After Slaughter, Bangladesh Reels at Revelations About Attackers

[Purveyor]

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Bangladesh’s capital city reeled in shock on Sunday as clues began to flood social media about the privileged backgrounds of the half-dozen attackers believed to have butchered 20 patrons of a restaurant during a bloody siege here late last week.

The six attackers were killed when the army stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery to end an 11-hour siege early Saturday.

The police declined to name the young men because nobody had shown up as of Sunday night to identify their bodies, but friends and relatives recognized photographs that were posted on a messaging app by the Islamic State, along with praise for the violence.

The men, all in their late teens or early 20s, were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad.

Among them was the son of a former city leader in the prime minister’s own Awami League, the governing party.

“That’s what we’re absolutely riveted by,” said Kazi Anis Ahmed, a writer and publisher of the daily newspaper The Dhaka Tribune. “That these kids from very affluent families with no material want can still be turned to this kind of ideology, motivated not just to the point of killing but also want to be killed.”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/world/asia/bangladesh-dhaka-terrorism.html?_r=0

[jtuck004]

1. "...kids from very affluent families with no material want can still be turned..." You must

have missed the 60's.

[Bluenorthwest]

10. I don't recall the 60's as being defined by lots of mass murder by affluent youth. Do you?

nt

[Igel]

11. The "mass murder" bit is just part of the culture.

A lot of fairly wealthy '60s kids turned counterculture. American counterculture involved breaking traditional mores and perhaps trying to break the political system.

Had the counterculture called for violent overthrow of the political system, then you'd have had a lot of the *same* kind of young people at various points in Russia's history.

Or you could just ponder Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, but her case sounds very Stockholm Syndrome-like.


Does make you wonder about the "more you know them, the more you want to live in peace with them" business.

[Recursion]

2. Most of the 9/11 team had Masters degrees IIRC

Terrorism is kind of exclusively an activity of the rich; I'm not sure where people get the idea that it comes out of poverty. Ditto mass shootings in the US (which, I argue, is essentially the same phenomenon).

[IronLionZion]

5. I would have thought rich educated people would manipulate poor people

into doing the dirty work for them. But maybe poor people are busy working and trying to survive while the rich have more time for social media and political ideologies. Or the rich have the resources to do it.

[Recursion]

9. The last sentence is a crucial one, I think

It's only the richest 15% or so of the middle east that get to travel much anyways; US visas aren't exactly easy to get.

[SunSeeker]

3. Osama Bin Laden came from a rich family as well, but he never wanted to blow himself up.

These guys actually wanted to die, even though they had bright futures. These people didn't become terrorists because they needed a job. It appears they were driven purely by ideology. That is some powerful brainwashing.

[Raster]

4. OBL did not want to die, but had no compunction at encouraging others to die or kill.

Radical Islamic brainwashing: it's the 70 virgins just waiting for you in heaven to do your every bidding.

[IronLionZion]

6. This is much scarier

because we can't just use economic assistance to defeat ideologies of blind hatred. This is way more difficult to deal with.

[bemildred]

8. It's kind of ordinary, Castro and Che were from privileged families too.

The leaders of revolts, revolutions, insurrections, and insurgencies of all stripes almost always come from the elites. Cases where one of the downtrodden leads a revolt are rare, Spartacus was one, and they lose unless the system has become too corrupt to defend itself, like the late Roman case.

[Igel]

12. It's not blind hatred.

To think it's blind hatred is to put blinders on and say there's nothing we can do.

If you feel humiliated, you want to regain your honor and your people's honor. Prestige. You want to be able to respect yourself, and that can only mean that others respect you and show respect. If they are to be submissive in order to show proper respect, then they must submit.

The dirt poor are too busy trying to find food to worry about this. Others have few opportunities to worry about it. But if everybody else in your society respects you, then what's left is defending your people's honor and finishing the job. You become aware of the systemic dishonor that's been shown and must fight to stop it, because nothing's changed and fighting is one time-honored means of getting people to listen and taking back what is yours. That also brings you honor from within your community, you're the Big Man on Campus (or wherever). You regain honor by forcing others to bend to your will. That's a fairly common view of honor in the last 6000 years, and only a few sublayers in a few cultures have gotten past this--and it's being rolled back in some cultures, notably US culture.

What's truly bad is that personal honor gets mixed up with religious honor and national honor. The greatest glory for the ummah was when they were military, conquering, occupiers. The glory of Andalusia was mostly about territory and power, and far less about tolerance. The Golden Age of Islamic science depended crucially on lots of money and lots of ideas flowing into the ME--the ideas were important because much Islamic science is warmed over, reinterpreted non-Islamic science. There were some additions, to be sure, but nothing compared to later. Die-hard Islamists don't like the "warmed over" bit and claim everything in the ideas as their own.

It's good that this is causing some shock. This attitude hasn't been all that pervasive, as far as I can tell, among the Bangalis. Hard to look up this kind of thing, because most people think of trivialities like food, fashion and folklore as the defining traits of culture, not interpersonal relations and value systems.

[bemildred]

7. George W. Bush was kind of from the upper classes too, eh?

He bombed how many countries? I've forgotten. It kind of blurs together.

That insensitivity to ones fellow humans feelings is kind of ubiquitous among our privileged elites these days.

[MisterP]

13. the ultimate cause is the failure of postcolonial developmentalism

everyone would get their shots and a 6th-grade schooling, swamps drained, rivers dammed, new monocultures and pesticides introduced, superstitions erased, belching smokestacks raised, forests made into lumber plantations
problem is that all just doesn't work: Bangladesh, India, Mexico, Africa, Turkey, and Egypt didn't "catch up" as they'd promised, and flexible, populist Islamism was bubbling up as a new thing by the 70s, against these rancid technocrats: this changed the rules of the game, but many simply couldn't realize that (many in the CIA blamed--as usual--the Russkies for this development)
so these fuckers were living on the inside of the secularist developmentalist Awami League, and went from one vacuous promise to its inverse
Mawdudi and Qutb were both the result of extensive travels in Europe and the US, and bin Laden had years of experience with US agents, and all of them were relatively well-off