Cause ... or effect?

In a discussion that veered to the causes of terrorism, some colleagues took the position that the problems we have with terrorism are only weakly linked to socio-economic conditions, the invasion of Iraq, the American bases that had been constructed on Saudi soil, despair and unemployment among those of Middle Eastern descent, and other events. The real problem causing terrorism’s escalation, according to my colleagues’ position, is inherent in religious fundamentalism. As I understand their premise, all the events that might ordinarily lead to violence are coincidental. The actual incitement is the religion itself.

I am no fan of any organized religion but I believe that that’s a simplistic argument. It ignores the madrasas boarding schools where poor families in the Middle East, who have no access to free public education, send their children, by the tens of thousands, to learn. Those children not only get an education, they get an indoctrination, isolated from families who might offer alternative viewpoints. The rank and file of the Taliban and al Qaeda are said to have been mostly products of these boarding schools. Poverty created the opportunity to mold impressionable children into eventual jihadists. It still does.

But, the other side might counter, young second-generation Muslim-Europeans are shucking it all and becoming terrorists. Since they weren’t subjected to indoctrination as children, but freely chose jihad, the argument goes, the fundamentalist Muslim religion, in and of itself, must be enough to incite terrorism.

I don’t buy that argument. Religion has been used to start wars, justify racism, murder, torture, and probably to justify every type of horrible act of which man is capable. But how do people get sucked in? What causes people to embrace forms of religion that preach violence? Is everybody susceptible or only those who have some sort of a genetic flaw?

I am not convinced that violent fundamentalism falls on the “cause” side of the equation in a cause-and-effect analysis. I suspect that, for the most part, it belongs on the effect side. I am also not persuaded that it’s because of something inherent solely in the Muslim religion.

What if there were no free public education in the U.S., and most of us were too poor to send our kids to school? But Pat Robertson or somebody like him ran free boarding schools where the curriculum included a good education in the basics along with Robertson’s interpretations of Christianity (sprinkled heavily with his ideas on how to deal with people he didn’t like). Might the U.S. have tens of thousands of thoroughly indoctrinated, potentially violent Christian fundamentalists?

What if we had a king, not a president, and that this oppressive monarch allowed Saudi Arabia to build military bases in places that held special meaning for us? Would we be angry? Might some of the tens of thousands of graduates of the Pat Robertson boarding schools get radical about it?

What if a Muslim super-power invaded Canada on some phony pretext? Would some of us cross the border to fight the invaders? Would we feel threatened that we might be next – especially if the guy leading the invasion had made it clear that he coveted Canada’s natural resources (and our country was rich in those same resources)?

Would more of us get religion? Would the fundamentalists among us find passages in the Bible to justify blowing up the enemy?

Aren’t a lot of us, right now, willing to justify open-ended imprisonment of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo, who are not charged with any crime? Aren’t a good many of us, right now, willing to give our government carte blanche to torture those prisoners or do anything else it wants to them? Don’t some Americans already use religion as a justification for this? What else might we feel justified in doing if we feel further threatened?

It’s easy to discount cause-and-effect in all terrorism in and about the Middle East by shaking our heads and saying, it’s those insane fundamentalist Muslims. Lay it all on their religion. In this view, somebody picks up the Koran, sees a passage about killing infidels, and goes from his nice little life in the suburbs to strapping explosives on his chest so he can blow up a bus or a pizza parlor or a subway. Our emotions demand that we demonize our enemy this way. We were attacked, damn it. And we hadn’t done a thing to provoke the attack.

But guess what? Those we’re demonizing appear to feel the same way about us.

I am a firm believer in cause-and-effect. The actions of the Western world against the Middle East, over the past half-century or more — but especially since Iraq — provoked and continue to provoke a violent push-back. It’s frightening and horrible and totally unjustifiable. But it’s also somewhat predictable and understandable. You just can’t dismiss a history of provocation as unimportant and lay it all down to religious fanaticism. Or, okay, maybe you can. But I can’t.

As long as we insist on seeing all this as a spontaneous combustion of sorts, totally unpredictable, we won’t be able to consider what steps we need to take to turn it around.

Unsacred Cows

A colleague in a private online forum in which I participate got angry, as I predicted some would, after reading what I had to say about parallels between Bush administration and Nazi propaganda (see my 12/23/05 blog post). My colleague’s outrage seems a reaction to the very word, Nazi — so reflexive that she went on for several paragraphs with condemnations that had absolutely nothing to do with what I actually wrote. I’ve seen such outrage from other people before.

It seems as if these good folks want to believe that the Nazis were a unique anomaly. They insist that nothing should be placed nearby or even mentioned in the same breath.

The problem with treating the Nazis as if so thoroughly unrelated to anyone else, a sort of untouchable breed of unholy cow, is that the herd is full of similar animals.

