by Amy Chua
Once we take group identity and tribal politics into consideration, it becomes unsurprising that the leaders of terrorist organizations are sometimes well-off and well-educated. The point is that they are well-off and well-educated members of frustrated, humiliated, economically and politically marginalized groups. Extremist organizations—like all organizations—will often be led by the better situated, more ambitious, charismatic, and talented members of these groups. That’s just how group dynamics work.
Thus the key to contemporary Islamic terrorism lies in the proliferation not merely of fundamentalist Muslim teachings but of the belief that Muslims, as a group, are being attacked, humiliated, and persecuted by an evil Western enemy. Osama bin Laden was a central figure in spreading this sentiment. He was a master of political tribalism. Inspired by Sayyid Qutb—an Egyptian poet often described as the founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism—bin Laden recast the conflict. It was no longer just about Israel. Instead, he chose as al-Qaeda’s archenemy the United States, the most powerful country in the world, “the head of the snake,” the “Great Satan.” He famously called on every Muslim in every country to kill Americans whenever possible:
[T]he United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors. . . . [W]e issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. . . .
Bin Laden created the ultimate global us-versus-them, asking Muslims to see themselves in a pitched historical battle to the death with the infidels.
To this, ISIS added the dream of a restored caliphate, creating a direct tie to Islam’s glorious imperial past, as well as layers of intra-Islamic group conflict. First, ISIS pitted itself against al-Qaeda. After an al-Qaeda leader mocked ISIS members as “simpletons who have deluded themselves with their announcement of the caliphate,” an ISIS spokesman responded: “All who try to sever the ranks will have their heads severed.” More fundamentally, ISIS invoked the ancient schism between Sunnis and Shias, calling for all Shias to be put to death.
Nevertheless, the core message of ISIS remains the invocation of Muslim “humiliation” and a worldwide call to Muslims to join in Islam’s glorious rebirth after centuries of oppression. In 2014, three years after bin Laden was killed, the “Caliph” of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared:
[T]he time has come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people, after their long slumber in the darkness of neglect—the time has come for them to rise.
Similarly, ISIS propaganda on the Internet (translated into English, French, and German) calls triumphantly for Sunni Muslims to “gather around your khalifah, so that you may return as you once were for ages, kings of the [E]arth and knights of war.”
Against a backdrop of stark group inequality, the most successful extremist groups offer their members precisely what existing societal institutions do not: a tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose, an enemy to hate and kill, and a chance to reverse the group polarity, turning humiliation into superiority and triumph. This is the formula that al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited.
They aren’t merely propounding a religious ideology. They offer their members status and power through group identity: being a warrior of Allah, with a heroic mission, whether defeating the Great Satan or restoring an Islamic caliphate. As terrorism expert Scott Atran puts it, “what inspires . . . is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings”; jihadis “almost never kill and die just for the Cause, but also for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers—their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem, or tribe.”
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ISIS may be on the verge of defeat, but the conditions that allowed it to rise remain very much alive. Consider this statement from a Muslim father living in Ceuta, Spain, during the Iraq War:
The Spanish authorities treat us like we were all criminals. Our people have been here for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, but even the Hindus get better treatment. We are always looking for work. . . . [Y]ou can’t help but feel the suffering of your people, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. . . . I swear, if George Bush were here in front of my son, I would shoot him and gladly die. And if I had the means, I would strap a bomb on myself and blow up American soldiers in Iraq even if my own son, whom I love more than life, were to grow up without a father. But I have no means to get there.
Millions of Muslims all over the world—in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East—feel victimized, threatened, and impoverished by Western enemies, whether America, Europe, Israel, Christianity, or Western civilization as a whole. To some extent, these feelings are beyond reach: they are the predictable distortions of group psychology, exaggerated and pounded home by demagogic leaders, by imams, and by echo-chamber social media. But to some extent, these feelings are self-fulfilling prophecies. As populist anti-Muslim sentiments rise in Europe and America, fueled by terrorist killings, Muslims in some places will in fact be more targeted, more marginalized, more socially isolated. As long as this cycle continues, Islamic terror organizations, new or old, will find a ready audience for their barbaric group appeals.
CHAPTER SIX
Venezuela
[A] trumpet tootles. Block-letter words pop up on the screen: “humanity,” “struggle,” “socialism.”. . . And then comes a close-up of the show’s host and star, Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, usually dressed in all red. . . . It is the only television show in the world in which a head of state regularly invites cameras to follow him as he governs.
—RACHEL NOLAN, describing the Venezuelan reality TV show Aló Presidente
Venezuela is a tragic mess, and U.S. foreign policy there for the last twenty years has been completely ineffective. Once a staunch U.S. ally with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela has been a thorn in America’s side since 1998, when Hugo Chávez rose to power. As we haplessly funded his opposition to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, Chávez simply turned to Russia and China, allowing our rivals to gain important footholds in the region. For two decades, Chávez’s defiance of the United States—he called President George W. Bush the “devil”—and immense popularity helped fuel the rise of similar anti-U.S., left-wing movements elsewhere in Latin America.
