I’m going to step away from the norm of this blog, which is writing about on-demand software and talk a little about one of my hobbies… history. I’m a big fan of history, I feel that you can tell A LOT about what will happen today if you look at similar situations and how they turned out in the past. Human interaction is all about societies, economies, etc. By learning history, you can get a feel for why societies in this world act as they do. Also, if a certain set of events occurs today in a society, a similar set of events occurred in a society in that past; my point being, you can look at how it turned out in the past to see how it will turn out today. I can give tons of examples of history repeating itself, but that’s for later (I will most probably write a post on this link later) . For now, I want to comment on a little article I read recently… “Why the bombers are so angry at us”

This article written by Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, for The Age (Australian newspaper), and is actually about 3 years old now. It was written after the bombings in London. For those of you who don’t remember:

I’ll start off with the point of this post, by quoting the best part of the article:

“What more than 95 per cent of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common is not religion, but a specific political goal to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly.”

Terrorism doesn’t happen becuase terrorists are “Muslim fanatics”. Terrorism doesn’t happen because we (by “we” I mean the country to the south of me: the USA) are on the other side of the world and “they hate our freedom”. Facts like these do not account for even remotely close to enough motivation to make people lose their lives. Motivation is another part of history that repeats itself. For example, Karl Marx predicted a socialist revolution happening in the 1880s, however the revolution didn’t come about till 1917. This is because as revolutionary as Marx’s ideas were, people weren’t motivated enough to uprise and lose lives. Therefore if people are attacking the USA with bombs and planes then there must be something REALLY bad that the USA has done to them.

This article proves just that. The most common and surefire way to stir up motivation and hate in people is to occupy their land. In the early 90s, the US started substantially increasing its presence in the Persian Gulf, to tens of thousands of combat forces, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighters. Over two thirds of the 71 al-Qaeda suicide terrorists that killed themselves from 1995 to 2004 were nationals from Sunni Muslim countries where the US has stationed combat troops since 1990.

“As long as the war on terrorism ignores the actual strategic logic of suicide terrorism, it will be impossible to win and our actions may well end up helping terrorist leaders recruit many more suicide terrorists to kill us.”

So now you see, in case 7 years of lies didn’t drive the point across, “they hate us for our freedom” is bunch of propaganda. But unfortunately people believe it. And politicians make sure you believe it. This is why I love history; knowing history removes that ignorance and lets you realise who’s lying to you and who isn’t.