Home, Land, Security Quotes

“Not long ago, I read that a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study had found a correlation between Germany’s deaths from the 1918 flu pandemic and support for the Nazis during the 1932 and 1933 elections. Controlling for other possible influences like unemployment and city budgets, the researchers found that high death rates boosted a locality’s support for Adolf Hitler’s party. Preliminary evidence suggests extremist”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“The logic of our throwaway culture now stretches beyond cheap consumer goods to people: if they’re broken, it’s simpler to remove them from circulation than it is to repair them.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“our security is never served by undermining human rights.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“The recruitment successes of militant groups serve as maps of a society’s mistakes.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“His vote was a reminder that successful extremist groups braid a broad range of grievances into their hatred. The deftest of them leverage unresolved needs or injustices, whether perceived or real, that governments hadn’t addressed.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“The city embarked on the appearance of what theorists have called “desecuritization,” or moving from emergency mode to the ordinary rhythms of civic life.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“To think of people in terms of a single identity “makes a caricature of each of us,” he says. “If I reduce you to an American and I am only a European, then you become Donald Trump in my eyes.” Worse, this kind of reductionism “allows people to get control over who you are.” Political opportunists prey on single-faceted identities, and all too soon “you’ve got leaders who are defining what we have to do to be a good American, a good Muslim, a good Belgian. Then, you lose your freedom.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Relying on traditional identity politics doesn’t work, he believes, because “labeling people is actually organized segregation.” Instead, viewing radicalization as stemming from isolation, he set out to strengthen Mechelen’s social connective tissue. In a hyperdiverse city, citizens needed to be allowed to thrive as multifaceted beings rather than simply be defined as “Muslim”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“right-wing extremism is a thousand times more violent”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Half of the work is taking away, and half of the work is finding something new. If you don’t find something new, and the person is not in a stable situation and doesn’t have hobbies, or anything to do all day long, they will go right back in.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“VAJA practices Acceptance-Based Youth Work, which means “we make a distinction between what a person does and what they think—and the person herself,” explains Ole. “So she’s a Nazi, but she’s also a human being. We accept the human being, but we don’t accept the attitudes”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Other Western countries have framed violent extremism as something foreign or freakish, walled off from wider cultural currents. Given its history, Germany can’t afford such illusions.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Habermas articulated the official postwar ideal for German citizenry: to be attached primarily to the liberal democratic order rather than to any ethnic or nationalistic concept of Germany.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Even as it failed at comprehensive denazification, however, West Germany worked to prevent renazification. Beginning”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“the “Eternity Clause,” which states that certain principles endure forever. Not even a majority vote in the Bundestag can snuff out human rights or the separation of powers.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“countries the United States invaded had 143 more terror attacks annually than other countries; those where the United States used drone strikes averaged 395 more terror attacks a year than those with no drone strikes.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“look at their own behavior,” he told me. “They’re so busy asking, ‘Why do these individuals sign up and use violence?’ that they’re not thinking about solving the bigger problem, which is, Why do these movements exist? Who else is responsible for violence and abuse in this context? What role do foreign governments play?”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“What was missing, I realized, was any acknowledgment of responsibility, any admission of a link between what these governments did abroad and the threats they faced at home.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“when the United Nations Development Program asked militants in Africa what push factors led them to join a violent extremist group, 71 percent cited “government action,” including the killing or arrest of a family member or friend.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“In truth, strongman repression doesn’t necessarily deter terrorist activity. Often, it has the opposite effect. Democracies that respect civil liberties, minority rights, and the rule of law are less likely to become targets of terrorism than are nondemocratic societies.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Though Yudi was an admirer of Al Qaeda, and this woman lost a loved one to a terrorist group, both blamed the violence less on terrorists than on governments.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Yet the forces that create extremism are systemic.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“culture opens you up to everything in this life, while extremists just talk about the next life.” At graduation ceremonies,”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“People used to talk about B.C. and A.D., and now they talk about Before 9/11 and After,” she said. “Before, living for twenty-five years in the West, I never thought about my color. Afterward I was made aware that I was of a specific race.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Pushed hard enough, by poverty or fear or brainwashing, anyone can find themselves engaged in horrific acts: “What scares me is that perhaps there is a monster in all of us.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“The boys at Sabaoon joined the militants less in search of personal meaning than because of the poverty of possibilities in Swat.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“But gradually, they realized they’d need to tailor an individual program for each one, shaped by his route into militancy, his relationship with his parents, and his mental state.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“These boys are not dangerous in themselves, but they can be made to behave in very dangerous ways.” With the right support, she judged, they could be helped and perhaps even transformed.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“But Peracha argues that the Sabaoon boys’ youth makes them victims of terrorism, not perpetrators of it. “Every time I hear of a bomb blast, I’m compassionate about the victims, but also about the young boys who were recruited to do it,”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism

“Hunter-killer drones like the Reaper and the Predator have one job: eliminate their targets—or fly home, having failed. The nature of the technology makes missions a matter of “all or nothing,” notes the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou in A Theory of the Drone. “Either shoot to kill or take no action at all. Lethal force is the only option available.”
― Carla Power, Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism