> Foreign policy, British and American, is obviously a big part of the
> story, but these guys were British, and hardly poor. So the mechanism
> is a bit more complex than simple blowback.
And Michael P.:
"don't lefties and liberals overdo the poverty breeds terrorism line?"
Part of the problem is accepting the blanket label, terrorism, which is more often than not, loaded.
It is important to distinguish the popular struggles that were branded terrorism (I am thinking of 20C. national liberation struggles, primarily) and those individual acts of terrorism, like the Unabomber, or indeed Timothy Macveigh.
Also, once popular movements can descend into individual terrorism when they lose contact with their social base. That happened in France in the early 20C. when the revolutionary socialists were isolated by the legalisation of the trade unions. The Bonnot Gang used terror to carry on their underground struggle in increasing isolation as most French workers embraced legal unionism (See Richard Parry's book for an over-sympathetic anarchist account). So to the Irish National Liberation Army in the 1980s, which had carved out a popular base to the left of the IRA were isolated by the latter's turn to the left. Less constrained by popular expectation, and holding authority over its membership by reckless encounters, the INLA descended into murderous feuding, which cost it a whole generation of cadre.
And then there are those pseudo-revolutionary sects that aped the military organisation of third world national liberation movements more as a cover for their own lack of support, than because they were responding to popular demands. I mean the Red Army Faction in Germany and Italy. In Italy, in particular, these claimed from war-time Partisan militias that had been isolated by the Italian Communist Party's constitutional politics. In Germany, the actual roots of the RAF in '68 failure was more apparent.
These latter movements were more a psycho-social expression of the collapse of popular militancy than an expression of it.
My argument is that the Al-Qaeda 'movement' has much more in common with the latter than with the national liberation movements. It is a loosely-based coalition of usually western-based or cosmopolitan intellectuals, who are characterised by their distance from popular struggle. Their actions are largely arbitrary, because they reflect isolation rather than movement. Their tactics are rightly called terroristic, because they relish killing people and commonly demonise the masses as corrupt and unworthy (somthing they have in common with the R.A.F. and Unabomber).
To consider this as a popular reaction against Western policy seems to me to be wholly deluded. It is quite distinct from, in fact isolated from, the militant opposition to American and British forces in Iraq, even.
And if that's what Fox News is saying then Fox News is a more trustworthy newssource than the LBO list. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050715/aa7060fd/attachment.htm>