The Danger of Safety

The critical moment has come, the hour is late, and it is time for us to face the terrifying truth.

We are not safe. We will never be safe, and the desire to insulate ourselves from the dangers of the world is often far more destructive than the threats we are attempting to avoid.

On December 26th, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to ignite a bomb on a Northwest airline flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. This incident has the Obama administration scrambling to reassess our security procedures and convince the American public that it is doing everything possible to assure their safety.

Here are some of the proposals.

Full body scans required on all passengers at all airports.
Passengers must have their hands in plain sight one our after takeoff and before landing
Barring lavatory use for one hour after takeoff and before landing
Canceling all direct flights from "suspect" countries.
More Background checks
More random searches
More restrictive baggage rules
And our old friend racial profiling.

All of this at a cost of Billions of dollars, millions of man hours and perhaps the loss of a bit more of our humanity.

But, if it means saving even one human life, it’s worth it, isn’t it?

No. It’s not.

It’s time for us to get out of the risk elimination business and get into the business of risk management.

The truth is people are going to die. They will die in their bathtubs and in their cars. They will die in shootings, by lightning, from disease, and from old age. They will die by accident, and they will die by intent. In war and in peace.

The world is a dangerous, unpredictable place and anyone who says you can be 100% safe is a liar.

So does that mean we should eliminate all safety measures, tear down the security checkpoints, and rip all the seat-belts out of cars?

Of course not.

However, with limited resources, (and our resources have become very limited indeed) it is important to face our fears and make rational decisions about where we can save the most lives.

We are terrified of another attack. However, in the 8 years since 9/11 there has not been one successful airline, terrorist attack in the United States. Even including September 11th, deaths from terrorism represent only a tiny fraction of our annual, preventable deaths.

If the Northwest bomber had succeeded he would’ve added 290 deaths to that number. Would such an event have been a tragedy? Yes.

But compare that to the tens of thousands of deaths from auto accidents each year or the hundreds of thousands of deaths from preventable diseases like obesity and lung cancer.

Want to save real lives? Take all fast food and sugared soda off the market tomorrow or reduce the maximum speed on all American roadways to 35 miles per hour.

That’s it. We’ve just saved thousands of lives. But we don’t want to do that because we judge (and I think rightly) that the cost to our lifestyle, our economy and even our personal freedoms is simply too high.

However, we will sacrifice almost anything in order to protect ourselves from terrorism

We have given up our freedoms, sabotaged our economy, and fought two poorly conceived and irresponsibly, executed wars. We have cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers and not tens, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani people, the vast majority of whom have never attacked the United States. The result has been a wrecked economy, a devastated military and a world which, for the most part, sees America as a decadent, aggressive and wholly self interested giant.

All of this, in a vein attempt to make us safe.

I don’t want to give up on security. In fact, when it comes to the really big stuff, chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, I think we haven’t done nearly enough. We still haven’t secured our ports, or our nuclear facilities and we are still unable to control the world’s fissionable material.

However, I, for one, have no desire to see my nation, predicated on the concept of liberty, transformed into some kind of gated community, complete with background checks, strip searches and endless suspicion.

I choose instead to be less safe, to accept that tragedies will happen but that sometimes the price of freedom is not eternal vigilance, but rather the courage to face our fears and dare to hope.

On the Power of Faith

Those of you who know me, or have read my blog, know that I am not a religious person. Logic, consistency, objectivity and provability are the standards by which I try (albeit at times unsuccessfully) to live my life. Those standards, are frequently at odds with those of religion, which value faith above all other things.

This predilection for the scientific perspective has naturally led me into one heated discussion after another with my more religious friends. These discussions invariably end badly, with me disappointed in my friend/opponent’s inability to see the inconsistencies in their faith while they are equally frustrated and sometimes angry with, what they see as, my patronizing attitude towards their most, cherished beliefs.

So, rather than once again reviewing my litany of Biblical inconsistencies, mocking the biography of Joseph Smith, or trying to explain the criteria for scientific proof, I have decided to examine the question of faith from a decidedly different angle.

Let us first stipulate that although it is possible (albeit, in my opinion very unlikely) for one, particular religion to be literally true, it is impossible for all religions to be literally true.

If the tenants of Hinduism are correct about reincarnation then Judaism must be false in it’s belief in only one life on earth . If, as the Jews believe, the Messiah has not yet appeared, then Christianity must be false as it is based on the divinity of Jesus. If Jesus was, as the Christians believe, the last great prophet, then the followers of Mohammed must be following a fraud.

If one is true, the others must be false. Consequently, since none of the religions of the world represent a majority of the religious population, it follows that the vast majority of religious people on the planet believe in a doctrine which is not true.

However, the fact that most religious people on the planet must be wrong does not effect the intensity of their faith.

The question is, “Is it possible that something which is not literally true can have real and transformative value?”

Here’s a story.

A Jew, a Muslim, a Christian and a Buddhist walk into an AA meeting. All four men have struggled with alcoholism for many years. All four men have tried, over and over again, to fight their addiction with will power and all have failed. All four men begin the twelve step program by admitting they are powerless over their alcoholism. All four men turn their problem over to a higher power. All four men define that higher power differently. Yet, all four manage to do something they have never been able to do on their own.