To be fair, Venezuela was not foremost on Washington’s agenda in the 2000s—with 9/11 and two wars preoccupying U.S. foreign policy—but in Venezuela too we undermined our own interests, turning vast numbers against us, through our blindness to the tribal identities that mattered most and the simmering ethnonationalist resentment that Chávez harnessed and gave voice to.
BEAUTY AS A WINDOW INTO VENEZUELA’S TRIBAL POLITICS
Latin Americans are obsessed with beauty pageants, and nowhere is this more true than in Venezuela, which has had more international beauty queens than any other country. Indeed, it’s often said that beauty is Venezuela’s second-largest industry after oil. Every year, two thirds of the country’s population of 30 million tune in to the Miss Venezuela contest. Thousands of Venezuelan girls as young as four are enrolled in beauty academies. The beauty obsession can push Venezuelan girls to unimaginable extremes. At sixteen, some have their intestines shortened to absorb less food; others have plastic mesh sewn into their tongues to make it painful to eat.
Beauty queens in Venezuela carry outsize importance. Irene Sáez, a Miss Venezuela who went on to win Miss Universe, became mayor of Chacao, the “Beverly Hills” of Caracas, then a state governor, then a presidential candidate in 1998. Her rival was a former army paratrooper whom the world had not yet heard of: Hugo Chávez.
Up to that point, every Mis
s Venezuela had been light skinned with European features, bearing little resemblance to Venezuela’s darker-skinned masses. Sáez was a six-foot-one-inch strawberry blonde with green eyes. She looked very much like the country-club elite who had dominated Venezuela for generations, but nothing like the vast majority of the country’s population.
By contrast, Chávez did look like them. He had, in his own words, a “big mouth” and “curly hair.” “I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair,” he added, “because it’s African.” In 1998, it was inconceivable that a person with Chávez’s complexion and “African” features could become Miss Venezuela or the country’s president. At the same time, it was taboo to even mention these racial realities. Chávez’s stunning victory shattered both the barrier and the taboo.
After sweeping to power, Chávez disbanded Venezuela’s Congress and Supreme Court, nationalized hundreds of companies, and seized control of the country’s oil sector. Although his regime was beset by political instability and his policies led to billions of dollars in capital flight, Chávez was reelected in 2000 and served as president for another thirteen years, with some spectacular successes, including dramatic declines in illiteracy and infant mortality. Chavez was even able to score victories in the United States: in 2005, with the cooperation of former Massachusetts congressman Joseph Kennedy II, Chávez began providing millions of gallons of free oil to poor Americans.
Today, however, Venezuela is in chaos, on the verge of a humanitarian crisis, with criminal elements apparently controlling large sectors of the state. Hunger is rampant. Grief-stricken parents are giving away their babies because they can’t afford to feed them. The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world (recent victims include another former Miss Venezuela).
How could Chávez—an ex-convict with a penchant for bizarre ideation (he once suggested that capitalism might have killed life on Mars)—have risen to power? How could he keep winning elections even as the country seemingly lurched from crisis to crisis?
These questions baffled U.S. policy makers throughout the 2000s. Washington completely misunderstood the Chávez phenomenon. Although it had been a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States reverted to a Cold War mentality and saw Chávez solely as an anticapitalist thug-buffoon who, along with his friend and ally, Fidel Castro, was threatening to spread communism throughout Latin America. In Washington’s eyes, such a regime had to be antidemocratic; its popular support couldn’t be genuine or deep or sustainable.
But Chávez was very much the product of democracy—democracy under conditions of inequality, deeply buried racial tensions, and a market-dominant minority. Whether because of ideological blinkers or self-delusion, the United States stubbornly underestimated Chávez’s popularity, failing to grasp the seismic shifts in the region’s tribal politics that he epitomized. The United States saw a dictator; Venezuelans from the poor barrios saw, at long last, a president who looked like and spoke for them.
From a tribal politics point of view, Chávez’s rise is simple to explain. He was a product of a battle between Venezuela’s dominant “white” minority and its long-degraded, poorer, less-educated, darker-skinned indigenous- and African-blooded masses. Even today, partisan finger pointers in the United States have little understanding of the origins of the autocratic havoc now engulfing the country.
“PIGMENTOCRACY” AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL DEMOCRACY
All over Latin America, it’s often said that “there is no racism,” because everyone, high and low, is “mixed-blooded.” Instead of black or white, “everyone is a mestizo.”
