Violence, Terror, and Terrorism

Ever since the tragedy of 11 September 2001, terrorism and security have been at the center of military and political policies, media coverage, and public concerns. In this essay, I broaden and deepen approaches to such concerns as terror and terrorism, violence and nonviolence, security and insecurity by getting at some of the generally ignored roots causes and by formulating some of a larger interpretative framework for understanding these contemporary phenomena.

This is an essay focusing on terror and terrorism, not specifically about Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks of September 11 and subsequent U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan provide the occasion for renewed interest in the central concerns of this essay. Nevertheless, my analysis could have been formulated if bin Laden had never existed, and my analysis will be just as relevant and significant even if bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are completely destroyed.

Redefining Terrorism

"Terrorism" is a difficult term to define. A "terrorist" to some is often a "freedom fighter" to others. "Terrorism" consists of intentional policies and actions that use explicit violence or implicit forms of violence and threats of violence-economically, militarily, psychologically, politically, culturally, religiously-primarily directed against civilian populations in order to terrorize or inflict extreme fear and insecurity as the means to achieving political and other objectives. Discussions of terrorism are invariably linked with demands for "real security." I use the term "security" as freedom from danger and risk; a well-founded confidence.

As is evident in the above definitions, I use such terms as terror and terrorism, security and insecurity, in much broader ways than one finds expressed by politicians, business leaders, and media figures. The usual, much narrower uses are oversimplified, self-serving, and inadequate. In my broader uses, U.S. military and economic forces, along with other powerful forces in the world, create, fund, support, and benefit from policies and actions of terror and terrorism. Terrorism is not restricted to small terrorist groups. One can also speak of corporate and state terror and terrorism and of policies of terror and terrorism formulated by "respectable," powerful, economic, political and military forces.

My broader use of the term "terrorism" and especially my focus on "the violence of the status quo" may create the false impression that terrorism is identical with violence. Terror and terrorism always involve explicit violence or threats of violence, but violence is a much broader term and most violence is not terrorism.

Terror can even be distinguished from terrorism. Conditions of terror, humiliation, and hopelessness breed certain kinds of terrorists. Many people who live under daily conditions of terror, who experience humiliation, domination, and hopelessness, sometimes find the messages of terrorists appealing or at least see no alternatives.

However, most people living under terror do not turn to terrorism. Their hopelessness and despair may lead to withdrawal and passivity in which they accept oppressive conditions as eternal, inevitable, natural, or overwhelming. They may turn their feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness on themselves, turning to alcohol and drugs. They may engage in imaginary escapist fantasies that do nothing to change the objective conditions that oppress them. They may turn to religious messages of a better life in the next world. They may turn their repressed rage against family members and others most vulnerable who are not the real causes of their oppressive conditions and consequent feelings of terror. Only under certain conditions do a minority of people, who are terrorized and living under conditions of terror, turn to terrorism as the means to express their outrage.

We must begin to ask critical questions about the terror and terrorism that define much of the contemporary world. What are the roots causes, origins, and boundary conditions that give rise to particular forms of terrorism? How can we contextualize such forms of terrorism and place them within a larger interpretive framework necessary for comprehensive, in depth understanding? How do we change fundamental conditions that give rise to a receptive and sympathetic hearing of terrorist messages, and how do we formulate solutions based on peace and justice commitments?

In thinking critically about such questions, I've begun to develop an explanatory image of the polluted sea or ocean within which the terrorist fish swim. One danger in using this image is that it can easily be misinterpreted to suggest several other approaches I strongly reject. Therefore, I'll present a section delineating several false interpretations and approaches with their different views of terror and terrorism. Next, I'll provide a brief formulation of this image of seas of terror and terrorism. Finally, I'll develop the image by providing extended formulations of violence, basic root causes, and past policies that have polluted seas and given birth to terrorist fish. I shall also suggest several solutions to present and future crises and insecurities that the United States and the world face.

