British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History. There is a wealth of detail about terrorists, their casual atrocities and the warped morality that terrorists habitually employ to rationalize their crimes; a nihilistic mentalite shared with their intellectual groupies in universities and political law firms that will shock and inform the reader. The scattered nature of the case studies that comprise modern terrorism though, makes Blood and Rage more of a kaleidescope than microscope.
Burleigh set out to chronicle a comprehensive examination of the evolution of terrorism in the last two centuries. There are Feinians and radicalized Russian Narodniks, murderous FLN Algerians and their pied noir OAS blood enemies, Irgun gunmen and Black September, ETA, IRA and Baader-Meinhoff gangsters consorting with Palestinian radicals and Herbert Marcuse. Burleigh dissects the psychopathology of ultraviolent degenerates like Hugh “Lenny” Murphy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Andreas Baader. Terrorists, statistically speaking, are generally not madmen in a clinical sense, but Burleigh records a noteworthy exception regarding Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang:
….With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg University, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R.D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalized patients. In the following years, about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Muller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufner and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan “Crazies to Arms”.
Blood and Rage makes for a grim read, with the recurring pattern of terrorism and counterterrorist response erupting to demoralize societies until the terrorists in question are either dead, imprisoned or mellowed by paunchy middle-age and political irrelevance as the times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.
The weakness of Blood and Rage, unlike some of Burleigh’s other works, is a lack of a strong analytical theme, focus or grand theory to explain and unite the relentless and gory march of geographically diverse case studies in terrorism, though an intelligent reader should be able to discern patterns present well enough for themselves. Given Burleigh’s stature as a scholar, one can envision him having taken the ball further down field for a deeper level of analysis of terrorism as a societal phenomena. Burleigh would probably reply that such is not the proper job of a historian, which while true enough, still leaves me wishing he had.
As a popular history, Blood and Rage makes a page turner out of rancorous destruction.
Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere. Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with theArlington Institute:
Zen here – I think Charles has hit upon a primal psychological mechanism that comes into full flower as societies break down and war begins to shade into warlordism. We have seen this repeatedly in history from Tamerlane’s mounds of skulls to Khmer Rouge killing fields. Mad Barons, Dogmeat Generals, Friekorps kapteins and butchers long since forgotten by history- there’s a gravitational pull toward atavistic, symbolic, destruction as social norms erode under the corrosive effects of escalating violence.
Mexico, Africa, Zarqawi?
by Charles Cameron
I’ve been struck by a couple of passages I’ve run across in my reading recently that remind me of what I can only call “brutality with religious overtones”. 1. Mexico
There have been a fair number of articles about the various Mexican cartels, but the excerpt from Ed Vulliamy’s book, Amexica: War Along the Borderline that’s now online at Vanity Fair is the one that caught my eye yesterday.
Here’s Vulliamy’s account of a conversation with Dr. Hiram Muñoz of Tijuana:
He explained his work to me during the first of several visits I have made to his mortuary. “Each different mutilation leaves a message,” he said. “The mutilations have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means the person talked too much—a snitch, or chupro. A man who has informed on the clan has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth.” This makes sense: a traitor to a narco-cartel is known as a dedo — a finger. “If you are castrated,” Muñoz continued, “you may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel.”<¶>Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball.
That’s the brutality — I haven’t see the book itself yet, but I gather it also gets into the narco-corrida music and the “quasi-Catholic cult of Santíssima Muerte” — which brings me to the second part of my interest – the religious aspect.
As Vulliamy mentions, there’s the cult of Holy Death, to be sure, a sort of shadow or inverse of the Blessed Virgin — a Dark Mother for dark times, or perhaps a revival of the ancient Mictlancihuatl, lady of the Dead? — with her own liturgy, too:
Almighty God: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we ask for your permission to summon Saint Death. Welcome, White Sister: we find ourselves gathered here at this altar of the Romero Romero family and of each one of us, to offer you a Mass that we hope you will like…
Which brings us to the Robin-Hood-like bandit and folk-saint, Jesus Malverde, to whom prayers such as the following [FBI .pdf, see p. 20] are offered:
Lord Malverde, give your voluntary help to my people in the name of God. Defend me from justice and the jails of those powerful ones. Listen to my prayer and fill my heart with happiness. For you shall make me fortunate.
Oh Malverde! The Vatican did not believe you to be holy and would not canonize you, but when they brought the Caterpillars to tear down your hood, you broke one machine and nobody could move you away, you broke another, leaving those who disrespect you speechless — and when the third one broke, they said, “Let Malverde’s chapel alone.”
