Monthly Archives: October 2014

Cognitive disinhibition: the kernel of genius and madness

Dean Keith Simonton writes: When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

Nash is hardly the only so-called mad genius in history. Suicide victims like painters Vincent Van Gogh and Mark Rothko, novelists Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, and poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath all offer prime examples. Even ignoring those great creators who did not kill themselves in a fit of deep depression, it remains easy to list persons who endured well-documented psychopathology, including the composer Robert Schumann, the poet Emily Dickinson, and Nash. Creative geniuses who have succumbed to alcoholism or other addictions are also legion.

Instances such as these have led many to suppose that creativity and psychopathology are intimately related. Indeed, the notion that creative genius might have some touch of madness goes back to Plato and Aristotle. But some recent psychologists argue that the whole idea is a pure hoax. After all, it is certainly no problem to come up with the names of creative geniuses who seem to have displayed no signs or symptoms of mental illness.

Opponents of the mad genius idea can also point to two solid facts. First, the number of creative geniuses in the entire history of human civilization is very large. Thus, even if these people were actually less prone to psychopathology than the average person, the number with mental illness could still be extremely large. Second, the permanent inhabitants of mental asylums do not usually produce creative masterworks. The closest exception that anyone might imagine is the notorious Marquis de Sade. Even in his case, his greatest (or rather most sadistic) works were written while he was imprisoned as a criminal rather than institutionalized as a lunatic.

So should we believe that creative genius is connected with madness or not? Modern empirical research suggests that we should because it has pinpointed the connection between madness and creativity clearly. The most important process underlying strokes of creative genius is cognitive disinhibition — the tendency to pay attention to things that normally should be ignored or filtered out by attention because they appear irrelevant. [Continue reading…]

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Brazil plans to lay trans-Atlantic cable free from NSA surveillance and U.S.-made technology

Bloomberg reports: Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.

The cable is being overseen by state-owned telecommunications company Telecomunicacoes Brasileiras SA, known as Telebras. Even though Telebras’s suppliers include U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Telebras President Francisco Ziober Filho said in an interview that the cable project can be built without any U.S. companies.

The potential to exclude U.S. vendors illustrates the fallout that is starting to unfold from revelations last year that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on international leaders like Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Germany’s Angela Merkel to gather intelligence on terror suspects worldwide.

“The issue of data integrity and vulnerability is always a concern for any telecom company,” Ziober said. The NSA leaks last year from contractor Edward Snowden prompted Telebras to step up audits of all foreign-made equipment to check for security vulnerabilities and accelerated the country’s move toward technological self-reliance, he said. [Continue reading…]

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U.S., Iran relations move to détente

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration and Iran, engaged in direct nuclear negotiations and facing a common threat from Islamic State militants, have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year, according to senior U.S. and Arab officials.

The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates who are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State. Sunni Arab leaders view the threat posed by Shiite Iran as equal to or greater than that posed by the Sunni radical group Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Israel contends the U.S. has weakened the terms of its negotiations with Iran and played down Tehran’s destabilizing role in the region.

Over the past decade, Washington and Tehran have engaged in fierce battles for influence and power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan fueled by the U.S. overthrow of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring revolutions that began in late 2010. U.S. officials still say the option of military action remains on the table to thwart Iran’s nuclear program.

But recent months have ushered in a change as the two countries have grown into alignment on a spectrum of causes, chief among them promoting peaceful political transitions in Baghdad and Kabul and pursuing military operations against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to these officials.

The Obama administration also has markedly softened its confrontational stance toward Iran’s most important nonstate allies, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Lebanese militant and political organization, Hezbollah. American diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry , negotiated with Hamas leaders through Turkish and Qatari intermediaries during cease-fire talks in July that were aimed at ending the Palestinian group’s rocket attacks on Israel, according to senior U.S. officials.

