zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — complex situations, unexpected consequences, analysts’ need for semi-random knowledges ]
.

Suppose you’re a Japanese journalist given a news report to write about a tourist who may have contracted an obscure disease on a visit to Zaire. The job seems straightforward enough, you expect your Japanese readers to be sympathetic to the plight of your Japanese tourist subject, you don’t exactly expect your readers to include one Shoko Asahara, guru of Aum Shinrikyo…

But he’s there in the penumbra, reading… as this report from the Center for Counterproliferation Research of the NDU testifies:

In 1992, Aum sent a team of 40 people to Zaire to acquire Ebola. Led by Asahara himself, the team included doctors and nurses. During an outbreak of Ebola in Zaire, a Japanese tourist visiting that country may have contracted the hemorrhagic fever. This report, which received considerable publicity in Japan, apparently inspired Asahara to mount the expedition to Zaire in October 1992. Ostensibly, this trip was intended as a humanitarian mission, called the “African Salvation Tour.” It is not known if Aum actually obtained Ebola cultures. A Japanese magazine quoted a former member of the group, “We were cultivating Ebola, but it needed to be studied more. It can’t be used practically yet.”

One things leads to an unexpected other.

*

Here’s a positive example, one that I heard on the radio yesterday, and nothing to do with terrorism — except perhaps at the cellular level:

You know, the Scottish surgeon George Beatson was walking through the highlands in England, and he heard some shepherds saying, oh, you know, when we remove the ovaries of cows and goats, the pattern — or the breasts of these animals changes; the pattern of milk production changes.

So, Beatson began to wonder, well, what is the — this was a time when no one knew about estrogen. So, Beatson began to wonder, what is the connection between ovaries and breasts? And he said, well, if ovaries are connected to breasts, then maybe they’re connected to breast cancer.

And he took out the ovaries of three or four women with breast cancer and had these spontaneous, had these, not spontaneous, but amazing remissions. And it was — this is the basis for tamoxifen, the drug that actually blocks estrogen, and thereby affects breast cancer.

I mean, who would have thought that walking through and talking to a shepherd in Scotland would affect a billion-dollar drug, which is very, very powerful against breast cancer today?

One thing leads to an unexpected other.  Listen.

*

Back to terror — and what jihadists notice, think about and discuss:

They follow the news.

If the stock-market takes a dive, the folks on the forums know about it — and crow about it.  Because, as bin Laden said, AQ’s policy is one of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.” Inspire magazine calls it “the strategy of a thousand cuts” and claims the “aim is to bleed the enemy to death”.  Daveed Gartenstein-Ross‘ book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, is abundantly clear on that point.

So yes, they follow the news.  So they know about the riots in the UK.

There was an interesting short flurry of tweets on Twitter a couple of days ago, when Will McCants, who monitors such things and runs the Jihadica blog, noted: “Lots of pictures of #londonriots being posted to Ansar jihadi forum” and followed up by quoting a couple of forum comments: “God is burning the ground beneath the feet of the Crusaders” and “We are witnessing this aggressor nation quaking inside and out….collapsing and suffering defeat by the permission of God”.

Jason Burke of the Guardian picked up on McCants’ post and noted, “so now Islamic militants exploiting #londonriots” – and Aaron Zelin of Jihadology chimed in with the tweet I quoted at the top of this post.

The conversation continued for a bit, but it’s Aaron’s comment that I want to focus on, because it makes explicit the kind of seamless weave of knowledge that I’ve been thinking about lately — which makes cross-disciplinary awareness both so necessary and so feasible at this time.  Let’s call it Zelin’s law:

every event and issue will be exploited by every group and ideology on the net.

Here’s my corollary: one thing leads to an unexpected other.

*

So what?

So we need a supersaturated solution of knowledges where decisions are made.

So our analysts need to be speckled specialists — experts with a sufficiently wide and random assortment of additional odd knowledges to be able to frame and reframe and reframe, to shake off any group frame and suggest half a dozen plausible alternatives, to doubt each one of them in turn, to turn to the right people who are themselves specialists in those other framings, to ask, to listen, to hear…

So we also need a supersaturated solution of ignorances — admitted, and inquiring.

*

Here’s Herbert E Meyer on the non-bureaucratic qualities of first-rate analysts:

In normal circumstances people like this would never be willing to take government jobs. Moreover, any agency that hired them would soon be driven nuts by their energy, their drive, their seemingly off-the-wall ideas, their sometimes bizarre work habits, even their tempers.

