Who Are The Insurgents?
Published April 29, 2007
I'm the last person in the world to condone violence, but there are times I can understand where it comes from. The mistake the West keeps on making is that we are constantly pouring gasoline on a fire. We have to stop responding to violence with increased violence and begin owning up to our share of the responsibility for creating the situation and circumstances that led to the violence.
We in the West have to stop thinking that our way is the only way and learn to meet people half way. We need to start making an effort to understand other peoples instead of lumping them all together as "different." We are the new kid on the block in terms of civilizations and yet we act as if any other way of being is inferior to ours, if not wrong.
Where do we get off judging anybody else and their way of being? Even amongst ourselves we can't reach any conclusions about how best to live our lives, so how dare we try to impose anything on others? What gives us the right?
I don't support the activities of terrorists of any stripe — whether they have homemade bombs used to wipe out anybody who happens to be in the vicinity, or they drop bombs from airplanes thousands of feet above that wipe out whole city blocks indiscriminately — but we need to stop thinking of the people who are called terrorists by our press as faceless beings to be dismissed as "fundamentalists" or "insurgents."
There are humans behind those labels and the quicker we start putting faces to them, the quicker we will be able to bring the violence to a halt. I may not approve of either form of terrorism, but I can understand one better than the other. If my country were invaded by a foreign power, I might fight back with any means at my disposal, too.
Richard Marcus is a long-haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Epic India Magazine.
- Who Are The Insurgents?
- Published: April 29, 2007
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Culture
- Filed Under: Culture: History, Culture: Media, Culture: Religion, Culture: Society, Politics: War and Terrorism
- Writer: Richard Marcus
- Richard Marcus's BC Writer page
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Comments on this articleComments
This article would have generated a lot of good discussion over in Politics. Pity. It fits in rather better there.
But since this is culture, we could look at this as a cultural issue. The reason there are insurgents comes down to a culture which encourages violence against outsiders and nonbelievers. It's a combination of pure culture and religion, which both encourage xenophobia and the perception that non-conformity and foreignness are threatening and should be responded to with violence.
It's a culture of absolutism which condones any action or outrage so long as it is perpetrated against outsiders or those who have transgressed religious or cultural taboos.
That's the root of the problem and that's why there are insurgents.
Dave
As the war in Iraq continues, I find it frustrating that we do not have a good understanding of who these insurgents actually are. Why aren't any of these captured insurgents questioned? I would find it very interesting to listen to what they had to say.
I think that the US government doesn't want its citizens to know exactly what the war is about. It's much easier to label this the "war on terror" and the people of Iraq as mentally deranged or "insurgents". Even the media outlets such as CNN don't give us the whole picture.
We need to ask more questions about why this so called war is even happening. We also need to know more about our so called enemy. Unfortunately, these are the questions that the US government doesn't want asked. As long as this war is kept simplified, public support (albeit small) will continue and more money will be pumped into the bank accounts of Bush and his cronies.
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"If my country were invaded by a foreign power, I might fight back with any means at my disposal, too."
Exactly who did we invade prior the 911?
Who had we invaded prior to the 83 barracks bombings in Beiruit?
You want to excuse the unecexcusable Richard.
You whine about how we treat arabs/muslims...well guess what...you know who else doesn't treat them so great? Their own fucking leaders....... why don't they go after them. They're oppressing much more than we could ever hope to. Yasser arafat had billions of dollars and used none of it to better the lives of the palestianins yet tehy idolized him. how do you explain that?