U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly tipped off Lebanese law-enforcement bodies close to Hezbollah about threats posed to Beirut’s government by Sunni extremist groups, including al Qaeda and its affiliate Nusra Front in Syria, Lebanese and U.S. officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Theo Padnos, an American writer, recounts being kidnapped, tortured and released in Syria

In a New York Times magazine feature article, Theo Padnos is described as a journalist, but his form of inquiry has gone far beyond the terrains explored by conventional news gatherers.

In 2004, when the United States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the West often seemed to lose its way. I began my studies in a neighborhood mosque, then enrolled in a religious school popular among those who dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam. Later, I moved to Syria to study at a religious academy in Damascus. I began to write a book about my time in Yemen — about the mosques and the reading circles that formed after prayer and the dangerous religious feeling that sometimes grew around them.

At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, I wrote a few articles from Damascus, then returned to Vermont in the summer of 2012.

One of those articles was a fascinating piece that appeared in The New Republic in October 2011.

In the New York Times, Padnos now recounts the last two years in which he was held in captivity by Jabhat al-Nusra after being kidnapped in late 2012 shortly after returning to Syria. Towards the end of his article (read the whole piece), he writes:

Earlier, in March [this year], the Nusra Front commanders in Deir al-Zour put a pair of Islamic State commanders in the cells on either side of mine. Because their religious learning was beyond question, the jail administrators allowed us to speak [previously Padnos had been forbidden to speak to fellow captives], provided it was about Islam. During this period, I occasionally brought up the “You killed my men, I must kill yours” logic in which the Muslims of the region seemed trapped. My cell neighbors were well placed to have an opinion. Abu Dhar, on my left, previously of Al Qaeda in Iraq, subsequently of the Nusra Front, lately of the Islamic State, had been a weapons trafficker. Abu Amran, on my right, had the same credentials and bragged of having been responsible for explosions that killed dozens — perhaps hundreds — of Syrians and Iraqis.

“But surely,” I said, “this violence is not good for Islam.” They temporized. In their view, the fight between Baghdadi [the leader of ISIS] and the Man of Learning [Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, a high commander in the Nusra Front] amounted to mere childishness. Abu Dhar and Abu Amran were almost too embarrassed to speak of it. Yet the explosions and sniper killings that both groups espoused were justifiable — even wise. Assad was bound to slink away into the undergrowth. The battle against his forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which the believers would prevail against the unbelievers.

“After we conquer Jerusalem, we will conquer Rome,” Abu Amran told me.

“No one is trying to conquer you,” I said. “Why do you want to conquer everybody?”

The conquerors had come to Syria in the past, Abu Amran answered. “They are sure to come again.” He spoke of the oil fields over which the West slavered, the archaeological treasures and the rise of Islam, which the world’s governments — all of them unbelievers, especially the Middle Eastern ones — could not abide.

“If Obama bombs the believers here, we will bomb you there,” Abu Amran told me. We have our Tomahawk missiles too, they said, referring to human beings. Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying, “He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they wore large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems in the hallways. It would be a mistake to assume that only Syrians are educating their children in this manner. The Nusra Front higher-ups were inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they want to teach the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighborhood and subway station back home. They want these Westerners to train their 8-year-olds to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State had done in Syria and Iraq. There, Western Muslims would at last live with dignity, under a true Quranic dispensation.

During my discussions with senior Nusra Front fighters, I would force them to confront the infinity of violence that this dream implied. “O.K., perhaps you have a point,” they would say. “Anyway, we only want to dispense with Bashar. We must build our caliphate here first. Provided the West doesn’t kill us, we won’t kill you.”

“Will your caliphate have schools?” I would ask. “Hospitals? Roads?”

“Yes, of course.” But not one of them seemed interested in repairing the mile after mile of destroyed cityscape encountered during any voyage in Syria. Not one seemed interested in recruiting teachers and doctors — or at least the kinds of teachers and doctors whose reading ventured beyond the Quran. They wanted bigger, more spectacular explosions. They wanted fleets of Humvees. Humvees don’t need roads. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Kurdish fighters cross Turkish border into Syria in battle against ISIS

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Iraqi Kurdish fighters have crossed the Turkish border to join fighters in Syria pushing back the attack by Islamic State (Isis) militants on the border town of Kobani.

