The Nigerian Village Square - Who is a terrorist?

Who is a terrorist?

Sunday, 13 August 2006

The term terror (Noun) is derived from Latin, terrere, to frighten; intense fear, one that causes intense fear; terrorism (noun) is the use of force or threats to intimidate, especially, as a political policy; terrorize (verb) to terrify, to coerce, make submit etc by filling with terror; terrorist (adjective). (Webster New Word Dictionary)

A terrorist is a person who uses force/violence to arouse intense fear in an individual or in many individuals with the intention of making him/them do as he wants them to do.

A terrorist(s) believes that human beings want to live at all costs; he believes that desiring to live, people fear whatever proposes to end their lives. A terrorist believes that if you threaten to harm and or kill some human beings, have the credible means to do so and do not hesitate in doing so, that the rest of them would do as you asked them to do. Point a gun at a human being and tell him to do something, or else you killed him; since he would prefer to live at all costs, he would do as you asked him to do.

A terrorist believes that if you indiscriminately and randomly killed a few persons that the majority of the people would fear their own death and would, in all likelihood, do as you asked them to do. Kill a person(s) and you arouse primordial fear of death in the many persons and they do as you asked them to do.

Terrorists, therefore, randomly commit acts of violence, kill people indiscriminately, hoping to arouse intense fear in the rest of the people and out of their fear for their lives they would comply with the political policy serving the interest of the terrorist.

Political terrorism is an attempt to influence public opinion and public policy through violence and intimidation.

Do you desire to live at all costs? Do you fear harm and death? Do you fear those who propose to use coercion to force you to do what they want you to do or else they killed you?

The chances are that if you are the typical human being you answered yes to the above questions. As Charles Darwin (Origin of Species) told us, human beings, like other animals, have one primary goal: to survive in their present physical forms; they, therefore, fear pain and death. Because they fear pain and death, human beings are amenable to terrorist threats. There are always terrorists among us. In as much as terrorism is a human phenomenon, we, therefore, have to try to understand it and cope with it. What we cannot wish away, we might as well learn about.

GOVERNMENTS AS POSITIVE TERRORISTS

If human beings were not creatures that desired to live and feared pain and death, there would be no need for governments. All governments maintain law and order largely by possessing the means of coercion and having the ability to arrest and punish people. Law is nothing more than the piece of paper it is written on if it can not be implemented through political coercion.

All over the world, governments have the means of coercion and use it to make sure that people obeyed their laws, or else they are arrested, tried and punished. Without the ability to implement laws through organized violence, the chances are that many persons would engage in antisocial behaviors.

Pro-social behaviors in most societies are obtained through the barrel of the gun. Disband the police force of any city and see what happens; those that you had thought were law abiding citizens would pillage their neighbors’ properties. Human goodness is skin deep!

Of course, most people fancy themselves as obeying the law out of choice, out of good will for their neighbors or because they are nice human beings, or that they, in fact, practice what their religions teach them: thou should not kill or steal from thy neighbor. Drop a few dollars by the side of the road and see what happens to it. Perhaps, one in a hundred will return it to the owner and the rest would pocket it.

If governments must use coercion to get people to live in civilized society, what does that make governments?

All governments (no exception) are terrorist organizations! All governments use coercion to get people to behave as society wants them to behave. Fortunately, the way society wants people to behave is, by and large, good for all members of society; unfortunately, sometimes, governments serve the interests of the few and use coercion to get the many serves the few. (In overt state terrorism, such as existed in the former terrorist state, the USSR, government was used to arouse fear in most citizens and get them to accept a political-economic ideology that they detested, communism, failing to do so, they were sent to Siberian Gulag, prison.)

In the main, governmental terrorism is positive in that governmental forces are used to arouse fear in folks so as to intimidate them into doing what serves social interests.

Let us briefly review Thomas Hobbes assumptions about human nature, assumptions that underlie Western conception of government. Hobbes, Leviathan, postulated that human beings are, by nature, selfish and would enslave and or kill other people if doing so served their self interests. Strong persons would enslave weak persons and use their labor to optimize their pleasure. As Hobbes sees it, life in the state of nature is dangerous and poses nothing but insecurity and death for human beings.

