Capitalism and Terrorism

As always when I get an idea, it's a compilation of several things I've heard recently.

Let's start with minerals. I recently spent a week in Creede Colorado, where a silver boom created the town in 1890 and a silver bust stopped the development of the town cold in 1892. Silver, lead, and zinc were mined steadily, keeping the town alive, but not booming. Now metal prices are such that the mines may be reopened. This would bring jobs and development back to the city. My cousin recently bought a cabin in the area. We visited over Labor Day and hiked in the pristine mountains and fished in the unspoiled streams. While my brother is usually a pro-market, capitalistic minded person, he expressed dread that mining would return to Creede. Why? If development is always good, government should not regulate or restrict businesses, and market forces should always be allowed to dictate public policy, why shouldn't the mountains around Creede be mined for their maximum mineral potential? After all, doesn't America need these minerals? We can't expect the environmental concerns of a small portion of the population to deny resources that happen to be in their area to the rest of the population. Like drilling oil in the gulf, for example.

The U.S., the old colonial powers, and other big or strong nations, have always seen their need for resources to transcend national boundaries or the interests of local governments and native populations. Our history in the Middle East, in connection with our need for oil, has also followed this pattern.

Rather than having morals, ethics, and principles that we hold to be true for all men, we have a history of applying a different standard to people in other countries as well as to people that stand in the way of our progress.

For those situations where Americans were the actors, you often had big U.S. corporations operating in small countries. You did not find large crowds of American citizens standing up in protest when these companies were using heavy handed tactics to get what they wanted. People here for the most part were unaware of how U.S. companies operated overseas. When they were aware, they did not care. Any exploitation, displacement, or disruption was happening to "those other people". After all, we were benefiting with oil, minerals, crops, or other lucrative goods. Why spoil a good thing just because some strange people in some other part of the world with unintelligible languages and incomprehensible cultures were being "inconvenienced"? Shouldn't the market dictate what happens in the world? If they did not want to be dominated, they should have developed their resources themselves and used the money to create a strong military defense. We can't help it if they were weak and disorganized. They were in the way of us getting to their resources. We did not regulate or rein in our rogue capitalists that operated in this fashion. We either encouraged or ignored their actions.

Now we live in an era of terrorism. We wonder what they have against us, because most Americans prefer to remain blissfully ignorant rather than pay attention to the way we have treated other countries. Sometimes mistreatment was a corporate policy while in search of resources. Other times our government committed mischief, crimes, or atrocities in search of an edge or advantage in the Cold War. If you lived in a country that had been exploited or disadvantaged by the U.S., you would see things quite differently. Maybe you would not hate America, maybe you could understand why things were done the way they were done. If you buy into the premise of survival of the strongest, you would also feel that the big guys can take care of themselves.

So when members of a country radicalize, call for jihad, and start taking actions against the western world, we in the western world finally turn our attention to these countries in horror and wonder why they do not rein in their radicals. We can't comprehend why they sometimes actually cheer the efforts of the extremists.

Why should we be surprised at their actions, revolted by their inability to keep those on the fringe under control? For people of the Islamic world, our application of capitalism is terrorism against them. Why does it surprise anyone that they consider turnabout to be justified?