Anti-Terrorism, a Message of Postulation

War has been ever present throughout most all of human history. The first pantheons of human religion typically contained some god of war, or at least a god with a strong hand in war, if not more than one. It has for so long been matter-of-fact that only just recently has war come under attack as unnecessary for human development. What changed was not just our nature, but our technology. (Sociologist James Henslin writes in his textbook Sociology, that human culture is directly based off the society's available technology.) With the globalization of the world, our interconnected network of world-wide communication via the internet, and enough physical means to develop the ideologies of tolerance and acceptance, we have had the exposure needed to realize that most humans are alike. Prejudice and racism and all their facets and dogma (historically common sources of justification for wars against other countries) have, in at least the first world and much, much of the third world, become wide spread symbols of evil. We can no longer use a people's nationality as a sole justification for war, many of us at least, as racism still prevails in all countries to such extent, America by no means an exception. The insightful of humans need an ethical justification, true reason, one clear to a reasonable being; as it should be.

The side effects of such a shift in culture have become evident by a few things: the UN and international community uses several peaceful means to deter acts of war, the most common of which is economic sanctioning, hence you don't see too much "Made in North Korea" at the store, although it's still there. Also, after the World Wars, war has never looked too pretty. There was a day where heroes, in the age of sword and bow, would go out, get beat up, and have a decent chance of suffering only survivable wounds, from which they could heal and go out again. When we added the additive of high powered explosives and poisonous chemical agents, and guns that can kill hundreds of men before running out of ammo... Well, I need not cite the world's sufferings from this era.

We realize war is bad. But we, humans, are far from eliminating it, in a sense at least.

There are two common connotations for the word War. To better illustrate the two, I'll dip into a little Arabic. The first is حرب, Harab, and it's the typical meaning of war: two countries dedicating allocated resources to fighting one another, with clear goals, and to the victor go the spoils. This one we have done a decent job at reducing. The second is مكافحة, Mukafiha, and it also means war, but it's a metaphorical war: the war on poverty, the war on pollution, the war on terrorism... It's not so clear, so so refined, you can't go in guns a blazing and shoot poverty in the face, because it doesn't have one. The impoverished, again metaphorically, have a face, but poverty itself is an outcome, one of a series of sociological events, out of any one person's control. This type of war cannot be fought on an individual level, it takes time, and shifts in culture. This is the view that needs to be applied to the war on terrorism. Really, we need to start the War on Terrorism (the Mukafiha), because right now we're locked in a War on Terrorists (the Harab), and that will last forever.

So, let's talk about this distinction, a war on terrorists verses terrorism. Fighting terrorists has been effective so far, al-Qaida once ruled wide expanses of countryside, and even held much higher positions in more formal settings. America came along, with some noteworthy support from our allies, and now they're living in caves trying to pick at the scab of what was once their glory days. These people did bad things, and still do, and we put a lot of man power into protecting the innocent.

But unfortunately that's not the end of the story, and we can't be so black&white if we are to adhere to the culture of unbiased, empirical, ethical observation of the world that we need to develop mankind. People aren't born wanting to take an RPG to everything under red, white and blue. There are a lot of factors that contribute into the breeding of terrorists. The main one so far as I can perceive is poverty.

Let's look at a desert: there's sand. And heat, lots and lots of heat... and more sand. Resources are scarce, it's easy to fight over hard-to-come-by water, let alone anything else. What this means that humans there in their primal stage of the ancient years had plenty of reasons to fight over these resources, for survival. The war became embedded in the culture there, as it did in most other regions of the world back then, but especially in the middle east. Because it is difficult to gather enough resources, it was also difficult to settle into cities, and thus tribal structure remained the predominant social hierarchy of the region. As war was common, having large families (more on that later, with population) was not only plausible, but became a symbol of prosperity, and honor. All this is normal, it's culture, it's how humans develop, it's hardwired into us.

This high level of intense desert survivalism lead to something else, a human need to explain the world around them in ways that gave us the things we need: things like hope, joy, relief from the stresses of the environment. Also, humans need mental stimulation, there's only so much you can learn from the desert when you have very little, primitive technology like the ancient peoples had. What's left to learn are life lessons, spiritual lessons. All this leads to religion. Hence the middle east becomes one of the most religious regions of the world, home to the worlds three largest religions today.

Now fast forward, to colonization. All these westerners come in, think they know a lot about the locals, and start drawing maps to fit all their expansionist needs. Most countries on maps you see in the middle east should never have existed. Thusly, combined with limited economies, governments have very little control over their peoples in the middle east. They really only exist in the big cities, then tribes remain the primary social unit elsewhere. Add oil, then you have the one resource abundant enough to contribute to anything near the global economic standard, established, again due to an interconnected, communicating world, and this centralizes the economy and the balance of power in the region.

Now add the population boom. Lots of people, in an area with high cultural connections, little lawful control by any authority figure, and so few resources there's just not enough for the people there, to include an education system capable of analyzing the situation from the inside-out or outside-in. Any human being raised under these conditions would react the same way: differently, depending on the person. But the situation will tilt the tables. There are lots of good, great people in the middle east. But the sociological aspects of the region described above, among many a great other reason, makes the middle east a hotbed for terrorism. If you dig deep into your insight, it's easy to see why so many of these people fight, because they're raised, not by others, but by the aspects of their environment, to believe that way, to think that way.

But reason and justification are two separate things. Ethics is a science, and it is one that like any true science is under constant development. Ethics now are different from ethics long ago. But like science, we can be wrong about ethics. The truths of right and wrong remain the same, we humans are just responsible for discovering them. It is an ethical truth that slavery is wrong, this is commonly accepted, as an example. Murder, most are quick to jump in and say, is wrong. But many would also say defense is a justifiable cause, that you may harm another who is attacking you to defend yourself. Thusly, where does the truth lie?

