[ by Charles Cameron — with irony, skepticism, and just a dash of dry humor ]
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image from the Ansar forum, h/t to Aaron Zelin

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You’re probably familiar with the idea of a jihadist flag flying over the White House. Anjem Choudry, the British radical Islamist preacher told Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week a while back:

Indeed, we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. Indeed, there’s even a narration of the prophet where he said that ‘the Judgment will not come until a group of my Ummah conquered the White House’.

I’ve dealt with this hadith before as it happens, and pointed out that in one telling the Prophet is asked which “white palace” he’s referring to and replies that he’s referring to the palace of Khosrau (Chosroes) I of Persia:

Jabir b. Samura said:

I heard the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say on Friday evening, the day on which Ma’ez al-Aslami was stoned to death (for committing adultery): A small force of the Muslims will capture the white house. I said: Kisra? he replied Kisra.

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Never mind, Choudary thinks the jihadist flag will fly over the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue — and like-minded protesters in New York even carried a photoshopped image of the concept (below) as a placard at a 2006 rally in New York.

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Hey! Put those two ideas together — a little “more of the same” photoshopping should do the trick — and you’d have a magnificent end to the Cold War, eh?

Maybe that’s what Choudary meant when he said, earlier in the same conversation with Amanpour:

Well, just let me say that Islam has a solution for all of the problems that mankind faces.

I suppose that’s one way to avoid a clash of civilizations — have just one guy holding both cymbals, right?

[ by Charles Cameron — comparative contemporary crucifixions, an ugly, ugly business whenever, wherever and by whomsoever… ]
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I don’t suppose MEMRI — which is after all, as its name suggests. focused on the Middle East — will be taking note of the recent crucifixion in Michoacan, Mexico, but any ZP readers who saw my recent post about the crucifixion MEMRI documented in Yemen (upper panel) might find the following from a “technical note” at SWJ about the Michoacan crucifixion of a rapist (lower panel) illuminating:

It would have been more expedient to simply hang Martinez Cruz by a rope over the traffic sign but instead the time and effort was taken to symbolically crucify him. This act, along with the accompanying narco message, the way in which the alleged rapist was forcibly taken from police custody, the severing of the male genitalia, and the fact that the incident took place in Michoacán all provide a “contextual basis” which suggests that elements of either La Familia or Los Caballeros Templarios (the Knights Templars) splinter group/successor are involved with this abduction and subsequent torture-killing. Both groups in the past have carried out public humiliations and torture-killings against those they deem as undesirables and threats to civil society. Viewing themselves as protectors of the citizenry of Michoacán, both groups, which expose cult-like Christian beliefs, would thus likely view such a symbolic crucifixion as indicative of god’s judgment on a sinner. If this interpretation is accurate, then this barbaric incident would represent another small escalation in radicalized Christian cult-like behaviors emerging in Michoacán.

Robert Bunker, with whom followers of the blog will be familiar, wrote this piece for SWJ and has added this in a striking addendum:

A recent precedent for the threat of Christians crucifying others in Mexico exists. In September 2011, seventy evangelical protestants were forced to flee from the village of San Rafael Tlanalapan, about 45 miles West of Mexico City, after being threatened with lynching and crucifixion if they remained in the village. The instigator of the threat was Father Ascensión González Solís, the local parish priest, who was subsequently forced to retire.

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Dangling thoughts:

Religious sanction can at times elicit violence from the merely pious…
The religiosity of the extremely violent is itself liable to be extremely violent…

[ by Charles Cameron — I thought it might be timely to consider trinary thinking in light of Zen‘s recent post featuring Clausewitz‘ Trinity ]
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I know, it sounds inherently ridiculous, but what would happen if we thought in threes instead of twos? I mean, we tend to see things in terms of black and white, good and bad. Let’s set up a binary of our own — US President George W Bush vs the Aymara of the Andes and Altiploano:

Two into three won’t go, as they used to say in math class when I was a kid.

