zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — the Joseph Kony rumpus, and Robert Fowler on the religious zealotry of AQIM ]
.

Above:

In the Glenna Gordon photo above the text is Jason Russell, the film-maker who put together the Joseph Kony 2012 campaign, who says of himself:

I am a rebel soul: dream evangelist. I am obsessed with people. I tell stories by making inspiring movies that move people’s emotions, and then I take those emotions and transform them into action. My middle name is Radical. I married my best friend.

— radical, yeah, and looking “tough” — or as one commentator on the Visible Children tumblr said, “posing”:

Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.

Below:

By way of contrast: the text below the photo is culled from Robert R Fowler‘s searing account of his al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM, but please don’t call it AA-kem) captors. As he also said:

Kidnappings of Westerners have fueled debate among securocrats as to whether our AQIM captors might simply bandits flying an Islamic flag of convenience. I know that to be the wrong answer. Our kidnappers were utterly focused religious zealots who believed absolutely in their cause. They sought to expel Western infidels from Muslim lands and to destroy what they saw as apostate Western-stooge governments who were usurping God’s purposes across the Muslim world. The concepts and ideals we hold most dear were anathema to them: liberty, freedom, justice, democracy, human rights, equality between the sexes — all matters which they considered to be the exclusive province of Allah.

Yes, that contains the popular idea that “they hate us for our freedoms” — but in the context of what I can only call ruthless religious idealism.

Fowler is very clear on that. And no posing.

Sounds like Fowler’s book, A Season in Hell, goes right onto the anti-library lists.

The End by Sir Ian Kershaw

I am currently reading The End, about the last year of the Third Reich and the Nazi death spiral toward Germany’s absolute destruction. It is a fascinating, mass suicidal, political dynamic that was mirrored to an even greater degree of fanaticism by Nazi Germany’s Axis partner, the Imperial Japanese. Facing the prospect of certain defeat, the Germans with very few exceptions, collectively refused every opportunity to shorten the agony or lighten the consequences of defeat and stubbornly followed their Fuhrer to the uttermost doom. It made no sense then and still does not now, seven decades later.

Adolf Hitler’s personal authority over the life and death of every soul in Germany did not end until his last breath. When surrounded by Soviet armies, trapped in his Fuhrerbunker in the ruin of Berlin, all it took for Hitler to depose his most powerful paladins, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler was a word. They still commanded vast military and paramilitary security forces – Himmler had been put in charge of the Home Army as well as the SS, Gestapo and German police – but when Hitler withdrew his support and condemned them, their power crumbled. Goering, the glittering Nazi Reichsmarchal and second man in the state, was ignominiously arrested.

Even in Gotterdammerung, the Germans remained spellbound, like a man in a trance placing a noose around his own neck.

Currently, the chattering classes of the United States are uneasily working their way toward a possible war with Iran, or at least a confrontation with Teheran over their illegal nuclear weapons program (some people will object that, technically, we are not certain that Iran has a weapons program. This is true. It is also irrelevant to the diplomatic dynamic created by Iran’s nuclear activities which the regime uses to signal regularly to all observers that they could have one).  There is much debate over the rationality of Iran’s rulers and the likely consequences if Iran is permitted to become a nuclear weapons state. There is danger and risk in any potential course of action and predictions are being made, in my humble opinion, far too breezily.

In the run-up to war or negotiation, in dealing with the Iranians and making our strategic calculations, it might be useful to recall the behavior of the Germans.

[ by Charles Cameron — addendum to an earlier post ]
.

Blog-friend Michael Robinson pointed me towards some interesting materials today that are relevant to my earlier post Of dust and breath, and I’m drawing here on his various emails to present them to you.

Each of these stories has more details than can be mentioned here: in each case, the link will take you to further riches.

1.

As Michael points out, “The ‘celebrity memorabilia,’ ‘sports memorabilia’ market — and also the ‘film memorabilia’ stuff is completely analogous to relics” featuring “individual players ‘worn’ unwashed game shirts or ‘Gone With The Wind Dresses’ and the like”.

