Fighting terrorism

How do we deal with terrorists? After the fact, we find them and disarm or, if necessary, eliminate them. Before the fact, we try to find them and then we do the same. That is, with real terrorists: people who kill, maim and rape unsuspecting, usually unarmed others.
Then we try to contain potential terrorists. We find them among the psychopaths: people without conscience, without remorse, without compassion, without empathy. Most psychopaths are made: by humiliation and torture, that is, by other people who are already psychopaths. And sometimes by extremists: people with lofty goals who consider everything acceptable that will lead to their goals. Extremism is fanaticism turned into action. More often than not, fanaticism is religious. What is wrong with religion?
There is not necessarily anything wrong with religion. We could state, more fundamentally, that out there is no such thing as religion, only religious people, people with certain convictions.
The most practical way is to look at religion as a booster. It makes broad-minded people more broad-minded, even incredibly so. And it makes narrow-minded people more narrow-minded, even incredibly so. It makes humane people more humane, and inhumane people more inhumane. It makes the wise wiser and the fools more foolish.
The problem of the superhuman is that it has so much to offer to the inhuman. The inhuman feels at home in the superhuman. And so the strongest light attracts also the strongest darkness. The most peaceful religions, like Buddhism, are more mental hygiene than religion. Confucianism is even more so. Though it can be stifling, it is rarely violent.
Religions that touch our soul the deepest, evoke the most enthusiasm, have the darkest fringes. Christianity and Islam come to mind. Fortunately, Christianity seems on the whole to have passed its psychopathic excrescences, Islam still has it. But when Christianity was as old as Islam is today, the religious wars were still in the future. An the first centuries of Christianity after it came into the open, where more violent and mad and cruel than Islam was in its first centuries. During the Crusades, the Europeans were much more primitive and cruel butchers and the Saracens were relatively enlightened, cultured and mild-mannered.
It is not religion that is decisive, but the mind-set of the believers.
Suppression of women in many non-Christian cultures is unbelievable to modern Europeans. When did we start to appreciate and value women? Around 1200 the Church began to teach that women should not be forced to be married against their will. That enlightened view started in the South of France and became part of chivalry, later of the cult of the gentilhomme, the gentleman. And where did the troubadours get it? From the highly cultured Moors in Spain. The people that were later, together withe Jews, wholesale murdered and subjugated by the barbaric Spanish Christians. The Spanish Inquisition and its auto-de-fés made even Rome look tame.

How many psychopaths are there? A reasonable estimate is around 2% of the population. Some may be born that way, others become psychopaths by growing up with psychopaths, or mixing with psychopaths in war, guerrilla, revolution or organized crime. The nazis emptied the prisons and offered the inmates work in the concentration camps. A few psychopaths in positions of power may unleash the others on the population at large.

Terrorists as we know them the last decades are small fry. The big thing is when regimes are run by psychopaths. Usually they remain at the intermediate level: warlords and crime bosses in failed states. Sometimes they come to the top and unleash a reign of terror. Not all dictators are psychopaths, but many fill the description, most, I suspect.

When, around 1980, I tried to identify the main international challenges, the first was cruelty, torture and terror, especially terrorist regimes. If you are interested in the history, the psychology and the sociology of terror, you may read the third chapter of  How People Make the World.* It includes what we should do about it.

The debate if Islam is a violent or a peaceful religion, is besides the point. It is both, of course. It is a source of inspiration for peaceful people. And also for violent people. For a full appreciation of women. And for a rampant suppression of women. As is true for all religions. Also the Bible is full of texts supporting one point of view as well as the other.

By the way, what is the easiest and the fastest way to grow and promote psychopaths? Consistent, mean, immense humiliation. We may have to confront terrorists and to isolate potential terrorists, but on the long run we have to eradicate humiliation - of any kind, in any shape.
To solve terrorism, fear doesn’t help, anger doesn’t help, prayer doesn’t help. A modicum of respect does. Also for the unwashed, the unkempt, the backward, the angry. If necessary, we should even kill respectfully.

Weird? Read Big Six Henderson by Jules Loh.* This feature ends: He was a legend in his time, all right, and not just because of his uncanny skill and his zealotry. He also had e reputation for fair play and decent treatment of the moonshiners he caught. ‘I never regarded them as doing something evil, just illegal,’ Big Six Henderson said, ‘and I never abused them.’ The big man thumbed through a sheaf of his faded daily reports, looking wistfully at the names. ‘Killed a few, but never abused them.’


*Hans TenDam - How People Make the World: The Ten Global Challenges, an Essay on Politics, Civilization and Humanity.   http://www.lulu.com      http://www.onlineoriginals.com
* Rene J. Cappon - The Associated Press Guide to News Writing

ATROCITIES

(This is a selction from a text I wrote more than thirty years ago. Still relevant and today once more actual.)

Atrocities are what people are doing to people. Atrocities mean violence - unimaginable, unpredictable, unstoppable violence. Terror means wanton manipulation and assault, chase, rape, torture, inquisition, execution. It means being shot, slain, burned, slaughtered, drowned, or starved to death. It means horror, loneliness, impotence, madness, grief, guilt, shame, disgust, repugnance, rage, malice, rancor, hate, thirst, hunger, filth, cold. Above all, it means intense pain, fear and despair, until mind and body become unhinged. Terror is the breaking of body and spirit. Fear for our own life and limbs is often not the worst fear. Even more terrifying is fear of what may be done to our children, our parents, our family and our friends. Often, mental torture is added to physical torture. Where brutality reins freely, brutes grow smart and mean.

Terror occurs in mob violence and in lynch parties, in revenge, capture and abduction, in arrest, interrogation and internment, and in slavery. And in genocide, At large, terror occurs in repressive tyrannies and dictatorships and in occupied countries, especially when occupation forces encounter armed resistance. It occurs in revolutions, counterrevolutions, civil wars, especially religious and ideological wars.
Whatever the danger of ‘terrorists’, bands of political extremists using wanton violence to gain political attention and reach political ends, the larger challenge are terrorist regimes.
    Revolutions and civil wars, where the enemies are fellow citizens, usually breed more terror than do wars between countries. They destroy our feeling of a safe home-base among people to whom we belong. Religious and ideological wars are even more cruel and dangerous because they tend to destroy any remaining pragmatism and business sense.
   
Why are people cruel? Why do they torture? Why do they rape and kill and maim others, apart from just fighting? Many people like to watch violence and cruelty, blood and gore. Horror movies are entertainment. Victim behavior may trigger brutality in others. Masochism may trigger sadism, and sadism may trigger masochism. To explain violence we have to understand the tyrants, the butchers, the executioners, the brutes and the bullies. We also have to understand the perpetrators farther away: the pay masters, the bosses, the organizers, the people who rule or benefit.
    Perpetrators of cruelty and torture come in many types. Whatever the type of perpetrator, engaging in cruelty, torture and terror overcompensates for deep feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
Cruelty, torture and terror constitute the ultimate lustful assertion, being unrestrained and all-present in the fear and horror and powerlessness of others. It transforms impotence in omnipotence, playing God or the Devil.  Just as an actor or musician basks in the attention and admiration of his audience, so a terrorist basks in the pain of his victims and the fear in spectators.
    Brutes see their descent into barbarism and sadism as courageous, hard, only for the strong. Brutes view others as sleepers, dreamers, sentimental squeakers, timid, afraid, soft and vulnerable. They view common folks as children of a lesser God.
   
What conditions turn people into brutes? The main breeding ground for brutes is intimidation and humiliation from an early age. Any continuous inhuman treatment of people sows the seeds of an inhuman response. Whenever people in authority treat others as small, insignificant or despicable, they create losers. In such losers, envy and hate may fester, and one day this hate may erupt. Brutality breeds brutes.
    The first brutes are born, not bred. ‘Psychopaths’ simply appear to lack conscience - or rather empathy. Their inhumanity is not an emotional reaction to being belittled, ignored, intimidated or rejected, but is rather a fact of life. Biological factors may play a role. As we analyze political terror here, physical factors are less important. But they do help to explain the beginnings.
       