On the Serengeti Plain of East Africa, strong animals kill weak animals; lions eat sheep and more powerful lions drive out weaker lions from resource rich territory and have exclusive access to available lionesses. (Animals are aggressive and territorial; they will keep other animals away from their territory; human beings have nation-states, which they arbitrarily assigned to themselves, and keep other persons out of.)

Simply stated, animals seek their self interests and do not care for other animals interests, even when they claim to do so. (White Americans talk shop about being loving Christians; nevertheless, they enslaved black folk and currently discriminate against them).

Given the selfish nature of human beings, Hobbes posits that we need a coercive government to use organized force to intimidate people to do that which serve each others interests.

Government, as is defined in the West, has one primary function: to use force to bring about law and order in society. All other functions of government are secondary; at least, this is the conservative, ideology, view of government.

(Liberals and socialists add providing social welfare to the functions of governments; this is all nice and well except that during periods of social disorder and chaos, when folk’s lives are threatened, all governments revert to performing their primary function: using force to arouse fear in the people, so that they would obey the laws that protect the lives and properties of all people. Unequivocally, all governments exist to intimidate the people into doing what otherwise they would not want to do. Many people, for example, do not want to pay taxes, but force is used to make them do so, and if they do not pay their taxes off they go to prisons; during wars, many young men do not want to go to the battle field, fight and possibly get killed, but force is used to compel them to go fight and, if necessary, die for their country.)

Hobbes is, perhaps, the most important political theorist in the western world. He stated it like it is. Other political theorists seem to have danced around the reality of man’s selfish and evil nature. Plato (Republic), Aristotle (Politics) Niccolo Machiavelli (Prince), John Locke (Second Essay on Government) Jean Jacque Rousseau (Social Contract), Charles Montesquieu (On the need for division of governmental powers), John Stuart Mill (On Representative Government) Jeremy Bentham (Utilitarianism), Hamilton, Madison and Jay (The Federalist Papers) and other political philosophers hemmed and hawed but did not quite state the truth of who human beings, are as Hobbes did.

Remove political force from society and society degenerates to anarchy. Politics is the business of managing violence in society. If you need example, see Nigeria. In Nigeria, folks actually have no clue as to the function of government. Many of them think that political office is designed to offer them opportunity to gratify their infantile narcissistic desire to be very important persons, to maintain other people’s attention and be admired as the most important person in the country. These folks do not understand that the primary function of government is to obtain law and order, which requires building prisons, courts and recruiting judges who place law breakers in those jail houses. The primary function of government is to pass laws that protect all people and to punish law breakers. With a population of about 100 million, all things being equal, a million Nigerians will be law breakers and ought to be in prison or under supervision (parole and probation). But, no, only a few thousands are incarcerated while law breakers are allowed to run around doing their antisocial thing. Indeed, if Nigeria is a country ruled by law, most of its present crop of politicians would be in jail, for they are nothing but criminals looting the national treasury.

In my experience, Hobbes and Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) are right in asserting that human beings are self centered creatures and will harm other human beings in pursuit of their self interests and that therefore we need government to intimidate the people into doing what serves public interests. Left alone, many of the people are criminals (or as the Bible says, sinners) and need to be corralled and made social serving through the constant threat of punishment by lawful authorities.

Let me redirect this discussion to the individual level. Have you, as an individual, ever tried to use intimidation and threat to get another human being to do as you want him or her to do? Have you ever threatened your friends, spouse and children and proposed to punish them if they did not do as you asked them to do?

If you are honest with yourself, the chances are that you have tried to intimidate other people into doing as you desired, not as they wanted to do. All of us, overtly or covertly, try to use force to arouse fear in other people, hoping that out of their desire to live, and their desire for safety that they would do as we asked them to do.

You, the individual, are a terrorist, although you may not know it! All human beings are terrorists although at the conscious level they may see themselves as nice persons.

The salient point is that all people are, in one form or another, terrorists; when it suits them, they will use threat and intimidation to try to arouse fear in other folks, and if those succumb to their ploy, permit them to be controlled by them.