His reference here for further reading is to Tim Munby‘s Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (1962), which “traces the rise of these sentimental phenomena in what after all was a Protestant Culture”. Michael notes, “if memory serves I think it simultaneous to the beginnings of Methodism, though from memory Munby draws no parallels”.

2.

Moving on to religious collectibles (assuming for a moment that sports memorabilia don’t qualify, not a necessary assumption), he points us to an article in the Toledo Blade today titled Ex-Toledoan sleuths out biblical relics for collectors, which discusses Scott Carroll‘s work in putting together the Green Collection, selections from which are currently on display at the Vatican:

Former Toledoan Scott Carroll doesn’t break into dusty tombs or dodge poisoned arrows, but the charismatic professor’s globe-trotting adventures in amassing the world’s largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts have earned him the reputation of “the Indiana Jones of biblical archaeology.”

Mr. Carroll … has purchased nearly 50,000 ancient biblical papyri, texts, and artifacts since November, 2009, for the Green Collection, funded by Steve Green and the Green family. The Oklahoma City-based owners of 499 Hobby Lobby retail stores in 41 states, the Greens have been bankrolling Mr. Carroll’s collecting with the ultimate goal of having the items displayed in a nonsectarian Bible museum.

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,” Mr. Carroll said in a telephone interview he gave The Blade from Rome, where the Green Collection this month opened an exhibit at the Vatican called Verbum Domini, or Word of the Lord. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, features 152 artifacts displayed contextually in settings ranging from re-creations of the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered to a monastic scriptorium and an excavation of a Roman garbage city in Egypt.

I liked this passage, too…

Mr. Carroll said he has to laugh at opening an exhibit in Vatican City, seat of the global Roman Catholic Church, when he thinks of his childhood run-ins with the church.

“It’s kind of ironic because I was suspended and expelled from several Toledo Catholic schools in my upbringing,” he said. One of the expulsions, he added, was for setting fire to a church when he was in grade school.

“I chuckled at length talking to cardinals about my expulsions,” he said. “I was an athlete and rather rambunctious as a child — and that is putting it mildly. I was too active, not very self-disciplined, and ran into trouble.”

Reminiscing about one’s setting a church on fire as a youth sounds like an intriguing was of breaking the ice with their Eminences.

3.

Michael also drew my attention to this account of Rabbi Menachem Youlus [depicted above], “a self-described ‘Jewish Indiana Jones'” according to the New York Times – Indiana lookalikes seem to be cropping up all over! – who for years “told stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust” but recently admitted he had lied (NYT, Rabbi Admits Torah Tales Were a Fraud, February 2):

“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”

4.

Finally, from the world of Islamic art, Michael brings us another tale of collectors and their sometimes disreputable practices — this time from The Economist and having to do with the 16th-century illuminated version of Ferdowsi‘s epic Shahnameh, with its “lyrical calligraphy on gold-spattered pages” and “258 painted miniatures”, purchased at auction and “broken up” [as also depicted] – to the horror of collectors and bibliophiles – by Arthur Houghton :

In 1976 Houghton auctioned seven of its paintings at Christie’s for £863,500 ($1.6m): nearly four times more than the $450,000 he had paid for the whole book. He gave 78 pages to the Metropolitan where he was chairman of the trustees. When he died in 1990, 120 pages remained in the manuscript. These went back to Iran in 1994 in a swap for “Woman III” by Willem de Kooning, an abstract expressionist painter. Each side of the swap was valued at $20m.

5.

Hypothesis: all collectibles are talismans, all talismans are sacred.

****

Further addendum:

I’d intended to post this as a comment, but the comment function seems to be off — will try to fix that — but Michael’s most recent post to me included a pointer to a still current offer of a highly-collectible Americana twosome:

Available for order today from The Historical Shop, Metairie, LA

ADDENDUM:

Zen here – dealing with an internal server error as it relates to comments and pings on Charles’ post. Unable to turn comments back on at the present time – only this post seems to be encountering problems. Trying to fix.

ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUM:

Comments are now open.

