Great Barrington — It’s easy to take a stand against terrorists, whether they are boys shooting up schools, men shooting up magazine offices, hijackers slamming airplanes into towers or vigilantes burning villages, massacring civilians and selling girls into sex slavery.
It’s easy to say Nous sommes tous Charlie, we believe in freedom of speech, we don’t believe in suppressing dissent or imposing religious values through the barrel of a gun.
It’s easy to say that extremism of any ideological stripe is dangerous, that acceptance of diversity, whether of people or of opinion, is the best way to ensure a stable, peaceful society.
It’s easy — all too easy — to look at what’s going on in the world in a pious, holier-than-thou way and link arms with our friends and neighbors to march in support of a better world.
It’s not so easy to unravel the complicated skeins that undergird the rise of violence and sectarian intolerance in the world today. It’s not so comfortable to recognize the ways in which all of us are implicated in the murderous events unfolding before our shocked and horrified gaze.
As always, it helps to follow the money. If we’re honest, we have to admit that the money trail leads straight from our cars’ gasoline tanks to the terrorists blowing up themselves and others in the name of Allah.
It’s no secret that petrodollars fund a lot of Islamic extremism, from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the Boko Haram in Nigeria to ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Middle East and North Africa. So indirectly, following the money, we who are addicted to oil are unwittingly supporting the very terrorists we claim to decry.
Then there’s the question of the guns used by these terrorists. The United States is not only the most heavily armed “peaceful society” on the planet, we are also the number one arms manufacturers and distributors in the world. American companies are very often producing the very same guns used to terrorize innocent people around the world.
There are other ways we in the so-called liberal, peace-loving West are implicated in the terror that besets us. We are among the world’s biggest producers and distributors of video games and pornography, forms of representation that are loaded with violence, bigotry and misogyny. The video game industry, and individual gamers, will vigorously deny that violent gaming leads to violence in the real world. But it’s hard to see how the two realms could fail to be linked. We also continue to tolerate the oppression of women in Islamic societies, as well as in our own far-from-perfect society. If more women were in charge of diplomacy and government worldwide, there is a chance that peacemaking might become more of a priority, since women and children are always the biggest victims in any conflict situation.
In terms of suppression of dissent, it’s not just the Islamic State that likes to cry blasphemy when confronted with unwelcome information. The U.S. has been hard on whistleblowers from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden to Chelsea Manning to Glenn Greenwald, all of whom are either in prison or in exile. And we seem to conveniently turn a blind eye when one of our petro allies cracks down on freedom of speech — have you heard of any official condemnation of the Saudi decision to punish a blogger by giving him 1,000 lashes, 50 at a time spread out over 20 sessions? Surely that is as barbaric as shooting up a roomful of cartoonists, and it’s a state-sanctioned suppression of free speech, not a rogue terrorist action.
Just as the Ebola outbreak revealed the extent to which people in the affected countries were living with dysfunctional, understaffed and underfunded health care facilities, the Charlie Hebdo massacre has spotlighted the poor conditions for Muslim youth in Paris and other French cities. Shut people into drab suburbs, ignore their pleas to be recognized as full French citizens and given meaningful work, and tolerate a posture of low-level racism, and you have a recipe for social unrest that can easily turn violent. Whatever their country, whatever their creed, young people who are angry and see no future for themselves or their families are susceptible to being lured into gangs, cult groups or religious sects which can in turn prey on society.
It must be acknowledged that our willingness to turn a blind eye to the social needs of people who look or speak differently from us is also part of the problem here. I am wondering why the massacre of 16 white French people caused so much more of a stir than the nearly simultaneous massacre of thousands of Nigerian civilians? If we’re all Charlie, are we not all Baga too? (Baga is the name of the town that was burned to the ground by Boko Haram on January 3 — the fact that it has no name recognition is exactly my point.)
So there you have it. Charlie, c’est nous, oui — but if we look in the mirror honestly, we will see that we in the West also wear the face of terror.
We are all in this together, and violence only leads to hardened resistance and more violence, no matter who is wielding the guns. To really get past this blood-soaked era, we need to do more than point fingers in blame; we need to take responsibility for our own role as enablers. And then start working with renewed vigor for real global change, each in our own local spheres.
