Another week, another tragedy to react to, this time in Nice, France, as over 80 people were killed by a man driving a truck into a crowd at Bastille Day celebrations. The most frightening thing about the attack is not the attack itself, which is horrifying, but what this could mean for France, and by extension, the rest of the world. The reason is every time something like this happens, the desire for retaliation makes a repeat occurrence more likely.
Here is the cycle that is currently in process in France. Step one, a disenfranchised Muslim man or group of Muslim men attacks a large group of people. Step two, people demand blood because of the actions of this group, generally blaming the religion of Islam as a whole for the attacks that take place. Take the reaction of the extreme right-wing National Front, which has called Muslim people “wolves” in response. That, in turn, leads to more young Muslim men who feel unwelcome in their own country and discriminated against in their lives. That makes them angry, once they get angry enough to kill it leads to a loop back to step one, and more attacks happen.
The extreme right wing response isn’t unique to France, it’s a trend that has taken root around the world. This is a fantastic recruiting tool for a group like ISIS, which wants angry young men who hate their country of residence to start killing people. If people are discriminated against, if they’re poor, if they have no hope for the future and believe that the people of their country are to blame for their problem, they’re going to be more likely to lash out with anger against the people of their nation. The scary thing is that when I read comments by France’s National Front, or America’s Republican presidential nominee, terrorist attacks start to make sense. They’re not in any way defensible, but you can begin to understand why someone would decide to commit one. If everyone says you’re a violent degenerate, you might as well prove them right.
The only solution for this, near as I can tell, is to stop giving these young men the chance to be angry. If the Muslim community are part of the overall community, if they’re made to feel welcome in the country, if they’re given the same opportunities as everyone else and they do not have to struggle through poverty and racism, they’re not going to commit a terrorist attack. It’s a case where you have to actually be kind to a community in response to heinous acts, because you have to make sure people in that community don’t get radicalized and perceive the people of their country as an enemy.
It’s hard to argue for kindness in the face of violence, but it’s necessary, because happy people don’t kill people. This seems like a naive response to some, but it’s true. It’s a case where you have to make the idea of someone killing themselves for a cause to be as unappealing as possible. The only way to do that is to give them something to live for, nobody is going to kill themselves in a suicide attack if they have hope for tomorrow. Nobody is going to attack their nation if they generally like people in it. The only possible way to counter these acts is to react with kindness.
That’s not what people want to hear. We like revenge, we like the idea of people getting punished for crimes, we want anyone involved in the attacks in Nice to suffer, because they made others suffer. In more extreme examples, people want anyone who even looks similar to the attacker in France to suffer, as can be seen by the response by the National Front. This is a dangerous reaction, because it just creates more angry young men who want to make others suffer. It’s a cycle, and one that can only be stopped if we don’t participate in one part of the process. For the nations in the west, we have to be the nice people in this situation, because the perception is that we are not, and that’s what is driving the angry young men of the world to commit heinous acts.
This will undoubtedly be considered naive, and there will be plenty of people advocating more violence in response to this violence and more anger in response to this man’s anger. That’s natural, that’s what has happened before, and that’s going to be what happens again if we don’t decide to finally learn from the mistakes of the past couple decades. Responding to violence with increased military action, with more violence, by making the perpetrators the villains in our entertainment, by dialing up the racism faced by people in their home communities and counties, it is not working. It has failed repeatedly, and while people like the National Front or Donald Trump want to continue escalating the problem, it’s clearly not effective and is in fact just making mass violence part of our every day reality. It’s time we learn from this mistake and react with the opposite response, try to increase the amount of kindness so people don’t want to hurt each other.
