Days of Rage.

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The Civil Rights movement in the South encountered a lot of violent resistance. (Birmingham, Alabama became known in some quarters as “Bombingham.”) The United States began to escalate its military commitment to South Vietnam. JFK, RFK, and MLK all were assassinated. Nothing in conventional politics seemed able to stop the momentum. In response, in Summer 1969, things began to boil over on the American Left. Outside the South, the Black Panthers were formed. Some people began to contemplate the “propaganda of the deed,” as the pre-revolutionary Russian dissidents had called bombings and assassinations. Perhaps a 100,000 young people had signed-up with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by 1968. A radical fringe broke away from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over SDS’s rejection of violence. They called themselves The Weathermen. When the Weathermen, called for supporters to stage so-called “Days of Rage” in Chicago in October 1969, only about 200 people showed up. The disappointed Weathermen promptly went underground and launched a terror campaign. Independently of the Weathermen, Sam Melville planted dynamite at a disused United Fruit warehouse in New York. Soon afterward, the Weathermen went underground themselves.

There was a great deal of savagery as well as a great deal of foolishness in the campaign that followed.[1] “Protests and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way,” said Bernardine Dohrn. “We could do [non-fatal fire-bombings] until we were blue in the face, and the government wouldn’t really care,” recalled one Weatherperson years later.[2] So, they opted for something more dramatic. Bombings followed in Berkeley, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York City. In February 1969, a secretary at Pomona College was wounded by bomb. In August 1969, one of Sam Melville’s bombs wounded twenty people in New York. In March 1970 one plan went wrong when a Weather Underground bomb factory in Greenwich Village blew up, killing three dissidents. The Weather Underground announced that it would shift back to non-lethal bombings. Apparently it was safer (for them) that way. In August 1970 a bomb at the University of Wisconsin killed a researcher named Robert Fassnacht. Between May 1971 and January 1972, a “Black Liberation Army” (BLA) killed five policemen around the country and badly wounded two others. In February 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. In May 1974, the Los Angeles police caught up with most of the group. The SLA got shot to bits on live television. In January 1975 the FALN, a terrorist group advocating Puerto Rican independence, launched a campaign that would run for eight years and set off 130 bombs. Finally, in October 1981, the BLA tried to rob a Brink’s armored car outside New York City. In the robbery and in a confrontation with the police afterward, three police officers were killed.

Brian Burroughs charitably describes the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army, and a group of Puerto Rican nationalists as “young people who fatally misjudged America’s political winds and found themselves trapped in an unwinnable struggle they were too proud or too stubborn to give up.” That could be. In “The Searchers” (1956, dir. John Ford), the character played by John Wayne explained why he could not take an oath as a Texas Ranger: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time and I took mine to the Confederate States of America.”

[1] Bryan Burroughs, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin, 2014).

[2] It strikes me as odd to complain that a government one accuses of putting property rights ahead of human rights doesn’t really care about property, but does care about harm to humans. I’m probably missing something.

Toward the cliff.

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In brief compass, the “supply side” theories of the Reagan administration de-stabilized the traditional budget by cutting taxes without cutting expenditures.[1] Deficits expanded. However, observers were more concerned about the budget deficits that would be driven by the cost of entitlements—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—for Baby Boomers. If one takes as a given that government can only account for some fixed share of GDP, then the growth of entitlements will crowd out spending on other areas: defense and the wide range of government functions labeled as “discretionary spending.”[2] These entitlements are so popular and the mythology surrounding them so powerful that the elected representatives in a democratic polity were unwilling to address them. The problem festered.

Then came the Great Recession. In 2009, the government’s deficit peaked at over 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2013 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the deficit would fall to 2.1 percent of GDP. Moreover in September 2013 the CBO projected that short-term government deficits would shrink, thanks to the economy’s recovery from the Great Recession and the cuts enforced by “zee zequester.” So, the deficit has been mastered. We’re good, right?

