On Terrorism (Part 1) – Understanding ourselves
Sun Tzu wrote in his treatise The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu’s strategies have withstood the test of time. Utilized by the most brilliant military minds, the principles he so wonderfully compiled in his writings have been underlying themes in countless victories from the battles fought by Alexander the Great, to the clashes of Saracen and crusader armies, from the Tet Offensive, to the Gulf War.
I think this is very important, before we try to understand our enemy, that we understand the need to know ourselves and understand our own strengths and vulnerabilities, to understand where we open ourselves up to attack, and where we allow ourselves to be caught up in thoughts, words, or actions that do not benefit us in the battles we face.
There is a question on many of our minds (one that comes to the fore whenever we read about a new attack, or a new massacre that’s taken place) about terrorism, specifically Islamic terrorism. We want to understand why these attacks happen and what is driving the attackers. We want to protect our families and friends, our countrymen and neighbors, we want to be able to prevent these attacks, to stop them before they take place, so we try to understand.
We talk amongst ourselves and use the information at hand to find the connection, the patterns, to discover the signs of danger so we can warn others and prevent further shedding of the blood of innocents. But before we can begin to understand our enemy – much less develop a strategy to defeat him – we have to first understand ourselves our own human nature. When I say we must know ourselves, what do I actually mean?
After all, it’s lovely to be able to make wise sounding, vague platitudes, but what does that mean to us in real life, and how will it help us in understanding and combating Islamic terrorism?
First of all, I want to make sure it’s clear (though I’m sure it’s not difficult to accept) that I don’t have all the answers, but I believe there is enough information out in the ether – from brilliant people who’ve focused on one aspect or another of this issue – that we can combine to attempt to pull together a picture of how to address the issues we face.
This is a topic that brilliant minds, both military and diplomatic, have tried to understand – though the question remains as to the desire of many of those who implement policy to really understand and take the necessary actions (when suggested by some of these brilliant minds) to prevent these attacks.
When doing research for this article (now a series of articles) I realized there are many, many aspects that come into consideration when trying to understand the motivation for terrorism. Edwin Bakker, Professor of (counter)terrorism studies at Leiden University, speaks about the complexity of the study of terrorism in his course “Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Comparing Theory and Practice.
He explains the different angles that are used to approach the issue, and how each is needed in the understanding of this phenomenon.
“Think of political science…” he says, “scholars in that field are very much interested where terrorism fits in in political systems, how it is maybe produced by political systems and how it influences that same system. How does terrorism have an impact on political processes, on decision making, on how governments act or react to terrorist incidents.”
“then you have military science, war studies. The term says it all. they’re mainly interested in the use of force, the use of the military to literately fight terrorism. Then we have international relations. Terrorism, at least for a long time, and in many countries, is pretty high on national political agendas, but also on the international one. scholars in the field of international relations want to know, who puts terrorism on the agenda and why. And what impacts the fight against terrorism has, for instance, on relationships between countries. Does it lead to cooperation, or more conflict? These are just a few questions they are interested in.
You have communication studies… terrorism, to some extent, is a tool for terrorists to spread the word, to spread a message, to create fear, to have an impact on society. Our scholars in the field of communication studies, want to know, how does that work? What is the role of the media? how and what circumstances influence whether or not a country is turned upside down by a terrorist attack; how can you limit, for instance, the impact of terrorism on societies.
Then there’s social psychology…there are quite a number of books that have in their title, the mind of the terrorist. We want to know what’s going on up there. How do they think? How do they behave? Are they different from you and me? Or not? Are they crazy or not? What are their characteristics, and what about group processes? Who radicalizes, and who not. How can we de-radicalize persons? All these are issues that are of importance in the fight against terrorism, in the struggle against terrorism, are studied by people in the field of psychology and social psychology.
Where to start approaching this question? Are we going to look at the behavior of individuals? Or look at the larger picture, the world political system and how terrorism fits in. Are we going to talk to people? Approach them? Try to interview of terrorist and people that fight terrorism? Or are we going to look at the facts? Are we going to get our data? Are we going to look at causes or the effects of terrorism?”
These are the many questions being asked in academia, for those who are studying this and attempting to come up with reasons why and ways to stop further radicalization, or further attacks. Bakker continues by saying “terrorism is highly complex, and that there is not one single explanation for terrorism. If you want to understand terrorism, you’ll have to look at many different causes.”
He is completely correct, there are so many factors involved, to the point where I could not adequately attempt to cover them all in any depth in only one article, so this will be an ongoing inquiry, until we’ve at least established a fair picture of the issue and what can be done.
I will try (in this article and the ones following) to cover various aspects of what causes terrorism, and what we can do as individuals and as a society to prevent further attacks. I’ll also take some of the prevailing myths and excuses and we will discover how many of the popular beliefs of terrorism are fact based, and how many are political or religious hyperbole.
