In the wake of the July 7 bombings in London, people in Britain and around the world are asking: why did this happen, and what can we do to stop it from happening again? Perfectly reasonable questions to which there are a variety of possible answers, all of which should be debated openly and vigorously.
However, a number of pundits in the right-wing British press have been advising people precisely not to try to understand why the bombings took place. Writing in the Murdoch-owned London Times on July 13, Daniel Finkelstein says: "These things [the bombings] happen just because criminals do criminal things. It is no more interesting to understand their reasoning than to find out what the Yorkshire Ripper thinks about prostitutes. And the more we search for reasons, the more we have aided the terrorists."
In a similar vein, Anatole Kaletsky writes in the July 14 Times: "The most important conclusion to be drawn from the bombers' banal backgrounds is that these killings should be treated as pure criminal acts with no political significance whatsoever. For politicians, media commentators and community leaders to try to understand or explain the killers' motives is not only to glamorise these suicidal misfits as religious or political martyrs, but also to mislead ourselves as to the true reasons for their acts." Finkelstein ends his column on a philosophical note: "It is always difficult to counsel that we should understand less, be less curious. Yet in the War on Terror to understand less is to comprehend more."
Socialist Alliance rejects this nihilistic approach to world events. We reject the terrorism of the jihadists, but we also believe that in order to end terrorism it is necessary to understand its causes. Just as a doctor can explain why I am feeling unwell without approving of my illness, we can explain the existence of terrorism without approving of suicide bombings on the London Underground.
We argue that the main factor driving people into terrorist groups is the unwelcome presence of US, British and Australian military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world. This is borne out by high-level academic research (see GLW #635 editorial).
This militarism is the product of a global economic system in which a small number of wealthy countries ruthlessly exploit the countries of the Third World, and in which the wealthy countries are themselves run primarily for the benefit of a small minority of obscenely wealthy parasites.
Why do our rulers and their lap-dogs in the corporate press counsel us against even trying to understand the existence of terrorism? The answer is simple: they do not want us to understand the existence of terrorism because the economic system that enriches them breeds it. In the same way, they do not want us to understand why the world is full of poverty and war because the economic system that enriches them is the root cause of these social evils. If we understand why there is terrorism, poverty and war, we may try to change the world to get rid of these blights.
Bush, Blair, Howard and the class they represent therefore go to great lengths to keep ordinary people ignorant about the nature of the events unfolding around them. This allows the ruling class to erode hard-won democratic rights and civil liberties in the name of "security".
In contrast, Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly and the Socialist Alliance fight to defend democratic rights and civil liberties, and seek to understand the causes of terrorism, poverty and war so that we can best work towards a world in which there is peace and prosperity for all.
Alex Miller
[Alex Miller is a member of the Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly-Socialist Alliance editorial liaison board].
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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