They stop drinking.

And who gets the credit for this transformation? God? Buddha? Allah? Jesus? If Jesus helped the Christian quit drinking who helped the Buddhist? Who helped the Jew? They cannot all exist and yet all four men found help.

So, what gave these men the power to do what they couldn’t do on their own?

Faith did. Not truth. Not God. Faith.

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is really a study in the power of the human mind, or, depending on how you look at it, the power of bullshit. Tell a patient that the sugar pill they are ingesting is a cure and you vastly increase the chances that they will recover. This isn’t psudo-science or new age mysticism. This is carefully documented scientific fact. Our health is intimately linked to our state of mind.

The placebo effect can work in the opposite way as well. In a recent study, the arms of a group of students were rubbed by a plant which they were told was poison ivy. 80% of those students developed rashes consistent with that plant’s effect, despite the fact that the plant they touched wasn’t poison Ivy at all.

Since scientists are seeking real drugs and techniques which can consistently combat disease, they spend most of their time trying to eliminate the placebo effect from their research. Consequently, we think of placebo’s as a statistical anomaly or an experimental nuisance. However, I think that is a mistake.

These results are not inconsequential. They are substantiated and significant. I do not believe that our perceptions and beliefs can magically change the world around us (as we have been told by self help books like The Secret) However, there is no doubt that our beliefs can have powerful, transformative effects on ourselves and by transforming ourselves we do change both our perceptions of the world and how we act in it.

If faith in a tiny pill can cure disease, how much more powerful is faith in an omnipotent and loving God?

So, let us return to our AA members and examine, once again, how they managed their recovery. They knew that they could not beat their drinking on their own. They put their faith in a cure and the cure worked despite the fact that, for at least three out of four of them, the cure must not exist.

Is it possible that something which is not literally true can have real substantial value?

The answer is yes.

Here is a description of a religion.

You go with your family and community into a beautiful space. You perform rituals which are probably not all that different from what your great grand parents performed. You sing, read, and pray in unison. You listen to the wise words of elders. You meditate and contemplate your own life. You ask forgiveness for your inequities. You fast. You dance. You celebrate together and you mourn together. You lend your strength to the rest of the community when you can and take strength from the community when you need to. You have faith in a meaning and a power beyond this world.

The question is, which religion did I just describe? The answer: Pretty much all of them.

So, what do we conclude from this? That the major religions are nothing but plagiarists, callously stealing ideas from each other, or is it possible that the stuff religions do, fasting, singing, praying, is simply good stuff, regardless of whether the doctrine it is designed to support is true?

Almost every religion has the story of the wise man, Christian monk, Hindu ascetic, aboriginal Holy Man or Zen master, who turns his back on society and goes into the wilderness where, through a process of fasting, self denial, meditation, or even drug induced hallucination, has a transformative experience.

Again, what do we conclude from this. Do we see the transformative experience as evidence that the particular mythology the holy man subscribed to is true despite the fact, that that mythology is in direct contradiction to the holy men of other sects who had similar experiences or do we instead conclude that putting the mind and body through a profound change, fasting, deprivation, silence, torture, etc...can be transformative with or without any mythology at all?

The truth is that if you put the human body and mind in an extreme situation, whether it is fasting on your Yoga retreat or going through basic training in the marine corps something will happen, something profound.

Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela had their transformative experiences in prison.

So what do we tell our four AA members who’s faith saved their lives? What do we tell the billions of people across the globe who gain solace, hope and a sense of belonging from their religious traditions. What do we tell the men and women who have had a religious experience so profound that it has not only transformed their lives but, from their perspective, the entire world?

Do we tell them that these experiences are nothing more than dramatic examples of the placebo effect? Do we explain that songs, architecture and ritual do not prove the existence of God? Do we belittle the most important experience of their lives by explaining it?

Can you imagine how insulting that would sound?

Faith is real. Faith is powerful. Faith helped Gandhi and Martin Luther King stand up against impossible odds. Faith helped Jesus forgive his murderers. Faith might even have helped your team win the super bowl.

The truth is that all of the elements of religion; community, tradition, music, mediation, art, prayer, the personal spiritual journey, and yes even faith, can be positive and valuable additions to a person’s or community's life. The problem arises when that genuine value is seen as absolute proof that the particular doctrine they believe in must be true.

And that is very, very dangerous.

Faith exists beyond rational thought and is therefor easily manipulated and very difficult to argue with.

Our four AA men’s lives were literally saved by their faith, so how can they argue when their faith calls upon them to persecute homosexuals, burn down abortion clinics, or raise the shout of global Jihad against all the infidels who oppose the god that saved their life.

Faith has spilt it’s share of blood and the only hope we have is that we find a way to mediate the power of our faith with the power of reason.

In my opinion, the myths of Samson and Jonah are just as likely as the myths of Hercules and Loki or, for that matter, Superman and Spiderman.

However, I will acknowledge that your belief in those stories and your participation in the rituals that go along with them can have lasting and positive effects on your life and that of your community.

