{"id":2837,"date":"2002-08-21T15:57:44","date_gmt":"2002-08-21T15:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2002-08-21T15:57:44","modified_gmt":"2002-08-21T15:57:44","slug":"terrorism-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2837","title":{"rendered":"TERRORISM, PART 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, let me try and set some expectations. I am not a military historian or expert; I have no \u0091inside\u0092 knowledge of our plans, responses or of the plans or responses of those opposed to us. I do not intend to talk about the tactical issues involved in practicing terrorism, nor about the tactics of suppressing it. Lots of folks in the Blogosphere seem to feel that they are terrorism and counterterrorism experts; maybe they are graduates of Ft. Benning, or maybe they read a Tom Clancy book once. I can\u0092t opine, because I am not an expert.
\nWhat I am<\/u> is a citizen, and what I am qualified to speak about is our goals and the acceptable costs and range of paths toward those goals. The rest is up to the professionals.
\nFirst, unlike conventional wars, which are typically at root fought for objective interests, I\u0092ll argue that terrorist wars are fought as much for emotional and psychological reasons\u0085in short, out of hate and frustration.
\nWhere does the hate and frustration come from? That\u0092s<\/u> the $64 million question\u0085
\nHere, I\u0092ll step over to the faar left side of the room and introduce \u0091liberation theory\u0092. This is a catch-all critical theory that explains all of Western society in the context of the various relationships created by the market and between classes of people, which are defined in this model by power and ultimately oppression. For some reading, I\u0092ll suggest first, and foremost, Franz Fanon<\/A>. His work (including the referenced \u0091Wretched of the Earth\u0092 is probably the cornerstone of what Paolo Freire called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/A>.
\nEssentially, (and I\u0092m running on old memory here) these works translate essentially all relationships into relationships of power. Since the market, and particularly the extractive colonial markets, in which colonies were essentially sources of raw materials and inexpensive labor, uses power – the power of the colonial military, the superior technology and economy of the colonizer, they define the relationships between colonizer and colonized\u0085which to them is both a national and a racial relationship\u0085as oppressive. The colonizer oppresses the colonized.
\nNow I don\u0092t agree with much, if any, of liberation theory. I believe that they started out with their conclusion and ideology and constructed theories to support it. But first, it is a useful and coherent analysis, and second and far more important, it is impossible to understand the roots of modern terrorism without understanding this body of work.
\nRead these quotes from Freire<\/p>\n

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion<\/I> of the vocation of becoming more human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not a historical vocation. Indeed to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not<\/I> a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
\nBecause it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
\nThis, then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to \u0093soften\u0094 the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their \u0093generosity\u0094, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this \u0093generosity\u0094, which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And another one:<\/p>\n

Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.
\nViolence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them. For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call “the oppressed” but — depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not –“those people” or “the blind and envious masses” or “savages” or “natives” or “subversives”) who are disaffected, who are “violent,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” or “ferocious” when they react to the violence of the oppressors.
\nYet it is — paradoxical though it may seem — precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You have to realize that all three of the waves of terror in our time come from the philosophical roots set out here. First, the terrorist wars against colonial powers; then the terrorist attacks against manifestations of the capitalist state by the academic terrorists; and now the Arab terrorist war against Israel, and by proxy, the West.
\nI had leant to the assumption that because the latest round of terrorists used the language and rhetoric of Islam, that what we were seeing was a war of religious fanatics against the West. And to be sure, the mullah\u0092s rhetoric on Friday nights sounds like that. But go back and reread (either in my blog<\/a> or the original articles from the Times<\/a> and Ha\u0092aretz<\/a>) the interviews with the \u0091failed\u0092 terrorists.
\nDoes this sound like religious fanaticism? For myself, I have an easier time placing it in the context of alienation and a striving for national liberation. I think they have more in common with the kids who were pulled into the Weather Underground, and in support, I\u0092ll point out that almost all of the leadership of the Palestinian\/Arab terror movement has been from the highly Westernized upper-middle class.
\nI\u0092m wondering if we are trying to fight the wrong war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, let me try and set some expectations. I am not a military historian or expert; I have no \u0091inside\u0092 knowledge of our plans, responses or of the plans or responses of those opposed to us. I do not intend to talk about the tactical issues involved in practicing terrorism, nor about the tactics of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}