More than 80 peshmerga fighters who arrived at the Sanliurfa airport in the early hours of the morning have reached Kobani.

The remaining 70 – who set off from Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, on Tuesday – are still on the road in Turkey, driving in a convoy carrying heavy artillery and weapons along with armoured vehicles and ambulances. They crossed from Iraq into Turkey at Habur on Wednesday morning where they were met by enthusiastic crowds and Turkish security forces. The convoy is expected to arrive in Syria later on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS uses intelligence to purge opponents

Ali Mamouri reports: The Islamic State (IS) differs from its predecessors and similar groups by running a powerful intelligence apparatus that is strong and has plenty of security experience acquired by intelligence officers from the previous regime. The IS intelligence apparatus carries out various types of operations, similar to other intelligence apparatuses around the world. One of its most important operations is to monitor and identify its opponents, to eliminate them immediately and to avoid the possibility of the Iraqi government, and other local and regional opposing parties, to infiltrate its intelligence apparatus, or a military opposition to emerge on its territory.

Based on IS operations, the list of people to eliminate includes tribal sheikhs who have previously cooperated with the government, members of the Awakening movement who have participated in fighting jihadist groups in the past, clerics who oppose IS’ extremism and anyone suspected of delivering security information to governmental parties or other cooperating parties.

The policy of eliminating opponents as soon as they take over large areas is considered an established IS method that was adopted when it evolved in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. In addition to the security reasons, this technique is also based on IS’ extremist Salafist principles, which aim to purge the land of any opposition party, to create a unified Salafist community without religious or political differences. [Continue reading…]

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The Sunni town Iraqi forces destroyed in order to save it from ISIS

The Washington Post reports: Iraq renamed this town on the banks of the Euphrates this week to reflect the triumph of its security forces here against Islamic State militants, who were driven out last week. Jurf al-Sakhar, or “rocky bank,” became Jurf al-Nasr, or “victory bank.”

But a visit to the Sunni settlement Tuesday laid bare the huge cost of that victory. The town is now emptied of its 80,000 residents, and building after building has been annihilated — from airstrikes, bombings and artillery fire.

After four months of battles between the Islamic State and the Iraqi army, about 10,000 pro-government Shiite militiamen were poured into the area for a final push, according to Hadi al-Amiri, who leads the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade and coordinated the operation. Defeating the militants involved clearing out all of the residents and leaving the town near-flattened, underscoring the challenge the Shiite-led government faces in areas where demographics do not work in its favor. [Continue reading…]

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Only Syrian opposition and peshmerga can save Kobane claims Turkish PM

Reuters reports: Turkey cannot be expected to send troops to defend the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani and only Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Syria’s own moderate opposition can save it, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

U.S. warplanes have been bombing Islamic State positions near Kobani for weeks, but air strikes alone will not be enough to repel the insurgents, Davutoglu said.

“Saving Kobani, retaking Kobani and some area around Kobani from ISIS, there’s a need for a military operation,” he said in an interview with the BBC broadcast on Tuesday.

But made clear neither Turkey nor Western allies would commit troops.

“If they (international coalition) don’t want to send their ground troops, how can they expect Turkey to send Turkish ground troops with the same risks on our border,” Davutoglu said. [Continue reading…]

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1,800 radical German Muslims now in Syria, Iraq

The Jerusalem Post reports: Germany’s domestic intelligence agency severely underestimated the number of radical German Muslims who are fighting for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, a Frankfurt-based newspaper reported.

The previous estimate of 450 combatants fighting for the Islamic State should be increased to 1,800, an unnamed agent of the domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAZ) newspaper in Sunday’s report. “We have to multiply the official number by four, in order to get a realistic number,” the agent said.

Nearly 40 women and a 13-year-old boy are among those who left to join the fight in Syria, German media reported.

