Why terrorists target civilians.

I condemn murder in all of its forms.  This is a conversation about terrorists and attacks on civilian populations.

Last week’s brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians.  For many years, I accepted the given definition of ‘terrorists’ as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all.  There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold.  I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation.  The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society.  For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.

Civilian massacres can occur with low fatalities or very high.  The setting can be away from scrutiny or in the most public of places.

In my lifetime, the targeting of civilians has existed in many forms.

• In VietNam, civilians were slaughtered en masse and at will.
• The Middle-East conflicts involving Israel and its neighbors are a constant stream of civilian deaths at the hands of armies and bombs.
• Conflicts in Africa and South America between dictatorships, rebel groups and criminal enterprise (both private and corporate)

However, the killing of civilians as a military operation really took off in WWII.  Germany and Russia killed nearly 20 million of their own civilian populations as a deliberate strategy.  The Allies bombed civilians in Europe to halt the industry that supported the Third Reich war machine.  The American bombings of civilians at Nagasaki and Hiroshima has been viewed as a strike against the military industry as in Europe and as retribution for Pearl Harbor or even a demonstration of US military might toward Russia and the world.

The killing of civilians goes back into history since the dawn of mankind.  So, why are we seeing so much of it now?  I don’t know the statistics of civilian deaths for military/economic/political causes to compare this century to any of the previous.  Maybe there only seem like more now because we are more rapidly informed by TV, radio, Internet & print news sources.  It sure would be interesting to see those numbers, but for this conversation they do not really matter.

Let’s look at why civilians are killed today and maybe take one step closer to ending it.

They are trying to get our attention.

Civilians are targeted because they are consumers back home while they turn a blind eye to their armies abroad, enabling thievery, murder, rape and resource robbery.  It is the money taxed from the civilian population that pays for the soldiers and weapons sent overseas.  It is the money spent by the consumers that creates corporations powerful enough to influence and hire the military overseas in pursuit of resources and labor from other nations.

We are ignorant of the real actions of our military and corporations or the real conditions of poverty, environmental destruction, pollution, disease – in other words, the consequences of our action that create misery in others.  In this regard, we are not unlike the ignorance of wealthy in our own country who are isolated and buffered in their neighborhoods and homes.  They do not see the poor, nor understand why they live in squalor and crime.  Ignorance is a privilege and it does not excuse their actions or ours.

They are trying to get a government’s attention.

In some instances, attacks on civilians is directed at the government.  The killers are seeking to make things difficult for the government to operate.  If the attackers can remain free indefinitely and continue killing civilians, then the violence becomes a bargaining chip.  The idea is that violence becomes a bargaining chip for the ‘negotiations’ between the existing government and its challenger.

So, if a rebel campaign or terrorist campaign is a violent format for negotiating power between formal, existing governments and their challengers; then what are they trying to say?  What are they ‘bargaining’ for?

• They could be protesting the their country’s being robbed of natural resources by another country.  How exactly should a person take it when a corporation comes in from another country, bribes itself into a monopoly and takes every natural resource away?  How should someone feel when their drinking water is filled with toxins as a result of making toys for ‘dollar stores’?
• They could be exacting revenge for atrocities committed at the urging of the CIA.  Wars started simply to fuel the arms trade.  Maybe the killers don’t take kindly to their country being turned into a proving ground for munitions and corruption.
• Maybe they’re saying to their government and ours that they would like their own people to get wealthy from the resources within their country.
• Maybe they’re just too conditioned to daily violence or consumed with anger that they cannot break from the path of murder.

Nothing justifies the killing of civilians.  Unless we genuinely understand why it occurs, we will likely make no inroads to stopping it.

-gadfly