Well, no. The deficit arising from the Great Recession has been mastered. However, that was a matter of course. Counter-cyclical deficit spending has been the normal response to recessions for half a century. Economic activity revises, spending falls, and tax revenues increase, so the deficit goes away.[3]

However, the deficit arising from entitlement programs has not been mastered. Or addressed. Or even acknowledged. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are about to rise sharply in total cost as the fabled Baby Boomers begin to retire in droves. From 1973 to 2013, spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security averaged 7 percent of GDP per year; the CBO projects that they will rise to 14 percent of GDP by 2038. By 2023, government spending will rise to 3.5 percent of GDP; by 2038 it would reach 6.5 percent. The trouble is that the economy will not grow as much as does government spending. Moreover, federal revenues are projected to rise by only 2 percent of GDP over the same period. Hence, this will drive up the deficit from the 38 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that formed the average from 1968 to 2008 to 100 percent of GDP in 2038.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats have shown any willingness during the Obama Administration to address this important long-term problem. The administration has concentrated tis efforts on raising taxes on the higher income groups, rather than on trying to contain or reduce costs. The Republicans have concentrated on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, rather than on trying to address the ballooning costs of entitlement programs.

Nor is it likely to emerge as a major issue in the 2016 presidential election. Older people vote in larger percentages than do younger people. No one has yet formulated a way to deliver the same quality of medical care or retirement income at a much lower cost. No one yet has formulated a way to raise substantially larger tax revenues from all Americans.

[1] Jackie Calmes, “Budget Office Warns That Deficits Will Rise Again Because Cuts Are Misdirected,” NYT, 18 September 2013.

[2] Obviously, one does not have to agree that some fixed share of the economy should be devoted to government spending. Certainly Senator Sanders does not.

[3] See Paul Krugman’s terse, withering evaluation of President Obama’s performance in this regard in NYT, 8 May 2015.

Rise of the Machine Minders.

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Back in August 2014, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, got the idea that students returning to college for Fall Term needed to hear his advice on the keys to success.[1] He wrote a column for the New York Times. Here, in a nut-shell, is what he said.[2]

He took as his point of departure the proliferation of “thinking” machines in the economy. Industrial robots threaten factory workers; self-driving vehicles threaten truck drivers, if not other motorists; drones threaten airline pilots, did they but know it; e-discovery research software threatens lawyers and college professors. What are we non-mechanicals supposed to do for jobs in this dawning era? What are the keys to success?

Being conscientious is one key. The opportunity to do something and actually doing it are two different things.[3] If students or workers need something more corporeal than a gnawing anxiety to keep them relentlessly on task, they’re in for a bad time.

Listening to the machines is a second key. GPS-based driving instructions delivered by an Oxbridge-educated woman of a certain age are just the beginning.[4] Pretty soon our smart phones will be tuning-up our decision-making in many areas. Deciding, like Doc Boone in ”Stagecoach,” to wave off the warning and have another drink will have a cost.

Remembering that Price reflects the ratio between Supply and Demand is a third key. Stuff that is rare will command a higher price than stuff that is common. In human terms, people need to work on how they present themselves and how they interact with other people.

The Return of Calvinism is a fourth key. Either people are internally motivated or they are externally motivated. If an employer wants to keep down labor costs, then an effective “Atta boy” or “You slime” can replace a bonus as a motivator. People who know which to choose incentive will thrive in the new economy.

Developing a Thick Hide is a fifth key. Computer programs will be able to measure productivity and some other aspects of employee performance.[5] (Not all aspects, just some other aspects.) Workers at every level will get turned into a mathematical formula.[6] You need to be able to learn from a harsh performance review, get up, and move on.

Remembering Harold Lamb is a sixth key. One of his characters was a 17th Century Cossack who bought a pair of expensive leather boots to demonstrate that he had money and then spilled tar on them to demonstrate that at he didn’t care about money. Lots of young workers are libertarian-subversive in this way.

Recognizing that machines under-cut the price advantage of cheap (Asian) human labor is a seventh key. A higher class of Nineteenth Century “machine minders” is on the horizon. That will be good for the right American workers.

Your quick conceiving discontent will have noticed that none of this has anything to do with which major a student chooses. It is all about what kind of person chooses that major.

[1] My guess would be that he was fed up with the stuff that his teaching assistants had been telling him and with the results of the Generals Examinations of the graduate students.

[2] Tyler Cowen, “Who Will Prosper in the New World,” NYT, 1 September 2014.

[3] See: Dorothy Parker.

[4] You ever wonder if people into BDSM choose some German dominatrix’s voice? Just asking.

