open Democracy News Analysis - Islamism and war: the demographics of rage, Gunnar Heinsohn - Comments

tandberg on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

tandberg — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:04:59 +0100

Is there a way out? asks Gunnar. Because there is a solution to every problem, we all know this, and the human brain works better if it has a problem to solve, so let’s start by identifying the problem. And I can easily do that for you all, the problem is war. After there was a war in Norway, more children was born than usual here as well. They called it the Baby Boom, and my parents are from that generation. Personally I agree with Gunnar, the first thing to do is to acknowledge that humanity is one, that we are all one, and that we can only solve humanity’s problems together. It will mean a lot of work and money, he argues, and where can we get it from? For me it is clear, like it is for Gunnar: Bei der Rüstung. And that means something like the weapons industry. I am in the age bracket Gunnar is referring to, so for me it makes sense. It is frustrating to see how society is polluting and going to war and not being able to do anything about it. Plenty of times I am down right angry. Why are we as a nation handing out a peace price to someone dedicated to fighting a brutal regime, and then on the other hand increasing our trade with this brutal regime? Why are we selling weapons to countries at war, why are we trading with countries that employ slaves and helpless refugees? But, here I am quite alone with these worries. So when I gently ask people to care more about the environment, they will still buy a new BMW, and try to remember to shut off the light when they are not in a room, but they are not willing to make it a priority. People have found their place and they are content. There is an open question here, the question why war has a tendency to increase the birth-rate? But while the cause is hidden, the effect is visible to us all, and the important lesson to take from Gunnars work is that we must solve our problems together and stop spending all the resources to produce weapons. That was completely left out in this article, so that’s why I felt compelled to write this comment. After all, these weapons are not made to hunt animals. Øystein Tandberg

andrew.spencer01 on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

andrew.spencer01 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:31:32 +0100

Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to read Dr. Heinsohn's book. Reading his OD piece hasn't really fired me to obtain a copy, however. The problem is that I find it very difficult to understand the logic of his article, but here's an attempt: there's some kind of correlation with persistent society-wide violence and the number of young men available as canon fodder. Dr. Heinsohn claims (apparently) that a rise in population causes the violence. Presumably it can't be the only cause, though. True, there was rise in population before England's Wars of the Roses but that was mainly because a third of the population had been wiped out by the Black Death the previous century. There was presumably a general rise in population in Europe at the end of the 19th century, as sanitation and other factors improved, but it seems a little implausible to attribute the First World War to demography. It's difficult to attribute the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism to population changes. Japan under the Edo shogunate was in an almost continual state of civil war for centuries, as was Renaissance Italy. As for violence within your own country, when the CIA installed General Suharto as military dictator in Indonesia in 1965 he murdered somewhere between 500 000 and 1 500 000 people within a few months, but this seems not to be related to demographic changes (most of the victims were ethnic Chinese, the 'Jews of Asia'). Do Stalinist or Maoist purges have a source in population statistics? And it seems rather fanciful to attribute the murderous behaviour of the USA in Indo-China to testosterone-fuelled baby-boomers. Is it really the case that the young men spraying Agent Orange over South Vietnamese paddy fields or carpet bombing Southern Cambodia were there because there was not much going on for them back home? Yet the violence meted out against an invading army by Afghan youths is negligible set against over a million dead in Vietnam alone. It's also negligible set against the million or more civilians killed in Iraq since 2003. The thesis therefore has to be that wars and civil unrest can be caused by various things, but that a youth-bulge will *definitely* give rise to violence (except in post-war Japan). One OD commentator suggests that Palestinian youths have suddenly cottoned on to this (having been quiescent for 60 years of Israeli occupation?). But all this begs an important question of what we mean by 'violence' and 'war'. Palestine is an intriguing case in point. For pretty well the whole of the conflict there the Israeli Defence Forces have managed to maintain a very constant score card of death: for every Israeli (soldier or civilian, adult or child) who gets killed by a Palestinian, three Arabs are killed by the army ('terrorist' or civilian, adult or child). This figure rose to 1:5 during the height of the first Intifada and ran at about 1:10 during the most recent of the invasions of Lebanon. If there is any truth in the drivel that Dr. Heinsohn is peddling it's this: when your country is being attacked and occupied (in the case of Afghanistan, for the third time in 150 years by the same imperial power) it's easier to mount a noticeable and effective resistance if you've got some manpower. And to answer Joep van Delft, if that doesn't work, because you're trapped impotently inside the most populated and one of the poorest strips of land in the world, and being continually shelled by the world's fourth most powerful army, then you might start blaming neighbours with a different ideology from yours and start attacking them instead. Do we need a demographic explanation for this?