If we don’t learn to stare past the horrors of the end result — the holocaust — to see Nazism’s beginnings, we won’t be able to prevent a manifestation of a Nazi-like culture elsewhere. Setting Nazism so far apart requires that we minimize anything similar that is on a smaller scale. We can convince ourselves the smaller, similar actions and tactics are benign by comparison and therefore, not similar at all. But all things begin small. Nazism did too. And that’s the whole point.

It’s worth repeating part of the passage I quoted earlier from Milton Mayer’s book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945":

>> Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.<<

Given the right set of circumstances, any government can exhibit Nazi-like traits. And any people can be convinced that the government’s actions are necessary to their survival.

If we insist on setting Hitler and the Nazis in a distant place that nothing and no one else can approach, we put too much distance between us and our understanding of how such movements begin, develop, and , if unchecked, overwhelm. We, ironically enough, almost invite a new proliferation of the unsacred cow by not being able to recognize it — and cull it — when it first appears in the herd.

Why worry about small changes? Because radical shifts occur millimeter by millimeter.

I know that a good number of people -- on the left as well as the right -- get pissed at comparisons between the Bush administration and the Nazis. But, that's probably because people can't divorce in their minds the horrors of the holocaust from Nazism. There was more to Nazism than the death camps. And there are other things to fear from a government that emulates some of the Nazis' early tactics and actions.

The changes in German society that made it possible for Hitler to rise in power happened millimeter by millimeter, as is documented in an excerpt from a book by Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 1945," a German who lived through it. A longish excerpt of that book is posted here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/12819/467

Read it, please. And pass it on.

Here's a tiny portion:
>>The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.<<

Who else wants to spy on the law-abiding citizen? Now the NYC Police get caught doing it.

Anyone who thinks that the government, at the local, state, and federal level, ought to be able to snoop on anyone at all, remember: even if you agree with those in power now, you may not agree with the next regime. Even if you are complacent about spies in the midst of those protesting today, think how you will feel if the guys you hate most come into power, you want to make your objections to their policies known, and YOU become a target.

Today's New York Times tells us the New York City Police have been spying on protestors -- and not just spying but creating disturbances that can turn a peaceful protest into something that's no longer peaceful.

Funny thing about peaceful protests that go wrong: under the Patriot Act provisions that Bush and friends are trying to ram through Congress (and might still succeed in getting through), such protests can be relabeled as terrorist activities -- and the participants labeled as terrorists. This would be true, even if the folks who started the ruckus were sham participants. And really -- how would you know if the disturbances were caused by actual protestors or by infiltrators?

Want to bet the NYC police not the only ones doing this sort of thing?

An article everyone should read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html

SNIPPET:
>>Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show...officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present...At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.<<

Let's Declare a Global War on Bullshit 1

Okay, let me see if I have this straight. George W. Bush admits that he has ordered wiretaps of private citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA) even though such wiretaps are illegal without a warrant from a judge. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/politics/18bush.html?hp&ex=1134882000&en=5b0fa310edb6186f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush claims that he had to do it, legal or not, because this eavesdropping on thousands of Americans is "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists."

Bush also insists that Congress must re-authorize some of the most troubling provisions of the so-called Patriot Act, that expand the executive branch's authority to eavesdrop on citizens who aren't accused of anything, limit their rights to know they have been eavesdropped upon, and otherwise curtail their civil liberties -- even if no evidence exists that they are engaged in any terrorist or criminal activities. Why? Bush claims: "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment."

Well, why do we need such a law when, no matter how far the law goes in erasing our civil liberties, Bush has proven he will ignore the law go farther still? Why have any laws when George W. Bush sees himself as more of a monarch than a president, able to ignore the legislative and judicial branches of government and do whatever he damned well wants?

This is a president who took us into war on the basis of a lie. He now claims it was all the fault of bad intelligence but, if I could deduce that the WMD claims were lies, and I didn't have access to any intelligence, how did the bad intel fool Bush?

This is a president who fought for the right to torture prisoners of war (who he refuses to call POWs, precisely so he can circumvent the Geneva Conventions against torture and other ill treatment).

When are we going to stop ducking under our beds every time the president and his men yell "terrorist" and instead, assess the situation as it really is?

We're not in a war against terrorism. You can't wage war against an improper noun. Yes, there are terrorists out there but they use the tactics they use precisely because they don't have the tools to wage a more effective war.

But for those who really think that we can fight a war against an idea or an activity instead of a country, maybe the first war we should wage against improper nouns is the global war against bullshit.

Because that, more than anything, is what endangers the people of the United States and the world. As long as people believe the bullshit spread by this administration -- and act as if it makes sense -- everyone is in danger. Everyone. Cut the bullshit. Stop listening to the bullshit. Stop believing the bullshit. Stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the bullshit. And we will immediately be safer, stronger and more free.