Ethics expert Dr Bruce Weinstein, in his book Ethical Intelligence (highly recommended), declares five main principles of ethics: do no harm, make things better, respect others, be fair, & be loving (or compassionate, he will explain). Murder clearly falls into the 'do no harm' category. But, would the terrorists not cause harm and kill and blow up cafes and schools and police stations and do all sorts of bad things? Yes they would, because to them the ends justify the means, and they take this to an extreme along with so many other extremes, hence the term extremism. But Dr Weinstein addresses this in a single statement, paraphrased: when harm is unavoidable, minimize it.

It's a sad-sad truth that right now, humanity only has so much available to them to fight terrorism. Much of what we could use goes to other ventures, some needed, like healthcare and education, and sometimes though we blow millions of dollars on sporting events and reality TV. These things are nice for entertainment reasons, I'm no prude, but the proportions of allocating resources for these things are just off. A topic for another day. The point here is that right now, in a temporal time, it is often possible to only stop terrorists, before they can cause great undue harm to the innocent, by ending their lives. This is not the most ethical choice, because harm is not minimized. It is less harm than if they had lived to move on and kill innocents, but it could be less. Remember that long list of social factors; mainly poverty, lack of education, and desperation to improve their world; that bred the terrorist mindset? All those things are external factors. Many terrorists are just trying to make things around them better, in their minds. The rebels always think they're the good guys. And this alone, the desire to do good, can be harnessed into reform. If these people saw directly the harm they do and its impacts, they could be retaught and reformed. Education is key.

Responding to ignorance with anger is just as destructive as the ignorance itself.

We cannot go to war for vengeance, for hate, for some kind of twisted justice where death is supposed to undo the death from before. This only breeds more destruction, more suffering. What we can fight for is the defense of innocent life still living. To protect the innocent from the darkest of tragedies. For those who don't know some of the extents terrorists go to to cause harm, it gets horrid. An example, America's military's medics don't just heal up our own, we will shoot a bad guy and send him straight to our medics, and when resources allow it, we do humanitarian work in places we fight in to help the locals. So when a terrorist sees this and decides to cut open a child's stomach, stick a bomb in their internal organs, sew them up, and send them to our medics' camps to blow us, and the kid, up, it's hard not to react with blind rage and some discontent for these groups. Bombs in busy city streets rarely kill their intended target, some high profile politician typically, but are sure to injure if not kill innocent by-standers. When they capture our guys and pull out their fingernails with pliers to extract information, it's an incredibly difficult road to not harbor prejudice.

Ethically, to remain objective and empirical is the way to go, but we simply don't have the resources allocated properly to sit down with every truly evil terrorist and reform him, not before he can kill and torture more innocents. Detainment will always be more ethical than murder, but the means to do so are hard to acquire. They're there, but to follow the ethical course will require far more of a cultural change then what we've accomplished.

If that's a lot to take in, it should be. My language, human language, is only so encompassing to portray these ideas. But now that the details are down, perhaps I can summarize this concept and still remain convincing.

Terrorism is an outcome of many sociological happenings, some thousands of years old, out of any one human's control. Terrorists don't know they're evil. They simply just don't know better because of the world around them, because of what they've had to learn from. Most of them simply want to make things better around them, an ethically justifiable goal. The problem is that leaders within these terrorist groups go to lengths so dark and sinister that it's impractical to blow off their most horrid of actions as consequence of their environment. They cause undue harm to innocent people. This doesn't mean that the most ethical solution is to kill and maim them right back, this truly only furthers the problem, as it gives them more to fight for, from their point of view. However, if we are to act in defense of the innocent, we must use what resources we have properly allocated to stop terrorist actions. Because of the shear number of terrorist cells, the only way to protect the most people is to kill the terrorists. Yet it still remains that the reformation of evil into good is better than the murder of people who have been bred into hatred and anger and evil. Anyone can be turned evil, usually by things outside of their control, but that does not justify the evil actions, and the innocent must be protected. Thusly, it is clear to conclude that although the current war on terrorism is justified, it is not the most ethical of actions. It is ethical, but it can be more ethical.

Please note, this must be taken with a grain of salt. It would be easy to exploit the semantics of anything I've written here, but try to understand the meaning of the ideas, not just the verbatim. If there's anything I want you to understand, it's that things aren't black and white; and that people are subject to the same vices all around the world, and they can change for better and for worse.

What's the solution to this problem? Well, I can't say exactly, not yet, but I can theorize. I'd say replacing killing with detainment would be a start. More development into non-lethal weaponry to make it effective in the war on terrorism would be drastically needed. If evil is shown mercy, it could change them. It would take time, resources, effort, but it would be more ethical. That is what separates good from evil, in that evil will give in to primal urges, initial reactions, without logic or reason, with zeal filling a hole where compassion is lost; and in that good will continue to show mercy in the face of darkness in the hope that retribution will pull forward and the evil will be turned. People can be made evil or good, by others, and by themselves.

Again, note, this is not an essay, it is an observation. It is meant not to provide detailed analysis, but to explain some overarching happenings, postulations, insight, and theorization. It is to be taken for what it is, and that is all I ask.

Also please note, as explicitly written in my disclaimer, everything in this blog is of my own personal opinion, and is not to be misinterpreted to be a representation of the opinion of any government or military entity.

All comments are welcome, and I truly hope you enjoyed this post. To all my readers, many thanks, and go be insightful!