Poverty Incubates Terrorism

The disease, simply, is poverty, and war, and unending violence, and the absence of education or opportunity. It is in the desperate, scrabbling hopelessness of poverty and despair that terrorism is birthed.

It is the absence of options beyond a promised reward in the hereafter that builds the lines of volunteers seeking martyrdom, for if there is no hope in this life, why not seek the next life by stepping through the crucible of a death-dealing suicide explosion?

The "War on Terror" will not be won by armies, will not be won through violence. The end of terrorism will come when we, as a global community, choose to eradicate the crushing poverty and despair that dominates so much of this world, that drives the economies of the elite nations by way of access to cheap labor pools that have no rights.

"What kind of peace do I mean," said Kennedy, "and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana, enforced on the world by American weapons of war. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children."

"Not merely peace for Americans," he said, "but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."

We can do this, we can do all of this, if we choose to. We have the resources, and no person living on this Earth should question the will of this nation once it is aroused to accomplish a goal. It can be done, but until our leaders see this truth and bend our efforts toward that goal, we will be trapped in an endless spiraling catastrophe of blood and revenge and hatred and desperation. If we continue to attack the symptoms while ignoring the disease, we will chisel our own doom onto the tablets of history.
- William Pitt/TO -

If our political machine would have put as much effort into the "War on Poverty" and expanded on the idea in order to reach the global populations, the "War on Terrorism" would be non-existant! Rather than treating the symptoms of helplessness, we should be treating the disease! It never ceases to amaze me how all these people who constitute our political elite, who have supposedly aquired the best institutionalized education that money can buy, are content to support their ideologies steeped in corporatism instead of helping build a needed egalitarian civilization! What sort of self-centered morons have we helped create, and how the hell can we continue to support their callous attitudes and their socially crippling actions/inactions?

Poverty is a crime to humanity and terrorism is spawned through the extreme hopelessness which grows in societies which have run out of alternatives to their suffering. It's very apparent through history that societies when faced with this hopelessness, have turned towards extremism out of desperation. This isn't rocket science, and if us grunts who sell our labor can see this, just why is it that our highly educated law makers can not? Is it possibly a self-induced blindness towards their fellow earth inhabitants? From my point of view, it is nothing more than an elitist social disease. It's not the common people who we see exhibit this social inadequacy, but rather it's the so-called social upper crust who continually build walls around themselves and erect scaffolding within the social structures in order to support their ideologies and selfish desires. And it's not a disease that is exclusively associated with our conservatives. This social disease is indiscriminate and it has been spread by the leftist demagogues as well!

During WWII, the world had freedom fighters who fought Nazism through the murdering and bombing of civilian as well as military populations. Why did these fighters choose to disregard innocent human life? Because of the oppression forced on them by the Nazi occupation and the hopelessness forced on them by this occupation. The terrorist acts by these freedom fighters have been viewed in a positive light throughout our history. The Nazis fought this form of terrorism through conventional militaristic retaliation but their strategy failed because they failed to recognize the cause of this terrorism was extreme hopelessness. Does this story begin to have a familiar sound? Have our intelligent leaders failed to learn from history? Do they even want to learn? We should be concentrating on and putting all our efforts into a "War on Hopelessness". We should be treating the actual disease, not one of it's symptoms!

These failed attempts by the world's social elite throughout our world can be seen in the Iraq conflict. And we can see the same irresponsible disregard for wisdom in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and the recent Lebanon/Israeli War as well. The wisdom of the people and their cry for peace must be spread and shared with the populations of our earth, less these ignorant power plays continue to kill our people!

In his article entitled An Alternative to Extremist Ideology and Terrorism, Stuart Hart relates the thirst for growth and profit to the exacerbation of poverty and enviromental deterioration.

Most people are not born to be suicide bombers or militia members. It takes a lifetime of neglect, despair, dashed hopes, thwarted opportunities, or worse--intimidation, exploitation and humiliation--to drive most people to such extremes. Only by reversing the conditions that breed such behavior--poverty, inequity, hopelessness, loss of dignity--will we deal with the root cause of the problem. Yet while thousands of lives were lost or altered forever by the events of 9-11, and hundreds of known terrorist leaders have since been killed or captured, these underlying conditions remain largely unchanged--or have perhaps even worsened. Terrorism, in short, is a symptom; the underlying problem is unsustainable development.

Our world leaders have been and are currently failing civililzation. The 20th century has been called the "Century of Genocide" and according to political scientist R. J. Rummel, more than 170 million people have been murdered through democide between 1900 and 1999. That's over four times the number of people killed in all the wars of the 20th century! Just how long will the people of our world allow these wars on humanity to continue. When will "we" say Enough!? When will "we" realize the power of change is in "our" hands? How much longer will the people allow these errant leaders to sponsor these atrocities against humanity as part of their opportunistic acts to bolster their power and their personal status?

According to Vincent Ferraro in the commentary on Global Poverty as a Threat To the Interests of States, he states that poor states are threatening to rich states because the weaknesses of these poor states could be globalized and therefore destabilize the entire international system enviromentally, economically, and politically. Poverty is the disease upon which the entire world should be waging war. If the "civilized" leaders of our world would wage a real "War on Poverty" instead of humanity, the future of the common people of our world might just become a little brighter and our children and their children may actually realize what it's like to have opportunity and maybe, just maybe, they will finally have a reason to smile!