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By Luc Loranhe (2006)
The truth about violence as political tool is that it is highly effective.
Not only can countries spread their cultures by militarily subduing other countries. It has also always been easy for armed institutions to impose their will over their own country’s population.
I assume that in more than 90 percent of all cases where a part of a country gained the independence to form an own country, armed struggle was involved.
How many freedom fighters do you need? A few hundred members can make a very efficient guerilla army. And a terrorist group only needs a few dozens of fully dedicated fighters to have a major impact. And time and again, small groups of revolutionaries were able to wrest political power in a country.
But political violence doesn’t have to go as far as planting bombs and ambushing opponents. Violent harassing goes a long way in intimidating people into submission.
In much of the Western world, violence as political tool has almost exclusively become the domain of right-wing movements, ranging from religious fundamentalists of any belief to ethnic supremacists. They all have anti-sexual agendas.
Would political violence work in asserting people’s sexual rights? We haven’t seen such a movement yet. But the vanguards would most probably have to be homosexual men.
In the US in the 1970’s, gays played an important role in the civil rights movement. However, because a preference for young sexual partners is quite possibly more pronounced in homosexuals than it is in heterosexual, legislation that defines sexual contacts with people below the age of 18 as child abuse has stifled gay political action.
And outside the Western world, there has never really been much political activism by homosexual men. Rather, the homosexual part of the population in non-Western countries, estimated as over 5 percent (http://www.avert.org/hsexu1.htm), has typically been hiding their sexual orientation in shame.
In the West and in other parts of the world, the punishment of sexual offenders has been spiraling towards ever heavier sentences. Just try to imagine what difference a violent reaction by gay militants would make: from the harassment of anti-sexual judges and politicians (just as anti-abortion lunatics harass pro-abortion judges and politicians) to more serious threats and acts.
Islamists bomb their religion into social acceptance in much of Europe. More and more politicians advocate privileges for Islam that even Christianity hasn’t been afforded for decades, such as protection against insult. Christian cultural imperialism has been withdrawn from Islamic countries around the world, just in order to not provoke violent reactions.
Therefore, it is obvious that even though Islamists have a medieval mindset, they are very well adapted to the means it takes to forward their agenda in the modern world. And the means include political violence.
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Copyright Luc Loranhe