All I ask in return is that you acknowledge that believing in a thing beyond reason, beyond logic, can be as dangerous and destructive as it is beneficial.

I support your right to choose faith but I hope that it will be faith tempered by reason and compassion, a faith which is at once humble and forgiving, self-critical and patient.

In short, if your faith helps you strive to be a better person, then we have nothing to argue about.

Killing The Chicken

“Have you ever killed a chicken?” This is one of the questions that my good friend, Mike Hoover, likes to ask when someone is saying something particularly naive or insensitive. “Have you ever killed a chicken?”

On some level, Hoover divides the world up into, “Chicken killers.” and “non-Chicken Killers”, those who are connected to the world in all it’s brutal reality and those who are not.

Most people, in this country aren’t chicken killers. In fact, for most of us, the closest we get to killing is picking out our cuts at the local super-market. We don’t see the blood, or the suffering, all we see is a product, impersonally prepared and wrapped in cellophane.

I’ve never killed a chicken. My friend Jeff has and he said it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.

So, why does Mike Hoover, a very, smart compassionate man, want all of us to start murdering birds? What’s the big deal?

There was a time when we weren’t removed from death. If we wanted meat we had to kill. So, does that mean we were more callous about killing then, more cruel?

No. The opposite was true.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, the animals they hunted were not hated or vilified, they were given positions of great respect in the community. The plains Indians did not hate the buffalo, they honored it, not only because it provided much of the raw materials necessary for their way of life, but also because, through the difficult process of hunting, they had come to know the animal. The buffalo wasn’t simply a walking dinner, it was a living breathing creature with a soul and a value. To hunt it honorably, and kill it humanely was the nature of their relationship.

However, to kill the animal and not use every bit of him was considered the cruelest kind of waste. Imagine, the horror the native Americans felt when this animal they respected, who played a key roll in their spiritual life, was hunted, almost to extinction, by ruthless men who were only interested in their hides and left the rest of the animal to rot in the sun.

However, somewhere Back East there was a buyer for that buffalo fur who never had to look into the eyes of the animal that died for him and thus had no pang of conscious for paying for the slaughter. It was a business transaction, nothing more.

I’m reminded of a question in Jedediah Purdy's book, Being America He asks, “Which American slaveholder treated his slaves with greater cruelty, the rich plantation owner with a thousand slaves, or the small farmer with only one?” My first instinct was to say the rich plantation owner. After all, he can afford to be generous, while the poor farmer can barely survive himself. Of course, the opposite is true. The rich plantation owner never really sees his slaves. He lives in a big house with every luxury and has no understanding of how his workers live. The poor farmer, on the other hand, lives much closer to his slave. He works side by side with him in the field. He eats the same food and wears the same kind of clothes. This proximity makes cruelty, if not impossible, far less likely.

Today, we are much further from the animals we eat than in anytime in history and, like the big plantation owner, our distance, our ignorance of where our food comes from, has made us cruel. It is a cruelty which manifests itself not in how our animals die but rather in how they live. Cows, living their whole lives, packed into industrial feed lots knee deep in their own filth. Chickens squeezed into cages so small they cannot turn around. We have become masters of efficiency, experts in turning grain into meat and meat into dinner.

We have separated ourselves from the killing fields because we abhor cruelty but the greater the distance, has made us far crueler than the hunter who kills the buffalo with his bow, or the rancher who slits the neck of the chicken he has cared for all his life.

However, it is not only the animals we eat who have been damaged by this separation. We have been damaged. In my last blog, I outlined how our industrial food system, has left us obese, malnourished, and vulnerable to new strains of disease, but this separation from the natural world, has consequences far beyond diet.

One Hundred years ago, 85% of the worlds population lived on farms or in small villages. Today, 85% of our, much greater, population lives in cities and that number is growing at a breakneck pace. Cities are ecosystems all their own, however, the needs of the urban ecosystem are in almost direct opposition to the needs of the natural one. Success in the city means following the urban paradigm, which is that consumption is success and greed is good. This philosophy has a direct, devastating effect on the natural world but the city dweller does not see the consequences of their actions and so they do not care. That this disconnected relationship damages the natural world is without question, but I believe it is equally damaging to modern man. Are we healthier in our regulated, manufactured, commercialized, and heavily branded urban existence? Are we happier? Are we kinder? Or have we, in fact, become more isolated, overworked, stressed, depressed and unhealthy?

Disconnection is the danger and a disconnection from death is a disconnection from life.

The modern world fears death in all it’s forms. We refuse to see it and this denial of one of the most fundamental realities of life is intensely destructive. There was a time when we died in our own homes, surrounded by our families. Today, death occurs in the sterile, industrial hallways of the hospital with the only human contact permitted during proper visiting hours. There was a time when the greatest concern at the approach of death was our spiritual well being. Today, the focus is on a thousand incomprehensible, medical tests. There was a time, when the bodies of our dead were cleaned and dressed by their families. Today, our dead are locked away in cold storage before they can be attended to by a professional. Which system gives better care in our last moments? Which system better prepares us to say goodbye? We have endeavored to protect ourselves from the pain of death but our lives are no less painful.

