Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
The entire concept of "radicalization" is premised in the flawed construct that good citizens go bad due solely to outside influence. Prevention seems to have been focused at these bad outside influences.

So, a man who largely ignores his wife, fails to show her proper respect, or prioritizes her low in his life relative to other interests may well take the position that she was "radicalized" when she becomes infatuated with the attentions lauded upon her by someone who is also lending a sympathetic ear to her plight. But is it really the "fault" of the guy who lures her away, or is it the fault of the man who foolishly created the condtitions that contributed to the new guy's success?

"Prevent" is fine, but the majority of it must be turned internally under the harsh light of frank self-assessment. What can we change about our own behavior to prevent radicalization? Weight the effort there. Only minor and reasonable measures will then be needed for dealing with the efforts of others.
What if a man has a hundred wives... 90 are happy, 6 are mildly irritated, three hate his guts, and one shoots him in the head. On the basis of the numbers you might say he's not doing a bad job, but he's still been shot in the head.

What if a man has a million wives, or a billion?

There's a difference between the kind of radicalization that creates insurgents and the kind that creates terrorists. If the populace has risen against the government and is out in the streets saying it with bombs, then absolutely the government needs to look to its conduct. On the other hand, if a government that failed to infuriate small numbers of extremists at various ends of various political and religious spectra, it's probably doing something wrong. Timothy McVeigh hated the US Government badly enough to blow up a building... but if the US had the kind of government that he would have liked, far more people would have been alienated or infuriated.

You can't please everybody, and given the various extremes floating around it's almost impossible to do anything without making somebody angry enough to kill. There are people out there who want their governments to adopt blatantly racist policies, or to impose medieval religious restrictions, or tax the wealthy out of existence, or outlaw currency, or ban eating meat, etc, ad nauseam. Some of them want these things badly enough to kill. Does their violence mean the Government is remiss in not giving them what they want? Should we allow violent minorities to impose their will on larger numbers simply because they are violent?

When we deal with other countries, we often have to admit that there is little or nothing we can do to prevent radicalization, whether it is insurgent or terrorist in nature. We generally don't have the kind of influence that would make any difference. It's not just between a government and a populace, either... the various factions and sub-factions that compose any given populace need to be able to reach compromises on many issues, especially if the minimum demands of one group are seen by others as cause for rebellion.