Sometimes bizarre, eh?  “Embrace the maverick,” Deputy Director for Intelligence Jami Miscik advised.

And by extension, embrace the unexpected — learn to expect it.

Is there a literature of the unexpected? Read it! And I don’t just mean read Nicholas Nassim Taleb‘s Black Swan — I mean, keep tabs on the undertows, read the opposition, read the factional fights within the opposition, read the underclass and upperclass, the radical and the pacific and the merely eccentric and the totally off the wall.  Know that some people believe there is a reptile in Queen Elizabeth II‘s head — and I don’t mean people who hold some variant on Paul MacLean‘s triune brain theory!  Read the ancients as well as the moderns.

Note especially the places where two fields or perspectives or framings overlap — they’re the places where experts can most easily see that each others’ approaches have value.  Cultivate binocular vision — and I mean, vision.

And do all this with a fair amount of randomness, with curiosity.

I happen to study religion, for instance, and splatter myself with other things — epidemiology, for instance, and complexity, and lit crit, and medieval music and plenty more besides — just enough to give a vaguely Jackson Pollock look to my interest in religion.

And Aum Shinrikyo’s attempt to gather samples of the Ebola virus isn’t an epidemiology story, isn’t a new religious movements story — it’s at the intersection, it’s both.

*

How many fields of knowledge can you gossip in for a minute or three? That’s a question with profound implications in terms of networked interactions and collective understanding.

How many languages can you frame your questions in?

Colonel Robert Killebrew comes to a conclusion I would endorse as both empirical and probable for reasons of economics – interstate warfare and military establishments are very expensive, while irregular conflict is both cheap and accessible to many hands of various motives. Great power wars can still happen, but as ventures of existential risk.

The End of War: Nonstate violence is the new norm

In “The Invention of Peace,” British historian Michael Howard notes that it was the rise of the modern state, with powerful kings, that first brought the idea of “peace” to the Western world. So long as the king or government retained sufficient power, determining “peace” and “war” remained the prerogative of the state, to be managed as required. Hence, the marching armies of August 1914. In the beginning years of the 21st century, though, we are entering into a new historical period. The state no longer has a monopoly on violence, and national borders are not as inviolate as they were in the long-ago 20th century. No other concept for managing fractious relations between states has yet emerged. (Except, perhaps, the concept of “bigness,” as in, “I’m big enough to do this and get away with it.”)

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, constant conflict has been the norm not only for the U.S. but also for much of the world, whether because of ideological struggle (the Balkans and Southwest Asia), political conflict (the Middle East and Eurasia), tribal wars (the Balkans and Africa), criminal insurgencies (Mexico, Central and South America) or terrorism (global). The pat-down at your local airport is a sign that the world has changed. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that Americans and Europeans used to vacation in spots where they would be beheaded today. In Central America – now the most violent region in the world – citizens report the social fabric that held their civic life together is disintegrating in the face of gang violence and government impotence.

Five global conditions that have grown exponentially since the end of the Cold War are challenging governments everywhere: first, the enormous growth in criminal wealth over the past two decades, fueled by drug money, human trafficking, illegal arms sales and other crimes; second, mass migrations of peoples from south to north, pressing in on developed countries; third, the Internet and other technology that has brought violent organizations into the same technical sphere as governments; fourth, the free flow of arms that supplies firepower equal (or superior) to government security forces; and, finally, the empowerment of violent extremists who use the first four conditions to attack states and their legal institutions, whether to overthrow them, neutralize them for criminal or other purposes, or out of simple nihilism.

….It is increasingly clear that the greatest armed threat the U.S. faces is the attack on international civil order that violent extremists represent. The most likely use for U.S. armed forces in the coming century will be to help extend the rule of law to states struggling against extremists that also threaten the U.S. This does not mean the end of armored warfare, for example; future battlefields are impossible to predict. But the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts have already begun to align U.S. military thought toward the more complex world of the 21st century. Conflict changes both winners and losers, and the armed services’ world after Iraq and Afghanistan will not be a return to the good old days of predictable deployments and annual training cycles, any more than the Army in 1946 was able to go back to the garrisons of 1935. While the development of aggressive, highly skilled units and combined-arms capabilities is still very necessary, the uses to which they are put will change….

ADDENDUM:

Posting from me will be light until next Monday.

[ by Charles Cameron — religious knowledge, foreign policy, military ]

.