Does choosing not to see death make us less cruel or more?

Is a nation that sees an endless stream of mutilated bodies more likely to an end a war than a nation that chooses not to see?

The first thing we must accept is that death in and of itself is not cruel. Death is inexorably connected to life. It is all around us. Every living thing on earth survives on death. It is not cruel when the lion kills it’s prey. It is merely the natural order of things. Cruelty is a uniquely human invention. A sociopath is cruel because he enjoys watching the suffering of others with open eyes but the majority of cruelties, the vast atrocities of our times, are committed with eyes closed. The more we disconnect, the crueler we become.

By separating ourselves from death we have separated ourselves from life. We have created a system in which we are at odds with the natural world and so, at odds with ourselves. Perhaps the only way to save the planet is to touch the planet and perhaps touching the planet is the only way to save ourselves.

Does that mean we should all run out and start killing our own chickens? Not necessarily. It simply means we should begin the long and, sometimes painful, process of opening our eyes.

On the Nature of Fear. Part Two: Fear and the Demon

By March of 1933 the United States was in the throws of the greatest economic disaster in its history. Half the banks had closed. Unemployment had passed 25%. Personal income had dropped in half and bread lines had formed across the country. Many people felt that they were witnessing the end of civilization, the final descent from American prosperity into a new Dark Age. It was in this atmosphere that Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood on the capitol steps and spoke, what would come to be, the most famous words of his presidency.

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

It is one of the most often repeated phrases in the history of political speech but what exactly does it mean? “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” There are certainly many things worth fearing. Death, disaster, starvation, war. When Roosevelt said those words people were literally starving in the streets. Isn’t that a cause for fear?

But why were people starving? All records show that, despite the disastrous blows to agriculture, there was still plenty of food in the US to feed all its citizens. Thousands of banks failed and much of the population lost their life savings, but, according to their balance sheets most of the banks that failed were solvent when the crowds started lining up outside their doors. Why did the stock market crash? Why did factories close and businesses lay off long time employees? The United States, had as much food, resources, workers and talent in 1935 as it had in 1925 and yet the twenties were a time of great economic prosperity and the thirties an era of economic desperation. Why? What had changed?

The answer is that people became afraid. Of course, there were other causes, poor business planning, insufficient, banking and securities regulations, and a corrupt agricultural system. But those factors only made the system more vulnerable to the panic. If the panic had been avoided, if no one had sold their stock or lined up to withdraw their money from the bank, there would have been no depression.

“The Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself”

A few years ago I worked on a documentary on great white sharks. Sharks are among the most studied ocean creatures and great whites are probably the most studied sharks. Is this because the mating habits or migratory patterns of great white sharks are somehow more interesting than other animals? No. What makes white sharks interesting is fear. They quite simply scare the hell out of us. After all, there is no dolphin week on the Discovery channel.

However, as I worked on the documentary it became very clear that fear was not something inherent in the white shark; it was something inherent in us. The reality is, sharks represent a nearly, insignificant threat to human beings. Of the millions of humans who die each year fewer than 20 are killed by sharks. Compare this to the thousands that die from bee stings or tens of thousands that are killed in car accidents. The truth is you are far more likely to die slipping in your bathtub or falling down your own stairs than you are to be killed by a shark but none of us live in mortal terror of our bathtubs. (At least not as far as I know)

Mark Marks, the shark expert we worked with on the documentary once said, “When you demonize an animal, you elevate its status with fear.” In other words, by demonizing the shark we give it far more significance in our mind than it has in reality. This new status does not change the shark. It changes us. Demonizing the shark or the bee, or the terrorist gives us the right to become the demon ourselves and begin the slaughter because morality, justice, and mercy don’t count for much when your life is on the line.

We are currently hunting sharks to extinction, killing over 100 million animals a year, not for food, but for their highly prized fins and tails. After the appendages are cut off, the sharks are thrown, still living back into the sea. This despicable practice would not be tolerated on an animal that wasn’t so universally feared.

Of course, as in the parable of the bee, sharks do not exist in a vacuum but rather as part of a complex ecosystem. As we destroy them, we are irrevocably damaging the delicate balance that we depend upon.

We are afraid of sharks so we destroy them and through that destruction we destroy ourselves.

Fear isn’t listed among the seven deadly sins, but I think maybe it should be. Like the other sins at it’s heart is something which, far from being evil, is actually part of a healthy life. Lust comes from the desire to propagate the species. At the heart of gluttony is the basic need for sustenance. Work hard and try to improve the trappings of your life and you’re admired, become obsessed with possessions and it’s greed. The same can be said for fear, which is a valuable instinct for survival but, taken to extremes, fear itself becomes the real enemy.

Today, the fear is all around us. We are in a war on terror. Each night on the news we seem to be bombarded by a new danger, or disease. Crime rates have actually gone down in the last fifty years but we feel less safe. In our minds, our children have become more fragile, susceptible to every disease, prone to every accident and surrounded by the worst kind of predators. In short, we have become fear junkies, unable to turn away from the things, which terrify us yet willing to sacrifice almost everything, our civil liberties, sense of social justice, and even our future for the illusion of safety.