Right beside the syncretistic quasi-Catholicism, there’s also a Protestant angle: La Familia is the group that, in Vulliamy’s words, “made its ‘coming out’ known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque.” Time magazine reported on what it termed Mexico’s Evangelical Narcos:
Federal agents seized one copy of La Familia’s Bible in a raid last year. Quoted in local newspapers, the scripture paints an ideology that mixes Evangelical-style self-help with insurgent peasant slogans reminiscent of the Mexican Revolution. “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work,” Moreno writes, using terms that could be found in many Christian sermons preached from Mississippi to Brazil. But on the next page, there’s a switch to phrases strikingly similar to those coined by revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. “It is better to be a master of one peso than a slave of two; it is better to die fighting head on than on your knees and humiliated; it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.”
What’s troubling here is that there is only one undoubtedly “evangelical” phrase in all those that Time quotes, and it is one of then ones said to resemble the aphorisms of Emilio Zapata. “It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion” is a pretty direct borrowing from Ecclesiastes 9.4 in the King James Version: “To him that is joined to all the living, there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.”
But that’s not actually all. I didn’t mention it at the time, but “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work” is almost word-for-word the same as a poem attributed to Islam — or Judaism for that matter. Indeed, it can be hard to tell who is borrowing from whom – but one final source for the La Familia bibleis known – it’s the book Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, the pastor of a ministry in Colorado Springs, who must have been surprised at the uses to which his writings were being put.
In any case, as I said on Zenpundit: These people have a theology, and we should be studying it. 2. Africa
I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a “witch” who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with “impotence, obesity, and then leprosy” for asking insistently why he charged so much to “cure” his patients. (I’m still waiting for the leprosy.) Where do these beliefs come from? What do so many Africans get out of them? Can they be changed? These are questions that are asked in Africa all the time, but we are deaf to the conversation.
That sent me in search of some early military anthropology related to guerrilla warfare I’d come across in earlier readings.
I’m quoting here from the chapter on “The Mau Mau Religion” in Maj. Hughes paper:
Leakey’s original hypothesis in Mau Mau and the Kikuyu: “Mau Mau was nothing more than a new expression of the old KCA … a political body that was banned … because it had become wholly subversive.” Furthermore, “Mau Mau was synomomous with the new body called the in school, Kenya African Union…” However, Leakey admits to a reversal of his original hypothesis in Defeating Mau Mau, and goes on to say, “Mau Mau, while to some extent synonymous with these political organizations, was in fact a religion and owed its success to this fact more than to anything else at all.”<¶>He then proceeds to attribute the origin of Mau Mau to an “ideology transfer,” wherein the religious beliefs of the Kikuyu transitioned from their ancient tribal religion to Euro-Christianity to Mau Mau. The first transition took place artificially, as the missionaries stripped away the traditional beliefs and supplanted them with “20th Century Europe’s concept of Christianity.” The second transition was more natural and evolutionary than the first. A reactionary hybrid of the old and the new developed, because the supplanted concepts would not hold up in their society. There were too many contradictions between the old and the new, mainly due to the 20th Century European “add-ons.”
Most of us have a pretty fixed view of what religion is, should be, or isn’t. Some of my readers no doubt hold to a evangelical Christian position, some are Catholic, some perhaps Buddhist, agnostic or atheist, and some perhaps Muslim. Each of us tends to take our own view of a particular religion as normative, but the reality is that the history of each of the great world religions contains sanctions for both peace-making and warfare — and human nature itself encompasses a range of behaviors that run from the kind of atavistic violence described above to the forgiving and compassionate impulse behind the Beatitudes…
And while economic pressures and political frustrations may be enough to power great struggles, when religious rituals, beliefs and feelings are added into the mix, it can quickly become even more lethal. 3. And Zarqawi?
All of which leaves me wondering how close the parallels are between the Mau Mau in LSB Leakey’s account, La Familia and the other Mexican cartels — and the brutalities of jihadists such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Tomorrow, a bank-not your bank, but any bank-could evict you from your home. Even if you didn’t know the bank was foreclosing. Even if your mortgage is paid off. Even if you never had a mortgage to begin with. Even if the bank doesn’t hold a single piece of paper that you signed. And major banks not only know this fact, but have spent millions of dollars to defend it in court. Why? The answer starts with a Jacksonville homeowner named Patrick Jeffs.
