At the root of hatred

John Rapley, Contributor

In the aftermath of last week's horror in the United States, the question on everybody's lips has turned from who, to why? What on earth could impel bright young men to kill themselves and countless innocent civilians as well? One answer floated is that Muslims may be more given to fanaticism than other peoples, that the promise of eternal life leads some of them to commit crazed atrocities.

Yet as far as I know, there is nothing in Islam that makes it any more inclined to fanaticism than other religions. After all, self-sacrifice and the destruction of innocent lives in the name of a good cause are things our own moral traditions consecrate. Western media spokesmen may have sanitised these grim realities by renaming them "unavoidable losses" and "collateral damage." Still, when a soldier heads off to war, he or she knows that he may well give his own life and will almost certainly take those of innocent people in the process. It is not something we welcome. But that, sadly, is war.

And war is precisely what last week's zealots were convinced they were engaged in. We may not consider their cause noble. But then, it's probably a safe bet that they would probably not have thought very highly of the Western cause. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that most radical Islamists would betray similar emotions as Western leaders do when Arab children die in bombing raids in Iraq. That is to say, expressions of regret, but not a lot of tears. After all, this is war, and innocents die in war.

The question then is, why would people in far-off lands have developed a hatred of the USA so great that they would seek to wage an all-out war on it? To answer this, I think it's best to put aside moral considerations and use an analogy from the natural sciences. Actions produce reactions. To say that action A will produce reaction B need not be a moral or normative statement, therefore, but merely an assertion of what is.

So while there can be no possible moral justification for last week's atrocities, many analysts have been warning for years that something like this was going to happen. That is because for years, indeed decades, a string of actions had taken place which made these reactions increasingly inevitable. These actions were themselves probably beyond moral justification. Individually, they paled in comparison to what we saw last week. But because there have been so many more of them, collectively they have produced a hatred and thirst for justice which, paradoxically, has now produced yet more injustice.

I refer, here, to the dealings of First World nations with the Third World, which includes most of the Muslim world. From the vantage point of the radical Islamist (indeed from the vantage point of many in the Third World) I suspect the West is responsible for two sets of sins.

In speaking of sins of commission, I refer to foreign policies which have propped up repressive regimes in order to preserve access to oil supplies. To cite one small but relevant example, Osama bin Laden was engaged primarily in the family business, not terrorism, until Saudi Arabia's Government "a staunch US ally" forced him into exile because he opposed the Saudi regime's corruption.

The history of the Western powers in the Arab world has not been clothed in glory, to put it mildly. Greed, rather than morality, usually governed American considerations of who to support. Primarily, the importance has been in keeping the oil supply open, at whatever cost necessary. It is preferable if enlightened regimes are available to do this job. But if oppressive regimes are the only ones willing to do the task, so be it.

Yet the sins of omission, if less obvious, may yet be the ones that have produced the most anger. Most of the fighters in Afghanistan's Taliban grew up in Pakistani refugee camps. There, they have suffered cold, hunger, violence and endless assaults on their dignity. And yet, living in the age of satellite television, they know all too well how the other half lives (as do our less fortunate compatriots). There are some ugly truths here. Namely, that in an age of unprecedented prosperity, humanity now has the resources to eradicate most of the planet's ills, but that the fifth of the population which controls this wealth has chosen to do otherwise.

In the 1990s, for instance, Western pharmaceutical companies cut production of anti-malarial drugs for poor countries, and instead developed cures for baldness, impotence and obesity in the rich ones. I am not saying there was anything immoral in these developments. I am saying that if a wealthy Westerner will not shed a tear for the Afghan refugee, then he cannot demand that child show any more respect for the dignity of his life.

Put differently, evil begets evil. That should be a no-brainer. Sadly, we persist in overlooking it, preferring to neglect our own contributions to evil, content to see merely that of our neighbour. But when I was a child and read 'The Pearl', I was horrified -- as the author intended me to be -- by the selfish doctor who showed no concern for the plight of the poor around him. How different is it today? We live in a world in which elaborate feasts are planned in the world's fashion capitals while, only a few hours flying-time away, the bodies of starved children are picked over by vultures. Should we be surprised that a great many of the sufferers feel nothing but hatred?

THE FALL OF EMPIRES

A lesson of history is that when the rich accumulate great wealth that they refuse to share with the poor, the poor will come after it. Envy makes empires fall. And we can decry envy until we are blue in the face, but railing against it will, I believe, accomplish little. For it appears to be programmed into the human genetic code. There are two ways to neutralise the anger of the excluded. One is to try and eliminate them all. The other, as Abraham Lincoln said, is to make them your friends.

It has been a very long time since America last produced a leader with the vision of Abraham Lincoln. I would submit that America in the 1990s faced an unprecedented opportunity to create a new global order that made friends of enemies and brought the benefits of prosperity to all.

The opportunity was squandered. Instead, US policies advanced American economic interests in a most mercenary manner, often at the expense of poor countries. Now, America is reaping its bitter harvest.

Will America ever produce such a visionary? Perhaps not now. Still, looking down the road, I am not without hope. In the middle of this tragedy, a perfectly human response to which is rage, an American friend sent me an e-mail. In it, she said that it is time her country's citizens began holding their leaders accountable for the actions which stir such hatred. The next generation may yet produce the enlightened leaders which America so desperately needs.

History teaches us one other important lesson, though. Preoccupied as we are with the injustice in imperialism, we overlook that it is also a fact of history. Over and over through the millennia, ascendant states expand and colonise their neighbours. But then, in what might be called their decadent phase, they end up being colonised by those same people.

As Rome grew, it required armed forces which lay beyond the capacity of its own limited resources. Moreover, the luxury of Rome turned its citizens away from the rigours of military service. Rome came to depend on mercenary armies whose own loyalty to the empire was suspect, and who in turn helped to undermine the empire.

As the European and, indeed, American empires grew, they also came to depend on resources which lay beyond their immediate grasp. A rising appetite for resources pushed them outwards and brought them into contact with subject peoples. By the late twentieth century, rising prosperity began depressing fertility. To maintain its prosperity,

America (and Europe) needed immigrants. In the process, the empire sucked in resources (including human resources), from disaffected and marginalised regions that harboured populations hostile to the empire.

Since then, some have been able to challenge it from within just as the mercenaries of the Roman empire gnawed away at its military capacity.

Nothing lasts forever. So it goes for empires. America's leaders would do well to note that there is nothing in their current status which entitles them to permanent domination. If they are enlightened, they may ensure their nation's health. If, on the other hand, they submit to a hubris that America really is forever, they may fertilise the seeds of downfall which have already been sown.

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