To answer my earlier question however, the question of what I mean when I say we must “know ourselves,” I wanted to start by exploring the psychology behind some of the reasons people turn to extremist beliefs of behaviors.
When it comes to understanding ourselves, there are two aspects that need to be addressed, the first is the understanding of ourselves as human beings, understanding drivers and motivations for violence, especially violence in pursuit of political aim, or in the name of a greater cause.
Again, this is not done to find ways to excuse terrorism, or to make the perpetrators out to be the victim. Rather, it’s done so that we can get a glimpse of the motivations and rationale of those who use this type of cowardly action to wage war and hopefully keep ourselves from engaging in similar thought processes and dangerous rhetoric or ideas.
Mental illness and social psychology
When the conversation of terrorism comes up (online or in person) we often hear various statements and excuses from the different sides of the political divide. One side in particular likes to claim that there is a witch hunt underway for Muslims, to the point where, if a “white” person shoots up a movie theater he is “mentally ill” whereas if a Muslim does the same it’s “an act of terrorism.” If this is the case (and not just yet another false equivalency from a certain wing of the political spectrum) then the implication would be that terrorists (at least those who carry out these attacks) are also mentally Ill. It would mean that this is not an issue of a politicized ideology, or the use of zealous and fanatical adherence to an interpretation of a highly politicized religious ideology (which we will discuss in the next part covering Islam).
If this is the case, and these attackers are just mentally ill, then the accusations against Islam, and the rhetoric against immigration or taking in refugees from the Islamic world can be shown to be wrong, they can be shown to be the xenophobic, racist sentiments that many on the left believe them to be (again we will explore the truths of these sentiments in the next part on Islam).
Unfortunately for this narrative; this topic, and these atrocities, can not be so easily packaged up into as simplistic an answer as this.
Research from Dr. Jerrold Post, one of the leading scholars in the field of the psychology of terrorists and author of the book The Mind of the Terrorist, is very clear on whether or not terrorists are “mentally ill” or psychotic (as much as some of these attacks would make one think otherwise).
He is quoted, in Louise Richardson’s’ book The Roots of Terrorism, saying, “it is not going too far to assert that terrorists are psychologically normal – that is, not clinically psychotic…they are not depressed, and not severely emotionally disturbed, nor are they crazed fanatics.”
“Indeed” he continues “there is a multiplicity of individual motivations. For some, revenge is a primary motivation; for others, it is to give a sense of power to the powerless; for still others, it is to gain a sense of significance”
When speaking on this topic, Dr. Post is looking at not just Islamic terrorism, but terrorism as a whole, from the IRA, to Al-Qaeda, to nationalist separatists and Marxist revolutionaries. He continues to say something quite profound and helpful in understanding the mindset of a terrorist (no matter the persuasion).
“There is a clear consensus that group, organizational, and social psychology – and not individual psychology – provide the greatest analytic power in understanding this complex phenomenon, where collective identity is paramount. For some groups, especially nationalist-separatist terrorist groups, this collective identity is established extremely early so that hatred is bred in the bone.”
Could this be an insight into (at least a part of) the reason for such vicious attacks, for such a desire to kill those who one hates, that a person is willing to drive a truck into a market crowded with families and children enjoying Christmas celebrations? Or an Ice cream parlor full of Iraqi families – all Muslim, but the “wrong kind” of Muslim? Does it explain the willingness to drive into people and then jump out of the vehicle and start cutting throats as was done in the recent attacks in London? Or the ability to break into the home of a police family and, with knives, torture and kill the mother and father in front of their young child… “hatred bred in the bone.”
The people killed and injured in these attacks had no prior knowledge or interaction with the attackers, certainly no interaction that would have provoked such vicious response. Could it be, that the collectivism and propagandizing of the young – in this case young Muslim children – to political agendas, especially violent action in pursuit of political agendas, could carry at least a part of the blame for these (and many more) horrific attacks?
The mind of the individual
Though Dr. Post is of the opinion that individual psychology cannot provide as great an analytic power to understand terrorism, Dr. Jordan Peterson has had some interesting insights into the mindset of the individual, that may prove the contrary.
In a video conversation on Islam and extremism, Dr. Peterson, referring to a situation where a young Canadian left their middle-class lifestyle to go join the Islamic State, speaks about potential motivation for such behavior. I was interested to see his application of this, more individualized look at the mindset behind extremist behavior, as another piece of the puzzle in trying to understand who the “enemy is” as well as a warning to us on what to watch out for in our own lives.
