Remembering Stalin in Ukraine, and Other Atrocities to Keep in Mind while Doing Very Careful Business with the Latest Russian Empire (and the Iranians)

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

                  — Attributed plausibly to Adolph Hitler,

                      preparing to annihilate, most immediately, Poles         

  

I'm listening again to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin (1st published 2012), and I've gotten to Stalin's program of collectivization and against the peasants and nationalisms (sic: plural) inside that "prison-house of nations" the Russian Empire was under the czars and remained under Stalin.

            The United States will have to cooperate with the Russians (and the Iranians) for immediate needs like a reduction of slaughter in Syria and vicinity, and for continuing necessities like nuclear-arms reduction so the number of warheads gets to and stays below any number likely to destroy human civilization. The history of Russian rule in Ukraine and in the Balkans, the history of Russia in the various attempts to destroy Poland — another big topic for Snyder — is crucial to know and keep in mind during any rapprochement with the Russian Federation: It must be done in ways that won't really upset people with grievances against the Russian Empire in its Stalinist forms and decent memories. In American time, the 1930s were a long time ago; not so for people with better memories, especially when the memories include Ukrainians in huge numbers intentionally starved to death by Stalin and his willing executioners.

            I just finished listening again to Destiny Disrupted: A History Of The World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary (2010), which makes the point that Islam, like aspects of Judaism and in the history of Christendom, is in part a political project. (Year 1 in the Muslim calendar is not the birth of Mohammed nor the year of the first revelation, but the year of the move to Medina and the birth of the Muslim community.) This is a point insisted on by Donald Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. It is also a point that must be kept in mind *and* handled with great delicacy.

            Here are two areas where the Trump people have legitimate points to make and could suggest some useful policies, but may end up with greater or lesser disasters because they don't "do nuance" and seem to consider delicacy (and what George Orwell called decency) unmanly.

            We need to cooperate with the Russians without undermining NATO and putting large parts of Europe in doubt of our willingness to prevent Russia from again doing horrible things on their territory. We need to cooperate with Russia and Iran against very much political aspects of "Jihad" in senses that definitely included military struggle. And we need to do all this very carefully.

            Another US administration that's into swagger over substance and some subtlety could make the US Iraq misadventures look relatively minor.

“America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” “The Iron Law of Fashion,” and History

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of

U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing,

according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape,

affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups.

While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults,

it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites,

blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults

with only a high school education; and among women as well as men.

‑ From “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” 12 May 2015,

Followup to Pew Research Center’s Study of 2007.

      The Pew Center’s exhaustive study of “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” for 2014 has shown “Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population” since the Pew study of 2007, while “Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” And that unaffiliated group includes increasing percentages of self-identified atheists (+1.5), agnostics (+1.6), and “Nothing in particular” (+3.7)

      That last group is significant. Atheists care enough about the gods to deny them, and the cliché observation is correct that militant atheists care a great deal; and in many places in America even declaring oneself agnostic is taking a position. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not,” and “Nothing in particular” may be the closest we have to such gentle cynics.

      Anyway, as I write the Pew study has been making news, and the general trends are significant. I’ll throw in here, though with those arguing that the results are not definitively significant since the studies give only two “snapshots” of American religiosity and the trend lines between two points. The whole graph is dynamic, ongoing, and, tracked for more than a few years, a whole hell of a lot more complicated.

      First, there is what has been called “the iron law of fashion change,” which I reduce to “the iron law of fashion” and relate to Mark Twain’s suggestion in “Corn-Pone Opinions,” “that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing — if it has indeed ever existed” (published posthumously, 1923). Allow here for satiric exaggeration and oversimplification, and insist strongly that fashions in politics and religion are of greater consequence than whether beards are “in” or “out” for men or women wear skirts or jeans. Still, even as there are fashions in appearance and manners and literature, even so there are fashions in politics and in religion. If it’s a human behavior, allow for fashion, always.

      Fashion viewed more earnestly, broadly, and over long periods gets us to historical trends and ethnic and cultural variation.

      I'll emphasize historical trends and note that over the long haul human cultures have tended to become more secular, at least insofar as increasing percentages of people don’t use theology to account for storms or volcanic eruptions or eclipses, plagues, or invasions. Still, like fashions, “These things go in cycles.”

