Deepak Chopra on Terrorism: Oh, So Wise

Sorry, it's the end of the summer and I don't have the time to write out a whole blog entry on terrorism so I'll let Deepak do the talking for me. This is from October 30th, 2005 right after the terrorist bombings in India. Great post @ IntentBlog:

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The latest bombing attack in India reminds us that terrorism is going to keep on striking regularly and at random.

This is the same realization that Britain came to during the long period of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and at home in London. The British didn't panic about national security; they didn't start a global war. Instead, they settled in and basically accepted a nasty fact of life, as we in the U.S. long ago settled in and accepted our outlandish rates of murder, drug trafficking, and street crime.

The secret to terrorism lies in the reaction of the victim. In and of itself, terrorism cannot succeed by mass destruction the way war can. Large modern societies aren't crippled by random attacks--except psychologically. In India everyone fears that the bombers will be Muslims and, if early signs are correct, Kashmiri insurgents. That knowledge alone can set off a chain reaction of violence between fundamentalist Hindus and Muslims. The more violent the reaction, the more successful the terrorist act. The previous Indian government encouraged this violent reaction through religious intolerance. Condemnation of violence is hypocrisy whenever politicians can't get elected unless they set Hindu against Muslim.

But there are more secrets about terrorism. I use that word because as governments manipulate public reaction, they also keep other alternatives well hidden. To someone in the general public who has been conditioned to consider all terrorist madmen, it's a secret that terrorism is a planned political tactic, as airplane hijacking was when it first began thirty years ago. Terrorists have legitimate political grievances that they try to solve through totally unacceptable means. In this case, Pakistan and India could have solved the Kashmir crisis decades ago through negotiation. There was no will to do so because both governments make political capital out of keeping the issue inflamed. They are being inhumane and cruel to the people of Kashmir as surely as terrorists are.

The same holds true in the Middle East. The oil-producing Arab states are unspeakably wealthy and could have solved the economic disaster of the Palestinian refugees any time they wanted to. Instead, they have constantly inflamed Palestinian hatred for their own ends. This again is just as cruel and unjust as the terrorism it spawns.The saddest secret about terrorism is that it can be solved politically. There is no reason why the dispute over Jerusalem can't be resolved except that clerics and governments don't want to budge from their irrational absolutism. Resolution only requires sensible compromise. As for the endemic hatred of Israel that underlies so much Muslim terrorism, it's carefully nurtured. If Arab governments took care of their poor, if they stopped fueling hatred with constant propaganda, if they reined in extreme clerics, and above all if they paid for secular education--all of which they could start doing tomorrow--their populace would not be acting like a desperately ignorant mob of the dispossessed with no economic future or political significance.

Finally, the secret of terrorism for the U.S. is that we aren't purely victims. We have been deeply implicated in arms trade, fomenting violence, financing foreign civil wars, and keeping oppressive dictatorships in power. These habits began in the Cold War, and they continue today. Critics of American militarism have had five decades to point out how ruinous it is for a democracy that values peace to devote so much of its wealth and power to war-making. Those critics were largely ignored. If the Soviet Union hadn't imploded on itself, we would still be fueling covert and declared military action in country after country. Now the job of the critics has passed on to the terrorists, for however criminal and horrifying their actions, they aren't insane. They know who they hate, and if we stop being in denial, we'll know the reason why.