Terrorism and Marketing
Seth Godin is usually willing to throw out some ideas and see if they stick- I don’t always agree but I can appreciate them as a catalyst. Today, six years after we all woke up (well, those of us on the West Coast anyways) to the twin towers crumbling he stumbles onto the root of our problems with the war on terrorism– Marketing.
Guns will always be available to us, bombs can be easily fashioned out of just about anything- but the reason why a rational person uses these weapons in committing acts of terrorism is because they’ve been sold a message. Laws can only go so far.
Seth covers it all in his post and the NYPD hit the nail on the head with their report of Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, both of which I invite you to read if you haven’t already.
One new spin I’d like to introduce is the United States military work in Ethiopia, which follows the idea that if you build hospitals, dig wells and provide aid to a country the people within that area will have little to no motivation to rise against you:
“Achieving this indispensable integration of the military and nonmilitary dimensions of U.S. foreign policy will require much better coordination between the Department of Defense and other agencies of the U.S government than has occurred on Iraq. It will also require all actors, in Africa and the global system, to reconcile the pursuit of their own interests with the increasingly recognized common interest in overcoming war, poverty, ignorance, and disease. Here, too, U.S. unilateralism in Iraq war has created a tragic negative example that must not be repeated.”
Now I’ve never owned a pair of Birkenstock’s, I eat meat regularly and don’t think I have to stick it to ‘the man’- far from it actually- but I can admit that we’re no longer fighting a figurehead, we’re fighting an ideology. Bringing the biggest guns to the conflict only serves to unhinge the process and irritate the situation against an invisible enemy. In essence, we’re proving them right.
Why not try proving them wrong?