We have to stop cruelty and terror, and we must do so without doubt, without hesitation, without undue consideration, and without becoming infected with what we try to eradicate. There are great differences between the surgeon who wields his knife, the butcher who wields his knife, and the sadist who wields his knife. Violence is usually is a butcher’s job. This job may become sadistic, but it must become surgical. A good cause does not need hate; it needs resolve. Surgeons don’t attack a cancer furiously with a kitchen knife. They concentrate on the job of cutting it out, calmly but definitely.
    Any timorous response to actual terrorism only strengthens it. Terrorism needs to be confronted squarely and strongly - without the responder becoming infected with the unholy triad of fear, hate and disgust. Even without indifference.
    Against fear, hate and disgust, we must mobilize wrath. Wrath is the kind of rage that is eye-opening instead of blinding. Wrath is adamant anger that makes us grow, not shrink. It makes us more human, not less human. Wrath is the unyielding strength of ‘Enough!’
    Sometimes terror for political reasons dies out gradually, just as some cancers spontaneously disappear. But no one in his right mind will count on this. Machiavelli already warned: malevolence is not vanquished by time, nor placated by gifts.
Tolerating terror is the penultimate political malpractice. The ultimate is to commit terror.    
If we want to fight terror, we need wrath and more: courage, common sense, and good organization. And preferably, those who fight terror are bachelors. If we speak or write about terror, we must spoil the sense of sport of the perpetrators. Contempt is good, if it is subdued and cool, and expressed without moral indignation. Indignation only entangles us in the mind web of the perpetrators, and when that happens their nostrils widen.
    The first root of political terror is extremism, the idea that the end justifies the means, that superhuman ends justify inhuman means. Extremism is the politics of fanaticism, while fanaticism is the psychology of extremism. The willingness to use extreme means for noble ends leads as surely to terror as indifferent or lecherous brutality does. Many fanatics at first abhor violence, but they start to accept its iron ‘necessity’. After all, all other methods have failed to convert the stubborn heathens and their chiefs and priests. The fanatics make themselves hard, unyielding servants of their higher purpose. Preaching fanatics are hot and acting fanatics are cold, but their henchmen are hot again.
    We have to see extremism for what it is: a sign of bigotry - and of incompetence. Competent people do not need either corruption or extremism. Ambition with incompetence breeds immorality. Hardness and extreme measures are indications of incompetence, just as a stainless steel condom would be a sign of impotence. If we really stand for something, we do not need to arm ourselves with extremist outcry.
    Other breeding grounds are poor areas filled with desperate people. Kids take to streets. Gangs offer compensation for inferiority feelings that lurk during adolescence, especially in boys. When we want to be somebody, but we are still nobody, our self-esteem is most easily corroded. Gangs offer protection, belonging, identity and self-worth.
    What else can we do? We should give more respect to feminine ideals in our society, ideals such as tenderness, intimacy, warmth. We can trade in our notions of macho for truer models of masculinity. (A real man fights other men and sleeps with women, a macho beats women and doesn’t dare to sleep with men.) Masculinity stands for courage, perseverance, honor, reliability - virtues that may be tempered and improved by feminine values. The ‘gentle man’ is one of the greatest inventions of civilization, in spite of the affectation, weakness and hypocrisy that may accompany it. By being gentlemen, men can have self-respect without being macho. Of course, we should know when to stop being gentle - and when to stop being violent.
   
Terror is the loss of reason, the loss of innocence, the loss of protection, the loss of hope, the loss of civilization. Cruelty, torture and terror constitute the ultimate pornography, the ultimate inhumanity. Large-scale atrocities are the deepest challenge, a black hole opening in society. No one wrote better about the opening of this black hole than Yeats in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity

The ‘blood-dimmed tide’ is being loosed again.

(From Chapter 3 in my book The Ten Global Challenges: How People Make the World, An essay on politics, civilization and humanity. At www.lulu.com. Also as e-book at www.onlineorginals.com.)

The War on Terror

The War on Terror cannot be won, I've read many times. That's true, but I can't remember I've read anything more downright stupid.
First of all, the reverse is also true and much more important: they can't win.
And second, it is irrelevant that we can't win. Why?

Remember that other (in)famous statement: The War on Drugs cannot be won. Let me add a third one, that anyone would agree on: The War on Crime cannot be won. How long are we fighting crime? At the very least since the beginning of modern police, almost 200 years ago. And we still have rampant crime. So we lost that war? Let's assume we would stop fighting crime, what would happen? Theft, robbery, fraud, murder, mayhem would multiply. We would have vigilantes and many unsavory types of self-defense.
The only real question is: should we do more? Or could we do better? Is the sum total of all our efforts worth the trouble? We can't win the war on crime, unless we somehow could prevent people having criminal intentions. That seems a long way off, if at all doable. The question is even if that would be desirable. A society without crime may have negative side-effects we could consider undesirable. The only real questions are if we can be more effective and if we can be more efficient in our crime fighting.

That is the same question with the war on terror: are we effective enough and are we efficient enough? Could we direct our efforts better? Should we do more? Can we do better with the resources we are spending? At least theoretically, and probably also practically, the answers to those questions are affirmative.
The War on Poverty and the War on Hunger are not won. Still, a larger percentage of people are not hungry and not poor, compared to where we have been before. We are not doing really good, but we are not doing really bad either. We should seek room for improvement, not give room to despair. We need realism, not fatalism. The road to fatalism is fatal. Even more fatal than the road of Great Expectations.

In fighting the War on Terror, we need also realism, not fatalism. And we don't need absolutism. If we want to be sure that no children would ever be abused in their families, we need a form of control that would bring its own abuse. We shouldn't go there. And, of course, we shouldn't simply accept that children are abused in families. We should always seek to improve on present conditions.

With the War on Drugs, we may also do things that are counterproductive. Therefore, many people advocate legalizing drugs. Those people have a point, I think. Think about the War on Alcohol, that helped institutionalize an organized crime that we are still suffering from. But legalize alll drugs for everybody all of the time? Seems wrong, and worse: counterproductive.

Terror is the ultimate social evil. But we should not forget that terrrorist regimes create much more havoc than terrorist groups. In my book How People Make the World, I consider Terror the oldest and most fundamental of the ten global challenges we are facing. We should go on fighting that war, as smart and as tenacious as can be. And efforts to prevention are an essential ingredient. Let's set realistic goals, let's have an effective strategy, let's have smart tactics (yes Sun Tzu, we are listening!) and let's have efficient execution.

And let's not forget the War on Weakmindedness. Can't be won either.