Bangladesh, Boston, connected by Internet and injustice

Dealing with "root causes" of terrorism requires recognizing the impact of the digital world.

by Ish Theilheimer

Justin Trudeau gets a lot of ink with almost anything he says at this point, including his plea to consider the "root causes" of terrorism after the Boston bombing.

Naive as he may have sounded, he raised a serious and terrifying question that nags at a lot of us: Why are North American kids and immigrants, many of them from middle-class families, willing to become mass murderers for extremist – usually Islamist – causes?

We’re looking at a serious aberration in human behaviour, and one we urgently need to understand better. Here are two suggestions for possible root causes, both starting with "in": injustice and the Internet.

The world has never been a just place. The strong, well-armed and nasty have always tried to dominate and terrorize the weak. Most often in history, they have succeeded.

What's truly wonderful and brilliant is that in almost 900 years since the 1215 Magna Carta, democracy has steadily advanced, although often slowly and painfully. Many people have died, gone to jail or faced torture to advance democracy, but it did advance — at least in the industrial West.

Ironically, most of the rest of the world was colonized until 50-100 years ago by the same industrial, "democratic" West. The old colonialism only began to fade after a couple of gruesome world wars.  Africa threw off colonialism in the 1960s, as other countries and continents had before them.

Unfortunately, in the Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney years colonialism regrouped as a corporate enterprise and came back more viciously than ever. Global trade deals, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) introduced a new colonialism under which giant transnational corporations and money-traders could force countries to play by new rules. They forced poor countries to sell off public assets and deregulate – which means cutting health and safety rules, labour laws and environmental regulations.

Employers exported millions of jobs from high-wage countries (Canada, the USA, and almost every country in Europe) to low-wage places (like China and Bangladesh, to name two prominent examples).

As a result, Canadians can buy socks, underwear and computer parts for cheap prices, and millions of Bangladeshis have jobs. But you can't find a job making socks or underwear or computer parts in Canada, and Bangladeshis live and work in conditions so degrading most Canadians cannot imagine them. Worse, trade deals like WTO and GATT have laid down iron-clad rules restricting Bangladeshis and others from growing their own food or producing goods for their own people. Instead, they must report to factories and produce cheap exports for the democratic West, in unsafe conditions and for paltry wages. Welcome to all the flaws of a tardy industrial revolution —  just like old times, but worse.

The gulf between the haves and have-nots has never been wider. The world's suffering billions are quite aware of the opulence and excess of the world's wealthy. They see images of everything they're missing every day in the mass media and Internet, and their own lives remind them constantly that the powerful are indifferent to their own suffering.

Fifteen years ago, the Internet injected free international communication into this toxic mix of despair and outrage over global injustice.  Angry people suddenly had a way to share their anger — as well as their most dangerous secrets and plans – with whoever they liked.

At the same time, the screen’s seductive power encourages surfers to suspend judgement on what they read. As anyone who has ever played an online game or used a smartphone can attest, these things have a way of taking over your life and your mind. Teens tend to be especially impressionable. Angry people now have more power than ever over those they manage to get under their sway.

As well, the Internet tends to encourage fragments of social groups. Whether it's in the websites we visit or the "friends" we hook up with on social media, we tend to seek information and views on the Web that confirm our own beliefs and feelings. Rather than reality checks, these small groups tend to amplify alienated feelings – or to confirm archaic attitudes towards women and towards sex. Only rarely does someone in a “friends-only” circle challenge another person’s statements, the same as you would in a group of real-world people if you start spouting dangerous, violent nonsense.

Of course, angry or alienated adolescents who surf the net constantly are going to find lots of reasons to hate and lots of suggestions for how to act on that hate. And no wonder.  Some are burning with legitimate alienation and anger, fueled by global injustice and a verifiable sense that their people have been victimized and exploited.

Now that it's as easy to learn how to kill innocent people as it is to book an airline flight, the biggest surprise is that terrorist bombings and attacks don't happen more often. Maybe they will.

Unfortunately, technology has yet to produce a quick fix that is going to heal all the world's psychopaths, extremist crazies, murderers and bullies. If we were serious, though, about "root causes," we would take serious action against global injustice instead of just paying lip service to problems.

The world's poor are suffering today and will suffer more tomorrow as a result of a climate crisis caused by the waste and dirty habits of democratic Western countries. They're suffering — along with many in the West itself — from economic rules set up in the most self-serving way by the richest people and corporations on the planet. They're suffering from a food crisis caused by both climate change and massive land grabs in developing nations.

Taking real action to end global injustice and suffering could begin to defuse some of the explosive anger that leads to terrorism, although consumers worry that providing safe working conditions or livable wages might increase prices for socks and underwear and computer equipment.

Fortunately, the Internet is also a powerful tool for digging up facts, such as the average gross profit margin in the retail clothing industry is 48 percent – or 7 to 12 percent net. Despite their protests, clothing manufacturers and retailers don’t have to rely on unsafe working conditions. They choose to profit from injustice, and pass along the blame to consumers, along with low prices.  Consumers can turn the tables, by choosing products that are fair trade and union made — even if they cost a little more.  

© Copyright 2013 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca