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[ by Charles Cameron — hoping to unload a series of quick posts sparked by my recent readings — 01, jihadi culture ]
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I was reading Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, The “futurist” aesthetics of ISIS — who could resist such a title? — in the Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, desultorily, and my eye was naturally caught by the phrase “religious apoalyptic symbolism”, because symbolism is my terrain and apocalypse (IMO) the specific area where the human imagination runs wildest and freëst..

… and since analogy is my preferred mode of insight, I was then delighted to find the comment about “stronly reminiscent” but subdued jihadi purple:

In the case of ISIS the overcoming of symbolist rhetoric signifies a clear shift towards Futurism. In Symbolism, poetical speech attempts to present a refined and infinite mental world. Such symbolist ambitions do exist in ISIS propaganda but they remain restricted to religious apocalyptic symbolism. ISIS replaces sunsets and hazes with whirring engines and explosions; further, the aim of ISIS propaganda is not merely to evoke a metaphysical world for its own sake but rather to establish the forces of a new futurist ideology in everyday life as a utilitarian force. Also this overlaps perfectly with futurist strategies of overcoming symbolism.

While ISIS aesthetics makes a decisive step in this modernist direction, Al-Qaeda religious propaganda remains kitsch and is strongly reminiscent of visual material delivered by Jehovah’s Witnesses or New Age sects. With the latter it shares the preference of purple as the dominant color, though the jihadi purple is more subdued than the New Age one.

The whole idea of jihadi aesthetics, of course, will seem wildly inappropriate to those whose view is constrained to the physical personnel, materiel and processes of war — but to those hoping for insight into the jihadist mindset, it is not so easily dismissed — see Thoman Hegghammer‘s Paul Wilkinson Memorial Lecture, The Bored Jihadi blog and forthcoming book, Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists.

Hegghammer’s book will be a must read, I suspect. I hope to review it here on ZP>

[ by Charles Cameron — FBI Pentagon photos from 9/11 h/t Nada Bakos, and an anarchist logo ]
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The FBI just released a portfolio of previously unseen photos from 9/11 at the Pentagon, and Politico published them yesterday. My immediate reaction was to think what a boon they’d be to Truther conspiracists, since they could now measure and calculoate and generally insinuate a whole raft of new hypotheses regarding how the whole thing was staged, a false flag, a deliberate own goal.

And then, see upper panel below, I noticed the circled inverted A in several of the slides:

That’s all the confirmation we need! It’s anarchist graffiti — see the same A in a circle in the lower panel for confirmation!

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As I write this, it is still April First, and I am not seriously proposing that 9/11 was a put up job, nor that the inverted A in the Pentagon photo has anything to do with the anarchist A in the lower panel — but that’s how conspiracies unfold — a plausible match that supports an obsession or paranoid fantasy, and voila!

The anarchists did 9/11!