Dr. Douglas M. Johnston just posted a piece titled Religion a crucial tool in U.S. foreign policy in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, and in it he quoted Dr. Sebastian Gorka‘s recent testimony to the HASC Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities:

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to provide the contextual knowledge we need to understand and defeat our enemy if we rely solely upon anthropologists and social scientists…. Today our multi-disciplinary analysis of the enemy and his doctrine just as much requires — if not more so — the expertise of the regional historian and theologian, the specialist who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran. We should ask ourselves honestly, how many national security practitioners know the answers to these questions, or at least have somewhere to turn to within government to provide them such essential expertise.

I do appreciate that this was written by Dr Gorka for an audience that needs to keep up to speed on many, many topics.  What dismays me here isn’t the idea that “national security practitioners” should know these things — they should indeed, and should certainly also know specialists who know a great deal more — but that the bar is set so low, “a specialist” being, for that audience, someone “who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran”.

Let’s back up a bit.  Here’s a report on the Senate hearing on the appointment of GEN. Dempsey as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, tapped by the White House to be the next top military officer, acknowledged Tuesday that he and other senior officers failed to grasp the power dynamics among Islamic-based groups in Iraq.

After the U.S. military toppled the Saddam Hussein-led regime there in 2003, a powder keg erupted that was driven, in large part, by centuries-old power struggles and distrust among Iraq’s various Islamic sects.

It took American civilian and military leaders years to adapt and understand these dynamics, which experts say played a major role in both the length and violent nature of the Iraq war.

Driving the lack of understanding was a tendency of the military to “take five minutes to understand” an issue while immediately spending the next “55 minutes trying to solve it,” Dempsey said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Those “five minutes to understand” might get you the basic difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras — but a specialist knows a little more than that, as one can gather from comments Dr Timothy Furnish posted just the other day on his MahdiWatch blog, commenting on Dempsey’s remarks:

One might reasonably wonder whether the US military and intelligence community (not to mention the State Department) truly does, finally, realize the importance of sectarian differences in the Islamic world. For example, the Syrian case pitting the pseudo-Shi`i Alawi rulers against the country’s Sunni majority only recently came to Washington’s attention; neither Libya’s history of Sanusiyah Sufi jihad against occupation, nor Mua`amar al-Qadhafi’s heretical Islamic teachings and rule, has been fully considered or acknowledged by the American government; and there are still commanders deploying to and from Afghanistan who seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that that country is 19% Shi`i (and that a substantial subset of that is not Twelver but Sevener, or Isma’ili, Shi`i).

But that’s one paragraph from a single blog post, and Furnish has written a book — has written, as they say, “the book” on Mahdism.  And that’s just one book, you don’t suppose Furnish’s knowledge is limited to what he managed to compress into a few hundred pages, do you?

Furnish is a specialist — that’s why I read and correspond with him.  I’m a generalist with, I hope, some decent insights into what to watch for and who to read for background — but Furnish is a specialist.

And the solution isn’t to add “specialist” to a checklist, find one on LinkedIn and check it off — the solution is widespread, ongoing conversation among specialists, with the help of generalists, across all silos and disciplinary boundaries, of the sort we try to promote here from time to time… until there are enough people, with enough parts of the puzzle, that we don’t get blindsided by our ignorances.

Ignorances, plural.  Knowledges, plural.

*

This just in…  Dr Furnish’s second book — The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? — is now available for pre-order. I hope to review it at some point here on ZP.

[ by Charles Cameron — various angles on Breivik, continuing ]

.

“There’s always a mystery.”

Dr. Dalrymple is holding forth on what we can — and can’t — know about the mind of a mass murderer like the Oslo shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. “I don’t think we’ll ever understand” what makes a person capable of this kind of premeditated murder, Dr. Dalrymple tells me over lunch. What’s more, he says, “we don’t even know what it is to understand. At what point do you say, ‘Aha! Now I understand!'” he asks.

That’s a [pseudonymous] British prison psychiatrist, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

*

A few things have happened since my previous batch of posts on Oslo and Utoya: some other reading – I’m betting one of them is that a lot of people have arrived that their “Aha! Now I understand!” moment on Breivik, and aren’t particularly interested in alternate views. Their eyes may still be caught by a sensational headline, perhaps, they may still be fascinated by police procedural accounts of the investigation and trial – but they’ve arrived at closure on “who he is and why he did it” and that’s it, case closed.

Dr. Dalrymple’s suggests there is “always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there’s always a mystery, and I think that’s going to remain.”