The Germans who left for Syria and Iraq were identified as Sunnis who adhere to the strict fundamentalist school of Salafism. As many as 200 German Muslim departed North Rhine-Westphalia state to fight in the Middle East, according to FAZ. [Continue reading…]

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The success of Tunisian secularists might not be advancing democracy

Monica Marks writes: A self-styled, secular, modernist party called Nidaa Tounes won against the Islamist Ennahda party in the Tunisian election this week. For many, the subsequent headline – “Secularist party wins Tunisia elections” – will seem more impressive than the fact Tunisia just completed its second genuinely competitive, peaceful elections since 2011.

Indeed, in a region wracked by extremism and civil war, the secularists’ victory will strike many as further proof that Tunisia is moving forward and is the sole bright spot in a gloomy region. Some may prematurely celebrate, yet again, the death of political Islam, arguing that Tunisians achieved through the ballot box what Egyptians achieved through a popular coup, rejecting the Brotherhood and its cousin-like movements once and for all. We should exercise caution, however, in labelling Nidaa Tounes’s victory part of a seamless sweep of democratic achievements, or seeing Sunday’s vote as a clear referendum against all varieties of political Islam.

Despite feeling kinship with the party because of its secular label, westerners understand surprisingly little about Nidaa Tounes, mainly because they’ve tended to hold the magnifying glass of critical inquiry up to Islamists but not secularists over the past three years. Counter-intuitively, Nidaa Tounes’s internal structure is noticeably more authoritarian than Ennahda, which boasts representative decision-making structures from its grassroots to national leadership. [Continue reading…]

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The quantum edge

Johnjoe McFadden writes: The point of the most famous thought-experiment in quantum physics is that the quantum world is different from our familiar one. Imagine, suggested the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, that we seal a cat inside a box. The cat’s fate is linked to the quantum world through a poison that will be released only if a single radioactive atom decays. Quantum mechanics says that the atom must exist in a peculiar state called ‘superposition’ until it is observed, a state in which it has both decayed and not decayed. Furthermore, because the cat’s survival depends on what the atom does, it would appear that the cat must also exist as a superposition of a live and a dead cat until somebody opens the box and observes it. After all, the cat’s life depends on the state of the atom, and the state of the atom has not yet been decided.

Yet nobody really believes that a cat can be simultaneously dead and alive. There is a profound difference between fundamental particles, such as atoms, which do weird quantum stuff (existing in two states at once, occupying two positions at once, tunnelling through impenetrable barriers etc) and familiar classical objects, such as cats, that apparently do none of these things. Why don’t they? Simply put, because the weird quantum stuff is very fragile.

Quantum mechanics insists that all particles are also waves. But if you want to see strange quantum effects, the waves all have to line up, so that the peaks and troughs coincide. Physicists call this property coherence: it’s rather like musical notes being in tune. If the waves don’t line up, the peaks and troughs cancel each other out, destroying coherence, and you won’t see anything odd. When you’re dealing only with a single particle’s wave, on the other hand, it’s easy to keep it ‘in tune’ – it has to line up only with itself. But lining up the waves of hundreds, millions or trillions of particles is pretty much impossible. And so the weirdness gets cancelled out inside big objects. That’s why there doesn’t seem to be anything very indeterminate about a cat.

Nevertheless, wrote Schrödinger in What Is Life? (1944), some of life’s most fundamental building blocks must, like unobserved radioactive atoms, be quantum entities able to perform counterintuitive tricks. Indeed, he went on to propose that life is different from the inanimate world precisely because it inhabits a borderland between the quantum and classical world: a region we might call the quantum edge. [Continue reading…]

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The collapse of order in the Middle East

freemanIn a speech delivered in Washington DC today, Chas Freeman said: Da`ish [ISIS] and the 15,000 foreign jihadis it has attracted are an existential threat to Arab societies and a potential menace to Muslim societies everywhere. Da`ish poses no comparable threat to the United States. Some Americans argue therefore that Da`ish doesn’t matter. A few suggest that, because tight oil and shale gas production is making North America energy self-sufficient, what happens in the Middle East as a whole should also no longer matter much to Americans. But the Persian Gulf is where international oil prices are set. If you doubt this, ask an American tight oil producer what’s happening in today’s energy markets and why. Without stability in West Asia, the global economy is also unstable.

