Terror roots

Today the Western world is concerned with stopping those crazy terrorists from the Middle East and surrounding areas. How did this all begin? That all depends on how far back you want to go in the history of the world. There are lots of theories about the origins of war in human history but the simple fact is that signs of warfare are evident from our earliest known humans.

Wars have also been fought for lots of different reasons from people needing more room for an expanding population to needing to move because of droughts or other disasters wrecking their homelands and lots of other reasons. Societies sometimes clashed due to cultural differences and sometimes that cultural reason was religious in nature.

Our clashes today are mostly based on economics, politics or religious differences between Muslims and Christians. The history of clashes between these two groups goes all the way back to the earliest days of these religions. They fought wars back and forth over control of the city of Jerusalem. Then there were invasions or wars by Alexander the Great, Chandragupta Maurya, and Genghis Khan. All of these groups acted like terrorists invading, looting and pillaging the areas they entered and sometimes defeated. Then there were all the Crusades which were the Christian equivalent of Jihad or holy war. I hear people today talking about how Muslims must be terrible vicious people to declare holy wars but the Christians were doing it first. Both groups consider Jerusalem a part of their holy history and so does the Jewish religion. Holy wars are nothing new and neither is harsh brutal terrorism of invading armies. Some people say terrorism only relates to activities since dynamite became readily available to equal out the powers of destruction between large armies and smaller ones. Dynamite has been replaced by C4 plastic explosive today. But come on if you were farming and a few thousand knights came marching toward your farm burning everything in their path and raping and murdering I think you would experience some terror. The power they used included the implied threat of if you do not bow down to us this is what we will do to you and your people. So they used threats to intimidate their intended targets, just like terrorists do today.

In the mountains of Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan with its difficult terrain it was fairly easy to build small compounds and defend them from invaders. That is what we have today in these areas, a bunch of anarchistic warlords ruling over their small compounds. They haven't really ever been defeated and they likely never will be so fighting a war over there to defeat them is not going to be successful. So why are we there? The British and the Russians have already demonstrated how impossible it is. What makes the U.S. think that they will fare any better? Sure the U.S. wanted to go in and punish them because of 911 but where does it end? Why is there no dialogue going on between the religions to come up with a peaceful solution? Is humanity just doomed to forever engage in Holy warfare until there is a once and for all world war and there is just one religion left? I hope not. It is time to start talking, settle the differences, stop killing each other and learn to live in peace.