I recently saw an ad for a home security company. They were selling a high tech system complete with motion detectors, security cameras and panic buttons. The tag line was, “Making your family feel safe for over thirty years.” Notice it didn’t say, “Making your family safe…” It said, “Making your family feel safe.” They weren’t selling security at all. What they were selling was the illusion of security. Not freedom from danger but freedom from fear. This has become a common practice in everything from politics to medicine, to technology. First terrify us with the most disturbing aspects of life, then, sell us something, an idea, a pill or a law, to make that fear go away.

Once again, fear has played a decisive roll in presidential rhetoric. Only this time, rather than helping us to face our fears, our government, and our media has fed them. We have been told that the world is filled with “Evil doers” who, “hate us for our freedom” and that someday soon, “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud”. Terrifying words. And once people believe that their life and the lives of tehir loved ones are being threatened they will protect them by any means necessary. Who would’ve imagined, just a few years ago, that the United States, one of the staunchest supporters of the Geneva Convention, would be openly and brazenly advocating the use of torture? Just as demonizing sharks transforms us into far more dangerous predators. Demonizing the Muslim has transformed the United States.

Like the stock market crash of October 1929, September 11th, 2001 was a transitional moment in history. Before 9/11 the economy was booming, we had the first budget surplus in 2 decades and, although not everyone agreed with our policies, the United States was a respected member of the world community. Since then, the economy has crashed on the hardest working Americans, we have wracked up the largest budget deficits in history, and seen the US transformed in the eyes of the world from a bastion of democracy to an imperialist power who’s only interest is self-interest.

The tragedy of all of this is that, far from hurting our enemies, our actions are playing right into their hands. Like the man in the parable of the bee, we cannot lash out at the world without, in the long run, destroying ourselves. The more innocents we round up and torture, the more dictators we support, the more unwinnable wars we force our troops to fight, the weaker we become and the more enemies we have to fear. September 11th was a devastating attack but the disasters since then have been almost entirely self-created.

Sun Tzu, the great military philosopher, once said that, “A general with 100 men can defeat an army of 10,000, if they can manipulate the larger force into defending 1000 positions.” In other words, a weaker army can destroy a stronger one if the stronger army is afraid. How many positions are we trying to defend? Why is America, unquestionably the most powerful nation on earth, also the most fearful?

President Bush says we are in a war on Terror but what we seem to be fighting is of war of terror. The world has been warned that either they are with us or against us. These are words whose purpose is to control with fear just as the terrorists have controlled us. The real power of terrorism isn’t dirty bombs or biological weapons. The real power is that terrorism transforms the victim into the victimizer.

A frightened animal is a dangerous animal not only to others but to itself. If humans are the most powerful animals on the planet, how dangerous, then, is a frightened human? How dangerous is a frightened America?

We are in a War on Terror, or at least we should be, because the greatest enemy we face is far more powerful than the suicide bomber or Islamic Extremist.

The greatest enemy we face, is fear itself.

Gandhi and Bin Laden

In my last blog, I wrote about the tragic consequences of failing to recognize paradigm shifts in military conflicts, and I discussed how such a shift has occurred in our so-called war on terror. It is our inability to understand the true nature of this conflict that has resulted in both the tragic loss of life on both sides and our failure to achieve anything remotely resembling victory.

But what is the nature of this paradigm shift? How does terrorism differ from conventional war and what counter measures are the most effective in combating its spread? These are not easy questions and as I sought answers something very offensive popped into my mind. “Mahatma Ghandi and Osama Bin Laden have a lot in common.”

The moment I had the thought I felt bad about it. Gandhi is one of the most revered pacifists in history and Bin Landen one of the most reviled villains. One man, was willing to sacrifice his life rather than lift a finger to hurt another soul. The other is willing to kill thousands to achieve his ends. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that once you let go of the moral considerations, there are, in fact, many similarities. Not in goals or philosophies but in how their tactics manipulate the world.

Gandhi, a native of India, began his exploration of non-violent resistance, in South Africa and rose to world prominence when he brought his movement into direct conflict with the British Raj in India. The expression, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Was not an exaggeration. They had prosperous colonies all over the world and their power, both militarily and economically, was unrivaled.

Bin Laden, a native of Saudi Arabia, began fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and rose to world prominence when he turned his attack on the United States whose Military and Economic eclipses that of the former British Empire.

During Gandhi’s time, the powerful British Navy, disciplined army, comparatively fair justice system and efficient bureaucracy made them uniquely suited to control a world empire. The fact that the empire was built on the backs of a hundred conquered nations did not concern them. In the minds of the British, what we would call imperialism was merely their way of brining civilization to the savages. After centuries of colonization the British had become experts at controlling native populations, whether through direct use of force or by bribing or coercing local leaders to do their bidding.

Today, the United States military is the most powerful the world has ever seen and the US/Western Capitalist Economy has become an almost unstoppable force, spreading across the world along with American Culture, and Values. What some would call American Imperialism we think of as spreading democracy and freedom.

Gandhi believed that only through the removal of British rule and the establishment of a free and independent India, was it possible for the Indian people to live the lives that they deserved. Bin Laden’s, beliefs, although perhaps less appealing to the western mind, are similar. He wants an Islamic world free of American interference, which will govern itself based on Islamic principals.

