When I was in Year 10, our history teacher, Loring Hudson, came into class one day and, before even saying good morning, bellowed in Arabic: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.”
“Rocky”, as he was inevitably nick-named, was eccentric, but at this we thought he had gone quite mad.
“Write it down,” he said, and spelled out the transliteration and then the translation.
He followed this with lessons about the rise of Islam in the sixth century to it zenith in the 15th century. “Rocky” – an American Renaissance man — was keen to tell us why it happened, as well as what happened. He was that kind of teacher.
In Year 12 we studied World War II. “Rocky” made us write a list under the heading The Causes of the Second World War. It was at the height of the Cold War. History was seen in the context of wars between nation states. The question was: why do nations go to war? These days a better question is: why do individuals resort to violence?
It is hardly surprising that the answers are similar.
Under the heading The Causes of the Second World War we wrote something like:
1. The harsh Treaty of Versailles forcing Germany to pay huge war reparations which sent its people into poverty and increased resentment among Germans against the victors in World War I.
2. The taking of former German territories – Alsace-Lorraine (to France), Konnisberg (to the USSR), the Sudetenland (to Czechoslovakia), forcing the German-speaking population out, again causing resentment.
3. The hyper-inflation of the 1920s, wiping out savings and increasing insecurity.
4. The Great Depression of the 1930s causing poverty and hopelessness.
5. The rise of the Nazi Party.
And so on.
We could have also written a high birth rate, giving rise to a large class or resentful unemployed male youth.
So what has given rise to the War of Terrorism, as distinct from the War against Terror?
Much the same really? It has been a combination of Big Power dispossession, economic deprivation and a high birth rate. This has led to a class of resentful, semi-employed young males ripe for the picking by fanatics. Most of the leaders are reasonably well-educated and fairly affluent, but their fanaticism would go nowhere without the resentful underclass.
Hitler would have remained a comical figure without the ammunition of grievance and unemployment. With them he was able to build up a following who would, and did, die for the Fruher and who would, and did, murder for him.
Violent fanaticism – religious or ideological – is not a preserve of Arabs or Muslims. People with white faces and a notionally Christian background are equally capable of it if the conditions are right.
The military crushing of Hitler and of fascist Japan would probably not have been enough to stop the rise of another wave of violence. Germany was beaten militarily in World I, yet just 21 years later was the incubator of more violence. No; the ending of centuries of violence in Western Europe came with the Marshall Plan and the European Union – solid economic and political development – as it must be with the war against terror.
This is not to “blame the west” for the unspeakable violence. But the west should fight the terrorism is a sensible way. The Allies watched Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s and did nothing to help. Violence broke out.
Too many people view the preventability of World War II from the perspective of 1937 and divide the political players of the time into appeasers (“bad”) and non-appeasers (“good”), instead of looking at the position in 1925. But the idea of helping German people then was preposterous. Germany was synonymous with evil — not to be understood or even pitied, let alone sympathised with or helped.
This week’s Irish Republican Army truce shows the way. The economic discrimination has gone. Ireland (north and south) are much more prosperous. Both Britain and Ireland being in the EU has taken the sting out of the reunification question. So the pool of resentful young males with no hope for the future has dried up. They now have better lives to live so turn away from violence. The IRA goal of a united, socialist Ireland is as far away as ever. It was much the same with Basque terrorism in Spain.
We are fortunate that in the wider war on terror in 2005 violence has not broken out in the same way as in 1939. It has broken out, but not in the form of being perpetrated by the full force of a powerful nation state. The fanatics have not got control of a nation state and overtly converted its total energies to violence, though Iran has come close.
This in fact gives us a chance to deliver a new Marshall Plan to the Middle East without first suffering the destruction of World War II.
Maybe it is wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the exploration of causation is an exercise in rationality – something which does not sit easily with the Christian fundamentalists who are now directing the war against terror.
“Rocky” would have despaired.