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Blog-friend John R. Hall is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California – Davis, and the author of such books as Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History; Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan with Philip D. Schuyler and Sylvaine Trinh; and Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. His current research involves deploying a social phenomenology to retheorize modernity in relation to contemporary society.

David Ronfeldt suggested that John’s long and detailed remarks taking off from my own post, 2083 Graphics – a first look, deserved to be a post in its own right and not be lost in the comments section, and with Zen’s approval, I am delighted to present it here as Dr Hall’s first Zenpundit guest-post. — Charles Cameron

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I have just completed a very preliminary examination of the Norwegian manifesto posted just before the Oslo bombings. It is an astonishing and significant document, far from the incoherent ravings of a mad person, as I would wish it to be. And it is incredibly chilling in its ruthless rationality and relative coherence. Here, I offer some initial reflections. I have concentrated on the portions from page 717 forward, where the author details ideology, revolutionary strategy, and utopian vision of a future, federated Europe. Beginning on p. 1388, the author offers an autobiography and c.v. of Breivik, which presumably will be checked out by investigators and the media, plus a quite detailed account of his actions over the past several years. A number of important comparisons already have been made – to al Qaida and the Oklahoma City bombing, for example. But in many ways, if the perpetrator indeed acted alone, he is something of a piece with the Unabomber, who similarly combined ruthless action with a carefully elaborated manifesto. There are important difference, to be sure. In particular, the Unabomber worked to conceal his identity so that he could carry out multiple actions, and he operated out of an environmental left ideology rather than a Christian nationalism.

The latter part of the document depicts its account of pre-emptive war as a new mode of writing, exploring scenarios rather than writing fiction or history, thereby claiming to eliminate its usefulness to authorities seeking to use it as evidence when bringing charges against the author or a perpetrator of the acts it describes.

As others already have commented, the label of ‘Christian fundamentalist’ seems wrong, at least in conventional use of the term today. Certainly the author represents himself as a nationalist/European federalist conservative opposed to ‘cultural genocide’ of the Enlightenment West, and seemingly he proposes reinstitution of monarchy as more representative of a nation than democracy can be. Only very late in the missive, p. 1134, does he embrace Europe’s return to the traditional Catholic Church, for its apostolic succession of authority and its capacity to guide believers in matters of scripture. This development is to be coupled with a re-initation of patriarchy, developed in substantial detail (p. 1141ff.), and concern about ‘the ongoing genocide of the Nordic tribes’ and a discussion of its genetic basis and the dangers of miscegenation and sexual promiscuity (including a discussion of ‘erotic capital,’ leading to a frank discussion of the possibility that the state could ‘play an essential role in national reproduction’ (p. 1157ff.; quote, p. 1185). The treatise goes on to mention future education, economic, pollution-control, population-control, crime, cultural/anti-multicultural, deportation, and youth policies, as well as discussing financing an organization, categories of traitors (A, B, and C). In short, it is a comprehensive (in Mannheim’s terms) ‘utopian’ vision, i.e., one that could never be realized in the world as it is presently institutionalized.

Yet there is certainly a basis for recognizing the claims of a ‘Christian’ basis for the ideology, and a religious fundamentalism as well. This latter claim, I make in relation to Martin Riesebrodt’s important comparative study of U.S. Protestantism at the dawn of the twentieth century and Iranian fundamentalism 70 years later or so – both of them strongly based in an ideology of patriarchy, as is the Oslo killer’s manifesto (A Pious Passion, U. California Press, 1993).