Dual Top Billing!  New Criterion (Thomas Bruscino)- “The New Old Lie” 
Rethinking Security (Adam Elkus)- On the War of Art 

The former is the smart essay making the rounds. The second is the smart blogospheric reaction to it. Here are samples:

For Schwarz, this was Bierce’s greatest attribute: to cut through the phony cant of the war’s causes, “including the North’s smug myth of a Battle Cry of Freedom (still cherished by many contemporary historians, as it flatters their sense of their own righteousness).” Bierce’s cynicism was not just the result of a painful individual experience that allowed him to produce affecting works of art; it was an identification of the universal truth of war.

….This conceit has long been de rigueur among professional critics of high culture. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson equated human war to the aggression of gangs of baboons and sea slugs: “at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.” Only humans, whether they are Napoleon, or the Nazis, or Americans, justify their instincts in terms of “morality” and “reason” and “virtue” and “civilization.”

….Over the past half century, scarcely an American student has studied Great War poetry without finding out that Wilfred Owen produced the greatest poem of the war. With its horrifying depictions of the suffering and death of fighting in the trenches, his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” proved “the old lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Tellingly, we would be hard-pressed to find a student these days who has read “Dulce et Decorum Est” in its original form by Horace. After all, the Roman poet could not possibly have produced art if it contained such sentimental pap.

and from Adam:

There are two paramount problems with the dominance of strategic nihilism in art. First, it does not accurately represent the conflicts it depicts. While Ambrose Bierce may have mocked the Civil War, it was deadly serious for both the Confederate and Union forces. Whether fighting out of an idealistic loathing of aristocratic and retrograde Southern slave society or a desire to build a more perfect Union, war fever was an undeniable (and historically documented) fact. Wilfred Owen may have accurately depicted the horrors of World War I, but his writing only depicts one phase of the Western Front. World War I was a mobile war in the West in 1914 and 1918 and was completely mobile in the East. The African, Middle Easter, and Central Asian dimensions of the conflict are mostly unheralded. Owen’s experience, however, is continuously privileged over other and equally valid experiences.

SWJ Blog (Robert Killebrew) –Well, They’re Not About Taking Over the Government 

A few years ago Latin American specialists began warning the defense community at large that the Mexican cartels constituted an insurgency in the actual sense, though one that was strategically different from the ideologically-inspired ones with which we are all familiar. By now, the weakness of the oft-repeated response that “Well, they’re not about taking over the government” ought to be plain. Sure they are. The pattern of cartel corruption of local governments in some areas of Mexico makes that plain. They just care about influence and compliance with their wishes, not about traffic law and picking up the garbage at the curb.

Some still think this is only about crime. It is not. Considering the full scope of criminality and terrorism in today’s world, on a spectrum ranging from the local gangs inside the United States to the confluence of the cartels, international terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and criminal states like Iran and Venezuela — there are others — it seems obvious that what we’re seeing is a new wrinkle in warfare itself, consisting of the blending of the huge resources of the black economy (estimated at a fifth or more of the world’s GDP) with transnational state and criminal organizations that wage economic, cyber and kinetic warfare outside the bounds of what we have come to think of as “established” rules of warfare.

Nir Rosen –Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition and Islamism and the Syrian Uprising

Nir Rosen is a very, very controversial figure, putting it mildly. While I find his politics to be radically left-extremist, I can’t fault Rosen’s willingness to crawl through hellholes to report important stories firsthand, much like Robert Young Pelton, David Axe, Michael Yon or Robert Kaplan.

ISW – Syria’s Armed Opposition

The institute for the Study of War is the influential think tank run by the Kagans that, after CNAS, is the most closely associated with COIN and the “surge” in Iraq.

CNAS – Pressure Not War: A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria

Title is self-explanatory, author is Marc Lynch.

The Atlantic (Joshua Foust) –Syria and the World’s Troubling Inconsistency on Intervention

Commentary (Michael Rubin) – Mrs. Clinton, Leave Sri Lanka Alone!

(Hat tip to Bruce Kesler)

AFJ (Frank Hoffman) – A New Principle of War

Chacago Boyz – Chicago Send-Off, with Guinness, for Neptunus Lex and “Engineers vs humanities….”

Michigan War Studies Review –Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg and Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy

 Eide Neurolearning Blog –Metacognition, Math, and the Brain 

Ribbonfarm –Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law