An interesting alternative perspective on a hotly debated topic in this forum. http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/what-makes-a-terrorist Evidence might be a bit skewed; Krueger looked at GDP per capita as a metric to measure whether or not outrage at economic conditions in one's host country contributed to joining terrorist campaigns. That measure is hard to disentangle with the prevalent inequality behind the distribution of oil resources that markedly inflate GDP in the region. There may still be evidence that poverty causes terrorism (albeit indirectly). This is an interesting, and unconventional perspective on an issue that seems too often to have been relegated to dogma; poverty causes terrorism. Solve poverty. They hate our culture. They hate our freedom. etc. It turns out that it might be more complicated than it seems. It is not the ignorant who go haphazardly to their deaths; it is, more likely then not, the educated who do it purposefully. Learning more about the system causes certain people to be angrier, rather than more complacent. Perhaps with the resurgence of populist movements that have a hope of creating a better framework for civil liberties in the region, there can be some hope to counteract this.
That's interesting, especially given there are PEOPLE on this board who simultaneously support supression of freedoms and civil liberties and claim to oppose terrorism. IMO it's always been blatantly clear that terrorism causes terrorism, and these factors are the fuel of that terrorism. So wherever you see terrorism, you can figure out why it's happening by finding the other terrorist, and you can understand why it's happening on a certain scale by looking at these factors. This has held true for almost all of human history, and it is something that (based on my conversations with them) virtually all Middle Easterners are well aware of, since they were the Big Chief terrorists just a few centuries ago and they STILL don't call the events of that time terrorism. You know what they call/called it? They say it was the spreading of an ideology that freed people, that the enemies were not giving their own people their rights, that the new people in charge improved literacy, that their conquests were shown to be righteous due to the boom in schience and technology in their empire. They said that it was based on God's will, and that the Christians had to choose being with them or against them because the empire was at war with oppression. They retaliated against Jews (remember, Jews were a small minority at the time) by demolishing their properties, they gave them sovereignty over their own lands if they followed conditions, they made them wear clothing which would make them identifiable and trackable, etc. If we take a look at these definitions: I will add to that first definition "political, religious, ideological" and commercial reasons, unless you consider commercial reasons to be an ideology (which I do). I agree that suppression is a leading cause. But I wouldn't discount poverty and education completely - I haven't read the whole article, but I would be interested to know if he delved into the possibility that wealth DISPARITY and educational DISPARITY also contribute to the problem of terrorism.
When I took a course on this over a decade ago (god I'm getting old...), main causes were poverty, lack of political representation, and a symbolic ideology that inspires or drives meaning in young people with ****loads of time on their hands. The first terrorist movements were non-religious and secular. Some sources claim that the French Revolution the birthplace of modern terrorism, I guess because the medium was there to document and spread the news.Then the Communist movements in the early 1900s (and continued many decades later) that attempted to mimic what happened to France a hundred years earlier. There's a documentary by Adam Curtis that makes the case that leaders of the Iranian revolution were heavily influenced by Sartre. Much like movies by the Wachowski Bros (Matrix, V for Vendetta), they posited that the Western Modern life was a symbol of listless decay of the then-modernizing Middle East. I forgot the name of the American educated dude that went back and formed the underpinnings of fundamentalist revolutionary Islam in the 50's, but these were leaders with sometimes strong intellectual backgrounds, much different than the cave dwellers you see in the news. So it's sometimes for the same reason like where people try to find meaning in their early youth and start thinking about their purpose. Some join gangs. Others join cults. A terror group is a little of both. Like any war or movement, it's mostly the young that are sent off to fight and die. And like any war, without the poor being sympathetic to your cause, you can't properly fight. It's not only because they're raw recruits, but as a sympathetic audience, you can hide and blend in with everyone else when soldiers start kicking down doors. When you're hungry or homeless, you might be invited to a stranger's home as a welcome guest. A strong case for this theory is Ireland. The Irish were more willing to come to the table as their economy rose from the ashes and briefly outpaced the rest of Europe. As people had more to lose from collateral damage in their backyard, they were less likely to hide terrorists...and more willing to rat them out. And finally, in the Middle East, there's a strong case that as long as Autocratic, sometimes US-backed, regimes clamp down on other political parties and movements (sometimes with brutal and lengthy reprisals), there will always be a secular component to their locally inspired terror groups. Kinda makes the Tea Party and their occasionally violently veiled threats an actual Tea Party.
