It’s the ideas having consequences, you unintelligent person, you Tom Smith
(We don’t use the s-t-u-p-i-d word in my household, it somehow having got on the list with the f-word as a bad word not to be used. Long story) As readers of this blog know, I consider it my duty to point out certain obvious things which notwithstanding their obviousness seem to elude our rulers. Here is yet another one. This is the insinuation that somehow it is due to the crushing poverty of Yemen that young men who go there for advanced terrorist studies come out willing to put incendiary devices in their underwear, further evidence if any were needed of the excessive fanaticism which certain varieties of Islam inspire. I’m not going to say this is just a liberal or left wing thing, though I tend to think it mostly is. But wherever you find it, it is wrong. Why should people find it so hard to believe that ideas and systems of ideas motivate people to do things, both good and evil? All kinds of people were seduced or inspired by Communism, Naziism, Taoism, Catholicism, you name it, to do all kinds of things. It’s not about whether someone is from a poor house or rich house. That may happen to have something to do with it in the event, but as an explanation, it has little power, much of the time. Or at least the sociology would have to be a lot more complex than, driven by desperation, the poor lad turned to terrorism. This is tied up with the fantasy that the state can get people to do what it wants them to do, to shape them into good little beings. In fact, people choose to do all kinds of things, good and evil, often inspired by the craziest things. I mean, caliphates, virgins, it’s nuts; and yet, it’s a real problem. You could turn Yemen into the UK and evidently you would still have a problem, since plenty of Brits immersed in the same ideas also set forth to murder people with bombs. I infer, daringly, that it has a lot to do with the ideas. I find it very frustrating the so many people seem to find it hard to accept that really bad ideas can have enormous influence in history. The whole twentieth century looks to me to be mostly about the consequences of really bad ideas working themselves out.