Hegel thought otherwise. Hegel thought two needed to move on into three, or we’d be stuck with binaries in stasis for ever. Hegel’s dialectic is about the possibility called three — which opens the otherwise static two up to various kinds of process…

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We tend to view conflicts in binary terms: “who goes there, friend or foe?” is the challenge I was supposed to offer Mad Mitch the Axe Man if I ran across him as a CCF trainee in the grounds of my old school, Wellington College.

What is conflict is viewed in trinary?

Here is Chris Crawford, from his justly famous 1982 Art of Computer Game Design:

The advantage of asymmetric games lies in the ability to build nontransitive or triangular relationships into the game. Transitivity is a well-defined mathematical property. In the context of games it is best illustrated with the rock-scissors-paper game. Two players play this game; each secretly selects one of the three pieces; they simultaneously announce and compare their choices. If both made the same choice the result is a draw and the game is repeated. If they make different choices, then rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper enfolds rock. This relationship, in which each component can defeat one other and can be defeated by one other, is a nontransitive relationship; the fact that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper does not mean that rock beats paper.

We’re back in play…

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Here, too, is a bit from m’friend Wm. Benzon, jazz-player, blogger, polymath:

Three against two is one of the most important rhythm ‘cells’ in all of music. What do I mean, three against two? You play three evenly spaced beats in one ‘stream’ in the same period of time you play two evenly spaced beats in another ‘stream.’ It sounds simple enough but, the problem is that three and two do not have a common divisor, making the ‘evenly spaced’ part of the formula a bit tricky. The two patterns coincide on the first beat, but the second and third beats of the three-beat stream happen at different times from the second beat of the two-beat stream. And if you think that’s a lot of verbiage for something that ought to be simple, when then you’re beginning to get the idea.

Noting that the brain has a hard time moving from two to three this way, Benzon quotes old-time piano virtuoso Joseph Hoffman:

In faster motion it is far better to practise at first each hand alone and with somewhat exaggerated accents of each group until the two relative speeds are well established in the mind. Then try to play the two hands together in a sort of semi-automatic way. Frequent correct repetition of the same figure will soon change your semi-automatic state into a a conscious one, and thus train your ear to listen to and control two different rhythms or groupings at the same time.

Those readers already familiar with my insistence on many-voiced (ie polyphonic) listening will quickly grasp that Hoffman is speaking of just that kind of broadening of our mental horizons — of our thinking capacities.

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I’d like to close part 1 of this two part post within my “Numbers by the numbers” series, with a quote from LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.), The Foundation of Strategic Thinking at Infinity Journal:

The United States and its allies need senior civilian officials and military officers who grasp the fundamental nature of systems, are adept at building shared mental models, comprehend the significance of Clausewitz’s paradoxical trinity, understand operational art and can connect strategic thinking with tactical actions through operational design. These are the true competencies of modern defense professionals.

As in conflict, as in Clausewitz, so in conflict resolution: we need to be able to think in trinary — in trinities — and beyond.

More on that — which interested me enough that I once designed a trinary game of my own, played with great splash and delight by three kids in a swimming pool — in the second part of this post.

“Clausewitz wants us to accept the practical reality that these dynamic forces are ever-present and constantly interacting in the everyday world….”

I just finished reading a working paper by Professor Christopher Bassford he has posted at Clausewitz.com that I am strongly recommending to the readership (with a hat tip to Peter at SWJ Blog).

Tiptoe Through the Trinity, or, The Strange Persistence of Trinitarian Warfare. 

At 31 pages of analytic prose, diagrams and footnotes regarding the nature of  Carl von Clausewitz’s “fascinating” trinity; how Bassford thinks Michael Howard and Peter Paret got some important points in their translation of On War wrong ; the real meaning of Politik and on the perfidy of non-trinitarians – Bassford’s paper is not a quick read but a worthwhile one. I learned some important things about On War from reading this paper and had some uncertain speculations strengthened by Bassford’s expertise on Clausewitz and Clausewitzians.  I am not going to attempt a summary of so long and abstruse an argument, but I would instead like to highlight some of Bassford’s more valuable insights. There were also a couple of points where, in stretching to make analogies with other fields, I think Bassford may be going astray, as well as some commentary I might make regarding “non-state war”.

