"Going for Broke" is the headline in the article by William Keegan in the Guardian on 8 February 2005. His commentary on the latest Bush budget indicates that the poor will be bashed while the rich are assured that they can feel OK about their wealth.
Several things that need to be said in addition to his views. In the first place, all of the urban poor will have an opportunity over the next four years to express their dissatisfaction with the people that their votes helped to put in power and the American rich will probably have the experience that they do not want - namely first hand experience of what it is like to have the dispossessed revolt against their oppression.
Terrorist do not just happen. They are created by the forces that create increasing levels of difference between the rich and the poor and that force people into situations in which they feel that they have no future and have no access to the freedoms accorded to others. With nothing to lose, they fight to attain those things that they have been denied.
The "war on terrorism" that is portrayed by the Bush administration as a struggle against Islamic fundamentalist forces would be better directed against himself and those forces that create the great divides of inequality that give rise to the sense of hopelessness that drive fanatical attempts at redressing the balance.
While the current crop of fundamentalist terrorists among the Islamic community have been created by the oppression of regimes in the middle east put into place by the western powers that won two world wars and then trained by the Americans as a cheap fighting force against the Soviet incursions into Afghanistan the future crop of terrorists may well be experiencing their birth pangs as we speak among the the dispossessed at home in the United States.
Let's hope that the administration there will have an 'aha' moment and realise that what they are doing to their own citizens is sowing the seeds of a revolution. If they are successful, that revolution, when it comes will have an effect on the rest of the world as well and so it is in the interest of all of us to try and head it off now by objecting to policies which emasculate people and put paid to any ambition that they have for a decent future.
Going for Broke indeed - in many senses of that phrase.
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5 comments:
Garpet,
I can buy into much of what you wrote, but I don't totally accept your argument about terror. Most of the 911 hijackers came from middle class families. They were not poor, they were educated.
Over and over we are encountering radical Islamists who fit this profile.
It may be true that there are those who are poor, but this is a more complex puzzle.
Beyond that there is a fundamental problem with not addressing the regimes in the ME more carefully. There has been Western influence there, but it was not all the US. France and Britain held a very large role.
And the reality is that nothing has prevented these regimes from trying to improve the lives of their citizens, other than corruption and the many excuses they generate about why they cannot help themselves.
The biggest problem is ideology that says that if you do not believe as I do it is ok for me to murder you.
Jack, I think what Garpet eludes to when he speaks of the poor are the people who are experiencing a shortage of hope; hope for a better future etc (it's not necessarity that they have little money). This shortage of hope is beginning to start filtering up through the middle class where once it was confined to the lower classes. If you are outraged that these terrorists react to having their hopes and dreams crushed by domineering colonial superpowers in an usophisticated fashion (e.g. suicide bombing) you should also be rightly outraged at the massive amounts of damage and suffering inflicted by the Coalition. In which case, wouldn't you have to believe that the ideology that says it's ok for me to invade because you live differently is an equally large problem?
A very accurate comment Garpet. Hage (2003) refers to the internally dispossed (that is, those who already live inside the host country in a state of hopelessness) as the 'refugees of the interior'. I am also of the belief that it is cause for revolt; the possibility of which seems all too certain.
Please forgive the spelling and tautology.
Thanks for the comments and thanks for the defence.
Let me say in my own defence that I KNOW that others besides the US wer involved in the imposition of regimes on the people in the Middle East. If you read my comment again you may actually find that I said this.
I will NOT resile from my comment that dispossesion is the key to understanding terrorism. It is only people who feel that they have nothing to lose that can contemplate self destruction as the only way that they can make a difference.
Whether they are right or wrong is immaterial. I certainly do not condone terorism and would have no compunctions about killing someone who wanted to kill me before they could do so. That is called the right of self defence.
However by understanding what on earth motivates people to go outside all of the normal social modes of behaviour may well hold a clue to what has to be done to prevent such behaviour in the future.
The war on terrorism is like the war on drugs. It is unwinnable and all that happens is that a truck load of taxpayers money gets spent on making certain groups in society a lot richer while ensuring that other groups in society continue to feel the impact of the lack of success.
Fix the inequalities, fix the lack of freedom, fix the things that lead to people's reasons for being upset and you have a chance to elminate the NEED for someone to BECOME a terrorist.
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