Reader Stille (@aperfectbalance)has left a link to a brilliant article on the reasons why terrorism exists:
People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. . . People join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community. . .It’s not that they’re ineffective; it’s that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group’s existence and cohesion.
This is very insightful and, I believe, absolutely true. Treating terrorists as people who resort to terrorism because they have well-defined political goals that they try to reach in this way because every other means has failed them is completely wrong. These are people who are in search for something far more precious than any political or economic goal, something that, as the Enlightened thinkers of the XVIII century discovered, makes people willing to die enthusiastically and joyfully: identity.
The less defined a group is, the more violence it needs to convince itself it exists.
Thank you, dear Stille!
Clarissa's Blog 
I think the contemporary reason for terrorism could be something like the need to psychologically consolidate an identity. I think in the past the ethic was something different. The talk may have been couched in terms of masculinity, justice and human rights.
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Yes, it’s always the identity, always. What wouldn’t people do to feel they exist
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It may be about identity always, but identity politics really is something new. It now has the hegemony when it comes to left and right populist discourses.
Of course, I have read Marechera concerning the ‘war of liberation’, which the Rhodesian forces called “terrorism”. There were, indeed, quite a few acts of terrorism — which is to say, gratuitous violence. The roots are clearly in something other than contemporary identity politics. In a way, I think, reading Marechera, it was in a desire NOT TO have the particular identity ascribed by the colonials. The guerrillas wanted to refuse an identity, rather than to accept one. So they refused, for instance, Christianity, which they identified as a white man’s religion. They also wanted to throw off the servile identity of the black servant.
Having done all that, and had a successful revolution, now Christianity is in full bloom like never before, and class hierarchy remains, with servants who are exclusively black working for their black and white masters. Furthermore, identity politics has begun to take a hold, especially in the liberal, artsy circles of contemporary Zimbabwe.
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Lonely, isolated, angry folks with a chip on their shoulder who are primarily men with no real oppression going on in their lives? Who would have thought the link between MRAs and terrorists would be so blatant?
Also, his suggestions on how to address terrorism are very intelligent and reasonable. Too reasonable for politicians to take seriously and implement, unfortunately.
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Identity building is part of it, but I think it’s more subtle; I suspect that what most rank-and-file terrorists really want is the chance to feel like a hero; to shrug off their own mundane and mediocre existence and prove that they are capable of making a real impact upon the world through the medium of extreme violence.
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“Misery loves company”
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One of the most important values (maybe the most important) in much of the world is group loyalty, that is loyalty to some kind of extended family/clan/tribe/ethnic group (and/or linguistic or religious group).
Loyalty is supposed to be absolute and unquestioned and hurting the interests the group (intentional or not) is the worst thing a person can do. Doing horrible things to non-members is okay as long as it doesn’t hurt the group directly.
A fair amount of terrorism are essentially loud (and deadly) expressions of group loyalty.
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Exactly! This is where I feel scarily different from other human beings.
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Since, to this date, there has been little to suggest the two Boston bombers had anything resembling a terrorism group behind them, I’ll follow up with a piece on the psychology of Aurora-style mass murderers, with whom I’d guess the two had quite a bit in common: http://sociological-eye.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/clues-to-mass-rampage-killers-deep.html
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Oh, and I just found an interesting speculation on the potential family dynamics that might have motivated the two. http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/fathers-sons-chechnya.html . There’s no mention in the article made of the mother, but this (http://alyssalindley.tumblr.com/post/48368749553/ive-met-the-boston-bombers) describes her as increasely religious and highly involved in her children’s lives – authoritarian marriages for the sisters, and one of Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s tweets expresses exasperation at her attempts to arrange a marriage for him.
Clarissa, any idea if I can use html tags in here? Showing the links in full as opposed to making selected words link to them doesn’t look that nice. Also, do tell me if I’m dropping too many links in your comment section, please.
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” She told me that she had cried for days when her oldest son, Tamerlan, told her that he wanted to move out, going against her culture’s tradition of the son staying in the house with the mother until marriage.”
– Typical Soviet mother. And them people wonder what I’m scared of.
“I have to say I felt kind of scared and vulnerable when she said this, as I am distinctly American, and was lying practically naked in her living room.”
– And this is typical American. gets “practically naked” for a facial. 🙂
The article by Juan Cole is as weird as ever: “It appears she meant he worked as an attorney for the prosecutor’s office in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, i.e. for the Communist, Stalinist state.
‘We were,’ she said, ‘lucky to get him out of Kyrgyzstan alive,’ presumably because radical Muslims were trying to track him down and take revenge on him there.
Update: If he had been a Soviet era prosecutor, a lot of people in Kyrgyzstan would have had a grudge with him. Hence his abortive attempts to flee first to Chechnya in the early 90s and to Daghestan later.”
Erm, what???? My grandmother was an attorney for the prosecutor’s office in Soviet Ukraine. It was a highly respectable position. Nobody persecuted such people. What a load of complete and utter BS.
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“It appears she meant he worked as an attorney for the prosecutor’s office in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, i.e. for the Communist, Stalinist state.”
– How old is the guy, anyway? If he worked under Stalin, he must be ancient.
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Yeah, that writer’s knowledge about Chechnya and the Soviet Union is only one step above the “Are the Tsarnaevs white” stuff peddled in the mainstream press. I found the religious radicalization as rebelling against the paternal authority figure (and, though the article doesn’t mention it, as an attempt to reconstruct a collective identity they felt they were in danger of losing by living a typical American life( )) interesting and skimmed over such stuff as using Stalinism and Soviet as interchangeable. The bombers’ father looks 50-60. Even chances that he was born before Stalin died, I’d say.
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“Clarissa, any idea if I can use html tags in here? Showing the links in full as opposed to making selected words link to them doesn’t look that nice. Also, do tell me if I’m dropping too many links in your comment section, please.”
– No, I love the links you leave! I think people have done html tags but I don’t know how to to them.
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Testing HTML.
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Works. To do them, you type (a href=link_address)words you want to link to stuff(/a) . Only instead of the round brackets you use greater than/lesser than signs.
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