Knocking around Athens some 400 years BCE, one would probably hear underemployed old men complaining about increasing irreligion among pampered young men, and the execution of Socrates was a kind of sacrifice to assuage the unease of the City (although I have some sympathy with occasionally banishing particularly obstreperous philosophers, as a warning to the rest). The concern of such religious conservatives was, to put it mildly, misplaced. The next few centuries saw the spread of mystery cults all through the Greek world and beyond, and in the time of Rome interest in even such exotic cults as that of the Jews — and then the rise of Christianity and then Islam.

      And eventually both Church and Mosque ceased being mass movements of the fanatical faithful and settled down to ritual and institutions in the Medieval Church and courts and schools in the golden age of Islam.

      Except for the occasional (periodic?) outbursts of religious fervor in Crusades and answering Jihad, obsession with death in time of plague and hysteria over heresy and, later, the witch threat.

      And then there was a relatively secular Renaissance in Italy ca. 1300, expanding out to most of the rest of darkest Europe by 1500. Walking around Florence much of that time or Rome during the reigns of the more corrupt Popes, one might talk of a growing secularization. Or you might talk that way unless you ran into the followers of Girolamo Savonarola crying out for purifying Florence of the 1490s — and doing some direction-action purifying on their own. Or unless you were observing carefully in the German mini-states in the 1510s and noted that a rising nationalism (or at least dislike for Italians and other foreigners) had religious significance, and that significance wasn’t a desire for secularism.

      In the West, the sporadically and somewhat secular Renaissance was followed by Reformation and then reformations of the reformation: and Reformation was followed by the small religious wars of the 16^th and then near-genocidal wars of 17^th centuries of the emphatically Christian era. (The Wars of Religion had other causes, but religion was a biggie.)

      And then came the 18^th-century Enlightenment and increasing secularism followed by Revival and 19^th-century middle-class religiosity — and general indifference in the upper and lower classes — and on into the 20^th century with our ups and down of Fundamentalism (a modern reaction against Modernism), evangelical passion, spiritual experimentation … and increasing numbers of loud atheists and louder fans of football or music or American Exceptionalism or other alternatives to religious faith.

And there were similar patterns of relatively secularity and Revival in Judaism, Islam, and other faiths.

      Most people most of the time want at least a little significant meaning to our lives, and this requires some varierty of faith and/or wilful blindness to the actual triviality of the human species — to say nothing of human individuals — in the larger scheme of things. If you’re doing okay, you can successfully slide on through believing in yourself and your luck and your immediate social world and, beyond that — “Nothing in particular.” Or it may be convenient to join a church or get involved with some other religious community.

      Whatever.

      Other people, in other times: in bad times, other situations, other cultures — then you might try the religion thing or return to your ancestral faith.

      And the same will be true for billions of others; and so the trivial wheels of fashion will spin on, and the Great Wheel of historical cycles will grind along, with luck not going into high gear — Crusades or 17^th-century style — and, with luck, not grinding down cities and peoples in the name of the gods or God or something else greater than ourselves.

Divide, Distract, and Rule (7 March 2014 [20 March 2015])

           The current crisis when I first wrote this blog in in early March 2014 was Russian troops pretty well taking over Crimea and threats and posturing over the fate of Ukraine. A year and a bit later, the crisis continues. 

            This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.

            The first bigger context is nuclear.

            The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."

            Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).

            To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.

            On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.

            The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.

            The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.

            This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.

            There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.

            We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.

            So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.

            We do tend to get distracted.

            I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.

            Things haven't changed much.

            There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.

            The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.

            But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)

            The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.

            So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.

            Focus, people, focus:
                        * Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
                        * Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20^th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17^th century.
                        * Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.


            Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

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“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness. 

