Tyranny and terrorism (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Sunday, 6 February 2005

Tyranny and terrorism

Michael Kinsley's column almost got me to blog last evening, but I decided to skip it. I'll handle it now. Here's Kinsley:

The anarchist Emma Goldman said much the same thing in a 1917 essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence." It is "the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" that drives some of them to acts of terror. "Can one question the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character exerted by great social iniquities?" She quotes a pamphlet from British-ruled India: "Terrorism … is inevitable as long as tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it."
Bush does not say that tyranny excuses terrorism. But he does say that tyranny explains terrorism. This is new.

No, it’s not. Alan Kreuger did a study for the NBER more than two years ago showing that poverty is not correlated to terrorism. While that doesn’t tell us what causes terrorism, it does tell us that, absent errors in the data, poverty is not a cause of terrorism. Kreuger goes on to show correlation between political oppression and terror, though I don’t think he establishes causality.

A subsequent study (þ: OTB) showed the same thing.

Similarly, President Bush issued the National Security Strategy of 2002 in September of that year and he's been using the rhetoric of freedom as a defense against terror for at least as long. Kinsley can act like the association of tyranny and terrorism is something new and take a poke at the President, but it’s not new and the President is probably right.

4 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. pat m. wrote @ Mon, 7 Feb 2005, 9:35 am CST:

No disrespect, but this post makes no sense to me at all.
Nowhere in Kinsley’s column does he claim that poverty causes terrorism, and thus, you seem to be beating on a strawman by trying to disprove that notion. Further, if you set aside the sarcasm, isn’t it pretty clear that Kinsley is complimenting Bush for what Kinsley views as more thoughtful rhetoric about terrorism and its causes, i.e., that terrorists are victims of tyranny, than the rhetoric offered by simpletons like Bennett who reject any examination of possible “root causes” and simply proclaim that terrorists are “evil”?
Further, your last sentence strikes me as incomprehensible. What exactly is the “it” to which you refer, and what exactly are you saying the President is probably right about?

2. Robert Prather wrote @ Mon, 7 Feb 2005, 11:24 am CST:

Pat,

I should have titled it tyranny and terrorism. Setting aside the sarcasm would miss the point of his column, I.E. another gratuitous poke at Bush. The “it” is tyranny and terrorism. I’ll update the post to correct the sloppiness.

3. Cassandra wrote @ Tue, 8 Feb 2005, 4:52 am CST:

Ooooh… don’t have time to read this right now but will get back to it. Too busy lampooning poor Eason Jordan.

Kinsley is such a fatuous ‘hat.

You know this is one of my bete noires (not awake enough to remember if there’s an ‘e’ on the end and too lazy to look it up at the moment so it has one now…)

Thanks.

4. cb wrote @ Wed, 9 Feb 2005, 3:42 am CST:

The article on Abadie's "subsequent study" needs to be read carefully to avoid over-optimistic interpretation. He is careful to note that tightly controlled dictatorships, like stable democracies, also inhibit terrorism:

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.
Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme – with tightly controlled autocratic governments – also experienced low levels of terrorism.

Make no mistake, the President is correct that freedom is the way to defeat terrorism (which I blogged about here). But we should expect major gains only as new democracies stabilize.

Current events in Iraq seem to bear this out.

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