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[by J. Scott Shipman]

This is worth the 20 minutes. Strategy without clarity, isn’t. There is no clarity or strategy to our current problems in Afghanistan.

“We have killed all the slow and stupid ones. But that means the ones that are left are totally dedicated.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.
H/T Feral Jundi at Facebook.

[ by Charles Cameron — more food for thought on religious and irreligious outrage — and Paris again, too ]
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Michel Mourre (in friar's habit) and Serge Berna reviewing "The Declaration of Mourre"

It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed readers of Zenpundit that three of the incidents we have been discussing recently — the Pussy Riot affair, the Innocence of Muslims video and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons — all revolve around issues of blasphemy and free speech.

I’m indebted to whoever it was pointed me to Colin Jager‘s Pussy Riot’s punk prayer, posted on the SSSR’s Imanent Frame blog ten days ago as a comment on the punk grrls incident:

Perhaps its most obvious precursor is the intervention staged by several young lettrist poets at Notre Dame Cathedral, on Easter Sunday, 1950. In the middle of the service Michel Mourre, dressed as a Dominican monk, climbed into a pulpit and began to read a sermon/poem that condemned the Catholic Church for “infecting the world with its funeral morality,” and announced that God was dead “so that Man may live at last.” As Greil Marcus details in Lipstick Traces, the response was dramatic: the Cathedral’s guards attacked the four with their swords, and the crowd chased them out of the Cathedral and down to the Seine, where they were apprehended by the police.

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That’s the sort of hint I like to follow up on, so I found my way to Greil Marcus‘ book, and to this paragraph for starters:

At 11:10 A.M. on 9 April 1950, four young men — one got up from head to foot as a Dominican monk — entered Notre-Dame in Paris. Easter high mass was in progress; there were ten thousand people from all over the world in the cathedral. “The false dominican,” as the press called him — Michel Mourre, twenty-two — took advantage of a pause after the credo and mounted the altar. He began to read a sermon written by one of his co-conspirators, Serge Berna, twenty-five.

Let me say right away that there is at least one pointer here suggesting that Marcus may not be the best observer of religious detail. Marcus says Mourre “took advantage of a pause after the credo and mounted the altar” before reading his sermon — Mourre’s own account has him “mounting the pulpit”. Curiously enough, the writer of the Immanent Frame piece makes a similar error in describing Pussy Riot:

Singing “Mother of God, Chase Putin Out!,” and clad in brightly colored dresses, leggings, and balaclavas, the women danced, kneeled, and crossed themselves in front of the Cathedral’s high altar.

Only in a stretched sense can the Pussy Rioters be described as performing their act “in front of the Cathedral’s high altar.” They were in front of the great doors of the ikonostasis, which when opened, lead to the altar. But the ikonostasis itself is no more an altar than a pulpit is.

Sacred architecture, gentle readers: these are differences here that do make a difference.

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Marcus then gives the text of the sermon, which can be found on Wikipedia and concludes with the line:

We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

Compare the Pussy Riot prayer, the Guardian’s translation of which can be found here, and which includes the lines:

Fight for rights, forget the rite – Join our protest, Holy Virgin.

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Moving along, Greil next allows us to glimpse the response, which included the drawing of swords and the threat of lynching:

The cataclysm that followed went beyond anything expected by Mourre and his fellows, who first planned merely to let loose a few red balloons. The organist, warned that a disruption might take place, drowned out Mourre just after he pronounced the magic words “God is dead.” The rest of the speech was never delivered: swords drawn, the cathedral’s Swiss Guards rushed the conspirators and attempted to kill them. Mourre’s comrades took to the altar to shield him — one, Jean Rullier, twenty-five, had his face slashed open. The blasphemers escaped — his habit streaked with Rullier’s blood, Mourre gaily blessed the worshippers as he made for the exit — and were captured, rather rescued, by the police: having chased the four to the Seine, the crowd was on the verge of lynching them.

You may recall for comparison with this incident that the sum total of weaponry attributed to Christ’s disciples in the Gospels was two swords, worn on just the one evening —

And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.

— [Luke 22.38], and that the sum total of wounds inflicted by those swords was the loss of one ear, which was quickly and miraculously replaced by the savior himself —

And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him.