In 2007, Deutsche Bank sued Jeffs for his home, which is a necessary step in the process of foreclosing on a homeowner in the state of Florida. Curiously, despite the fact that he immediately hired a law firm to defend his property when he found out about the foreclosure, neither Jeffs nor his attorneys were at the trial. That’s because it had already happened. Deutsche won by default because Jeffs wasn’t able to travel backwards in time to attend, even though the trial featured a signed affidavit indicating that he had been served his court summons.
The only problem with the summons Jeffs supposedly received was that it had been conjured out of thin air.
In June of this year, a Florida court ruled that the document was fraudulent, as the person who was supposed to make sure Jeffs was served had mysteriously received a copy of the summons before the lawsuit had even been filed, and Jeffs never even saw the copy. The text of that ruling was posted on various financial news websites in September. The lawyers that Jeffs hired to defend his case say that fraud such as this is not uncommon. It’s a widespread problem, and it has cost countless families their homes.
“I think it’s safe to say that 95% of the foreclosure cases in Florida involve some form of fraud on the part of the bank,” David Goldman of Apple Law Firm, PLLC told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “It’s probably closer to 99%. And the court system is helping them get away with it.”
Banksters should not only be going to prison for intentionally destroying the lives of people who are not only NOT in default on their mortgages, but have never transacted a mortgage with the institutions attempting to illegally seize their property, these guys should be made to face an angry mob composed of the people they have defrauded.
This is the Oligarchy in action. They intend to hollow this country out and move their loot offshore just like in Russia during the 1990’s
Blogfriend Fabius Maximus, who often blogs on economics, would like to offer a counterpoint and i have agreed to let him put up his perspective here and some excerpts:
….The real estate title system in the US is complex, with safeguards protecting debtor and creditor (for details see this by Barry Ritholz). It’s also local (rules and data are not national). This system worked well for generations, but collapsed during the housing boom.
Loan volume accelerated, overloading key parts of the system. Appraisals were often corrupted, as loan originators routed business to compliant appraisers.
Massive securitization of mortgages ignored these constraints, and erected a pseudosystem on top of it that cheaply processed the high volume of both mortgage origination and securitization (e.g., the Mortgage Electronic Registration System – a faux version of security clearing corporations; see this explanation). Securitization also broke the link between the originator and end owner, with many ill consequences. Among other things, this put great pressures on the servicing firms to lower costs.
During the RE boom years recoveries on foreclosed mortgages were zero or positive, which meant a low rate of foreclosures (homes could be sold by the owner rather than default on the mortgage). So the institutional apparatus for foreclosures atrophied.
The the default bust hit. Massive flow, overwhelming the system – which was never configured for such an event. Remember, experts believed home prices never decline for more than a calendar year. The worst scenario considered by the most experts was flat prices for 3 years.
The servicers (sometimes the bank originating the mortgage, often not) reacted by cutting corners (seethis Reuters story). Finding the original loan documents was too expensive, so they used lost document procedures designed for extraordinary circumstances (e.g., fire, flood, or misfiling – see this at Calculated Risk and here at Reuters). Some servicers hired law firms set up as foreclosure mills (e.g., FL), processing incredible numbers of foreclosures. It’s not clear how, but clearly proper procedures were not followed.
As a result there have been many claims that foreclosure notices were never served (an easy way to make serving a high-margin profit center). Employees have admitted under oath in depositions to fraudulently signing thousands of notarized affidavits.
This took place in the 23 states with judicial foreclosures only with the cooperation of Judges. A few Judges protested when shown that their banks and their agents were committing perjury. But the process ran smoothly for the past few years. Now the wheels are coming off. This might be difficult for the financial sector to conceal or mitigate, despite their de facto control over the government’s regulatory machinery.
….Despite the oft-hysterical analysis, there is as yet insufficient public information about the scale of the problem. Quite likely even key players (e.g., banks, their law firms, government regulators) lack the necessary information. Deliberately, as all prefered to “see no evil.” But now that the problem has erupted into the daylight, this leaves them ill-prepared to respond. Especially as any adequate response will reveal their incompetence and malfeasance in creating the situation. (Here are Wells Fargo’s procedures regarding creditors’ complaints; nothing available for their procedures to debtors’ complains).