Yet this is not simply ideological quasi-religious fundamentalism/nationalism. Rather, the utopian program has all the markings of an apocalyptic crusader, and more generally, the apocalyptic warring sect that I described in Apocalypse (Polity, 2009). The lever by which the author makes contact with Christianity (beyond its status as the cultural basis of European civilization, is a modern-day ‘PCCTS, Knights Templar’ struggle to initiate a European ‘civil war’ against ‘enablers’ – cultural marxists and multiculturalists who are ‘aiding and abetting’ cultural genocide, most significantly in efforts to accommodate Islam within Europe. The challenge, as the author sees it, seems to be to eliminate Islamic migration to Europe, assimilate or force emigration of Muslims, and to excise all Islamist or Arab influenced culture, art, and architecture from European countries. The Knights Templar, described as an ‘ancient Christian European military order,’ is being re-founded not by Christians alone, but by 12 individuals, including a ‘Christian atheist’ and a ‘Christian agnostic.’ Eventually, p. 1309, the manifesto is clear that its appeal is to ‘cultural Christians,’ although it invokes the Bible and Church crusading history, especially the work of Bernard de Clairvaux, to justify the contemporary initiative. One of many elements is the crucial proposal to engage in asymmetric warfare – a vein that is classically that of the apocalyptic warring sect, using a ‘clandestine cell organization,’ combining the rhetoric of ultimate belief in a cause with the cold, rational logic of how to operate. In considerable detail, the manifesto outlines a mode of operations that foreshadows the actions in and near Oslo, including the chilling note, page 886, that it will take ‘the SWAT team 10 – 40 minutes to reach you,’ and therefore, it is worthwhile to divide up the components of a planned action accordingly.Similarly, the author mentions, p. 995, ‘announcing your operation’ ‘only seconds before you initiate’ it, and suggests, p. 927, ‘hide a knife behind a smile,’ a recommendation, along with subsequent ones, that foreshadows the killer’s use of a police uniform and a story about helping to ensure the safety of the island camp participants before beginning to slay them – a technique that he used twice, in different places on the island.

In a variety of passages, the document offers a detailed handbook of asymmetric operations of war, including attacks and sabotage, and evaluation of a variety of targets, accompanied by a detailed catalogue of equipment, weapons (including bombs made from fertilizer – see esp. p. 1015), and armor, where to buy materials, and how to create weapons, detailed discussions of chemical, biological assaults, and attacks on nuclear reactors, as well as dietary recommendations, and an outline of a training regimen, recommendations concerning alliances with certain criminal networks [a theme that reprises the analysis of Eric Hobsbawm that I cited several weeks ago].

The author also announces that the apprehension of a Knights Templar is not the end of the operation: it ‘will mark the initiation of the propaganda phase’ (p. 948), and afterward, the task will be one of ‘countering the misinformation campaign’ (p. 1073), and comments on the use of trial opening and concluding statements for propaganda purposes (p. 1108-14). Alternatively, if you die, you will live on as a martyr in the memory of those carrying on the cause.

The scope of the publication is almost encyclopedic. It also includes historical analysis of how the past millennium of European history lead to the present crisis and need for re-formation of the Knights Templar, as well as a sketch of the umbrella organization, membership, military uniforms for dress occasions, medals, appropriate tombstones, a proposal for subsequent compensation (upon victory) for people who contribute to the resistance movement (a sort of rational-choice approach to mobilizing supporters), and on and on.

In short, the document envisions apocalyptic war as the means to reach a new European conservative/nationalist/Christian utopia. Yet unlike many other visions of apocalyptic war, this manifesto goes far toward detailing what that utopian world would look like. Even if, as it seems, this action is that of a lone individual, it is a dangerous development that we ignore at our peril.

John Hall

This was pretty cool, from Lewis Shepherd’s blog, Shepherd’s Pi:

Virtual recipe stirs in Apple iPad, Microsoft Kinect

Who says Apple and Microsoft can’t work together?  They certainly do, at least when it involves the ingenuity of their users, the more inventive of whom use technologies from both companies (and others).

Here’s a neat example, “a just-for-fun experiment from the guys at Laan Labs” where they whip up a neat Augmented Reality recipe: take one iPad, one Kinect, and stir.

Some technical detail from the Brothers Laan, the engineers who did the work:

We used the String Augmented Reality SDK to display real-time 3d video+audio recorded from the Kinect. Libfreenect from http://openkinect.org/ project was used for recording the data coming from the Kinect. A textured mesh was created from the calibrated depth+rgb data for each frame and played back in real-time. A simple depth cutoff allowed us isolate the person in the video from the walls and other objects. Using the String SDK, we projected it back onto a printed image marker in the real world.” – source, Laan Labs blog.

