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[ by Charles Cameron — covering all bases? — an astonishing display of symbols ]
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Lists of three — sex, drugs and rock’n’roll for example, or wine, women and song, as we used to say — sex, lies and videotape — can usefully itemize / totemize the whole of life as it is lived — a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me — at the individual, general, universal or transcendent level — when two or three are gathered in my name —

But this image, from a Ukrainian law enforcement advisor’s Instagram account beats all!

Hat tip: Christopher Miller

Pistol, crucifix, condom — I was wondering whether one could play scissors, paper, rock with those symbols, but..

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Coleridge characterizes symbols thus:

A symbol is characterized… above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it Renders Intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity of which it is representative.

At night, to be honest, a pistol, a condom an a crucifix might each be placed on the bedside table of someone in law enforcement as a matter of convenience, with no great symbolic import attached. But they are each nonetheless highly symbolic items. And the greater the degree to which these three items, when considered as symbols, are “translucent” to the individual resder here, the more astonishing their juztaposition in this image will appear.

[ by Charles Cameron — maps as records, as wishes, as hints, as silent threats ]
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Interesting things, maps. Models and descriptions, too, but it’s maps I’m thinking of here. Two examples:

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Turkey:

From my point of view, the most striking paragraph in the Foreign Policy piece titled Turkey’s New Maps Are Reclaiming The Ottoman Empire was this one:

At first glance, the maps of Turkey appearing on Turkish TV recently resemble similar irredentist maps put out by proponents of greater Greece, greater Macedonia, greater Bulgaria, greater Armenia, greater Azerbaijan, and greater Syria. That is to say, they aren’t maps of the Ottoman Empire, which was substantially larger, or the entire Muslim world or the Turkic world. They are maps of Turkey, just a little bigger.

Map bloating & boasting is obviously bigger business than I had fully realized.

Also of interest was the comment:

On two separate occasions, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the Treaty of Lausanne, which created the borders of modern Turkey, for leaving the country too small. He spoke of the country’s interest in the fate of Turkish minorities living beyond these borders, as well as its historic claims to the Iraqi city of Mosul..

Mosul, okay, noted — but what interests me more is the parallelism with Putin‘s attitude to the Ukraine:

“Novorossiya” or “New Russia”: Putin only briefly mentioned that term during a five-hour, televised question-and-answer session this month. But his revival of that geographic title for southern and eastern Ukraine—territory won from the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century by Catherine the Great—is resonating among Russians today.

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Palestine:

One other recent map controversy caught my eye…

The claim was made that Google had eliminated the name Palestine from Google Maps. Google denied this:

“There has never been a ‘Palestine’ label on Google Maps, however we discovered a bug that removed the labels for ‘West Bank’ and ‘Gaza Strip,’ ” the company said in a statement. “We’re working quickly to bring these labels back to the area.” It is unclear if that bug played a role in spurring the online outrage.

Elizabeth Davidoff, a spokeswoman, said in an email that the company had also never used the label “Palestinian territories” on its maps. The bug affecting the words “Gaza Strip” and “West Bank” persisted on Wednesday, but when Google Maps functions properly both areas are labeled and separated from Israel by a dotted line to signify that their borders are not internationally recognized.

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Dotted lines in the sand..

[ by Charles Cameron — bribery regarding bribery in Ukraine and Iraq, form & pattern recognition as analytic markers ]
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You might think it would be difficut to cap this, from Ukraine, which I quoted recently:

#Ukraine busts a prosecutor who tried to pay a $10k bribe for job in anti-corruption bureau https://t.co/cALDTIPpz3 pic.twitter.com/aZfE8Q5EZK

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 17, 2016

but I believe this, from Iraq, just might do the trick:

Iraq anti-corruption chief: "Everybody is corrupt, from the top of society to the bottom. Everyone. Including me.” https://t.co/7arNBklYSE

— Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) February 19, 2016

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Let me be explicit.

As an observer of the global scene, these two tweets are about bribery and corruption — but they are also recursive. As an analyst, I find that formal property, present in each case, compelling: these are not simply example of corruption, but of the corruption of the anti-corruption process.

But there’s more, there’s yet another form here, a pattern which allows us to connect otherwise unrelated dots. It is found in the doubling effect of the quick succession of the Ukrainean and Iraqi tweets. This pattern is that of repetition — more fancifully put, echo or rhyme. We see here something more than a simple isolated incident no matter how interesting — an being cognizant of that, we can be on the alert for it elsewhere in the future.

To the heuristics follow the money and cherchez la femme, I’d add take note of the form — use pattern recognition as an analytic tool to cut across disciplines and silos, and thus capture aspects of life’s complexity that the trammels of linear cause-and-effect thinking will tend to miss.

For the DoubleQuotes aficionado, these two tweets are a rich haul indeed.

[ by Charles Cameron — vexilla regis prodeunt, comparative version ]
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Two recent examples of religious iconography on the battle field.. from the Badr Brigade, outside Amerli, Iraq:

and from Pro-Russia fighters near the eastern Ukrainian city of Starobeshevo:

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The Vexilla regis is a hymn written by Venantius Fortunatus to welcome the procession bringing a fragment of the True Cross to St Radegunda‘s convent in Poitiers: the first line translates to “The banners of the king go forth”.

Here it is, illustrated with battle flags flown by Catholic and Royalist troops during the War in the Vendée:

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Sources:

Iraq

Ukraine

[ Charles Cameron — Garry Wills sees “holy war” lurking just around the corner ]
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Pro-Russia fighters near the eastern Ukrainian city of Starobeshevo in Donetsk region, on 25 February. Photograph: Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images

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Let’s be clear. the image above is from the confrontation in Ukraine, whereas the holy war that Garry Wills sees is quite another business. Under the headline that also heads this post, he writes:

Discussions ricochet around Pope Francis’s ability to reconcile the Catholic Church’s bureaucracy, theology and practitioners. But for a man of Francis’s scope and skill, this is too narrow an assignment. His real task, for which he is ideally situated, is to prevent the world’s descent into religious war.

Many people want to make our “war on terror” a war on at least a segment of the Muslim religion. Sen. Lindsey Graham (RS. C.) makes this very clear: “We are in a religious war.” Some think of this war as being waged in revenge for the attacks of 9/11 — to prove, as former deputy undersecretary of defense Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin once put it, that their God is greater than Islam’s. But there are 1.3 billion followers of Islam scattered around the world, and an ambitious Gallup poll of Muslims in 35 heavily Muslim countries found that the vast majority of them did not approve of the 9/11 attacks. Significantly, those who condemned the attacks based their opposition to violence mainly on religion, while the 7 percent who considered them “completely justified” relied heavily on political arguments. How can we blame the Muslim religion for this horror?

I don’t agree with everything that Wills says, but his view of Francis’ “scope and skill” is worth pondering.

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I posted the image above because it gives a vivid and immediate sense of what “Onward, Christian Soldiers” might look and feel like, if it left the churches and turned up on the evening news.

Image source:

The Guardian, Frontline Ukraine:’How Europe failed to slay the demons of war’