Please examine your behavior, past and present, and answer this question: are you a terrorist or are you not? Please do not use any of the ego defense mechanisms (repression, denial, dissociation, projection, displacement, rationalization, justification, reaction formation, sublimation, fantasy, avoidance, minimizing, anger, fear, pride, shame, guilt, etc) to avoid owning up to the truth of what you are.

For once in your life, try to take responsibility for your thinking and behaviors. Answer the simple question whether you have used intimidation and threat to get those around you to do what you want them to do.

In my village I witness folks trying to use threat of what they are going to do to others to get them to do as they want them to do. In land disputes between folk, some resort to threatening using their juju or other means to make their opponents die. These are primitive terrorist attempts to influence behaviors through arousal of fear in ones opponents.

If you have no fear of death, if you have accepted the existential reality that we are born and must die, and you are willing to die, at any moment, no one can control you through terrorism.

So one dies, so what? We begin to die right from the moment of our birth. That which is inevitable, death, should not be feared.

You cannot intimidate and terrorize a man who has already accepted his physical death and could care less about living in body.

Who is a terrorist? All Human beings are, up to a point, terrorists! The sad part is that many of them do not even know that they are terrorists. They tend to see terrorists as other people. In the current xenophobic climate, folks tend to associate terrorism only with Arab Muslims. Whereas this is wrong, for we are all potential terrorists, let me focus on Arab Muslims and terrorism, for a while.

Apparently, some Arabs perceive the Western world, particularly Americans, as supporting Israel. These Arabs would rather Israel did not exist in their midst. However, America, being the most powerful country in the world, has the ability to guarantee Israel’s existence in the Arab world.

At present, no matter what the Arabs wish, Israel has the military wherewithal to defeat them and therefore exist.

In America, the Jewish segment of the population is the richest segment. The Jews actually dominate many parts of America: business, film industry, banking, and academia (at some elite universities, they constitute over 70% of the faculty).

The American Jewish lobby makes sure that America’s policy towards the Middle East is supportive of Israel; and there is nothing Arabs can do about it unless they become powerful in America. (To become powerful in America, Arabs must revamp their archaic theological approach to life and embrace empiricism. At present, Jews predominate in science and technology, areas the Western world cultivates.)

Given Western values, the Jews are very valuable to the West. Arabs only use to the West is the oil found under the Arabian Desert, and when that oil runs out, the West will abandon Arabs to their static unchanging ways.

Political and economic realism compels the West to support the amazingly productive Jewish people.

In the meantime, Arabs feel frustrated in their inability to favorably influence Western policies towards them. They feel powerless from their inability to get the West to engage in public policies that eliminated the state of Israel.

The West, aka Christendom, went to war with the Arabs, Crusades, to regain the “Holy Land” from the Muslims; now that the West has control of that real estate, why would she want to give it up? Arab politics sometimes baffles ones thinking. The West will not give up supporting Israel; this is political reality and Arabs ought to get used to that fact.

Unable to influence Western public policy through the approved channels for doing so, that is, through interest groups and political parties influencing decisions in Western legislatures; Arabs increasingly take recourse to terrorism as a means of influencing Western policies through violence and intimidation.

Some Arabs engage in random acts of violence, kill Americans, and hope to arouse fear of death in the rest of America, and out of this fear America would change its policies towards the Middle East. Al Qaeda, seem to be in the forefront of these terrorists acts. On several occasions, it sent suicidal persons to immolate themselves and take some Western lives along with them. One can think of the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the American war ship, USN Cole, and, above all, the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001.

Arab terrorists are trying to kill some Americans so as to arouse fear of death in the rest of them and, as a result, get Americans to change their policy towards the state of Israel; they are trying to use terrorism to change public policy in their favor.

Every policy ought to be evaluated to see how well it is working. In that light, are Arab Muslim terrorists succeeding in getting the West to cower and tilt towards Arabs? Well, are they? What do you think?

One sometimes wonders why Arabs refused to study empiricism and instead rot in their ahistorical understanding of human behavior. If Arabs studied people as they are, not as they think that they are, they would have learned who Americans are, not who they think that Americans are.

In Arab minds, white Americans are prone to fear and if some of them are killed by Arab terrorists, the rest of them would be scared into changing and supporting Arabs.

What a silly understanding of whom they are dealing with. White Americans are largely antisocial personalities who came all the way from Europe to the Americas, and without conscious, without guilt feeling, without a sense of remorse, killed off most of the natives and took over their lands, and enslaved Africans and used them to develop the virgin land they stole from Indians.

Look, white Americans are hardened psychopaths and, as such, will not be intimidated by those who propose to use force to scare them into relinquishing their loot. In fact, Arab terrorism may generate unintended consequences for Arabs.

If Arabs continue randomly attacking Americans, America will throw off her veneer of sociability, her false Christianity, and revert to her roots: Barbarianism.

Americans are mostly of Germanic origin (the Germans include England, France, Germany Austria, Luxemburg, Lichtenstein, Scandinavia, parts of Switzerland and Italy etc). These people are blood thirsty creatures and, in fact, kill for the sake of it; these sociopaths enjoy seeing other people suffer, as is the case with their relationship with black Americans.

A few more Arab attacks and American barbarians will behave in type: go to the Middle East and take it over. The warning shots have been fired in Iraq. It is not inconceivable for the Western vandals to militarily take over the Middle East, oil and all.

It would probably take a combined Western military assault on the Middle East less than a month to take the whole place over. (Remember the exploits Erwin Rommel, the desert fox, Patton, Montgomery, Alexander etc in North Africa, during the Second World War? Read up on the Second World War.)

Osama Ben laden and his ragtag crew are operating at an infantile level terrorism; they do not seem to understand that they are dealing with masters at the game of terrorism, Europeans. When this initial sparring is over, the Europeans, white America included, will revert to their true nature and do what they have to do to survive, which may include re-colonizing the Middle East.

Therefore, it would seem that the most prudent course of action for the Muslim Arabs to engage in is not terrorism; instead, they ought to secularize their society, build universities of science and technology every where (with their oil money, before their oil wells dry and money goes kaput) and in a few generations become able to compete with the West economically and militarily.

At present, obviously, the Arabs are no match for the West. If the West wants to destroy Arabia, she has the nuclear weapons to do so. Jut think about all the aging nuclear weapons in the Arsenals of Russia and America, weapons that, sooner or later, must be gotten rid of, before they pose a danger to their owners. What better way to get rid of these dangerous weapons than to explode them in the various Middle Eastern countries!

Arab Muslim terrorists are playing with fire and will get burned; they will get what they have asked for; it is coming to them!

Any one who considers himself a friend of the Arabs ought to tell them to knock off this terrorism thing before it gets out of control. Please tell them that the only way they are going to be able to compete with the West is by modernizing and secularizing their society. As long as they live in seventh century Bedouin world they are no match with the big boys of the West.

This essay is not intent on dwelling on Arab Muslim terrorism; its aim is to define terrorism and call our attention to the fact that all human beings are potential terrorists.

The reasons why human beings are terrorists are beyond the scope of this essay. Please see my writings on spiritual psychology. Briefly, human beings are the extensions of one unified life, aka God.

God is love. The children of God are, like their father, love. In their true nature they are spirit and are unified.

The children of God sought to experience the opposite of their nature and separated from their source and from each other. In their essence they love, but they wanted to experience their opposite, hate.

On earth, people are, by definition, hateful. On earth each person is looking after his self interests and will kill and or enslave other people if it suits his interests.

To make their life on earth pleasant (not brutish, nasty and short, as it is, in fact) they must have governments and laws. Without laws, human beings are worse than the devil they imagine exist out there; they will kill you and blame you for killing you; it is your fault that they enslaved and or killed you; that is how depraved human beings are. As my philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, observed, human beings are a mistake of nature and ought not to have been created. It would be better if human beings did not exist on planet earth. They are a pollution of the environment.

But, here we are, so, what are we going to do about our nature? As long as we live on earth, we cannot change our human nature. True religion may help us care for one another. (But do not get your hopes high, for when the chips are down, folks will seek their interests at your expense, you had better protect your won interests). As the good book, the Bible, said, we are sinful (my term would be egoistic, for the ego is what religious folks call Satan) creatures and therefore need draconian governments to corral us, to make us obey the laws that protect all of us. Law and order is conservatives’ mantra.