It becomes even more interesting when we discover that in many of the recent attacks, especially those in the UK, many of the perpetrators were second generation UK citizens, born and raised in fairly middle class households, in a quiet (relative to places like Afghanistan and Pakistan) nation such as the UK.
Dr. Peterson stated in his thoughts on the matter saying, “the period of late adolescence is also a time when people catalyze their identity, and I think that people who have one foot in two cultures have a particularly difficult time in doing that, so sometimes they may be impelled to make a move of radical simplification, instead of trying to mediate between the moral demands of two cultures. We also shouldn’t underestimate the allure of adventure, people have marched off to war happily on many different occasions.”
When asked if “a switch in the mind just flicks” or if phenomenon such as radicalization is more gradually developing, Dr. Peterson proposed that “A switch in the mind can flick, you see it sometimes with recovering alcoholics who become religious overnight. You can imagine your mind as a battleground between different moral systems – especially in a modern state – and there are times when there are compelling reasons for one of those warring factions to take over, it does have something to do with the search for moral clarity (with utopianism) Which is a real problem because, you can understand why people would seek the good, but paradoxically, the consequence of people seeking the good on a ultimate level, say in the 20th century, was a string of never ending catastrophes. There is some proclivity towards that “higher-order” moral thinking that is concerned with systems and systemic perfection that also seems to be deeply rooted in this.”
“Many young men have a very strong drive for heroism and dominance, there are a verity of reasons for that, but one of them is that young women are much more likely to be attracted to dominant men, so it’s a deeply rooted drive.”
When thinking about this statement I wondered at first how that drive could play into a person seeking out martyrdom, and to be fair, that is not what Dr. Peterson is discussing when he brings up this point. However, if it is a deeply rooted drive, to the point where young men would act on it on a subconscious level, then it could very easily play a role in the thinking leading someone to seek martyrdom in this way. As the conscious purpose is not the dominance or the desire for heroism in order to attract a mate, rather it is to seek the presupposed heroism of martyrdom. But its roots in the subconscious can (potentially) be traced back to the subconscious drive of primal man to attract a suitable mate. These are my thoughts however, and should not be confused with those of Dr. Peterson.
Peterson continues, “People are able to take on victimization on behalf of a group even if they haven’t been victimized themselves; this is a very well-known social psychological phenomenon.
With regards to the group identity issue, you never want to underestimate the motivating power of resentment and victimization. When you take on the burdens of a group – especially ones you see as low on the “dominance hierarchy”- and you construe that group as a victim, that is a real precursor to the use of violence because you can justify it as deserved and also as defensive. We know from the emergence of violent movements all around the world that, atrocity is often preceded by a dialogue of victimization on the part of the people who are committing the atrocities, so resentment is key to these sorts of things.”
(see Nazi Germany, the Rwandan Genocide etc.) In my opinion, this is also the danger of the victimized narratives we see from the extreme left and right wings, from groups like Black Lives Matter and the Racist “white-supremacist” aspects of the “Alt-Right.”
Dr. Peterson hits on a very interesting point during the conversation, where he points out, “One of the complexities of this problem is that a lot of the things that the ordinary person regards as moral get exaggerated in these situations and become pathological. This really tight, “in-group” identity is indistinguishable in many ways from loyalty; this drive to be dominant and “messianic” is very difficult to dissociate from striving for achievement.
These things start to become pathological though, when the persons viewpoint becomes closed to any other information, that’s where totalitarianism starts to develop. This has been the focus of religious study for a long time in the west…when you take your morality to the point where everything you know is enough and you don’t need anymore information at all, then you’ve crossed the line from moral to judgemental and rigid; the steps from there (especially if you’re resentful) to violence and pathological behavior is a very short one. But the horror of all this is that it is the exaggeration of many things that we would regard as admirable that produce this outcome.
Solzhenitsyn addressed the problems we’re talking about very deeply because he was willing to note (to begin with) that the idea that the world is a battle ground between good and evil is an extremely old idea, and it’s true for everyone’s worldview – people just switch what they consider good and what they consider evil.
Now Solzhenitsyn’s solution to that was that people recognize that the line between good and evil runs down the middle of their own heart rather than being played out by “the good” and “the evil” on a broader scale, and he regarded the highest moral impulse is one that which strives for self improvement on the moral plane… you can’t deny the primary religious impulse (although people do it all the time) it has to be shaped in a way that doesn’t produce these “totalitarian” outcomes.”
We need to understand that within all of us is the potential to do good or evil. Some people might have cause for concern when those two terms are used, but as history has shown collectively, and society reflects on an individual basis, human beings are capable of rationalizing incredible evil, usually in their desire to bring about some perceived retribution for past wrongs, or in pursuit of some form of social justice; as C.S. Lewis once said “Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.” Imagine, added to that lifetime of small choices that lead to who we become, if we we’re raised to believe that certain people, because of belief (or lack thereof) were less than human, and should be destroyed or enslaved.