This paper will be more digestible if we blog the topics one at a time, in succession.

The most important part in the paper and I think most helpful to people who have not read On War many times was Bassford’s emphasis on the extremely dynamic nature of Clausewitz’s “fascinating” (his translation) trinity:

….in fact, the Trinity is the central concept in On War. I don’t mean “central” in the sense that, say, Jon Sumida applied in his conference paper*7 to Clausewitz’s concept of the inherent superiority of the defensive form of war. That is, I do not argue that the Trinity is Clausewitz’s “most important” concept, that the desire to convey it was his primary motivation in writing, or that all of his other insights flowed from this one. Rather, I mean simply that the Trinity is the concept that ties all of Clausewitz’s many ideas together and binds them into a meaningful whole.

….In any case, the role of the Trinity within the narrow confines of Book One, Chapter One ofOn War, which reflects Clausewitz’s most mature thinking, is crucial. That chapter must be read in terms of Clausewitz’s dialectical examination of the nature of war. That discussion is very carefully structured but (purposefully, I suspect) largely unmarked by clear dialectical road markers labeling thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,*8 or even by sections clearly devoted to one stage of the dialectic or another. The Trinity itself represents the synthesis of this dialectical process.

….The H/P translation then gives the impression that the Trinity is being offered simply as an alternative metaphor. In truth, Clausewitz has already ceased riffing on the chameleon imagery. He is actually switching to a whole new metaphor, with a new structure, new entailments, and new purposes. The chameleon metaphor pointed to changes in war’s appearance from case to case; the Trinity addresses the underlying forces that drive those changes.

….The second problem here is the choice of modifying adjective. It seems that no modern translator is prepared to render wunderliche in the military context as “wonderful,” “wondrous,” or “marvelous” (much less “queer,” “quaint,” or “eccentric,” all good dictionary definitions). H/P 1976 gives “remarkable,” a throw-away word of no particular significance. This was changed to “paradoxical” in the 1984 edition, but this word seems to have no relationship to wunderliche and carries inappropriately negative connotations. Clausewitz wants us to accept the practical reality that these dynamic forces are ever-present and constantly interacting in the everyday world. But he clearly found this shifting interaction really, really interesting—to the point of being mesmerized by it.

…..Clausewitz, in contrast, was skeptical (to put it mildly) of any positive doctrine that was not highly context-specific. The pursuit of such a doctrine was entirely alien to his approach to theory. His Trinity was descriptive, not prescriptive, and foretold the very opposite of balance. (Schwebe carries the connotation of dynamism, not equilibrium.) The message of this Trinity was that the relationships among his three elements were inherently unstable and shifting. What he actually said was that “the task … is to keep our theory [of war] floating among these three tendencies,” and not to try to set, or to count on, any fixed relationship among them.

….it is the infinite variability among the trinity’s factors and in their interaction that underlies Clausewitz’s insistence on the inherent unpredictability of war. It is a classic model of Chaos, in the modern scientific sense.

….In short, this last element of the Trinity represents concrete reality, i.e., everything outside of our own skull and its emotions and calculations.

…. Clausewitz’s Trinity is all-inclusive and universal, comprising the subjective and the objective; the unilateral and multilateral; the intellectual, the emotional, and the physical components that comprise the phenomenon of war in any human construct. Indeed, through the subtraction of a few adjectives that narrow its scope to war, it is easily expanded to encompass all of human experience. It is thus a profoundly realistic concept.  

What came across to me from Bassford’s essay is that the Clausewitzian trinity makes the most sense understood as a true trinity – three separate coexistent forces in unity – and not a mere triad, which would be a simple grouping of three forces. So while Bassford is probably right that Clausewitz had no mystical intentions whatsoever here, his contemporary readership, aristocratic, educated, army officers versed in Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, would have grasped the difference and that primordial violence and hatred, probability and chance and the pure reason of policy were in fusion and tension and not three entirely separated forces.

I particularly like Bassford’s analysis that the trinity was unstable and shifting which wars frequently do, sliding from disciplined and limited use of military force to unconstrained barbarism or “total war” and back again.