— [Luke 22:50-51]

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Next up, here is Michel Mourre’s own, retrospective account, from his book In Spite of Blasphemy:

It would be absurd to expect that the incident I was organizing with my friends was going to bring about a change in the state of the Church. In the fever of excitement we were in at the time, some of my friends, particularly one who was a former monk, a Spanish Jesuit, really believed it would. But I knew only too well that I had no message to deliver, no reforms to attempt, since I as in a far more wretched moral condition than so many others. I did not believe that God could be found anywhere outside His Church or that God could be an ally of ours against the Catholic Church. In this connection there was the example of all the pseudo-saintly sinners, the pseudo-mystics, the pseudo-illuminaries, both Buddhist and otherwise, who flourished in Saint-Germain-des Pres, and the “hidden knowledge,” the “esoteric intuitions,” the “visions” of the diabolical procession in honor of Satan, the Devil-Lucifer, of which at least one initiate could be found any evening in a Saint-Germain bar ready to describe his “trances.” All these voluntary outcasts from the Church, all these madmen drunk on occult fumes and in search of a substitute God, a substitute Church and Mysteries, discouraged, by the very excess of their nonsense, any attempt to look for God outside the discipline and rules of the Church.

No, I had really no idea of changing anything in the Church! I was trying rather to convince myself that God no longer counted for me, nor did His Church, nor above all did the atmosphere of sacredness that could be felt in the ceremonies of the Church. By this insult to God, by this small sacrifice I was going to make, but not without anxiety or fear, I was trying to make God equal in my eyes with human, transient things which are destined to die and which can be trodden underfoot relentlessly and without regret.

And yet, once I was embarked on the details of our scheme for creating a disturbance during the Easter service at Notre Dame, I began to take it all quite seriously. To my feverish mind the cry of revolt which we decided on at a table in the Mabillon was like a message to the Church, to the world, and I found it quite natural to put on my monk’s habit again before mounting the pulpit. For me the habit of Saint Dominic was an exasperating symbol, an object of reproach. By profaning it I hoped to be rid of it.

Next day, after the Credo of the Easter High Mass in Notre Dame, dressed as a Dominican and wearing a tonsure, I mounted the pulpit and shouted out the old blasphemy: “God is dead!” But the blasphemy is no longer what it was in Nietzsche’s day, the prelude to a hymn of joy; it is only a cry of madness and horribly sad.

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While the Moscow Cathedral and Notre Dame incidents are similar in some ways, the Notre Dame venue — Paris, 1950 — prefigures both the students at the barricades in 1968 and the Last Temptation troubles that I reported in connection with the Innocence of Muslims video — and Charlie Hebdo, too. The motivations, however, are quite dissimilar, as the quotes from the grrls closing statements, which I’ve excerpted here and which are extensively quoted in the Jager piece, suggest:

Maria Alyokhina, for example, asserted that for the Orthodox Church “[t]he Gospels are no longer understood as revelation, which they have been from the very beginning, but rather as a monolithic chunk that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wherever necessary.” Noting that Jesus himself had been accused of blasphemy, Alyokhina goes on: “I think that religious truth should not be static, that it is essential to understand the instances and paths of spiritual development, the trials of a human being, his duplicity, his splintering. That for one’s self to form it is essential to experience these things.” And she makes the link to contemporary art explicit: “all of these processes—they acquire meaning in art and in philosophy. Including contemporary art. An artistic situation can and, in my opinion, must contain its own internal conflict.”

and:

The radical power of that diagnosis becomes most clear in Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement: “In our performance,” she writes, “we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.” Most striking here, perhaps, is the language of “uniting” orthodox and protest culture, rather than setting them against each other. This is done, Samutsevich suggests, in the name of a democratic ideal: both orthodox and protest culture are properties of the people rather than of one group or another. The performance, on this analysis, becomes a visual and aural demonstration of what Alyokhina had called “internal conflict,” something posed by all three women as the space in which religious revelation happens. Thus art, religion, and the state are not conceptually separated here but deliberately mixed up, in the name of religious truth.

