Sept. 11/Oct. 12: To explain is not to justify

Johan Galtung, Professor of Peace Studies, Founder, Co-Director, Transcend: A Peace and Development Network, galtung@transcend.org

Take any human relation. Between persons, between states, between civilizations. Something bad happens, very bad, evil. People are killed, there is massive destruction. Of course it is tempting to see evil as the work of an evil-doer, and that is it. He has only one thing on his mind: To do evil, no motive beyond that. He is his own cause, causa sui as Lutheran theologians say about God; he is caused by nothing else, hence cannot be influenced by anything outside his own evilness. Conclusion: There is only one way out: search, and destroy. Dialog, negotiation, solution: All meaningless.

This is the model we use for micro-organisms, vermin, pests, with WMD, bio-chemical weapons, antibiotica, for mass destruction. And, as we know, the model works till we discover that they have developed "resistance", "regroup" to use anti- terrorist jargon, and hit back with a vengeance.

To make human beings -- some decades ago "communists", right now "terrorists" -- fit the vermin model we have first to verminize them; the major function of the whole terrorism talk; preparing our minds for their imminent extermination. Clearly, their acts are abominable, criminal to say the least. That something must be done to put a stop to "terrorism" is obvious. But the anti-vermin model seems to bring about what it seeks to abolish, to produce terrorists rather than to reduce their numbers. Why?

Because the whole "analysis" (Rumsfeld: "We have seen evil reveal itself in our midst, then seen it humbled by the power of pure goodness," International Herald Tribune, Sept. 12, 2002) is irrational. Human action, also that of terrorists, is motivated. And motivation is caused.

Rational analysis is never afraid of tracing those causal chains because rationality is based on one single, rather bright, idea: If you do not like the effects, try to remove the causes. "Evil", or "terrorist" for that matter, is not a cause, only a sloppy justification for verminization, and begs the question: What makes people do evil acts? Which may lead to the US$64,000 taboo question: what have we done since they hate us so much that they do a thing like Sept. 11 or Oct. 12?

But that is not a satisfactory approach either. Causal "chains" are not quite that, they branch out in all directions; the arrows are two-way, cyclical, bite themselves in the tail. Complex; but they tell a story. And the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget did us all a major favor by making a distinction between autistic and reciprocal views of human affairs, depending on whether causation, of good effects or bad, originates only on the other side, or also in us.

A sign of maturity is the ability to see oneself as a part of the causal mass affecting Other, also when the effect is bad, bad, bad. Reciprocity, in other words. Immaturity is to see everything as coming from the outside; washing one's hands, I am innocent, he did it. Autism, in short.

According to Piaget girls enter reciprocity earlier than boys, and some boys seem to get stuck in autism. There must be a lot of them in the Western leadership, and in al-Qaeda too. Hard, fundamentalist Christianity (like U.S. Puritanism) and Islam (like Arabian Wahhabism) lend themselves to autism, seeing sin and evil all over except at home. Soft Hinduism/Buddhism is compatible with reciprocity, complex views of causation and preferences for shared reciprocity rather than the stark "guilty/innocent".

How can we even start thinking of Sept. 11, not taking into account the massive story of violent U.S. state terrorist intervention, at least 67 of them after World War II, with an estimated 12 million to 16 million killed, moving its point of gravity from East Asia via Latin America to West Asia?

Using intervention "to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault" as a Pentagon planner once said, adding that "to those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing". Maybe also unfair?

How can we think of Oct. 12 in Bali without paying at least some attention to night clubs as places of sins to many, as places of sexual exploitation of local girls by white men, as a place of racism close to "whites only", of Australia as having ulterior petroleum goals? This is being whispered all over, bring it out in the open, if wrong then rebut it! Have a dialog!

How can we talk about North Korea as "admitting/confessing" uranium enrichment with no mention of the two civilian reactors not having been delivered, nor of the nuclear threat hovering over North Korea from the end of World War II? Or of U.S. geopolitics?

How can we talk about WMD in Iraq with no mention of massive weaponry pointing at them from the West and used, from the Baghdad massacre in 1258, by Hulagu, Djengis Khan's grandson in alliance with the Pope and Armenian Christianity (ending a civilization) via egoistic British colonization up till today? If wrong, rebut!

Well, we somehow manage, showing how shallow our "freedom of expression" is when so many people even are afraid of mentioning the obvious. If the West retaliates and punishes, what makes us think that others may not be similarly inclined? If the West wants massive weaponry also for deterrence, what makes us think that others do not also want some WMD for deterrence?

Maybe there is a common enemy here. Maybe it is located in such ideas as retaliation/punishment and deterrence as opposed to trying to find out what the conflict is about and then solve it?

But, hold it! Osama bin Laden's latest message, if his it is, was way above Western rhetoric by having a historical dimension; with Hulagu, with what happened to the Palestinian people ("more than 80 years ago" in his September 2001 message, "near hundred years ago" November 2002, clearly pointing to the Sykes/Picot treachery and the Balfour declaration. But it is not better than the West in its unlimited self-righteousness and justification of violence, invoking historical disasters as justification.

The West is scared to death by explanation, afraid it will justify, not being totally ignorant of the disasters that colonialism, slavery, imperialism, interventionism, exploitation have wrought, and the death and misery it continues to bring about. There is some awareness way down there, even in those autistic boys: "One day they will come back and treat us the way we treated them".

Al-Qaeda, a more complex phenomenon than the Pentagon image, as a projection of itself, highly vertical with one man on the top and much money (where widespread cells, united by faith and hatred, and idea-intensive rather than capital-intensive probably is closer to reality) uses this explanation as justification; scaring the West even further away from being honest. Two different ways of using history for self-righteousness: Denial, and full use.

To explain is not to justify violence which then breeds more violence in seemingly endless retaliation cycles; also because violence is used to communicate when words fail. To explain is to point to causes and their possible removal. Mostly the task of the West is: Change the policies of interventionism and exploitation of the present, apologize and try to reconcile for those of the past, solve conflicts for a better future. Entirely possible. Germany has done it (Japan not), South African Whites have done it.

The West: Live up to the best in your civilization, not down to the worst.

The writer was a resource person at a recent workshop on conflict in Asia held in Jakarta. He contributed this article to The Jakarta Post.