[5] The SEC wants to track executive compensation against company performance. The first rule for plumbers is that shit runs downhill. The second is to not bite your fingernails.

[6] This will lead to its own disasters. Both life experience and literature indicate that there are non-performers who are vital to the functioning of an organization. So, judgment and experience will be vital.

There will always be an England.

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“There’ll always be an England.”[1] You know why? ‘Cause it’s a country filled with strong-minded flakes, that’s why.

Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899-1971) had a German father and a British mother. She went up to Oxford to study history, then went to grad school there. Her dissertation flunked because it contradicted the argument of one of the readers and her supervisor didn’t have the “cojones” to fight for her. So she settled for tutoring Oxford undergraduates for half the year and travelling throughout Europe the rest of the year. She visited Weimar Berlin a lot, but also travelled throughout Europe. Wiskemann became an ardent critic of Nazi Germany, so the Nazis expelled her in 1936. During the Second World War, she worked for British Intelligence in Switzerland. Here she became the lover of Adam von Trott zu Solz, one of the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. When he left her to return to Germany, he accidentally left behind his gloves. Soon afterward, Von Trott was hanged. She kept the gloves as a momento. After the war she wrote books. When her eye-sight failed, she took her own life.[2]

Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) grew up in Germany and Italy in the Twenties and Thirties.   She got to know many British and French writers on the Riviera. Actually, she was German and only became British through education and a marriage of convenience with a gay British man who married her to prevent her from being sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. (Her discovery that she was a lesbian after her first night with a clumsy, self-absorbed man is hilarious.) Later, she became a writer who reported on British criminal cases, wrote novels, a biography of her friend Alduous Huxley, and a couple of highly-deceptive memoirs.[3]

Patrick Leigh-Fermor (1915-2011) had no talent for coloring inside the lines. He managed to be expelled from a series of “progressive” schools in interwar Britain. Then he failed to gain entry to the British equivalent of West Point. One school report card described him as “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.” In December 1933 he set out to walk from Holland to Istanbul, Turkey. In January 1935 he arrived, having travelled on foot through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania. Later, he fought in a Greek civil war, then served as a British Commando in German-occupied Crete. After the war, he became a travel writer.[4]

Eric Newby (1919-2006) got a good education, but never went near a university. After a couple of years in advertising, he signed on as an apprentice seaman on the square-rigged grain clipper “Moshulu.”[5] In 1938-1939 he made the passage from Belfast to Australia to London in the “last grain race” before the outbreak of the Second World War. He joined the Commandos after the war started, got captured on a raid, escaped from the prison camp, met his future wife, got re-captured, spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Germany, went into the dress trade, got bored, went for a short walk in the Hindu Kush, and became a travel writer.[6]

[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qhLPWcm-0w

[2] See: The Europe I Saw (1968). Her description of a sailing trip along the Croatian coast led me and my wife to a similar adventure.

[3] See: Jigsaw (1989); Quicksands (2005)

[4] See: A Time of Gifts (1977); Between the Woods and the Water (1986); and see also W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), which recounts the 1944 kidnapping of the German commander of the Crete garrison by Leigh Fermor and Moss. You can’t make up this stuff. Or: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKW_9uUwa0

[5][5] Now a floating restaurant on the Philadelphia waterfront. “How are the mighty fallen.” 2 Samuel, 1: 27.

[6] See: The Last Grain Race (1956); A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958); Love and War in the Apennines (1971); and Learning the Ropes (1991).

Casablanca.

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Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. Germany took over Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939. Jews, Marxists, and liberals high-tailed it out of those countries (if they could). Soon, France was awash in refugees desperate to get to anywhere else. Murray Burnett (1910-1997), an American playwright with Jewish relatives in Europe, went over in 1938 to help them out. He picked up a lot of material that he turned into a couple of plays with his fellow writer and wife, Joan Allison (1901-1992).

Then war broke out in Europe. Germany conquered Poland (September 1939), then France and the Low Countries (May-July 1940), then the Balkans (May 1941), and then attacked Russia (June 1941). France set up an authoritarian, right-wing dictatorship and collaborated with Germany. That government was headquartered in the resort-town of Vichy, so people talked about “Vichy France” when referring to the country and its empire. The Japanese, already at war with China, started leaning hard on the British and the Dutch in the Far East. America didn’t want any part of these fights, but could it stay out?

