Absorbing the Aftermath

My feelings in the aftermath of the senseless attacks in London yesterday are myriad and complex. I am of course angry. Angry that anyone professing membership in the human race can wantonly, randomly attack innocent civillians as they go about the ordinary business of their daily lives. Terrorism is the lowest, least honorable way of expressing protest known to the human race. I can not imagine anything moving me to take such action.

What drives a person to embrace such extreme measures? What makes a human being strap on a suicide-bomb and set it off, killing themselves and as many innocents as possible? At the risk of getting bitch-slapped by the likes of Karl Rove, I maintain that we need to try to understand the motivations of our enemy.

Sun Tzu, in The Art of War instructed us to know our enemy if we desired victory. I am not a scholar of the politics and societies of the middle east. I do not hold a PhD in Anthropology or Comparative Montheistic Theology. I am, however, a rational and concerned human being; and I do have an above-average IQ and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physiological Psychology (my area of expertise is the physical structure of the brain, not the expression of mood, or affect) I do hold a minor in Anthropology.

We are in this muddle of multiple messes because some of our forebears had colonial aspirations and delusions of grandeur and heady superiority. The map of the middle east as we know it was drawn up by Winston Churchill in a Baghdad cafe, with a country allotted to each oil company. Traditional ethnic rivals found themselves countrymen, and it was never an easy fit. Countries with oil had infrastructure developed and modern life introduced. Countries without oil were left to flounder. An insurmountable dichotomy arose between the haves and the have-nots. A man who can't feed his family resents seeing a neighbor throw out a feast with the garbage. This plants seeds of hatred.

Western hubris and paternalistic arrogance toward the middle east dates back a thousand years, to the time of the crusades. The "Father-knows-Best" attitude of the western world does not play well in any society that predates the Christian era by a few thousand years. It is probably especially galling to have western "superiority" shoved down their throats when one considers that the Islamic Clerics of the time kept the texts and rituals of Christianity alive during the dark ages, when western civilization was anything but. Remember, we are out to civilize the "Cradle of Civilization" and that seems out of balance somehow.

I am not offering "therapy" to our enemies. But understanding, on the other hand, is crucial. Without understanding we have no hope of prevailing. We are just flinging rocks in the dark as long as we refuse to know our enemy.

We need to study the cultures of the geographic areas that have become a breeding ground for terrorism. Terrorism grows from desperation, from deep hatred, from hopelessness. Young men with bright futures don't tend to blow themselves up for ideology. People with bleak futures are the people who become suicide-bombers for Hammas and Islamic Jihad and now, al Qaeda. People with no hope for a better future are easily manipulated into the commition of unspeakable acts.

The populations of the middle east have been screwed over by the west for a long time, and they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Colonialism was brutal, and oil wealth was stolen. Sovereign governments were overthrown by western-backed coups so puppet governments friendly to oil companies could be installed.

These things all happened. We can deny them, but that does not mean they did not occur, any more than I can insist that the sky is purple, and that anyone who disagrees is an unpatriotic traitor who should be taken out and shot. I could unleash a Robespierre-like reign of terror and execute everyone who insisted the sky was blue, but that still would not make the sky purple. And we still meddled in the middle east when we had no right to do so, and now we, the ascendents of the robber-barons, are paying the price.

The cultures of the mid-east have no history of democracy, no history of representative government. They have a history of trade and commerce, a history of capitalism, but no history of democracy. Social structures have remained essentially feudal and patriarchal in spite of western efforts at transformation.

The cultures of the middle east not only lack a history of democracy, they lack a history of cooperation. It is a brutal landscape and a harsh climate. Everyone has heard the Arab parable about the two brothers who will fight to the death, but join together to fight their cousin. They will fight their cousin to the death; but in the presence of a member of another clan, the cousin will join them in yet another fight to the death.

A hundred years ago, a golden opportunity was lost, because of greed. If the oil barons had traded on the tradition of commerce and capitalism, instead of faux democracy and puppet regimes, we would behold a vastly different middle east today. But why share fairly when you can just take it all? The world will never know what could have been, but it is certain that a better present could have been brought about with a little forthought, compassion, and cultural literacy.

Our meddling has had some very undesirable side effects, not the least of which is the loss of status the women of the middle east have suffered. Islam is not in and of itself an anti-woman religion, no more than Judaism or Christianity. Mohammed's wife owned property, operated a commercial enterprise, and was his equal in all things. The way Islam is being interpretted and practiced in the modern era by a few fanatical jihadists in madrassas throughout impoverished areas of the region is an affront to the teachings of Mohammed.

If we have any hope of curbing the proliferation of terrorism, we must understand our enemy. There are thousands of Anthropology majors selling sweaters in Gap's throughout the land who could give us an assist in understanding what we are up against. Let's bring on the Liberal Arts grads. It isn't fair to ask them to clean up the mess that a bunch of MBA's made, but it has to be done, and the folks who mucked it up not only don't have the skills to fix what they broke, they just don't care.