This is an aspect I wanted to address before continuing to investigate the causes of terrorism, especially before beginning to address the topic of the influence of Islam in “Islamic terrorism.”
There is the potential for great good, and great evil in all of us, and when we can understand that about ourselves, it can help us in understanding where to draw the lines between faith and zealotry, between the care and kindness that is often seen from Muslim communities around the world and the terrorism that finds the same faith at its core.
Understanding ways our society enables attacks
Another aspect in “knowing ourselves” is understanding that society does no favors to either Islam, or to the victims of these attacks, in trying to mitigate the presumed backlash of the majority by downplaying or outright denying the facts that are seen by anyone who cares to look at the situation objectively.
When we focus more on making sure that the majority of the population does not go out and harass Muslims than on practical ways to protect the innocents in our nations; when we not only deny the involvement of badly planned immigration strategies, lack of assimilation, unrest over demographic and cultural changes, and the involvement of these communities (or individuals within them) in the planning and carrying out of attacks, but go so far as to actually paint as victims those who are (rightly) called on to denounce these attacks and the practices and beliefs that underlie them, then we are setting ourselves up for two major problems.
1. As Douglas Murray warns in his book, The Strange Death of Europe, when governments and so-called centrist moderates, flatly deny and actively seek to cover up evidence of the connections between these attacks and the ideological and sociological reasons behind them, they, by causation, drive the moderate (yet concerned) population into the arms of the more radical alternative political parties and personas; Le pen in France, Wilders in Holland, and even the Alt-right in the United States.
The danger here should be obvious, as people grow more concerned, they actually come closer to running into the arms of the very ideologies (fascism for example) that the current “elites” are so worried about. Whereas, if moderates would leave behind the semantics and the political games and address the issues at hand with honest dialogue and a genuine search for solutions, there would be no need for these massive population shifts towards the political extreme.
In playing these games, governments and political parties are playing with fire and it could be – if things don’t change – that the fire becomes completely unmanageable. When that happens it will be – as is always the case – the innocent who will suffer, no matter their “identity.”
As Dr. Jordan Peterson says during his conversation on Islam and extremism, “ Political correctness is a help and a hindrance, It makes people polite, so that’s helpful, but it does stop people from trying to understand where the real differences are and then discuss them.” This is a case where I think the extreme politically correct climate in many nations is hindering the honest discussions that need to be had.
2. We (as a society) support the idea of a victim mentality amongst these attackers and their supporters and sympathizers. When we immediately come out and condemn any “xenophobia” as a response to an attack. When, instead of realizing the pain being felt by the real victims – the ones who’ve lost children, mothers, fathers, brothers and friends in such cowardly and heinous attacks – organizations like CAIR, and Islamist apologists, come out and play the victim card for themselves, we set the scene for a festering resentment that, if left unaddressed, will likely bubble up into something far worse than harassment.
It is the responsibility of Muslims to take back control of their religion if they do not want it to be automatically connected to terrorism, it is the responsibility of Muslims to decry -in the strongest words – the actions of these extremists. It is up to the people who make up the leadership in Muslim communities to stand up and in the strongest terms denounce the violence and the ideology that underlies it.
If we as a society (this means Muslim and non-Muslim) allow this farce to continue as it has, and worse, implement legislation to discourage any discussion or opinion on the matter (as can be seen in Canada’s “Islamophobia motion” and the UK’s Orwellian “hate-speech” laws) we not only force underground the discontentment (allowing it to fester into something far more dangerous) but we place our stamp of approval on the “victim mentality” and resentment that seems to be a part of the reason for these attacks to begin with.
Unfortunately, this has to be said (as sad as it is that anyone would do this). While I mention fear of harassment as something that has to be put aside and that there needs to be a cogent debate on the issues of Islamic terrorism, this in no way excuses or endorses those who do harass people based on ow they’re dressed, or on their beliefs.
The harassment of individual Muslims is so incredibly wrong, that even stating it in these words seems to be an immensely inappropriate understatement. It shouldn’t have to be said at all, yet it must because people, in fear, not knowing who to blame or how to predict or stop these attacks assume that the next Muslim they see is guilty by association. Stop it!
Having a pubic debate, and approaching a needed topic is important, we shouldn’t have to mince words to find the truth, but the day to day harassment of someone for the clothes they wear, the religion they follow, is beyond wrong, and goes against every tenant of the liberty of the individual that is one of the core tenants of not only libertarianism, but western philosophy in general.
It is content of character that must be judged. The extreme responses on both ends of the political spectrum will only exacerbate the issue.
Arthur Cleroux
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