It cannot be overemphasized that providing such an explanation, trying to understand terrorism, does not amount to justifying terrorism. If we want to combat and overcome the threat of terrorism, we must understand and then eliminate its root causes and transform its oppressive conditions. Otherwise short-term actions will do little to overcome long-term insecurity and repetition of tragedies at home and abroad.

False Views of the Seas of Terrorism

The following false views can easily lead to a misinterpretation of my image of the sea or ocean of terrorism. First, various counterinsurgency consultants like to use the image of "draining the swamp" to eliminate the enemy. The problem is that "the swamp" is usually the land and its people. Draining the swamp to flesh out insurgents usually means destroying the land and inflicting death and suffering on the innocent population.

Second, during the Vietnam/Indochina War, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington formulated his influential "Forced Draft Urbanization" as the U.S. policy of rural pacification in Southern Vietnam. Huntington's image was of a rural sea of terrorism in the South in which the U.S. could not distinguish the enemy and in which some of the civilian population hid, fed, and supported the Vietnamese enemy. In denying the countryside to the enemy, the U.S. depopulated rural Vietnam and drove Vietnamese into urban camps that it could police and control. Unfortunately, Vietnam is primarily a rural country, and the rural sea is most of Vietnam. Such pacification programs contributed to the destruction of Vietnam, the death of 3,200,000 Vietnamese (about 2,200,000 in the South, where most of the U.S. bombing and killing took place), and turning two-third of the Southern Vietnamese population into refugees.

From the perspective of U.S. policymakers the death and devastation of millions of innocent Vietnamese was "collateral damage," a necessary unavoidable consequence of war. In the same way, the estimated death of over 500,000 innocent Iraqi children since the Persian Gulf War is downplayed as collateral damage in the bombing and embargo of Iraq. When we realize that from the perspective of the perpetrators of the terrorism of September 11, the innocent human beings who died are also collateral damage, we should pause before we easily invoke that obscene rationale to justify the infliction of so much death and suffering on innocent human beings.

Third, the image of a polluted sea is especially dangerous because it brings to mind a long history and contemporary examples of ideologies and policies of ethnic, communal, religious, cultural, and national "purification." According to these ideologies and policies, their sacred, pure, eternal, cultural, historical, authentic borders became porous, weakened, and unstable. This allowed the infiltration of foreigners, infidels, Jews, peoples of color, homosexuals, and others who polluted the seas and weakened the authentic, once-great people. Whether it be Nazi, fascist, racist, sexist, ethnic, communal, or religious images of "outside" alien pollutants that have diseased and weakened "our noble people," the result has usually been purification policies that contribute to the death and persecution of countless human beings.

Fourth, we must avoid dangerous, oversimplified, essentialized, static formulations of one sea, whether this be a sea of terrorism, a polluted sea, or a purified, healthy, life-sustaining sea. There are many seas with dynamic, multi-layered, frequently changing, constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed borders. Seas constructed from simple, us versus them, believers versus infidels, good versus evil formulations make for effective propaganda and good sound bites, but they distort what are dynamic, complex, contradictory phenomena. The same Samuel Huntington wrote a best-selling book in the mid-1990s in which he posted an irreconcilable "clash of civilizations," focusing much of his attention on the modern West versus anti-modern Islam. His oversimplified stereotypical thesis was widely embraced by policymakers in Washington and has been revitalized since September 11. In reality, Islam and other religions, Islamic and other civilizations, modern Western civilization, and the relations between Islamic and modern Western phenomena are all highly complex, full of internal and external changing contradictions. Who are terrorists, what are particular seas of terrorism, and what are alternative healthy seas are many-sided phenomena, constituted by past human constructions, and open to change by new human interventions and reconstructions.

Components of Seas of Terror and Terrorism

In order to understand the origins, nature, consequences, and solutions of terrorism, I shall use an image of seas of terror in which terrorists swim. These seas are constructed and maintained by means of different, complex, often contradictory, physical, conceptual, emotional, and imaginative variables.