To achieve their goals both men had to overcome a seemingly unbeatable foe. One who’s power both militarily and economically is way out of their league.

Most people would conclude that this is where the similarities between the two men end. However, in my opinion, although their methods are diametrically opposed, the ingredients necessary to produce them and their effect have much in common. To explore this idea I have come up with, what I consider to be, five crucial ingredients in the non-violent revolution which we can compare to Islamic Terrorism.

1. Desperation. The risks of any revolution, non-violent or otherwise, are tremendously high. Lives will be changed, if not lost. Wealth will be shifted and society will be irrevocably transformed. Nobody would take those kinds of risks unless they saw no other choice.

2. Lack of Representation. A well-run government does not guarantee that its citizens won’t be put in desperate situations from time to time. What a well-run government should guarantee is that when the desperate situation arises there will be some mechanism to air grievances and attempt to gain justice. This is not to say that all people are taken care of at all times, merely that opportunities for social change are possible within the system. When Justice is absent, when desperate people have no established voice in the halls of commerce or government their only choice is to move outside of the rules and fight back (peacefully or otherwise) against the system that has betrayed them.

3. Courage. What does it take to face down a squad of policeman armed with shotguns and fire hoses? What does it take to march unarmed through 1000 miles of enemy territory knowing that an attack could come at any moment? What does it take to stand alone in front of a Chinese tank? Non-violent resistance takes courage and more. It takes a belief in something greater than yourself because in this kind of struggle there is the very real possibility that you could die. Nobody, who is only interested in their own worldly advancement would become a non-violent resistor. This is why so many of the great pacifist movements were inexorably linked to religion. Faith is part of what gave the followers of Gandhi and Martin Luther King the courage they needed for their struggle.

4. The Media. I wont go so far as to say that non-violent resistance cannot succeed without media attention but it is incredibly difficult. A Buddhist monk burning himself alive to protest the South Vietnamese government would only have effected those who actually saw the event, were it not for the photographs which were seen all over the world. We all remember the images of Tiananmen Square, and the protestors being attacked at Kent State. Without media attention, non-violent resistance is like a gun without bullets because the true weapon of non-violent resistance is not the boycotts or sit-ins it is the reaction those incidents have on the rest of the world. Which brings us to the fifth and most important factor in a non-violent revolution.

5. The Enemy. In the end, it is the opponent whose actions have the real power. Remember, the resistors cannot change the situation on their own. They need the help of those in power. That help can come in both positive and negative ways. Positive, in the form of help and negative in the form of force. Force used against non-violent resistors can help the movement because it casts the protestors as the heroes of the story and the Government as the villain. The greater the force the more polarizing the effect. It is possible, to scare a non-violent movement out of existence but if the movement remains true to it’s principals and united against the common enemy, perceptions about the situation will begin to shift. Once that perceptional shift solidifies, the powers that be are in an untenable situation. The more openly they pressure the resistors the worse they look.

In this sense, Non-violent resistance is a kind of psychological war. It does not attack the resources or men of the enemy directly. Instead, it attacks their will to continue an oppressive system while at the same time inspiring those sympathetic to join the cause. In other words, non-violent resistance changes the worldview of both oppressor and oppressed by showing them both the courage and morality of the people in the weakest position and the cowardice and immorality of those in power.

This is how men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. achieved their goals. These were great men, brave men, men who were willing to, and eventually did give their lives for a cause greater than themselves. To make any comparison between them and the terrorists of 9/11, or the men who planned those attacks, is an insult to their memory. However, it is my contention that much can be learned from just such a comparison. Let’s look once again at my five ingredients for a non-violent revolution, except now, let’s do it in a context of Islamic Fundamentalism and the war on terror.

1. Desperation. Islamic Fundamentalism rises out of extremely stratified, repressive societies, where there is minimal access to education, or representation. The followers of Fundamentalist principals, feel, they have been betrayed, economically, socially, religiously or politically by the modern world.

2. Lack of Representation: We claim to be fighting for democracy but the truth is all of our Islamic allies are dictatorships. If a viewpoint is antithetical to the wishes of the government it simply will not be aired.

3. Courage: Bill Maher was fired from ABC for saying it but let’s not bullshit here. Terrorists might be evil, crazy religious fanatics but they are not cowards. Sacrificing your life for any cause, regardless of it’s relative justice, takes tremendous courage. And, like the non-violent resistors, it is no coincidence that often this kind of willingness to self-sacrifice is built upon belief in a spiritual world beyond our own.

4. The Media: Terror feeds on press. Terrorism has killed fewer than 4000 people in the entire history of the United States. More people are killed each year by Bee Stings but we treat Terrorism as the number one threat to our livelihood. Why? Because the bees aren’t in the news. How may times have you seen the towers fall? How many red, yellow and orange alerts have you heard? How many times have you tuned in to the evening news only to discover that you still are not safe. The Media is the terrorist’s number one weapon.