I am a stringent law and order person. If I had my choice, I would string, on the nearest electric poles, criminal Nigerians looting the country’s wealth. First off, I would line up most of the corrupt politicians and have folks use them for target shooting practice. I would not lose a second of sleep from seeing garbage dumped into garbage dumpsters, where they belong, anyhow.

We are all potential terrorists; I just wanted you to know this fact so that you quit kidding yourself about what nice person’s human beings are. Human beings are not nice persons at all, they are evil. If you intend to have a secure society you had better carry a big club while talking softly (or whatever Theodor Roosevelt said to that effect).

CAN NIGERIANS BE ARAB STYLED TERRORISTS?

To end this essay, let me speculate on whether Nigerians can be Arab styled terrorists. Nigerians, as I know them to be, are capable of terrorism that serves their personal interests but not terrorism that serves other people’s interests. Nigerians will use force and coercion to get you to do what they want you to do for their own gain; indeed, they could even kill you if it serves their individual interests. What is Nigerian politics but an arena where criminals kill each other, so as to gain access to political office, from where they enrich themselves; just wait until next year, election year, and the killings begin, big time, as the criminals vie for Aso Rock, governorships, and other positions from which they hope to swindle the country.

Arab Muslims can kill for the collective Muslim interest (as they understand it) without regard to their individual lives. I do not think that the Nigerians I know can do such a thing.

Nigerians are, perhaps, the most self centered human beings on planet earth. Most of them want to live forever and give themselves empty titles that make them seem important, such as: Dr, Professor, Alhaji, and Chief Attention Seeking Do-Nothing.

The Nigerians I know seem incapable of sacrificing their lives for causes that are larger than their individual lives. I simply cannot see a Nigerian strapping a bomb around his body and go blow himself and other people up, for a cause that does not benefit him personally. The Nigerian loves his life too much to kill himself for other people’s benefit.

Kill other people to benefit himself, yes, but be killed to benefit other people, no. During election times, candidates for political offices often pay thugs to kill their opponents. Nigerian robbers kill other Nigerians without the slightest qualm. Nigerians will do anything that benefits them personally, but not other people.

We must remember that these people, until the twentieth century, were selling their children into slavery and using the money they got to buy European drinks and buy titles to make their egos seem important. (Why is it that the Nigerian finds it difficult to transcend his ego and live a selfless life dedicated to serving the public? Why is he eternally vain, proud and childishly narcissistic? Is this problem caused by his culture or is it in his genes?)

I do not see Nigerians posing terrorist threat to Americans; stealing from Americans, as in 419 criminal activities, yes.

In the nature of things, there are always exceptions to every rule. Wonders and miracles, as they say, exist in this world. Whereas one expects the average Nigerian to be selfish, I have actually seen a few Nigerians who seem capable of living for the collectivity, rather than only for the self. The greatest miracle I have witnessed is to see a Nigerian actually do something for other people rather than merely take from them. Halleluiah.

I do not think that the West should fear that terrorists would be coming from Nigeria; thieves yes, terrorists, no; at least, not at this time. The West should worry about Islamo-fascists, socialists, and white supremacist-fascist doing her harm, not Nigerian terrorists.

Perhaps, in the future, Nigerians would have learned to transcend their individual egos and place social interest above their individual interests. This process probably will take no less than another hundred years. At that point, one can see Nigerians who actually believe in something other than their bellies and therefore fight and die for it.

CONCLUSION

I do not believe that contemporary Nigerians are potential terrorists for the Western world. In so far that they may engage in terrorist acts, it is the garden variety type where they threaten each other and try to use intimidation to get each other to do as they want done. Theirs is school boy bullying, not major league terrorism.

Major league terrorism, as exhibited by Arab Muslims and socialists, requires the individual, usually a youth, 18-28, to make total commitment to an ideology, religious or secular; this is a behavior that is not yet part of Nigerians psyche. At present, Nigerians are committed to their egos survival not to larger causes that require them to sacrifice their individual lives. They are yet to attain a higher level of psychological functioning from which ideological terrorists act.