What are these seas of terror and terrorism like? They are not healthy, life-sustaining waters. They are highly polluted seas that are infested with causal determinants and structures of great violence and suffering. They breed terrorists who receive shelter and sustenance in such polluted waters. They are constructed under conditions and by means of relations that create and maintain polluted waters in which most human beings have trouble surviving, much less flourishing.

These polluted seas sometimes breed terrorists, who receive shelter, sustenance, and other means of survival, but it is not always necessary for such terrorists to have popular mass support. If there had not been the oppression and humiliation arising from the conditions of seas of terror, the violent, inhumane, and perverted messages of the bin Ladens of the world would not have the receptive hearings they sometimes get. However, such terrorists often lack popular mass support. There are numerous, humanly created seas of terror and seas of terrorism, and under some conditions, a minority can provide the seas within which terrorists can hide and can receive sufficient military, financial, and other support.

Just to give one of many possible examples, Osama bin Laden had hundreds of millions of dollars in family financial resources; certain religious, political, and economic forces in Saudi Arabia provided extensive support; and the Taliban, created largely by Pakistan and others in terms of their own self-interests, welcomed al-Quada and violently repressed oppositional forces through terror and coercion. What all of this meant was that bin Laden and others in al-Qaeda were able to swim within seas of Afghanistan, appealing to recent and longstanding grievances, but without the need for voluntary majority or popular mass support.

How have humans polluted these waters? How can we transform these seas, not drain or eliminate them, so that the people who swim in them do not live under conditions of terror, and the terrorist message is not a viable option?

In answering these essential questions, we must think critically about the root causes and structures of power that create the conditions for seas of terror. Otherwise, we may kill a big terrorist named Osama bin Laden, but unless we change the essential conditions and relations of seas of terrors, they will continue to breed future terrorist fish. Substituting slogans, sound bites, oversimplified short-term "solutions" focusing on a few individuals and not getting at root causes perpetuates the long-term existence of seas of terror.

Not only do terrorist fish swim in those seas of terror, but also powerful outside forces in the U.S. and elsewhere benefit economically, politically, and militarily by maintaining these seas of terror with their constructed oppressive polluted conditions. By focusing exclusively on a few individuals and simple "solutions," those with power deflect our attention away from thinking about root causes and their complicity in creating and maintaining seas of terror and terrorism.

Up until now, I've restricted most of my references to terrorism in ways similar to the portrayal in the mass media before and after the September 11 tragedy: the al-Qaeda and similar cells of terrorists found throughout the world; individuals and small groups of people willing to inflict brutal acts of terror, usually on civilian populations. We must begin to broaden this concept of terror and terrorism. Hundreds of millions of human beings live under oppressive conditions and experience daily lives of terror. They are terrorized and live under terrifying conditions that are created by other human beings. A minority has constructed conditions of exploitation, oppression, injustice, humiliation, and domination, and they benefit economically, militarily, politically, culturally, and religiously at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humankind. People who are exploited, humiliated, dominated, and terrorized, who live in seas of terror and see no other viable options, are often receptive to terrorist messages that aim at destroying established conditions and relations.

In what follows, I shall emphasize how powerful economic, political, and military forces in the U.S. and elsewhere construct oppressive, exploitative, polluted waters and create and maintain seas of terror and terrorism. It is important to recognize that there are many other pollutants. For example, repressive, authoritarian, dictatorial regimes pollute their own waters and create conditions for oppositional, sometimes terrorist, voices that resonate with much of the terrorized population.

To give a second example, various forms of Islam, as well as other religions, provide polluting conditions that contribute to terror and terrorism. It is ethnocentric, ignorant, self-serving, racist, and dangerous for Westerners to lump together, stereotype, and usually condemn Islam as a religion and civilization that is anti-modern, envious of the U.S. and the West, and a breeding ground for terrorism. However, it is also inadequate for Muslims and their friends to present an idealized, romantic, equally sweeping version of "true" Islam and the Koran. Islam and other religions may have fundamental teachings about not killing, but most wars in history have been given a religious justification. Religions may preach tolerance, but most religions have practiced great intolerance toward nonbelievers. It is more accurate to recognize that Islam and other religions are highly complex, give rise to contradictory forces expressing relatively progressive and reactionary tendencies, and provide arenas of contestation over what are the true Islamic and other religious interpretations and practices. Those struggling to create a world with relations of justice must resist Islamic forces that pollute seas and contribute to seas of terror and terrorism. Instead they must align themselves with Islamic and other forces that struggle to overcome oppressive relations and transform the seas into healthier waters, in which fish can swim and flourish free from terror and terrorism.

