The danger of turning terrorism into an irrationality of the individuals who undertake it

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate writers, Mr. Antonio Cristóbal Luque Ambrosiani. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

In these times of war, where two cultures with different religions clash in the Middle East, the need to address the issue of terrorism becomes more evident than ever. An action that violates human rights is never justified, but we must avoid failing to analyse the causes that lead a person to become radicalized to the point of committing atrocious acts such as those seen recently.

In numerous media, the person who commits the violent action is usually exposed as someone irrational and inhumane, and it is common to focus on the mental problems he suffered. This leads us to consider that person as a terrorist, closer to an unreasonable animal than to a human being, justifying his actions precisely because of this lack of humanity. The problem with this perspective is that it actively makes us completely ignore the causes that may have led that person to become radicalized.

As members of a society, in our case the European one, we must pay attention to this issue, as it concerns all member countries, since terrorist actions are not something from a distant place, but we could say that they are even a domestic issue.

It would be interesting to expose these causes, as Shafieioun D et al do, since they invite us to think that beneath radicalization lies systematic discrimination, abuse of power, constant marginalization, and the perception of injustice. As an example of this, it is common to see that, in some European cities, the neighbourhoods where the greatest number of people who profess a religion other than Christianity or who have immigrated from other countries live are located on the periphery. Between these neighbourhoods and the most central ones there is usually little interrelation, as an example at the level of infrastructure such as the metro, bus, or tram.

On other occasions the examples are more obvious, such as the rhetoric used by some politicians that focuses on blaming minorities in a society for the problems it suffers. The generation of a feeling of marginalization leads to nothing other than the uprooting of an individual from the group to which he belongs, seeking external alternatives that offer him what he feels taken away from, see feeling of belonging. Instead of letting this rhetoric cause the havoc that it generates, we must insist that our rulers generate measures that actively compensate for this uprooting, favouring the interrelation between minority and majority groups, offering decent job opportunities, and compensating with economic and social support.

We could try to take a more bellicose attitude, instead of trying to generate social policies that try to solve inequality between groups in a society, thinking that by ending the lives of these people or expelling them from a place or subjecting them to stricter rules we would be able to end the problem. However, ideas cannot be killed, it is impossible to defeat them with weapons, we need a rhetoric that offers something better and makes people not get carried away by them.

Guided by the words attributed to Miguel de Unamuno at the beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936, you can win, but not convince, because to convince you need to persuade and for this you need reason and law. We must not allow ourselves to be carried away by irrationality as a justification for human atrocities. Science gives us answers to those questions that concern us and we must address them diligently to ensure peaceful coexistence that ensures respect for human rights. It is our common duty to offer an alternative to radicalization, through building a better society all together.

References:

1. Shafieioun D and Haq H (2023) Radicalization from a societal perspective. Front. Psychol. 14:1197282. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1197282