“The war against terror
is bound up in the war against poverty.” --Bono
“Human rights are not only violated by
terrorism, repression or assassination, but also by unfair economic structures
that creates huge inequalities.” – Pope Francis
In
1939, John Steinbeck published the Grapes
of Wrath – his elegy to the dispossessed farmers of the Great
Depression. Buried in that tome are what
have become known as The Three Cries of History. He said:
“And the great owners, who must lose their land
in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read
history and to know the great fact: when
property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion
fact: when a majority of the people are
hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little
screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The
great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer
hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great
owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great
holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might
be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored;
and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt
went on.”
This should
sound eerily familiar – if not prescient – in the 21st century. We are living in times of unprecedented
wealth. But the gap between our rich and
our poor has never been so great, either. Nearly 1.3 billion people live on
less than $1.25/day. Another 2 ½ billion
live on less than $2.50. That’s half of humanity.
In this gap, terrorism festers –
also on an unprecedented scale.
In 2014, after a meeting with the
Vatican, John Kerry stated, “We have a huge common interest in dealing with
this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism or
even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions of people on this
planet.”
In the wake of the Paris attacks this weekend,
there is likely to be much sabre rattling about the War on Terror. Canada’s new Prime Minister will be assaulted
for his pre-existing stance on removing troops from Syria and resettling 25 000 refugees. This will not be a popular decision. But despite evidence to the contrary, we do
not elect our leaders to be popular. We
elect them to lead.
According to Forbes Magazine, in 2011, the War
on Terror had cost American taxpayers 1.7 trillion dollars since 2001. Other left-leaning academics have pegged the
price tag as high as 5 trillion. However,
in The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs –
Director of the Harvard Earth Institute – calculated the cost of eliminating
extreme poverty at $175 billion over 20 years.
This figure is roughly equal to .7% of the OECD’s gross domestic product. That’s less than a penny from every dollar in
the world’s thirty richest nations. Even
at the most conservative estimates, one nation alone (the United States) spent
this amount in the first decade of its War on Terror.
Imagine for a moment that this money had been
spent on building schools, creating jobs, improving access to clean water, and
feeding the hungry. What would the world
look like today? Alas, imagine is all we
can do.
One thing is for sure, however, armed conflict,
destabilization, and civil unrest only strengthen the conditions for terrorism. The National Bureau of Economic Research
found an even greater correlation between these conditions and terror, than it
did with poverty (Poverty,
Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism).
It is not a secret – even if not widely heralded in the media – that ISIS/ISIL was fostered and even
aided by American intervention. Barack
Obama defended his decision to support what he originally considered “moderate
rebels” by “non-lethal” means. This
support transformed ISIS/ISIL, which had previously been a bit player in the
region, into the force for global terror that it is today.
It is one thing to foster terror through
inaction. It is another to “spread
compost on the weeds.”
We have only to ask ourselves, “Is the world a
safer place today than it was in 2001?”
If the answer is no, than the War on Terror is a failure.
The truth is, terrorism is the twisted
offspring of inequality. Bombing treats
only the symptom. To stop terrorism, we must
attack it at the source. Build schools,
build hospitals, build democracies. Anything else is an absurd game of
Whack-A-Mole – strike terrorism once, and it will show its ugly head again
elsewhere in little time.
Al qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS/ISIL… whack, whack,
whack…
Our thoughts can be nowhere else but with the Parisians at this moment in history. #ViveLaFrance