5. The Enemy: Since 9/11 the ball has been almost entirely in our court. We have entered two wars, gone deeply into debt, suspended, the rights of our own people and openly advocated mass arrests and torture as reasonable methods for the achievement of our ends. We have in short become very much like the unilateral Imperialist nation that Osama Bin Laden claimed that we were. Did the terrorists do this to us?

6. Remember how angry you felt when you watched the World Trade Center collapse 6 years ago? How hopeless? Now try to imagine how an Iraqi feels when he sees the pictures from Abu Ghraib. 2743 people died on 9/11 and in our nation of 300 million, we all felt some connection to the victims of that tragic day. Iraq has less than 10% of our population but some estimates put the death toll there at over 500,000. Imagine how they feel.

9/11 resulted in a few thousand deaths and approximately 30 billion dollars in damage. Our war on terror has resulted in a few hundred thousand deaths and cost over a trillion dollars. After 9/11 America experienced a worldwide outpouring of compassion and support unlike anything in history. Today, the rest of the world has begun to view America as a dangerous power, wholly consumed with the pursuit of it’s own interests. Did the terrorists do this to us or did we do it to ourselves?

Like the opponents of a non-violent revolution, our actions since 9/11 have had a polarizing effect on the world. We, not the terrorists, have sent many of our people to their deaths in impossible wars. We have driven away some of our staunchest allies and we have used the politics of fear to divide our nation. Where once we were seen as the heroes of the story, much of the world now sees us as the villain. This is what we have done, not the terrorists.

Is it my intention to imply, through this comparison, that Gandhi and Bin Laden are the same? No. Gandhi is one of my great heroes and Bin Laden, certainly, is not. What this comparison does hopefully point out is that, in the end, the true weapons of the terrorists are not IED’s and Dirty bombs. The true weapons are the effect those things have on the minds of their targets and the actions that state of mind produces.

Next Week: The Parable of the Bee

Paradigm Shifts in Military Strategy: Part One

The war in Iraq has now been going on for four years and three months, making it one of the longest wars in US History. Only the Revolutionary and Vietnam Wars were longer. If you include the war in Afghanistan as part of the greater War on Terror we have been in a continuous state of war for five and a half years.

At first this, so called, War on Terror went well. The armies of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein were no match for the worlds surviving super-power and they fell quickly. However, since then, things have grown progressively worse. The death count, both in American military personnel and the civilian population has continued to rise and the stabilizing effects of democracy and economic progress have failed to materialize. Instead, both nations have been thrown into chaos, with rising sectarian violence, diminishing security and economic collapse. Life in both of these nations was difficult before the war under the rule of a tyrannical dictator in Iraq and a fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan, but most would acknowledge that the tyranny of the past is in many ways preferable to the chaos of the present. To make matters worse, the people of the world, who were, for the most part, sympathetic with the US after 9/11 have grown increasingly distrustful of our policies and Anti-American sentiments have begun to spread like wildfire.

Despite our tremendous military and economic advantages we find ourselves locked in an un-winnable war in an increasingly hostile world.

What has brought us to this state? Are the terrorists so strong that they can actually defeat the most powerful military force the world has ever seen?

When I was in college I decided to take a course through the ROTC program titled “American Military Strategy from the Revolutionary war to the Present”. On the first day of class, the professor wrote this sentence on the board. “Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancements in technology and tactics.” We didn’t understand what this meant at the time but as the weeks unfolded we saw the echoes of this statement across the battlefields of Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, Dunkirk and Saigon.

“Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancements in technology and tactics”.

To understand what this means you need look no further than 1776 and our war of Independence. After all, our nation was born out of the inability of one great military power to adapt to a paradigm shift in military tactics.

We all know the story. The red coated armies of the British Empire marched in perfect unison, confident that they would easily defeat the poorly trained rabble that opposed them. What they did not know was that the world had changed. New, more accurate weapons allowed for new tactics and despite their tremendous military advantages the British were unable or unwilling to adapt their strategy to changed circumstances. The best trained, best supplied, best led army in the world was losing.

They could’ve shifted strategies, abandoned their rigid tactical systems for more flexible ones but they didn’t. It’s one thing to be surprised by unusual tactics for a few battles but the British doggedly held to their traditions right up until the disastrous end. After eight years of fighting, the most powerful Army of the time was forced to withdraw from an inferior force using tactics and technology that they couldn’t adapt to. Sound familiar?

More tragic examples of this inability to adapt to new paradigms can be found in the American Civil war. At that time, Napoleonic tactics were considered unbeatable and one of the hallmarks of those tactics was the bayonet charge. Soldiers would fix bayonets (long knives) to the end of their muskets and sprint full speed to the enemy’s line where they would engage in hand to hand combat. This was effective in Napoleon’s era (and earlier) because the smooth bore muskets of the time could fire accurately only up to about 100 yards. Then after each shot the weapons had to be cleaned and reloaded which made for a slow firing rate of only 2 or 3 rounds per minute. The average soldier, armed with his bayonet, could run through the 100 yard kill zone in under 20 seconds which meant he would only be exposed to only 1 or 2 rounds of fire before he was close enough for hand to hand combat.