Violence of the Status Quo

Seas of terror and terrorism are very violent environments. They have been humanly constructed, arising from violent origins, created through violent relations, and maintained by violent conditions and mechanisms of domination and control. We need to enlarge our usual notions of violence and nonviolence in order to come to terms with basic causes and solutions to contemporary forms of terror and terrorism. My approach is greatly influenced by the writings and activist struggles of such figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everyone recognizes that what happened on September 11th was very violent. Terrorists transformed civilian airplanes into weapons of mass destruction killing almost 3,000 human beings. Most of us restrict our notions of violence to killing, physically assaulting, torturing, raping, and other forms of overt physical violence.

Different political theorists, ethicists, religious leaders, and revolutionary or counterrevolutionary thinkers have defined, conceptualized, and analyzed violence and nonviolence in radically different ways. How we define and distinguish violence, nonviolence, and their complex relations directly shapes our views of whether we are relatively secure or insecure and whether other forces are relatively hostile or friendly.

To come to terms with recent terrorist acts, we must understand the dominant violence of the status quo that defines the "normal" existence of seas of terror and terrorism. Hundred of millions, even billions, of human beings live their lives under violence of the status quo. Millions of them die unnecessary, humanly preventable deaths every year from such violence of the status quo. The overwhelming majority of human beings who live in violent seas of terror are not shot or tortured. They live "ordinary" lives in waters of great suffering, hopelessness, humiliation, and terror defined by conditions and relations of the violent status quo that are humanly created and maintained for the benefit of the minority. I'll cite briefly a few of the dominant forms of such violence.

Most pervasive is the economic violence of the status quo. Countless human beings live under great stress and anxiety, often under conditions that are terrifying. They face choices of providing food or heat during the winter; pray that no family member becomes seriously ill because they cannot afford medical care; and experience daily conditions of economic deprivation and insecurity that produce deep feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, humiliation, anger, and sometimes direct and indirect violence directed at oneself and others. As Gandhi reminds us, if I am accumulating wealth and possessions while my neighbor is living under conditions of great need, suffering, and hopelessness, and if I do not ask what I can do to change the desperate conditions and relations under which my neighbor is living, then I contribute to and am part of the violence of the status quo.

We live in an interconnected world of haves and have-nots in which the violence of the status quo is greatly determined by dominant policies and power structures that benefit the haves and exploit, oppress, and terrorize large segments of the have-nots. We live with a permanent war economy in which huge multinational corporations producing weapons of mass destruction flourish most in a world of danger, instability, violence, and war. We live with this economic violence of the status quo in which weapons manufacturers, greatly subsidized by taxpayers, sell highly profitable arms to dictators and military juntas who then use these weapons to repress their own people and maintain their power status quo. Then we in the United States are repeatedly warned of our insecurity and asked to spend billions of dollars on new weapons needed to defend ourselves against the threat often posed by our old weapons.

Similarly, we live with economic transformations of the violent status quo in which indigenous, more self-sustaining agricultural economies are destroyed and transformed into cash crop economies for export that are directed at those who have the wealth and with the resultant malnutrition and starvation of indigenous populations. Similarly, we live with the economic violent status quo in terms of a global system in which those with wealth and power can exploit sweatshop and other cheap labor and have access to relatively cheap raw material, usually at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humankind.

It is these "normal" policies and structures of power that help create and maintain seas of terror throughout world in which some people, living under the daily conditions of the violent status quo, see no viable alternative to the oppositional messages of terrorists. It is such phenomena, illustrating the violence of the status quo, that reveal the construction of seas of terror and that stand as the primary obstacles to the creation of nonviolent waters.