Da`ish aspires not only to destroy the states of the Mashriq – the Arab East – but to conquer their territories and use their resources to mount attacks on the United States, European countries, Russia, and China. It wants to get its hands on the world’s major energy reserves. Its depredations are a current threat only to stability in West Asia, but its recruitment efforts are as global as its aspirations. Quite aside from the responsibility the United States bears for creating the conditions in which this dangerous cult could be born and flourish, Da`ish threatens American interests abroad today. It promises to threaten American domestic tranquility tomorrow. It sees inflicting harm on the West as a central element of its mission.

For all these reasons, Da`ish cannot be ignored by the United States or other nations outside the Middle East. It requires a response from us. But Da`ish must be actively countered first and foremost by those it targets within the region, not by the United States and its Western allies. This means that our response must be measured, limited, and calculated to avoid relieving regional players of the primary responsibility for protecting themselves from the menace to them that Da`ish represents.

Muslims – whether Shiite or Sunni or Arab, Kurd, Persian, or Turk – now have an expanding piece of Hell in their part of the Earth, a growing foulness near the center of Islam. It is almost certainly a greater threat to all of them than they have ever posed to each other. Da`ish will not be contained and defeated unless the nations and sects on its regional target list – Shiite and Sunni alike – all do their part. We should not delude ourselves. The obstacles to this happening are formidable.

Virtually every group now fighting or being victimized in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon has engaged in or been accused of terrorism by the others. Sectarian violence continues to stoke hatred in the region. The religious animosities between Shi`ites and Sunnis are more intense than ever. The geopolitical rivalry between Iran and the Gulf Arabs remains acute. The political resentments between Turks, Kurds, and Arabs and between Arabs and Persians are entrenched. Each describes the other as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Unity of command, discipline, and morale are the keys to both military and political success. Da`ish has all three. Its opponents do not. Some are dedicated to the defense of Shiite privilege. Others assign priority to dislodging Shiite or secular authority. Some insist on regime change. Others seek to prevent it. A few support Islamist democratic movements. Others seek to suppress and eradicate them. Some fear terrorism from the victims and enemies of Da`ish more than they fear Da`ish itself. Most treat opposing Da`ish as a secondary strategic objective or a means of enlisting American and other foreign support in the achievement of other priorities, not as their primary aim.

With few exceptions, the states of the region have habitually looked to outside powers for leadership as well as firepower and manpower with which to respond to major security challenges. Despite vast imports of foreign weapons systems, confidence in outside backing has enabled the countries in the region to assume that they could avoid ultimate responsibility for their own defense, relying instead on their ability to summon their American and European security partners in times of crisis. But only a coalition with a strong Muslim identity can hope to contain and shrink Da`ish.

There is no such coalition at present. Every actor in the region has an agenda that is only partially congruent with the Da`ish-related agendas of others. And every actor focuses on the reasons it cannot abide or work with some or all of the others, not on exploring the points it has in common with them. [Continue reading…]

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The crisis in U.S.-Israel relations is officially here

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” this official said, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his nickname.

This comment is representative of the gloves-off manner in which American and Israeli officials now talk about each other behind closed doors, and is yet another sign that relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments have moved toward a full-blown crisis. The relationship between these two administrations— dual guarantors of the putatively “unbreakable” bond between the U.S. and Israel—is now the worst it’s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran, should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.