ianniscarras on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

ianniscarras — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:22:06 +0100

This article is interesting, but also represents a clear example of overkill by a social scientist eager to prove a thesis at all costs. Simplifying complex human situations to just one root cause to the exclusion of all others can help shed some light, but runs the risk of being overly simplistic, disingenuous, even, at times, slightly dangerous. I.C.

suziq on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

suziq — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:58:53 +0100

It's a complicated issue, isn't it? But what the heck to do? As others have pointed out, neighboring Pakistan - which the Taliban/Al Qaeda/OBL are trying to overtake - possesses nuclear weapons of considerable size. Check out this frightening website: The Truth About Islam http://islamwatchers.blogspot.com

Jack Schitt on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

Jack Schitt — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:00:39 +0100

Today´s Muslim Tunisia is not occupied by foreign armies, Muslim or otherwise. Don´t let Gunnar bamboozle you with his fertility fertilizer.

KVB Tharoor on "Islamism and war: the demographics of rage"

KVB Tharoor — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 17:03:28 +0100

I don't doubt that the abundant "raw material" of frustrated young men certainly facilitates violence in Afghanistan. But I think the demographic explanation is minor, even to the point of irrelevance, when one takes into consideration Afghanistan's recent geopolitical history. Why Afghanistan when not Tunisia? is an insulting question, as if one could only expect violence and instability in Muslim states. Better to look at the events and political forces that have determined Afghanistan's fate in the last 30 years than its membership in some otherwise homogeneous bloc of middle eastern states. There's a particularly European obsession with demographic studies that I think springs more from European insecurities (and also the more unsavoury European socio-scientific tradition) than meaningful insight. When looking at casualty statistics, I would ask "why so few coalition casualties?" not "why so many?". Why the emphasis on air strikes (that kill more civilians than militants, but safeguard European and North American lives)? And maybe then, we could begin to unpack the troubling problem of violence in Afghanistan.

Islamism and war: the demographics of rage, Gunnar Heinsohn

robert.cawston@opendemocracy.net — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:51:06 +0100

Canada's military death-toll in Afghanistan increased to sixty-six with the killing of six soldiers by a huge roadside bomb in Panjwali district, southwest of Kandahar, on 4 July 2007. In the forty-five months from 17 April 2002 to 31 December 2005, eight Canadians were killed - four of them by friendly-fire. But in the eighteen months of 2006 and 2007 alone, fifty-eight have given their life.

A British soldier killed in the upper Geresk valley of Helmand province on 12 July brought the number of British military deaths in Afghanistan to sixty-four, of which fifty-three have occurred since July 2006. The country's media reports on 16 July that the casualty-rate is both higher than that of United States forces, and (in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan) approaching that experienced by British troops in the second world war.
Gunnar Heinsohn is the director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut at the University of Bremen, Europe's first institute devoted to comparative genocide research. He is the author of Sons and World Power: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations (Söhne und Weltmacht; 8th impression, December 2006), a German-language scholarly bestseller. In 2005-07, he lectured on the subject of youth bulges and violence to Germany's secret service (BND), commanders of British armed forces, and Germany's Academy of Security Policy in Berlin

Also by Gunnar Heinsohn:

"Why Gaza is fertile ground for angry young men"
(14 June 2007)
In September 2006, General James L Jones, then Nato's supreme commander for Europe, admitted to his deep surprise about the growing threat of the Taliban (though this is a factor long discussed in Paul Rogers's column in openDemocracy). As in Iraq, western strategists are scrambling to deal with the resurgence of sustained violent opposition on the heels of splendid western victories. True, foreign aid has not been managed well; in many cases it has been squandered and has evaporated. Moreover, centuries-old tribal regional rule that resents the western occupiers and their proxy government has reasserted itself and. But where have all the recent insurgents come from?

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