This analysis must be enlarged to encompass the psychological violence of the status quo, the social and cultural violence of the status quo, the political and religious violence of the status quo. What happens to human beings psychologically when they are forced to live under conditions that make it difficult to develop in psychologically healthy ways? What are the objective conditions that give rise to contradictory, psychological responses, whether through helpless passivity, self-hatred, oppression of others even less powerful, anger, and rage? What happens to human beings when they feel that their religious and cultural values and relations, even in their most positive aspects, are under siege and attack by outside, more powerful forces that threaten to destroy their values and replace them with hostile relations of domination?

These many dimensions of the violence of the status quo help us to understand the origins, conditions, and solutions to much of contemporary terror and terrorism. Only by understanding how seas of terror and terrorism have been constructed and maintained, through external and internal direct violence and numerous manifestations of the violence of the status quo, can we change those conditions and relations so that human beings are not terrorized and feel no need to respond to alternative messages of terror. This is not only the long-term solution, but it also must inform our most immediate, short-term actions and policies to deal with the real problems of violence, terror, and terrorism.

Root Causes and Structures of Power

This section focuses briefly on U.S. constructed policies in order to understand conditions that give rise to contemporary terror and terrorism, although, as previously indicated, there are other, multiple, complex, often contradictory, contributing factors. This presentation should make clear the inadequacy of focusing exclusively on individuals and individual acts without coming to terms with roots causes, human relations, and structures of power.

The United States emerged from World War II as the world's number one power economically, militarily, politically, psychologically, and culturally. Other major powers were greatly weakened by the war, economically, militarily, politically, psychologically, and culturally.

U.S. policies were increasingly directed at preserving and strengthening a power status quo in which the U.S. was at the top. Policies were directed at maintaining U.S. privilege, wealth, and power, even if this was at the expense of most of humankind. Those throughout the world, including many in the U.S., attempting to change hegemonic relations of wealth, privilege, and domination, were increasingly defined as the enemy and as antithetical to U.S. interests. This included those motivated by concerns for freedom and democratic empowerment.

U.S. policymakers had no illusions about this. George Kennan, one of the most influential policymakers in Washington, wrote this widely-quoted formulation in 1948 (U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study 23): "[W]e have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population® Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will have to dispense with all sentimentality® We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization." Kennan and many others, in formulating their policies for maintaining and strengthening U.S. domination, were very aware of the fact that if they were have-nots, they would see the world in very different terms and would question the existence and justification of U.S. hegemony.

What emerged over the past six decades were economic, political, military, media, cultural, and other relations, including mutually beneficial, interlocking relations with repressive, counterrevolutionary forces throughout the world. In numerous cases, indigenous, political, national, cultural, religious, and other relations, some of which were popular and democratic, were destablished, weakened, destroyed, reconstructed, or completely replaced by newly constructed power relations.

The Vietnam/Indochina War illustrates more than two decades of largely unsuccessful policies by Washington aimed at creating and imposing new relations perceived to be in the interests of the U.S. power elite. There are numerous other illustrations from throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world: Chile, with the destabilizing and overthrow of democratically elected Allende and his replacement by the military dictator Pinochet; Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and many other countries in Central and South America; South Africa, with the support of the racist Apartheid government and the opposition to Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress; the Belgian Congo, with the assassination of Lumumba and his replacement by the dictator Mubutu in what became Zaire, and numerous other countries in Africa; Indonesia, with the overthrow of Sukarno and his replacement by the dictator Suharto; the Philippines and Iran, with the support of dictators Marcos and the Shah; Pakistan, with the support of military regimes, and numerous other examples in Asia.

And, of course, there are many other examples of arming and supporting repressive regimes in Islamic countries of the Middle East, West Asia, and Africa, including years of support for Saddam Hussein in Iraq; decades of continuing support for repressive regimes in such countries as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; and support for the mujaheddin ("holy warriors"), including bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. In the Islamic countries, such arrangements with wealthy, corrupt, repressive regimes are the rule and not the exception.