The fault for this breakdown in relations can be assigned in good part to the junior partner in the relationship, Netanyahu, and in particular, to the behavior of his cabinet. Netanyahu has told several people I’ve spoken to in recent days that he has “written off” the Obama administration, and plans to speak directly to Congress and to the American people should an Iran nuclear deal be reached. For their part, Obama administration officials express, in the words of one official, a “red-hot anger” at Netanyahu for pursuing settlement policies on the West Bank, and building policies in Jerusalem, that they believe have fatally undermined Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.

Over the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and “Aspergery.” (These are verbatim descriptions; I keep a running list.) But I had not previously heard Netanyahu described as a “chickenshit.” [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish women in Kobane are fighting for the rights of women everywhere

Meysa Abdo, the commander of the YPG Kurdish resistance in Kobane (she is also known by the nom de guerre Narin Afrin) writes: Since Sept. 15, we, the people of the Syrian town of Kobani, have been fighting, outnumbered and outgunned, against an all-out assault by the army of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Yet despite a campaign that has intensified in the past month, including the deployment of United States-made tanks and armored vehicles, the Islamic State has not been able to break the resistance of Kobani’s fighters.

We are defending a democratic, secular society of Kurds, Arabs, Muslims and Christians who all face an imminent massacre.

Kobani’s resistance has mobilized our entire society, and many of its leaders, including myself, are women. Those of us on the front lines are well aware of the Islamic State’s treatment of women. We expect women around the world to help us, because we are fighting for the rights of women everywhere. We do not expect them to come to join our fight here (though we would be proud if any did). But we do ask women to promote our case and to raise awareness of our situation in their own countries, and to pressure their governments to help us.

We are thankful to the coalition for its intensified airstrikes against Islamic State positions, which have been instrumental in limiting the ability of our enemies to use tanks and heavy artillery. But we had been fighting without any logistical assistance from the outside world until the limited coalition airdrops of weapons and supplies on Oct. 20. Airdrops of supplies should continue, so that we do not run out of ammunition.

None of that changes the reality that our weapons still cannot match those of the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS — a faceless organization that stands for nothing

Icons are inescapable — even for those who make it their business to destroy them.

For Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden was an iconic figure. The American effort to hunt him down had more to do with the need to destroy his image than to thwart a terrorist.

So who or what stands as the central symbol, the image around which ISIS gravitates?

In early July, ISIS released a short video showing the stone-faced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi preaching in a mosque in Mosul. Even if this man happens to be a brilliant military strategist, he possesses no obvious charisma. He looks somewhat less personable than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Caliph-Ibrahim

Badhdadi’s brief appearance carried much less significance than the arrival of a new caliph and seemed to have more to do with proving the existence of what was and remains a shadowy figure.

Based on the little he has revealed about himself, his followers have clearly committed themselves through acts of blind allegiance.

The head of ISIS is for all practical purposes invisible.

Moreover, in spite of the fact that ISIS has recruited fighters from dozens of countries, many from the West and many speaking English, from throughout its ranks it appears they have no one competent to serve as a spokesman. Instead they rely on the face and voice of their British hostage, John Cantlie, whose BBC-English offers them credibility they fear they would lack if they dared represent themselves.

ISIS has no face of its own.

Likewise, their media offerings unintentionally pay homage to American cable news and Hollywood, as though there could be no means of communication superior to the crude aesthetic conventions that have been globalized by CNN and Warner Brothers.

On the battlefield, nothing appears to have been a source of greater pride than ISIS’s ability to capture and use American-made military hardware.

ISIS is not American-made in the sense intended by conspiracy theorists, yet in ways its followers would be loath to acknowledge it is in large part an American product — first and foremost as a product of America’s misadventure in Iraq, but also in the multiple ways in which in leans upon American culture.

If there is one image that ISIS has made its own and that serves to symbolize everything ISIS stands for, it is that of grinning men holding aloft freshly severed human heads.

Thanks mostly to Twitter, these are the images we get confronted by with a frequency that would until recently have seemed unimaginable.

Ask anyone in the world about ISIS and the one thing everyone knows is that decapitation is the ISIS signature.