ISIS and the Fall of Rome: A Parable (16 Aug. 2014)

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            The Christian God won out over those of ancient Rome for many reasons, but most basically because there were significant numbers of people in the Empire who were "frustrated" in Eric Hoffer's definition in The True Believer (1951): "people who, for one reason or another, feel that their lives are spoiled or wasted" — and who felt that their lives could be improved in the Christian Church. Primarily this was because the primitive Church offered community: it continued the Jewish synagog system but improved on it by making Christian congregations more open and "proactive," recruiting actively among the gentiles and soon freeing male gentiles from circumcision and all Christians from Jewish dietary laws and other segregating inconveniences. The Church also offered hope. If it outdid the Jews at offering a structured and protective community, it competed effectively with the Mystery Cults in offering comforting expectations of immortality and a New World Order far better than anything offered by any increasingly corrupt and parasitical Imperial bureaucracy. In a crumbling world — with old oppressions hanging on while much else changed all too fast — the Church offered "Faith, Hope, and Love," and equal to these, immediate community and at least local stability.

            Rome in the West fell to the Germanic tribes not because of some sort of Prussian military prowess in a massive German invasion, but because the Empire was weakened greatly by refugees from the Huns and because (along with other reasons) there were many people in the Western Empire who had no strong inclinations to shore up that increasingly corrupt, distant, and ineffective Imperial rule. Between the Imperial status quo and opportunities among the newcomers, significant numbers joined the barbarians.

            Much of the Roman Empire in the East — pretty much all but the rump state of the Byzantine Empire around Constantinople — fell to the forces of Islam, finally bringing to an end the Ancient World. The dominoes fell not because the Muslim fighters were all that numerous or fanatical, although many were jihadist True Believers, but because large numbers of the peoples in the fading Ancient World had little stake in the Eastern status quo or the tribal system in North Africa; and many middle-class and common folk had much to gain if they went with the flow and submitted to God as Allah, and the power in this world of religio-political Islam. Taxes would be no higher; the new governments were at least honest and energetic, and soon enough the rules were clear with the development of Sharia law; and the new faith was democratically straightforward and hopeful. As Christianity had done earlier, but in a more concentrated way, Islam gave people hope, and gave many people's lives structure and purpose.

            Within a few hundred years, from 623 to the 1050s and beyond, Islam also offered victory and conquest and for Muslims thereafter a glorious history to look back on.

            Nowadays we have The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and/or the Islamic State (IS) and/or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and/or, with some redundancy in English, the State of the Islamic Caliphate (SIC).

            The Caliphate has been taken seriously lately by The Powers that Currently Be, and should be.

            The numbers of ISIS's combatants may be small, but small numbers can undermine whole societies if introduced into larger populations ready to at least acquiesce in radical changes. The holy warriors of the SIC, moreover, are fanatics and constitute a potential core of a mass movement that can inspire other movements in alliance with them or in violent opposition to them. The men of ISIS have helped create a realm of refugees and move in large areas of displaced people: people physically displaced by warfare, others more comfortable, but psychologically displaced in a modern world that seems militantly secular and committed to constant mutability: a threatening new world where "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ... ."

            Rome as "the Eternal City" decayed, was sacked, and decayed again for an age; Rome as an empire fell three times — three counting the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453; and if one seeks successors to Rome, Moscow has a claim, and the Chinese have an argument. From the 1^st century A.H. (anno hegirae, After the Hegira) to Early Modern times, however (say 622 C.E. to 1492) — for a large hunk of human history, the best contender for the successor to Rome was a House of Islam that extended through much of the territory from Spain through Indonesia.

            If the current claimants to the Caliphate can find themselves a Leader with the charisma and skill of a Mohammed or Saladin, combined with the fanaticism of a suicide bomber, we can be in for a period of jihads and crusades that will remake our world, and destroy, minimally, much of our world. 

ISIS: Psycho-Sadistic Thug … Idealists (23 Aug. 2014)

When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted,

and at the sound of the trumpet,

when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed;

so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.

They devoted the city to the Lord

and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it

— men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

(Fall of Jericho, Joshua 6.20-21)

If [you will] not [surrender], why, in a moment look to see

The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand

Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;

Your fathers taken by the silver beards,

And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,

Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused

Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry

At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

(Shakespeare's Henry V threatening the town of Harfleur)

            I don't watch much TV news, and what I do watch is on a screen at a fair distance from an elliptical trainer in the exercise room in my condo complex; so I tend to get the general gist and pattern of things but not always the details. One general pattern is that talking heads on "ISIS" — the guys trying to revive the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria and then the rest of the Dar al-Islam — the talking heads discussing ISIS, now and then fall into talking about these guys as psychopaths, sadists, thugs, and various varieties of madmen.

