terrorism
A point I have made before but deserves making agan came up in response to a comment on kiwiblog by radar
"imagine how terrible a situation must be to make a mother want to strap explosives onto herself and blow herself up?"
Now I don't think suicide bombing works that way. Consider this
1) suicide bombing is not a trivial task - the average grieving mother doesn't know how to make a effective suicide bomb or who to target. that means that there is another essential factor required - the 'terrorist organization'.
By terrorist organization i refer to the pure terrorist side of things - this is the set of angry people who's specific goal is to blow up people with suicide bombers.
2) The terrorist organization wants to blow things up - it isn't just a service provider to angry people. So it actively searches for people to do suicide bombings (and if it did not then it would be replaced by those that do - a competitive market place if you like). markers for suicide bombers will be people who are easy to persuade, take orders well etc. Also people who are not too smart because if they were smart it would make more sense to put them in the planning side of things rather than the blowing up side.
3) the terrorist organization invests in the suicide bombers - they train them and give them secret information (like their identity). Considering these people aren't very smart and are easy to influence, they don't want many of those people to back out or otherwise survive.
So we have a group of smart probably adult men with social power, weapons, money (compared to the others) in an organization that looks and sounds like a cult designed to find weak people as fast as possible, teach them to take orders and kill them in a public place.
The problem is there will ALWAYS be weak people - there are lots of weak people in NZ or anywhere else (after all there are cults everywhere) - what we lack is the organization that would train them to blow themselves up.
"imagine how terrible a situation must be to make a mother want to strap explosives onto herself and blow herself up?"
Now I don't think suicide bombing works that way. Consider this
1) suicide bombing is not a trivial task - the average grieving mother doesn't know how to make a effective suicide bomb or who to target. that means that there is another essential factor required - the 'terrorist organization'.
By terrorist organization i refer to the pure terrorist side of things - this is the set of angry people who's specific goal is to blow up people with suicide bombers.
2) The terrorist organization wants to blow things up - it isn't just a service provider to angry people. So it actively searches for people to do suicide bombings (and if it did not then it would be replaced by those that do - a competitive market place if you like). markers for suicide bombers will be people who are easy to persuade, take orders well etc. Also people who are not too smart because if they were smart it would make more sense to put them in the planning side of things rather than the blowing up side.
3) the terrorist organization invests in the suicide bombers - they train them and give them secret information (like their identity). Considering these people aren't very smart and are easy to influence, they don't want many of those people to back out or otherwise survive.
So we have a group of smart probably adult men with social power, weapons, money (compared to the others) in an organization that looks and sounds like a cult designed to find weak people as fast as possible, teach them to take orders and kill them in a public place.
The problem is there will ALWAYS be weak people - there are lots of weak people in NZ or anywhere else (after all there are cults everywhere) - what we lack is the organization that would train them to blow themselves up.
posted by Genius at 10:36 PM
2 Comments:
Another response to the comment on Kiwiblog would be to pose the question, "How many daft reasons have people come up with to justify killing themselves over the centuries."
There's an unfortunate number of people who, alongside the weak-willed, seem quite happy to kill themselves for a mulitude of daft reasons. This was on A&LD a while back - http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_what_makes_a_terrorist.html
That is a perceptive article unlike many that one reads about these things.
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