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It is worth noting that Michel Mourre, who had been a Dominican friar before the event in Notre Dame, came back into the Church and lived until 1977, writing a number of books including Religions et Philosophies d’Asie, Le Monde à la mort du Christ and L’Histoire vivante des moines, as well as his Dictionnaire d’histoire universelle.

As the world spins, so spins my head.

[ by Charles Cameron — my apologies for an earlier incomplete draft, quickly withdrawn — first of two, on loose cannonry and mirror imagery — second will deal with recent events in Benghazi ]
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Charlie Hebdo recently published some cartoons featuring the prophet…

Okay, I’m always on about symmetry.

I posted a piece titled Messianic symmetries on ZP a while back, noting that both Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu can be viewed as exercising “leadership that makes decisions out of messianic feelings” — the quote comes from an unimpressed ex-Shin Beth director describing Bibi; Ahmadinejad makes the case for his own Mahdist leabings quite well himself.

Symmetry seems like an important analytic category to me, either because it’s there in the build of the world, or because it’s there in the build of the mind. Either way, I think we should take careful notice of symmetries.

Asymmetries I’ll talk about in my next post.

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What about the cartoon above, right? It’s clearly based on the photo above, left, which shows Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, holding his magazine with its offensive cartoons / vindication of free speech. And the suggestion is clear that he’s some kind of suicide bomber.

But who is he blowing up, exactly? Himself, and perhaps his staff and anyone else who happens to be within a few yards of his office at the time? France, Europe, the western world — the world itself? And how much irony should we read into the cartoon portrait?

They may have learned the technique from the Tamil Tigers, but these days, in the immediate wake of widespread rioting over the video clip and in the context of someone publishing cartoons that satirize the prophet, it’s clearly Islamist suicide bombers who provide the model for the cartoon of the cartoonist above.

Tit for tat? An eye for an eye? You’re just setting yourself up for a fatwa like Salman Rushdie?

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Incendiary rhetoric on one side leads to incendiary behavior on the other, validating the incendiary rhetoric and making the escalation to incendiary behavior all the more probable.

Some of the incendiary rhetoric has its origin in holy books, which also preach peace.

There are Coptic Christians utterly blindsided by the virulence of the video, attributed to one of their number. There are Libyan Muslims utterly blindsided by the virulence of the attack on the US Embassy, attributed to some of their own.

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I want to focus not on the specifics of the topic, but on the symmetry.

One writer, observing the partition of India and Pakistan, wrote:

The rioters brought the train to a stop. Those who belonged to the other religion were methodically picked out and slaughtered. After it was all over, those who remained were treated to a feast of milk, custard pies and fresh fruit.

Before the train moved off, the leader of the assassins made a small farewell speech: “Dear brothers and sisters, since we were not sure about the time of your train’s arrival, regretfully we were not able to offer you anything better than this most modest hospitality. We would have liked to have done more.”

Commenting on this paragraph, Ali Sethi wrote recently in the New Yorker:

That is all there is: murder—methodical and quick—followed by a feast and an ingratiating speech. Note the withholding of tags: we don’t know the location of the massacre or the religion of the killers. All we have is a spurt of base instincts.

The point here is that whenever you see a symmetry of opposites, it’s worth considering that symmetry in the abstract, as well as weighing the particular issues that drive your own side or the other.

That, I’d suggest, is one of the implications of that Paul van Riper remark I’m fond of quoting:

What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.

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I am concerned about hatred, simmering here, boiling over there. I am concerned about what sparks hatred, and what fans it. What I want to draw your attention to here, though, is the process by which one hatred fuels abother, the process of mirror imaging.

Mark Juergensmeyer, a terrific scholar of religion who has published on topics ranging from Gandhi‘s nonviolence to the violence of religionists who consider themselves sanctioned by the scriptures of various religions, makes the point in a recent Religion Dispatches post thus:

The US-based Islamophobes behind the insulting and amateurish video “The Innocence of Muslims,” and those behind the violent protests it allegedly caused around the Muslim world, are kindred hatemongers. Both are extremists with a political agenda, and both want to use this incident to discredit the legitimacy of the moderate governments in power in their respective countries. There is a symbiotic relationship between the strident protesters and the bigoted filmmakers; each needs the other.

We are in a hall of incendiary mirrors, with plenty of kindling: in my view, we should avoid playing with matches.

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Thank God, there are also asymmetries.

In a companion post, I’ll take a look at recent, very promising events in Benghazi (h/t to Pundita for a pointer to this particular article), the not particularly unsurprising but unwelcome attitude of a Pakistani minister, and the imbalances that go along with the dangerous balances I’ve discussed in this post.

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Oh, and let me digress…

I won the Divinity essay prize back in my schooldays at Wellington College, and received my chosen prize book, the Liber Usualis with its glorious collection of Gregorian Chants, from the then Minister of Defence, John Profumo, MP. Not long thereafter, it was discovered that he pillow talked with one Christine Keeler, a night lady of class, who also pillow talked with the Russian defence attaché. And the story was broken, week by glorious week, by the British satirical magazine, Private Eye.

Which I consequently have an affection for, after all these years. And I tell you this, because Charlie Hebdo, or Weekly Chuck as we might call it over here is, I’d suggest, a plausible latter-day French rough equivalent of Private Eye.

I don’t really like our guys posting inflammatory materials, you see, but I also have an affection for freedom of speech — and for magazines with a satirical bite, too…

So sue me, I contain multitudes.

Controversial journalist Nir Rosen is, by my standards, a left-wing extremist with carcinogenic political views. On the other hand, he is also a fearless and skillful war correspondent who goes places to report where few others dare; as a result, Rosen is usually worth reading, particularly as he seldom is treading a well-worn path:

London Review of Books: Among the Alawites -Nir Rosen reports from Syria 

….When Abu Laith took me to Rabia itself, news of our arrival spread quickly. Thousands of residents staged a seemingly spontaneous but clearly sincere demonstration in support of the regime in the centre of town, next to a statue of Hafez al-Assad holding an olive branch and a sword. The statue, paid for by locals, was erected after the uprising started. Behind it was a massive poster with a picture of Hafez and Bashar. On it was written ‘Rabia is the lion’s den,’ a play on the word assad, which means ‘lion’. I was dragged from house to house so people could speak of their dead and wounded relatives, and of Rabia’s 42 martyrs. I told one group of local men that when I visited opposition strongholds like Baba Amr in Homs I always heard similar stories about fathers or sons being martyred. ‘Our sons were just going to work,’ an army colonel whose nephew was killed in Idlib said in reply. ‘There is a difference between killing a man going to work for the state and killing an armed man taking up weapons against the state. Is it peaceful demonstrators who kill five officers at a checkpoint?’

For the past year Rabia’s Alawites have clashed with neighbouring Sunni villages. Last summer the town’s students couldn’t travel into the city of Hama to take their exams because the opposition had blocked the road. Around thirty Alawite families from one nearby majority Sunni village have settled in Rabia, feeling it was no longer safe to stay where they were. The displaced families were disappointed with the government’s response. ‘We didn’t have any weapons or we would have fought back,’ one man told me. ‘They should have sent in tanks but the opposition blocked the roads. We want the state to solve our problems and the army to return us to our land. The army has to enter the villages, but the army is busy in Hama. Why is the state taking its time?’ Abu Laith’s father, a retired soldier, agreed. ‘Only the army can solve this,’ he said. ‘If we respond ourselves it will be seen as sectarian violence and other villages will join them against us. They will outnumber us.’

From Rabia I headed north-west towards Aziziya, a remote Alawite village which has clashed with the neighbouring Sunni village of Tamana. As in most Alawite villages, the majority of its men work in security or the army. Its Sunni neighbours all support the opposition, and opposition militias have been operating in the area since last spring. Salhab, the nearest town of any size, contains hundreds of displaced Alawite mothers and children who have fled the village. The fight between Aziziya and Tamana showed no sign of abating and in the town I found several families in a near hysterical state. A woman who’d recently reached Salhab shouted at me: ‘We left under fire! Our dignity is precious! Our leader is honourable! They are traitors! Everything for Bashar!’

The Alawites and Syria’s Christian minorities are not going to fare well if Syria falls to the increasingly Salafist-tinged opposition. Their back is against the wall. The Druze and Kurds, with potential ethnic allies in neighboring states, may have greater leverage if the Baathist regime collapses.