Shepherd has more on the technology here.

If AR is doable on an iPad fast and dirty by wizardly geeks then Apps for the casual technoprimitives cannot be long off.

The Profession by Steven Pressfield 

Tequila Junction: 4th Generation Counterinsurgency by H. John Poole

Steve’s novel The Profession I have mentioned previously, but I confess that I am puzzled by the choice of book jacket on Tequila Junction, which looks somewhat like a children’s illustrated guide to COIN in 1980’s El Salvador. H. John Poole is a respected veteran and tactical expert and Tequila Junction carries the warm endorsements of General Anthony Zinni and William Lind. Maybe his grandson drew it? Odd.

In any event, small unit tactics are not a subject I pretend to know much about, so it will remedy a gap in my knowledge base.

My amigo and SWJ News co-columinst Crispin Burke recently put forth a very interesting and provocative jeremiad “Be honest: Who actually read FM 3-24?” and one of his targets, journalist and Iraq war veteran Carl Prine, has been duly provoked, Prine has responded in great detail yesterday at Line of Departure:

Starbuck is wrong

Starbuck is wrong.

And in his drive to keep getting it wrong, he’s trying to rewrite FM 3-24, the military’s chief doctrinal publication on counterinsurgency.

But that just makes him more wrong.

He’s wrong about me.  He’s wrong about what I believe.  He’s wrong about the literature that informs FM 3-24.  He’s wrong about what the manual says and he’s wrong about what it left out.  He’s wrong about historiography.  He’s wrong about how a caste of top officers and diplomats came to understand “strategy” in the wake of the occupation of Iraq.

Let’s help get him right.  Or, at least, less wrong.  He’s a good man.  We need to turn him and ensure he quits taking shots at me I don’t deserve!

….The problem to anyone who studies Malaya, however, is that since the publication of the memoirs of exiled communist leader Chin Peng a dozen years ago, we now know that the civic, military and political policies under the British “hearts and minds” approach didn’t defeat the revolution.

Instead, the revolt was irreparably broken by brutal operations against the guerrillas, then a most coercive “screwing down the people” phase that dispossessed or killed thousands of Chinese, followed by draconian “population control” measures that, as Peng put it, starved the guerrillas in the bush because they snapped their rat lines and cut off their rice.

The “hearts and minds” initiatives designed to bring medical care, education, social welfare and other aid to the resettled Chinese and woo them to the colonial government’s side from 1952 – 1954 didn’t crack the back of the insurgency, a point now pretty much beyond dispute.

Why?  Because the previous “hearts and minds” claptrap as the cause of pacification in Malaya was contradicted by the Malayan Chinese, most especially those guerrillas who took up arms against the British regime!

You know, the people targeted by a population-centric counterinsurgency.  The people most counter-insurgents in their pop-centric fantasies almost never discuss except as abstractions, the human yarn wefted and warped by their long needles of war.

One finds “Hearts and Minds” prominently mentioned 11 times in Dr John Nagl’s valentine to Templer and colonial Malaya, Eating Soup with a Knife; to Nagl it’s the stuff of police services and economic development and whatnot with the psychology of the people being the center of gravity those reforms are meant to snatch.

And Nagl would like the best burglar of hearts and minds to be a learning, nimble and evolving military-political institution such as the U.S. Army.  It’s no small wonder, then, that Nagl became a dominant voice in FM 3-24 and that many of this thoughts in Eating Soup came to dominate the manual, too.

Or, as the introduction to FM 3-24 echoes soupily, “by focusing on efforts to secure the safety and support of the local populace, and through a concerted effort to truly function as learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps can defeat their insurgent enemies.”

This is mere euphemism and wasn’t worth the ink that it cost taxpayers to print it.  But it sets the stage for the rest of FM 3-24, which follows a hearts and minds template that Starbuck doesn’t apparently realize is borrowed from mid-century….

Ouch. Note to self: if I ever decide to square off against Carl, I will make sure to do my homework. Read the rest here.