In this post, I’ll begin to list some of the more remarkable and/or worthwhile reading I’ve come across since my previous post. Let’s begin with Thomas Hegghammer:

When Thomas Hegghammer writes about Breivik, which he has finally done, we get the chance to read one of the world’s finest Al Qaeda scholars writing about one of his fellow Norwegians. I mentioned his tweets as passed along by Will McCants in my first “some other reading” post. Hegghammer’s NYT op-ed, The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists, claims that Brevik’s 2083 manifesto “reveals a new doctrine of civilizational war that represents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of Al Qaeda”. If anyone should, Hegghammer should know.

So that would be my number one pick.

And then…

An American Apology to Norway . . . sorry about that, from MilPub.  Written by Seydlitz, a friend of — and recent guest poster on — this blog.  Personal and touching.

Moving farther afield, this one caught my eye:

Joan Acocella, Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right, on the New Yorker’s Book Bench: “The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway — and, by extension, in Scandinavia and the West as a whole — to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence.” Acocella closes with the words, “Larsson died before those developments, but he’s up there somewhere saying, ‘I told you so.'”

Of all the people on that Scandinavian right, Breivik quoted the blogger known as Fjordman most frequently – so this interview with Fjordman (under his own name, Peder Jensen) is key. Most telling quote, strangely enough: “After the terrorist attack and his blog being cited as an influence, Jensen says he will never use the alias «Fjordman» again.”

I wasn’t intending to use this post to do much in the way of propagating my own ideas, bur many of the items that follow have to do with who influenced or inspired Breivik, and thus with the issues of free speech, inspiration, incitement, and slippery slopes. Earlier today I responded to a ZP comment with an aphorism playing off the phrase “correlation is not causation” – so that phrase was already prepped and ready in my head, and what nudged its way into consciousness as I was tapping out this quick write-up for Fjordman was another:

Quotation is not causation.

I think that’s important in a way that parallels the importance of “innocent until proven guilty”.

Back to my list.

Oslo anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Anders Behring Breivik: Tunnel vision in an online world, in The Guardian, comments on Norway’s “subculture of resentment”:

Breivik must willingly have allowed himself to be brainwashed by Islamophobic and extreme rightwing websites. However, had he instead been forced to receive his information through a broadsheet newspaper, where not all the stories dealt with Europe’s loss of confidence and the rise of militant Islam, it is conceivable that his world would have looked slightly different. Perhaps one lesson from this weekend of shock and disbelief may be that cultural pluralism is not necessarily a threat to national cohesion, but that the tunnel vision resulting from selective perusal of the internet is.

Okay, Stormfront next. I won’t link there, but I visited, and they had a thread titled Please post ALL items about the “Oslo killer” in this thread! which already ran to 51 pages shortly after the event. Conspiracy is stranger than fiction – consider this intriguing suggestion from the first page:

White Brothers from Norway, let us know the truth. It sounds like a Mossad operation to me. Another, 9/11, Mumbai, 7/7, Spain, Shoe Bomber or Ball bomber. This has the tell tale signs of a Mossad operation.

Pastebin / Anonymous. Worth quoting in full:

Operation UnManifest:

As Anders Behring Breivik wants to use the cruel action of killing over 90 young people to promote his 1516-page manifesto, also with the help of the internet, Anonymous suggests following action:

1. Find the Manifest of Anders Behring Breivik : 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence
2. Change it, add stupid stuff, remove parts, shoop his picture, do what you like to…..
3. Republish it everywhere and up vote releases from other peoples, declare that the faked ones are original
4. Let Anders become a joke, such that nobody will take him serious anymore
5. Spread this message around the internet and real life, translate it
6. Have a moment for the victims of his cruel attacks

We all are anonymous,
We all are Legion,
We all do not forgive murder,
We all do not forget the victims.

Time for a quick detour on Anonymous? — in the words of NYU’s Garbriella Coleman, in the most detailed account I’ve seen (h/t Shannon Trosper) of that curious entity, Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action:

Anonymous functions as what Marco Deseriis defines as an improper name: “The adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors.”

And while we’re on the subject of names — “We are Legion” is likely an echo of the response a biblical demon gave to Jesus when commanded to leave a crazed man: “My name is Legion; for we are many” (Mark 5.7).