A more detailed analysis would reveal that each of these illustrations is very complex and has its own particular historical, economic, cultural, and other variables, along with common structures and power relations. These countries and societies, including their relations with the U.S., are structured in terms of numerous, contradictory variables and relations: most quite violent and others more nonviolent; most clearly economic and others more ideological, at times even assuming an ideological orientation at odds with narrow economic interests; some part of traditional cultures and others newly created and often antitraditional; some complementary and others antagonistic and the source of conflicts; some dominant and hegemonic and others subordinate and subaltern; some manifest and visible and others latent and often unrecognizable.

These multiple variables and relations dynamically interrelate, interpenetrate, and are arenas of struggles and contestation for legitimacy. They disclose numerous diverse voices: some empowered through local or foreign relations; others silenced, repressed, or distorted through the mechanisms of power elites; and others in temporary or permanent conflicted relations with dominant voices and interests and who voice the need for alternative relations.

In working out these global arrangements and policies, directed at maintaining and strengthening U.S. wealth, privilege, and power, U.S. policymakers have been guided by two basic criteria. First, if you are the enemy of my enemy, you qualify as a friend or at least as a functional ally. If you want to maintain your privileged place, in relation to the dominant U.S. privileged place, by imprisoning, torturing, killing, and repressing popular movements in your country dedicated to transforming or overthrowing power structures of domination, the U.S. can work with you. If you are brutal terrorists, who will terrorize the Russians in Afghanistan and those threatening U.S. relations of domination elsewhere, the U.S. can work with you.

Second, if you are good for U.S. business, as defined by the heads of major corporations and other sectors of the power elite, you qualify as a friend or at least as a functional ally. You do not even have to be an enemy of my enemy. If you keep the oil flowing at a relatively cheap price, that is enough. If you purchase weapons ensuring high profits, that is enough. If you provide cheap labor, access to raw material, and a guarantee of high profits on investments, that is enough.

In establishing such global relations, U.S. policymakers must decide how to relate to the numerous, complex, contradictory relations they find already constituted throughout the world. Some of these phenomena were largely created by indigenous, local, traditional, tribal, peasant, class, caste, gender, religious, cultural, and other relations. Others were largely created by colonial, trade, missionary, multinational, and other relations dominated by nontraditional outside forces. In some cases, U.S. and other powerful policymakers establish relations with already constituted traditional relations, reshaping and restructuring them so that they interconnect with new modern relations in ways that benefit those with wealth and power. In other cases, U.S. and other powerful policymakers find such reshaping and restructuring impossible, undesirable, or unnecessary. They have the need and power to construct and impose new relations on less powerful others.

The common triumphalist message is usually implicit but is frequently proclaimed proudly and loudly: There are no other options; we are the only game in town or in the world; if you want to succeed in the modern world, you must play by our rules and learn to function within our dominant relations; if you insist on holding on to your traditional or alternative values, you will increasingly become impoverished, disempowered, irrelevant, and obsolete.

Without developing this analysis, my basic point is that such global power relations and such criteria shaping U.S. and other policies contribute greatly to creating and maintaining violent seas of terror and terrorism. We must begin to challenge the imperatives behind U.S. and other policies and about the nature of relations with such friends and allies. Should we support relations with repressive regimes that buy weapons in order to maintain their domination and to inflict great suffering on their own people? Should we support relations with repressive regimes that maintain wealth and privilege by having multinational corporations exploit their own people without concern for labor rights or environmental conditions? Don't such relations make the U.S. and other powerful countries complicit in perpetuating overt violence and the "normal" violence of the status quo? Such past and present relations have helped create and maintain polluted seas of terror and terrorism in which alternative messages of terrorism sometimes get a receptive hearing.

Solutions

While bringing the perpetrators of the violence of September 11 and other acts of terrorism to justice, we must come to terms with why there is so much anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility. We must expand our analysis to include corporate, state, and military terror and terrorism, overt violence and the violence of the status quo, the many dimensions of insecurity and what constitutes real security. In this concluding section, I'll simply delineate several of many areas in which we can begin to take short-term and long-term steps to solve the complex problems of terror and terrorism.

