty they are not apatheistic secular humanists.
DCBob
(24,689 posts)Fear of losing something one considers extremely precious... culture, religion, values, etc and blaming that on a government, a country, another religion or whatever and feeling helpless or hopeless to stop it in a non-violent way.
OneGrassRoot
(22,920 posts)While I feel what fuels terrorism in other parts of the world is extremely complex, what you describe here pertains to terrorism that we have experienced here in the US. The KKK, for example. I worry about zealots (ideological, if not religious) increasing in number here in the States again, and the reason is fear, as you have described here.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)"Terrorism" is a tactic of war.
All of them are tactics of war to achieve certain ends.
Avalux
(35,015 posts)randome
(34,845 posts)But it is. Much of the Eastern world is still mired in medieval mindsets and as this world becomes more closely merged with our own, conflicts escalate. Dissatisfaction grows. Extremists thrive.
I don't see that women's rights or LGBT rights will take hold in the Eastern world for a long, long time to come. There may be isolated pockets of people who want to join the rest of the world but far too many want to remain in the dark ages.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]
braddy
(3,585 posts)Mohammed was just a married merchant until he created Islam, and Allah required him to switch to becoming a beheading warrior chieftain, slave owner, polygamist with concubines and sex slaves, and an empire builder with an Army to conquer the non-Muslims, even a 6 year old wife (and others) to go along with his old original, pre-Islam wife.
Read the Koran and it tells you what you must do as a devout Muslim and follower of Mohammed. Peaceful Muslims read it and find out that they are living it incorrectly.
For Christians, it is just the opposite, the violent Christian reads the New Testament and the life of Jesus, and he learns that he is living it incorrectly.
Compare Jesus to Mohammed, as the example life for their religions.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)You're doing your part to continue a charade that goes back millenia.
braddy
(3,585 posts)Look at Mohammed's life, and what he switched to being in his 40s, to create and teach Islam.
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)These wars of annexation were unprovoked by their neighbors, but demanded by the Quran.
No charade, no evil islamophobic propaganda.
Man from Pickens
(1,713 posts)Without "terrorism" they'd have no good reason to be consuming the vast resources that are poured into these endless-by-design conflicts.
The word "terrorism" really doesn't have any actual meaning behind it. It's meant to scare the listener into abandoning reason and reacting emotionally.
your bunny wrote
(9 posts)leveymg
(36,418 posts)might possibly work. Therefore, it is the action that never actually gets carried out.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)Poverty --> anger --> terrorism.
ileus
(15,396 posts)lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)and after several years and the 2010-2014 Iraq protests they stopped believing that the Iraq government was legitimate. Iran-backed Shia militias have been terrorizing Sunni (& kurdish) populations for years, IS came in jump-started the Iraq civil war in combination with the Alawite Assad regime that has committed numerous atrocities. No food, no opportunities, combined with the heavy propaganda + fear & intimidation tactics which a public beheading + crucifixion is designed to do.
Four years on, civilian deaths continue in Syria
As the Syrian conflict enters its fifth year next month, an alarming uptick in violence targeting innocent civilians has once again been unleashed on this devastated nation. The loss of life is not only incidental or a mere side effect of war, but is in many cases a deliberate part of the military strategy of Syria’s major warring camps.
Since a lot of the fighting of Syria’s conflict takes place in heavily populated towns and urban areas, sniper kill zones often dissect neighborhoods and fighters dig in and embed among the civilian population. Effectively, this makes human shields of their inhabitants, and inevitably ensures they suffer disproportionately when those entrenched combatants start to fight and shell each other’s positions. This is made worse by the very nature of this type of urban warfare, which usually produces deadly stalemates, or only excruciatingly slow advances at terribly high cost. This callousness and indifference to the suffering of Syrians by those fighting in their name the Syrian regime and the rebel and jihadist groups opposing it has been a central and dominant theme throughout this messy and brutal war.
Another disturbing aspect in which civilians are caught up in the war is through the heavy indiscriminate bombing of their neighborhoods by the infamous “barrel bombs” dropped by regime helicopters from high altitude on rebel-held areas, the main purpose being to clear out the residents and make the areas easier to capture. Needless to say, the results of such bombing campaigns are catastrophic. This sometimes goes in tandem with crippling sieges that can last for months or even years, causing untold misery and suffering for the people trapped inside, who have to not only contend with a possible quick death from above but also a slow agonizing death from starvation and poverty.
Being in an area that one of the warring camps controls does not necessarily delineate support for that camp, although it is matter-of-factly portrayed as such by the propaganda machine of the other side, seeking to justify its excessive brutality. This divisive “us against them” is a rather peculiar aspect of this conflict, even if not surprising. A terrified populace can easily be polarized against their former friends and neighbors, especially when told that they are now the enemy, with corroboration of that coming in the form of deadly shells and bombs fired from their areas. We have experienced this first hand in Aleppo city, for instance, where rebels shell neighborhoods in the west (the regime-controlled part) on a daily basis, killing and wounding many people, with the justification being that anyone still living there must be “shabiha,” a derogatory term for a regime loyalist.
Thus, the warring camps in Syria seek to consolidate support among “our civilians” while demonizing “their civilians,” which makes mass slaughter of people more palatable and acceptable. In fact, in the tit-for-tat shelling of Damascus city and eastern Ghouta earlier this month, there were calls to wipe Douma out, and everyone in it, by people in Damascus, while those in Ghouta cheered with glee every time rockets were fired into the capital. Of course these sentiments are not universally shared or accepted, but illustrate how quickly desensitized and dehumanized people living through the horrors of war can become. The end result, though, was equally as grotesque as those attitudes, with many deaths and injuries in Damascus, and a disproportionate number of people killed in Ghouta, too, with the unsettling prospect of this mutual slaughter now becoming the new norm as both sides continue to threaten and escalate their rhetoric.
Of course, the absurdity of all this is that it serves absolutely no military purpose at all for either side. The only effect it had was to further terrorize an already traumatized population, entrench mutual hatred and perhaps satiate an unhealthy bloodlust and wanton desire for revenge.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/syria-war-civilian-casualties-regime-opposition-jihadists.html#ixzz3SSVnW28l
Basically there is a political situation that exists that enables IS & Wahabbi militias to exist in a territory predominantly made up of 20,000 poverty stricken Sunnis. The "Sunni Awakening" will need to be replicated or they reject them either way but the last time they fought for the US a brutally oppressive regime was left in its place.
IS has sophisticated military commanders & slick marketing which sets them apart from anyone else really, if you notice they spend a lot of time fighting for control of the 2 rivers as well as the Baji refinery. They target aid & cut off supply to make the population dependent on them. They cut it off for refugee camps. With control of dams they cut it off, control electricity, or flood crops.
Given their ruthlessness their defeat is critical (I feel the same way about the 'House of Saud') but I would be weary of supporting opposition forces. They day after IS gained control of Mosul --
The bodies of 44 Sunni prisoners were found in a government-controlled police station in Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. They had all been shot Monday night in the head or chest. Then the remains of four young men who had been shot were found dumped Tuesday on a street in a Baghdad neighborhood controlled by Shiite militiamen.
By evening, it was Shiites who were the victims again, as a suicide bombing in a crowded market in Sadr City killed at least 14 people, local hospital officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/middleeast/sectarian-violence-appears-to-spread-to-streets-of-baghdad.html
As you can see how easily sects can be radicalized or tolerate their existence due to the protection they offer from terrorizing militias.
AgingAmerican
(12,958 posts)Religious fundamentalism.
Gun fundamentalism
Tax fundamentalism
Eco fundamentalism
Fundamentalism pretty much invites terrorism.