As a symbol of the enemy vanquished, the severed head represents a victory more absolute than unconditional surrender. As such, ISIS presumably engages in these acts of ritual slaughter in order to display its uncompromising, ruthless power.

But the symbolism also cuts another way: the organization with an invisible head and no public face of its own, through decapitation represents its own headlessness.

Furthermore, through its subjugation of women by slavery and rape, ISIS manifests its relationship with the powers of creation: its powers are solely destructive.

What does ISIS ultimately stand for? Death, and little else.

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How the Left abandoned the Kurds by getting stuck up its anti-imperialist cul-de-sac

Yasin Sunca writes: One can simply put hundreds of reasons as to why the left has to oppose and react against the ISIS and what they have been doing to innocent people throughout last two years. However, those who are supposed to speak out against the ISIS, primarily the left wing parties and organisations, have simply failed to come up with a comprehensive approach, are even devoid of understanding what is going on exactly and, unfortunately for them, are stuck in the orthodox interpretation of socialism against imperialism. They have once again stuck to the marginal track to blame their respective governments as imperialist, which in fact, means almost nothing, either for the government or for the society.

In the specific case of the ongoing resistance of the Kurds in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) the Popular Protection Units (YPG) have been resisting against both the brutal attacks of the jihadists and the military aggressions of the Syrian regime. The Kurds have not opted for cooperation either with the regime or the mainstream opposition groups due to very convincing and understandable reasons. The regime has been oppressing the Kurds, among others, for a very long time and therefore, it was impossible for the Kurds to go along with the regime politically. However, facing political and military difficulties in the context of the ongoing war, the regime decided to focus on the strategic areas in their war with the opposition groups and intelligibly, have not carried out heavy military offensives against the Kurdish self-declared cantons, compared to other regions of the country. Furthermore, the declaration of the Kurdish cantons in Rojava would pose certain problems to Turkey which has been amongst the most vocally critical countries of the Syrian regime. Thus, we can talk about a political convergence between the regime and the Kurds rather than a strategically motivated agreement. Besides, the Kurds could not have cooperated with the mainline Syrian opposition because of two core issues. The first, the Arab opposition have not recognised any collective rights of the Kurds and postponed all Kurdish demands to a probable post-Assad period. The second, the Arab opposition did not have a clear agenda for the future of Syria. The question such as whether it would be a new dictatorship or a democracy has not a clear and convincing answer and the Kurds remained sceptical about the will of the opposition in relation to democratisation.

Taking all this background into account, the Kurds opted for a third line policy and started to build their cantons with a new democratic understanding, inclusive of all the different factions of the population. The Kurdish cantons have never carried out any offensives against any group unless a military attack was the case. The current resistance of the Kobane canton is due to the brutal attack of the jihadist ISIS and it is a war of self-defence. The Kurds are carrying out a socialist experiment in the Middle-East, one of the most challenging regions of the world, and the international left is equally responsible for the protection of this emerging socialist hope. This experiment needs the unconditional support of the socialists of the world and internationalist solidarity. (For those who are interested in the new model in Rojava here is an article, available online: http://roarmag.org/2014/07/rojava-autonomy-syrian-kurds/)

However, the left wing parties and groups in Europe are far from understanding what is going on exactly in Kurdistan and in Kobane, nor do they have any plans to understand the ideological background of the Rojava Cantons. They have to admit that they were unable to understand the third line policy and, just like the mainstream media have been doing, positioned the Kurds together with the Assad regime despite the fact that the Kurds clearly declaring and practically manifesting a billion times that they are an opposition group. They kept on blaming the Kurds to be the proxy of the regime. Besides, some other groups adopted a restrictive approach and claimed that if the Kurds are not with Bashar al-Assad then they have to be with the opposition. Yet one should remind people of the fact that being against the regime doesn’t automatically mean accepting all analyses and projections of the mainline opposition in Syria. Moreover, the mainline opposition in Syria is also supported by “imperialists” against the regime. So, the Kurds clearly understood the right place to stand was a third line. [Continue reading…]

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