A reader of a column of mine on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new Bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken.
“Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin.
But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass.
Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents. Their anger, one day, will surely find a political channel as well as the inevitable criminal one.
I think, indeed, the argument can be taken even further: there are 800 million people living in hunger without sufficient nourishment. Many exist in a state of political torpor, barely able to summon the energy to plant next year’s crop. But somewhere in the vast mass there are those who seethe with anger at their predicament. These days the mass media is ubiquitous, reaching even into the poorest villages, telling all. I’ll never forget sitting on an African country bus, filled with peasants holding their live chickens, watching French-made videos portraying the most ghastly violence. Ideas travel. The only surprise is that it is has taken so long for a bin Laden type to hit us where it hurts.
http://newageislam.com/lords-of-the-flies-and-breeding-bin-ladens/war-on-terror/d/2140
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4:49 AM
Moderate Islamist here