However, When Union generals ordered their men to fix bayonets and attack the Confederate position at the first battle of Bull Run, they were unaware that the nature of war had changed. Soldiers on both sides were armed with rifled weapons, which could fire 3-4 rounds a minute and were accurate at up to 300 yards. Now, instead of a 100-yard sprint, the civil war soldier had to run 300 yards against a much higher rate of fire. The result was nothing less than slaughter. 1500 Union soldiers fell in that first battle, one quarter of the total Union force, clear evidence that the bayonet charge was obsolete, but the lesson was not learned.

Battle after battle, year after year, despite the unbelievable death toll, generals on both sides continued to fall back on outdated tactics. Soon, the 1500 casualties of the first battle of Bull Run seemed like a skirmish. Shiloh: 23,000. The Wilderness: 25,000. Chancellorsville: 30,000. There were more Americans killed in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg than were killed in the entire history of the Vietnam war. The most disastrous action of that battle was when the greatest general of the era, Robert E. Lee ordered 10,000 men to fix bayonets and march across a mile of open field to attack a fortified Union position. He gave this order despite the fact that he had watched the slaughter of countless Union soldiers as they had attacked his fortified positions over the previous three years. This tragic maneuver, which came to be known as Picket’s charge, would haunt him for the rest of his life and was one of the deciding moments of the war.

War had changed, but despite Hundreds of thousands of wasted lives, the generals did not adapt their philosophy to the changing nature of combat.

Fifty years later in the trenches of World War I, the most terrifying order to go down the line was still “Fix Bayonets!”

“Military Philosophy is always tragically slow to adapt to advancement in technology and tactics”.

Today it seems as if we are in the midst of a new paradigm shift. The rules of war have changed, but, like the British in our revolutionary war, we are unable or unwilling to adapt. The truth is our strategies and tactics are the result of fifty years of military planning that simply no longer apply.

The current American military was born out of the cold war, a time when two superpowers were building fleets of aircraft carriers, Submarines, long range bombers, and weapons so powerful they could destroy every living creature on earth. We trained missile experts and built fallout shelters. We built an army that could take on any traditionally organized force in the world. Luckily we never had to face such a war. Instead we are now in the midst of a very different kind of struggle. One without organized armies or massed troop movements. There are no front lines in the war on terror, no clear objectives to be captured and controlled. Like the British before us, our well organized, well trained, well supplied troops are languishing in a chaotic terrain where every friend could be an enemy and the difference between an atrocity and self defense is merely a matter of perspective.

The result is nothing less than tragic. 3600 American Soldiers killed. Over 30000 Americans wounded. And those numbers don’t compare to the number of Iraqi and Afghani dead, which estimates place at between 150 and 600 thousand. To make matters worse, our Global war on Terror, like our war on drugs, shows no signs of ending. If America is to have any hope of surviving this war, much less winning, it is imperative that we understand how terrorism works on a basic, fundamental level.

So, what is terrorism? It is an important question and one that is rarely asked. The first misconception we must address is that the word terrorist describes the members of a unified group. It does not. We tend to describe all “terrorists” in Iraq and Afghanistan as members of Al Qaeda. They are not. Al Qaeda is a loosely structured organization of Sunni extremists. There are also Shia terrorists, Palestinian terrorists, secular Bathists and literally dozens of other small groups using violence to further their agenda.

Frequently what we mean when we say “Terrorist” is Arab or Muslim, as if only those groups produce terrorists. Nothing can be further from the truth. Almost every culture, religion or philosophy has produced extremists willing to do anything to achieve their ends. From Timothy McVeigh to Zionists fighting the British occupation of Palestine, there have always been people who see violence as the only way.

Some people believe that terrorism refers to the killing of innocents, like the victims of 9/11. We find the idea of killing civilians repugnant, and yet, the reality is, our army has killed far more civilians, men, women and children, then were killed by the terrorists on September Eleventh.

When we think of terrorism we think of sleeper cells and secrecy. We see men among us armed with everything from chemical weapons and dirty nukes to box cutters and shoes bombs. But those are not the true weapons of the terrorists.

Terrorism is not a nationality or a philosophy. It is neither religious nor secular. It is not left or right, liberal or conservative. Terrorism does not involve the use of any particular weapon or even any particular of target.

Terrorism is a tactic.

It is a tactic used by groups who cannot possibly fight their enemies in any conventional way. Terrorism is the tactic of the helpless, the hopeless. After all, only someone without hope would strap dynamite to their chest or fly a plane into a building. It is the weapon of someone with nothing left to lose.

But the power of terrorism, does not lie in bombs or guns or weapons of any kind and the damage of terrorism cannot be measured by broken buildings and murdered people. Because the truth is nothing terrorists can do can destroy the United States of America. Even the most destructive of terrorist attacks, the dirty bomb or biological weapon, would not be enough to destroy us.

The truth of terrorism is that when you fight the most powerful enemy in the world there is only one thing that can defeat them.

Themselves.

After all, there has not been a terrorist attack on US soil in almost six years, but those six years have been far more damaging to the United States than anything that happened on September Eleventh 2001.

Continued Next Week with Part II: Gandhi, Osama and the true Nature of terrorism.