            That is not a good idea.

            Now I fear ISIS as much as most folk not directly threatened (or a lot more), and I will note immediately that any group of over 10,000 men will include a fair number of murderers and brutes, and State-sponsored or NGO militaries offering weapons and immunity to hurt and kill other people will have far more than a random number of participants who like to hurt and kill people.

            Still, if Hamlet has a point in warning his Mom against laying the flattering unction upon her soul that he is mad — however much Hamlet fails as a paragon of robust mental health — even so we should be careful about inferring mental aberration with ISIS and other terrorists.

            If ISIS are (sic) sadists, they are different from the more statistically normal sort of sadists in consensual sexual interactions with masochists: for sure,
                        * the videos the different groups post to the web differ radically;
                        * it's doubtful that there's a significant ISIS subculture exchanging stories of getting aroused and/or whacking off ever or about anything, kinky or straight; and
                        * there is a crucial difference in occurrences of death, serious injury, wounding, or maiming between terrorists and a spanking club — or even between organized terrorists and your average serial killer.

            If ISIS are thugs and assassins — and they are — it is thugs in a sense that includes the origin of the word in capital "T" Thugs as "an organized gang of professional assassins" and thieves operating for some six hundred years in India — and assassins as highly trained and indoctrinated murderers for a cult with religious and political goals (assassins the Wikipedia entry suggests might be usefully seen as the Knights Templar of Islam).

            The murderous scoundrels of ISIS are, unsimply, a digital-age form of Holy Warriors of the type that have been with us since at least the time of Joshua son of Nun from the late Bronze Age (2^nd millennium BCE), plus warriors, period, for most of human history.

            Men do not need religious fanaticism to commit atrocities. They don't even need strong ideologies. Slavers and the Mongol Hordes were pretty much doing what they did when they killed and immiserated by the millions: business was business, and it was only fairly late that the more respectable descendants of slavers came up with racism to make grand theft on a grand scale more respectable — I'm oversimplifying here, but the point is valid — and it has only been recently that the mass murders of aggressive warfare needed justification: Alexander the Great was "great" because he killed people from Asia Minor into what is now Pakistan and took their lands and property and made whole peoples submit to him. "Back in the day," as we say, conquerors bloody well bragged about their body counts and could be teased about whose was bigger: "When the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with timbrels and lyres. As they danced, they sang: 'Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands'" (1 Samuel 18.6-7).

            And unto Shakespeare's day (ca.1600 CE) "warlike" was a compliment for a person or people, and Henry V in both history and in theatrical presentation was probably seen by most Englishfolk as an unambiguous hero for going out and killing French soldiers — although things got complex when Henry had rich POW's killed and maybe got ambguous when he threatened to spit infants upon pikes. (One can say without flattery that Shakespeare's views were rather more nuanced than those of your average Elizabethan groundling, or Duke.)

            Still, fanaticism helps raise the body-counts and misery indexes, and no fanaticism is stronger than that old time religion when combined with variations on modern nationalism.

            And ISIS is moving into an ideal world for fanaticism: a world full of physically and/or psychologically and spiritually displaced people — including many young men — looking for meaning, some sort of goal. ISIS can offer that: the ideal of the Caliphate, Islam returned to its proper glory, individuals returned to community and a meaningful life.

            Oddly, perhaps grotesquely, one of the most important ideas for understanding 21^st-century Islamist extremists, and fanatics of other faiths (religious and otherwise), may be a 19^th-century woman's comment on a 16^th-century Spanish mystic, George Eliot's comments on St. Teresa of Ávila in Eliot's Prelude to Middlemarch (1871-72): "Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life [….] Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self."

            ISIS will probably be crushed as too extreme for its time. But there is a good chance that it will prepare the ground for a Mass Movement to follow, one that promises and threatens to"change the world, re-arrange the world," and (to the horror of those of us who grew up on Sixties protest) return it to a past-tense eutopia of religious purity and purpose.


            The Holy Warriors of ISIS are a deadly peril not because they are madmen — psychopaths and sadists and thugs — but because they are bringing warfare back to what may be its barbarous norm, and doing so as heavily armed and fanatically dedicated idealists.