The reality is far more complex. Latin American society is fundamentally pigmentocratic: characterized by a social spectrum with taller, lighter-skinned, European-blooded elites at one end; shorter, darker, indigenous-blooded masses at the other end; and a great deal of “passing” in between. The roots of pigmentocracy are traceable to the colonial era.
Unlike their British counterparts in, say, India or Malaysia, the Spanish colonialists freely and prolifically procreated with indigenous women. From the outset, Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers waxed enthusiastic about the charms of Amerindian women, who were “beautiful, and not a little lascivious, and fond of the Spaniards” by one account and “[v]ery handsome and great lovers, affectionate and with ardent bodies” by another. In an important sense, “the Spanish Conquest of the Americas was a conquest of women. The Spaniards obtained the Indian girls both by force and by peaceful means”—sometimes as tokens of friendship from Indian leaders. Intermarriage, concubinage, and polygamy were common.
Although this “racial mixing” might suggest a readiness among Latin America’s colonizers to transcend ethnic boundaries and skin color, in reality it was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, what emerged was an invidious social system known as the Society of Castes (sociedad de castas), in which individuals were classified in accordance with their racial “purity,” with whites occupying the highest stratum.
The names of the specific castas that emerged in Spanish America varied across different regions and changed over the years. The following list is illustrative of eighteenth-century New Spain:
Spaniard and Indian beget mestizo
Mestizo and Spanish woman beget castizo
Castizo woman and Spaniard beget Spaniard
Spanish woman and Negro beget mulatto
Spaniard and mulatto woman beget morisco
Morisco woman and Spaniard beget albino
Spaniard and albino woman beget torna atrás
Indian and torna atrás beget lobo
Lobo and Indian woman beget zambaigo
Zambaigo and Indian woman beget cambujo
Cambujo and mulatto woman beget albarazado
Albarazado and mulatto woman beget barcino
Barcino and mulatto woman beget coyote
Coyote woman and Indian beget chamiso
Chamiso woman and mestizo beget coyote mestizo
Coyote mestizo and mulatto woman beget ahí te estás
That the Spaniards were supposed to be “pure-blooded” is, to say the least, ironic. Among the numerous groups that, by the Middle Ages, had inhabited and commingled with one another on Iberian soil were Celts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, and Gypsies.
Nevertheless, with the exception of countries like Chile and Uruguay (where indigenous people were largely extinguished almost immediately), disdain among a “pure white” Spanish elite for the “colored” masses is a deeply ingrained feature of the history of every modern Latin American country. In Mexico, mixed-blooded mestizos were for years prohibited from owning land or joining the clergy. In Peru, even intellectuals believed that “the Indian is not now, nor can he ever be, anything but a machine.” In Chile, victory in the War of the Pacific (1879–83) was often attributed to the “whiteness” of the Chileans, as compared with the defeated “Indians” of Bolivia and Peru. In Argentina, a popular writer wrote in 1903 that mestizos and mulattos were both “impure, atavistically anti-Christian; they are like the two heads of a fabulous hydra that surrounds, constricts, and strangles with its giant spiral a beautiful, pale virgin, Spanish America.”
In Venezuela, there was an added layer of complexity and racism due to the importation of roughly one hundred thousand slaves from Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, according to one historian, more than half of Venezuela’s population was black when the country declared independence in 1811. Over the centuries, Venezuela’s elites blamed all of the country’s social ills on “the constant mixing of whites, Indians, and blacks” and repeatedly and actively encouraged immigration from Europe in order to “whiten” Venezuela. After World War II, substantial numbers of immigrants arrived from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and other countries. This postwar influx from Europe “slowed the longstanding tendency in the country t
oward racial mixing.”
Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century, a national myth—promoted by the country’s intellectuals and elites—perpetuated the idea that Venezuela was a “racial democracy” in which racism and discrimination did not exist. As late as 1997, a prominent Venezuelan businessman and columnist wrote:
[I]n Venezuela we complain about a lot of things that we think are wrong. But we have some things that should serve as an example to other countries. One is that race is not important in judging a person. In Venezuela racial discrimination is not a factor either in employment or in social or intellectual realms. . . . Prejudice against someone because of the color of his skin does not exist. This is not an obstacle here as it is in other places.
As elsewhere in Latin America, this myth of color blindness and “everyone is a mestizo” conveniently hid the fact that wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in white hands while the country’s impoverished underclass, representing a full 80 percent of the population, consisted primarily of darker-skinned Venezuelans with more indigenous and African ancestry. At the same time, the myth suppressed the mobilization of the country’s poor along ethnic or racial lines.
Thus on the eve of the 1998 presidential election, even as Venezuela’s elite proudly declared that their country was free of racism, a small minority of cosmopolitan “whites”—including descendants of the original Spanish colonizers as well as more recent European immigrants—dominated Venezuela economically, politically, and socially.
