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TERRORISM |
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Chapter 4
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TERRORISM |
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Terrorism, feelings, beliefs & actions Terrorism has always existed in different ways, practiced by humans individually or in groups, it has taken many forms. What do we understand from studying terrorism in history? we
will find that there were 2 kinds of ways fro using terror:
People have used terrorism individually for different purposes, mostly in the hope of creating safety, by making others feel frightened as a way of preventing attack (as a defense mechanism). People lived in communities, which meant there were many people sharing the same resources. That life depended on sharing, people needed many things to have a reasonable life like; water, food, shelter, etc. We need material things to live and since there are other humans needing the same things we must share what we have or we will fight to get what we need, therefore we have systems to organize possessing things. That was the reason for creating our ideological systems like socialism and capitalism. In my opinion, our God created us on this earth and he created everything that we needed to live. At the same time all that we had to do was to share the things that God had created, but unfortunately that didn't happen! Until this day we still do not have things fairly shared out and unfortunately that has created conflicts, struggles and wars between people from the beginning of human life on this planet. It’s easy to see individual conflict in daily life concerning acquiring more things, (legal or illegally) or even conflict to protect what we have already (who doesn’t use keys to protect what he has?) so because of fear of loss people use small arms to protect themselves and to protect what they have. That is very prevalent in America today, and if we go back in history then we will find the possession of personal arms was very common in all civilizations that existed in the past. All these conflicts and struggles involved more than the killing of other humans, it was also associated by terrorist acts which targeted to increased fear inside opponents like torturing before killing or representation for dead bodies, all that is to increase fear in side other humans to controlling them and preventing them from doing specific things. There are thousands of examples we can study in history about using terror to regulate our life in some other way to keep ourselves safe, I would just like to tell you that punishment and revenge is just what human beings have used to create fear of doing the wrong thing (death, robbery or losing freedom) as a way to organize our life and to protect our systems of sharing resources. Without that fear and terror nothing would have been able to keep our systems working! Look at the first law made by Hammurabi, ("An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.") you can see easily that punishment was an essential factor in the law, and that it was fear that forced people to respect the law. Implementation of the law sometimes needed to use harsh ways like execution or torture in prisons. The respect for the law that we have today didn't came by itself because someone had written the law and asked us to respect it, it happened after thousands years of fear and terror not only of individual punishment but also collective punishment (using nuclear bombs on Japan at world war2). With all our knowledge
of history and with all of our fearful experiences of the past, we still
have people pushing against the law, the religions and our traditional
aspects. In spite everything there are people causing harm to other
humans who are living in the same community, killing, stealing, and
other crimes are still common in recent times!!! WHY??? I'll try humbly
to answer… Feeling è belief è action. All our acts depend on our feelings. People naturally work like this: When a person feels that he is thirsty, this gives him a belief that he needs to drink water, he beliefs he will die if he doesn't get some water, this is just a simple example to help you to understand what I am trying to say. Like I explained before,
the essential feeling the human has is fear, after with time that
feeling developed to another feelings (like love for example). Fear of
death made us to working to keep our life to be continuing with using
different things depending on our needs as human beings. Since we need
to share what we have on earth like water, food, land, energy resources,
etc… what we can call that; wealth. It’s true that there is plenty for our needs on earth, but it’s not distributed equally between all people, some people have plenty of water and some others suffer from a shortage. Mostly people need to share what they have using a system to regulate that sharing, but sometimes there are people who feel that the system doesn’t provide them with their true needs and that causes a feeling of injustice inside them. That feeling can push them to feel that they need to find a way to restore the justice in their society. When person has strong feelings about anything, and belief that something has to change then that will make him act according to that belief. For example; sometimes we say “I feel sad today” or unhappy, that make us do something to cheer ourselves up, for example looking for someone to talk to, or to listening to music, we do this in the belief that sadness isn’t good for our health so we need to do something to make ourselves happy again. Things work like this inside human beings; our feelings are connected to the physical action of our bodies, as well as our mental state. Doing some kind of physical activity can make us happy, like sport for example, going for a long walk, or dancing. That companionship
between our feelings and our physical activities is special character of
humans, which isn’t in animals because activities in animals work by
instinct, not with feelings. That shows us how important it is to understand
ourselves and our feelings as humans. Justice or injustice is
an important feeling inside us because our life depends on sharing
resources fairly and in a just way this takes balance. Any imbalance in
that sharing will cause bad feelings inside us and that can push people
to take the law into their own hands, and to take action themselves
(like using violence) to correct that imbalance, there are millions of
examples of this mechanism. We have all seen people break something like
a glass or throw something; to relieve their anger, or even hurt
themselves. All our systems exist to try and provide us with good balance between our needs and what we actually have, once the balance is lost then people are given motive for wars, conflicts and crimes in history and to the present day. Justice brings peace, freedom brings democracy understanding is the way |
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