First and most basically, we must analyze how we are locked into humanly constructed structures, policies, and systems of violence, including the usually overlooked pervasive violence of the status quo. We must find ways of breaking these polluting chains of violence. This means questioning "normal" dominant relations and providing alternatives to fundamental polices directed at maintaining wealth, privilege, and power since such policies result in domination, exploitation, and the suffering of much of humankind.

Second, we can focus on what is best in U.S. history and society, as well as in other histories and societies. As Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, the United States has had some splendid ideals, but it has usually failed to put them into practice. When asked what they most cherish about the United States, most citizens refer to ideals of freedom, civil liberties, human rights, democracy, concern and opportunities for the underdog and the disadvantaged. If we work to implement such ideals as central to the construction of relations at home and abroad, the presently polluted waters will become healthier and more life sustaining.

Third, we can temper arrogant triumphalism and recognize that the U.S. and the modern West do not have all of the answers and can learn from other peoples. For example, dominant U.S. conceptions of "human rights" and "democracy" are too narrow and allow for seas of terror. A more adequate and greatly enlarged approach to human rights should include economic and labor rights; the right to sufficient decent food, housing, healthcare, education, and employment. A more adequate and enlarged approach to democracy should involve a truer democracy based on self-determination in which human beings have the real means to make meaningful informed decisions that affect their lives.

Fourth, we can analyze how the imperatives of corporations and a small elite, maximizing profits and the accumulation of capital by controlling and guaranteeing access to raw materials and cheap labor, have established power relations in ways that create and pollute seas of terror.

Fifth, we can question relations with repressive dictators, military juntas, and other authoritarian regimes that repress their own people and force them to live in polluted seas of terror. We can recognize the devastating consequences, based on many precedents, of befriending and supporting brutal dictatorial regimes simply because they are willing to pay lip service or align themselves with dominant economic and military interests.

Sixth, we can question the necessity of the bloated and dangerous permanent war economy which fuels and thrives on instability, insecurity, violence, terror, and war and which eliminates the possibility of constructing alternative, economic, educational, healthcare, and other values and policies that can transform the seas of terror and terrorism.

Seventh, we can rethink many approaches, and policies toward key areas of the world in which there is great conflict, violence, injustice, class exploitation, and race, gender, and ethnic oppression and which fuel seas of terror and terrorism. For example, how do we change approaches to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, recognizing security needs of Israel against terrorism while taking very seriously the conditions contributing to the incredible violence, suffering, and terror inflicted on innocent Palestinians? How do we change approaches to the conflict with Iraq, recognizing that U.S policies since the end of the Persian Gulf War have largely contributed to the death of 500,000, innocent, Iraqi children? Past policies toward these and other conflicts contribute to the pollution of seas of terror, within which terrorist fish can swim and in which their messages have great credibility, whether these messages are reactionary or progressive, unjustified or justified, illusory or in touch with reality.

My hopeful conclusion is that all of this can change if we educate ourselves and others, organize, develop alternative voices and peace and justice communities, and become active agents transforming history. All of the conditions and relations I have cited that have given rise to the origins, sustenance, and dynamics of seas of terror and terrorism are humanly created and hence contingent and open to change. We can identify and resist violent, economic, political, military, class, imperialist, gendered, and other oppressive relations disclosing structures of domination, exploitation, alienation, and humiliation. We can work to construct and expand nonoppressive relations that provide conditions for healthy human development. We can become active in our personal lives, our interpersonal relations, and our activism in emphasizing commitments to human rights and democracy, to dealing with violence and the violence of the status quo, to identifying with the well-being of the least fortunate at home and abroad, and to establishing truly life-sustaining, meaningful relations with other human beings and with nature. Such commitments and struggles will allow us to identify and resist the real causes of violence, terror, and terrorism and to construct new human relations that allow for real security and for maximizing conditions furthering human development, freedom, and fulfillment.