Political factors, not legal or economic, probably will control the evolution of this crisis. Hence the likelihood of modest impact to the national economy. More than the small impact expected by Wall Street; less than expected by the increasingly rabid doomsters. Over a longer horizon, a year or more, the economy will affect the political dynamics. For a good analysis of the current political situation see “Congress Taking Cautious Approach with Foreclosure Mess“, American Banker, 14 October 2010. The Republicans, as usual, eagerly support the banks – despite any violations of the law, despite the interests of the American people.
The economic impact looks to be minimal and probably less than the political effects. New home sales are unaffected by this crisis. The title problems are solvable. New home finance is unaffected, and in any case are now 90% government financed or guaranteed. Interruptions in sales of existing homes will have severe effects for those affected, but little for the overall economy (despite the massive attention to the volume of existing home sales, they have minimal economic effect).
What could change this forecast? A second dip would radically change the situation, as more links in US and global economy “unexpectedly” break. As would a long foreclosure moratorium, although this is unlikely under the current political regime. It could happen as part of system change, of such magnitude that the moratorium would be one of the lesser results.
….Last week, at least 30 Mexicans from the town of El Porvenir walked to the border crossing post at Fort Hancock, Texas, and asked for political asylum. Ordinarily, their claim would be denied as groundless, and they would be turned back. Instead, they were taken to El Paso, where they expect to have their cases heard.
No one doubts that they have a strong claim. Their town on the Mexican side of the border is under siege by one or more drug cartels battling for control of the key border crossing. According to Mike Doyle, the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, one of the cartels has ordered all residents of the town of 10,000 to abandon the city within the next month.
“They came in and put up a sign in the plaza telling everyone to leave or pay with their own blood,” Doyle said. Since then there has been a steady stream of El Porvenir residents seeking safety on the American side of the border, both legally and illegally. Among them are the 30 who are seeking political asylum.
In recent days the situation in the impoverished, dusty border town has grown worse. According to Jose Franco, the superintendent of schools in Fort Hancock, the cartels have threatened to execute children in school unless parents pay 5000 pesos in protection money.
And on Wednesday night, according to Doyle, several houses in El Porvenir were set on fire, and there were reports of cars loaded with furniture leaving the town.
I saw this coming. I’m sure that so has anyone else studying insurgency or military history who stopped to give the matter five minutes of serious thought. There’s nothing magical about geographic proximity to the United States that would prevent this tactic, if applied widely and backed by lethal examples, from working. What has been done in the villages of Bosnia or Dar Fur can be done in towns of northern Mexico.
Foresight, apparently, does not include governmental officials though:
Authorities fear that an incident might spark a mass exodus by the residents of El Porvenir that might cause them all to surge across the border at once.
Doyle says there are no plans yet to set up camps for an influx of refugees. “There is just no way to plan for that,” he said. “We are waiting to see what happens. We will use the standard natural disaster procedures if it happens — the Red Cross and housing at the schools, and if it gets worse, the state and the federal government will have to step in.”
I would not bet my mortgage that the Feds would step in – at least not until the situation became an unmitigated, if entirely avoidable, humanitarian disaster. Here’s a hint: Very large numbers of people + a desert + no planning – Food – Shelter – Water = Dead children on CNN. Human physiology is the same on the Rio Grande or in Arizona as in Sudan.
“No way to plan for that”? WTF? There’s no examples of handling influxes of war refugees anywhere in world history? Give me a break. What they really meant is that this kind of contingency planning is politically unacceptable to national security officials because it would offend the Mexican government, a few members of Congress and some activist constituencies in the Democratic Party’s base.
Political Correctness in national security affairs is the autoimmune disease of our body politic.
In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico’s organized criminals.In taking such aggressive action, the traffickers have shown that they are not reluctant to challenge the army head-on and that they possess good intelligence on where the army is, how it moves and when it operates.
The bigger question looms, how will this impact the sovereignty of the United States to secure our borders and ensure tranquility?
….You will note after you read the link embedded above that this blog concurred and wrote on the same issuetwice last year and the year before.
….When I read each day that the cancer of lawlessness gains control like a reverse “Oil Spot Strategy” right on our southern border; and then read about this and this from the President of a country where we are spending our most preciousresource to secure.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO — A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. consulate. The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 killings in the city in the past year.
Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.
“Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,” said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso division. “They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it.”
The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, “Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars.”
The mayor of Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, said that the city is honeycombed with safe houses, armories and garages with stolen cars for the assassins’ use. The mayor received a death threat recently in a note left beside a pig’s head in the city.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.