[ by Charles Cameron — comparative riotology, with sidelong glances at goats and a single mole ]
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It’s not always disrespect for the Prophet that causes people to burn flags and attempt to break into embassies…

This week, the disputed sovereignty of some uninhabited islands has done the trick quite nicely in Beijing, where rioters have attempted to breach the Japanese embassy and burned the Japanese flag (upper image, above) in a manner that’s somehow reminiscent of the breaching of the US embassy and corresponding burning of the US flag (lower image) in Cairo .

I imagine that if one was Japanese or Chinese, one might consider the Beijing protests over the ownership of the Senkaku / Diaoyu / Tiaoyutai Islands to be the primary troubling news-story about embassies, rioting and gross breaches of diplomatic protocol this week.

There’s a strange kind of parallax involved here, I think. Or perhaps: what’s in the foreground depends on where you stand.

But that’s not to say there’s an exact equivalence between the situations, just that bearing one in mind may shed some light on the other.

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I hope to get into the layers and layers of motivation that feed a riot in a subsequent post, but for now I’d just like to point to one similarity between the two situations. In each case, there’s an undertow of strong feeling that surfaces at a certain point — and astonishes us by its force.

In the case of the disputed islands, it may be Chinese feelings about Japanese behavior towards them in World War II that are triggered by Japanese claims on the islands. As China Daily USA says:

Japan has to recognize China’s sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands and atone for its past aggressions and atrocities, and take measures to punish those Japanese who deny the country’s violent past, in the way that Germany has been doing for decades. Only if Japan does that will China and other Asian countries see it as a normal country. Otherwise, China should prepare for a long-term struggle.

Or as the Israeli Arutz7 puts it:

As

The dispute with Japan is now part of the legacy of World War II and China claims that under the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, Japan was obligated to return all the territories seized illegally.

The above means that the dispute over the islands is now connected to one of the most highly charged issues in Sino-Japanese history, making it a matter of national honor for the Chinese that is not subject to negotiation.

Note here that the question is expressly one of honor.

It is significant, too, that the Chinese can be described as lenient towards their protesters attaching the sovereign embassy of a sovereign nation, just as the Egyptian government has been described as lenient towards their protesters attacking the sovereign embassy of the United States:

In the interim, China has allowed anti-Japanese demonstrators a relative freehand (“Their feelings are perfectly understandable” explained the Chinese Foreign Ministry) and the Japanese Embassy in Beijing has issued warnings to Japanese citizens and businessmen to take precautionary measures.

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I strongly believe that undertows, as I am calling them here, are among the most important topics for monitoring and analysis — and that the fact that they so often take us by surprtise is a good reason to pay them closer analytic attention.

They surface in dreams, in graffiti, in conspiracy theories, in all the liminal spaces. And they can have game-changing impact: Great Game Changing impact.

That, btw, is why Cass Sunstein‘s paper on conspiracy theories is one we should consider in detail here on ZP one of these days.

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Of course, as this recent map from the Economist shows —

— there are also oil and gas fields nearby.

What drives a crowd to riot and what interests the powers that be may be two very different sides to the same affair.

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Curious Goat Fact accompaning the above map:

In the 1970s Japanese ultra-rightists took two goats on a 2,000km (1,250-mile) trip southwest from Tokyo to a group of uninhabited rocks near Taiwan called the Senkaku Islands. In the absence of humans willing to live in such a remote outpost, the hardy creatures would be the vanguard of a new push to solidify Japan’s hold over the islets, which are also claimed by China and Taiwan.

Supplementary Mole Fact:

The Senkaku mole is an endangered species.

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Does comparing Beijing 2012 with Cairo 2012 change the emphasis with which you view recent events in Cairo and elsewhere?

Do you find the analogy between Cairo 2012 (upper panel above) and Tehran 1979 (lower panel) more convincing?

Look, I think the making of analogies is one of the chief ways — if not the chief way — in which we make “instinctive” judgments, which we then back up with appropriately selected data and reasoning. If you like, it’s subject to our own mental version of undertow in terms of what analogies we chose and how strongly we then weigh them — unless we take responsibility for the process, and begin to explore how it actually works in our own minds, and in the public mind…

Analogy is an extremely powerful instrument of thought — and it’s about time we understood it as well as we understand linear logic.