Back to our Breivik materials…

Anders Sandberg is someone I respect and have been reading for years – currently at a futuristic tank at Oxford I believe, an old-time gamer, well acquainted with heremetic and kabbalistic traditions, and pretty clear-headed in not always expected ways. His piece here — Blaming victims, individuals or social structures? — is worth reading in full, but the sting is in its tail:

It is worth considering that the number of victims of terrorism and individual hate-crime over the past century (perhaps of the order of hundreds of thousands) is minuscule compared to the number of victims of institutionalized democide and war (of the order of hundreds of millions victims). While terrorism is horrific and personal, it is when mistrust or hatred of out-groups become institutionalized they become truly dangerous. In this regard any political ideology or institution that does not try to reduce its out-group bias ought to be viewed as far more potentially dangerous than any individual, no matter how hate-filled or destructive.

*

Okay, I clearly need more than one post to do justice to my materials, so I’ll leave it at that for now, and be back soon.

[ by Charles Cameron — popular opinion, informed decision-making, journalism and analysis in reference to Oslo / Utoya ]

.

At least two regulars here on ZP, Cheryl Rofer and Joey, have wondered whether it’s even worth bothering to track Anders Breivik’s thought — fifteen hundred pages of cut and paste from all across the web, interspersed with page after page of his own musings.

Joey wrote, “I’m not sure this guy deserves the kind of close analysis he is getting” — and Cheryl:

I’m not at all sure that examining his “writings” tells us much beyond that these themes have been pulled into a particular orbit of hating. What might be interesting is why those themes have been found so suitable for that purpose.

I believe that tracking Breivik’s thought processes are important for two main reasons, and for two main audiences: the general public (and by extension the journalists who inform them), and policy makers, military and civilian (and thus also the intel analysts who brief them).

1: media and public

It’s important for the general public not to be left with the wrong impression, specifically as regards who or what is to blame — so that the events in Oslo do not contribute to a further deterioration in public debate.

There are a number of ongoing public conversations around Islam, Islamophobia, Christianity, the clash of cultures, the “socialist” left or “fascist” right, the media, the internet, the pernicious effect of gaming, etc., where it’s not just useful but necessary to establish some clarity on what can and cannot fairly be said about Brevik — who he was, who influenced him, who ignored him, who publicized him, who he really hated, whether he was simply mad, and above all, whose fault “it” was.

And as always the truth is more nuanced than black and white – so that in all this morass of claims and counterclaims, there are slippery slopes to be avoided, and significant distinctions to be drawn..

2: analysts and policy makers

There are also a number of areas of intel analysis where his writings may provide significant leads, and where intelligent intelligence (forgive the play on worlds) is at a premium.

As an example, I have suggested that just as it’s important to know the history of the far enemy and global jihad concepts in studying contemporary jihadism, it would be helpful to know if Breivik’s manifesto is the first place where Hindutva and Odinist and militant Christian and Masonic strands have been brought together in what I can only call an “ecumenical” manner.

I’ve no doubt some of this is of importance to those whose job it is to prosecute or defend Breivik himself: but it’s the significance Breivik has as a marker of otherwise barely detected currents of thought — “undertows” in my personal shorthand — and of the fact that such currents can now easily connect across the net to create an increased complexity of the unexpected, that most concerns me.

*

By now, most of the specific groups and individuals mentioned by Breivik have been identified, and those with specific interest in them have taken note: thus the Indian press has reported on his interest in Hindutva and quotations from Sita Ram Goel, both the UN-recognized “International Templar Order” and his own Masonic order have disowned him, and so on – so there’s no point in my posting separate comments on the role of the Hindutva movement in his thinking, nor of his fascination with the Templars and their symbolic presence in other places of interest such as Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret‘s Order of the Solar Temple (locus of mass suicides/murders in France, Switzlerland and Quebec, 1994), or more recently the Michoacan La Familia cartel offshoot Los Templarios – a link which John Robb was one of the first to make…

Mexico, not Norway…

I will, however, post two more roundups of articles: one of pieces that strike me as outliers from the usual media coverage, touching on some of these specifics, the other noting the most thoughtful and informed coverage I have seen from scholars of religion.

I offer these as resources for those who have good reason for continuing interest in Breivik, in the hope that they may turn up some data points that are illuminating when connected — but also to help correct some of the erroneous linkages that have already been made.

*

I am also hoping to make a post here shortly on Romanticism and the significance of myths, rituals and dreams — focusing mainly on the recent Requiem and obsequies for Otto von Habsburg, but with, I suspect, relevance to a strong romantic streak in Breivik, too…