First, I would point out to readers here for whom some of this in both essays is inside baseball, that the tone is less harsh and the substantive distance between Burke and Prine less great in  the comments sections of both blogs than it first appears in reading their posts. It is a healthy, no-holds barred exchange and not a flame war.

Secondly, it is an important exchange, tying together COIN disputes over theory, historiography, empirical evidence, operational and tactical “lessons learned”, strategy, policy (Clausewitzian sense), politics (colloquial sense) and personalities that have raged for five years across military journals, think tanks, the media, the bureaucracy and the blogosphere. In some ways, these essays can serve as a summative of the debate. I say “some ways”, because what is the most important element or effect of America’s romance with COIN will differ markedly depending on whom has the floor. My own beef is not with doing COIN, it is with not doing strategy.

As Crispin and Carl’s vignette about General Creighton Abrams demonstrated, American historians are still having savagely bitter arguments about the war in Vietnam. For that matter, everyone who lived through the era did and still does. It is a wound that never seems to heal and has crippled our politics to this day, even as the veterans of Vietnam now turn to gray.

The 21st century COIN wars have not ripped American society apart down to the soul the way Vietnam did. As with the Korean War, the soldiers and marines in Afghanistan and Iraq fought bravely, at times desperately, to a general and mild approbation back home that sometimes looked a lot like indifference. Even the anti-war protestors mostly made a point of stating they were not against the troops, the venemous public malice of the 1960’s New Left radicals in the 2000’s was a property only of the lunatic fringe.

But COIN itself will be a historical argument without end.

Recall the “antilibrary ” discussion some years back, prompted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

The other day, I was having a conversation in the comments section regarding ancient Chinese philosophers with my learned friend Lexington Green, when I had cause to quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from his most recent book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. he is the owner of a large personal library ( containing thirty thousand books), and separates vistors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You wil accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growig number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.

A passage that immediately made me feel better about having resigned myself to falling further and further behind in reading the books that I keep purchasing ( I’m now also periodically finding myself going to IKEA to buy shelf extensions. I’ve resigned myself to that too).

Taleb was advocating building a library – an organized assemblage of books on a wide range of topics, of which the unread portion was your antilibrary. Libraries, private or public, are wonderful things, functioning in an earlier time as the poor man’s university. Andrew Carnegie endowed public libraries for that purpose and in past ages, wealthy patrons opened the doors of their private libraries to their favored scholars, like King George III did for Samuel Johnson.

My library is sizable but disorderly and eclectic. There are books on Turkic kingdoms and network theory, art history and classical economics, political memoirs and diplomatic papers, the “great books” and sci fi. And of course a great deal of books on strategy and history. My friends Lexington Green and Dave Schuler have far larger personal libraries and Lex’s, I can say firsthand, seems to be much better organized than mine ( though, admittedly, that would not be hard).

Recently, one of my uncles, an academic, decided he wanted to make me the eventual recipient of a major portion of his library, along with the funds to transport and shelve the books. This generous offer came with a proviso – that his collection is to be kept intact and passeed on only to someone else who would agree to keep it so. And it is really a collection and not a library. Naturally, I agreed

The difference between a library and a collection is puposeful focus and quality. My uncle decided on the advice of one of his mentors to really become a collector and decided to target the Hanoverian period of British history and only read and collect books that related directly in some way to the book previously read. He also specifically wanted to acquire rare editions and copies with the marginalia of important people from the period for purchase. My uncle also made a habit of going to the best rare and used bookstores (when he visits Illinois, Bookman’s Alley is his faviorite) wherever he happened to be. The uncle has been doing this for at least thirty+ years and has read his way forward to the early 20th century and in recent years, developed an extensive sub-collection dedicated to T.E. Lawrence.

Interestingly enough, none of this has anything remotely to do with his area of academic expertise (he has two doctorates; in a hard science and another in a medical specialty) but he’s made himself into more of an expert on the historiography of this period of British history than are most professional historians.The reason is a tunnel-like focus, which is the primary distinguishing characteristic between a building a general library and building a collection. There’s a comprehensiveness to a collection that becomes an end in itself.