One of the Burnett-Allison plays, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” didn’t get produced, but Irene Diamond, a Warner Brothers story editor was visiting New York in 1941 and she read the script. She persuaded producer Hal Wallis (1898-1946) to buy the movie rights in January 1942.   Hollywood had been leery of making anti-Nazi films while America was neutral. Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States (both December 1941) solved that problem. Wallis drove a rapid writing of the screen-play by the Epstein twins, Julius and Philip; hired Michael Curtiz (1886-1962) to direct; signed-up Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) to star; recruited a Who’s-Who of European refugee actors for the rest of the cast; and pushed through filming in June and July 1942, with an expected release day in May 1943. Then American troops invaded French North Africa and captured Casablanca. It was all over the news, so why waste the free advertising? The movie was rushed into theaters in November 1942. It turned into a slow-burning hit and won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

What is the movie about? One way to see it is as a parable for America’s involvement with the world. The previous love affair in Paris of Rick and Ilsa stands for America’s war “to make the world safe for democracy” in 1917-1918. Ilsa’s mysterious betrayal of Rick stands for the many failings of the Versailles Treaty that ended that war—and set the stage for a new one. Rick playing the odds in his nightclub in Casablanca stands for American neutrality in a world on fire. Victor and Ilsa Lazlo, Captain Renault (the “poor corrupt policeman”), and “Major Strasser of the Third Reich” stand for a nuanced view of Europe: brave, passionate, amused and disabused, and brutally aggressive. Rick’s choice stands for America’s choice: to re-engage or remain disengaged. No choice comes without a cost.

Rick himself stands for a particular way that Americans used to think of themselves. Rick is an idealist who fought against the Italians in Ethiopia and the Nationalists in Spain. He’s also a tough guy and a worldly one. He’s practical and gets things done. He’s on the run from something in his past. Along the way, life has taught him a lot about the darker forms of human behavior. They don’t scare him. He can live in the world the way it is. Not a bad way to be.

The final scene takes place at an airport. The studio didn’t have any airliners available, so it had the props department build a model out of cardboard, then hired a bunch of midgets to play the ground-crew to make the plane look bigger. (I’m not making this up.)

Munich.

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In 1967 Israel lashed out against a gathering flock of vultures (Egypt, Syria, Jordan). In an astonishing triumph, this “Six Day War” put Israel in possession of the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. It also put them in possession of a large population of Arabs and Palestinian refugees cast up by the agony of Israel’s initial creation in 1948. The problem became what to do with the conquered lands and people. Israel offered to “trade land for peace” with its neighbors. The neighbors showed little interest. Meanwhile, the Palestinians launched their own war on Israel through terrorism. In 1972, members of the “Black September” group kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. Most of the captors and all of their captives died in a botched rescue operation by the Germans.

In revenge, Israel launched “Operation Wrath of God.” In theory, the objective was to kill eleven of the “Black September” leaders who were responsible for Munich. The operation went on for years. It killed many more than eleven men. Eventually, the operation wound down.

In 1984, Yuval Aviv, one of the assassination team leaders who then was living in New York and no longer working for Israel’s intelligence agency, became the source for a book about the operation.[1] Soon afterward, HBO brought out a movie based on the book.[2] Then the story languished for almost twenty years.

Then, early in the 21st Century, Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the book and made his own version, “Munich.” Why did Spielberg want to re-make somebody else’s movie? There are a couple of possible answers.

On the one hand, Spielberg has made a bunch of historical movies that can be thought of as grouped in pairs. The pairs deliver different perspectives on the large historical subjects. Thus “The Empire of the Sun” (1987) and “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) consider the legacy of surviving traumatic events in the Second World War; “Amistad” (1997) and “Lincoln” (2012) deal with the fight against slavery, a problem which continues to haunt America; and “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Munich” (2005) turn on the struggle for survival by Jews in a hostile world. In the case of the latter two movies, “Schindler’s List” made an argument for Israel as a Jewish refuge; “Munich” asked how Israel differed from other states.

On the other hand, maybe the movie isn’t about Israel at all. Maybe it’s about America. At the end of “Munich” the World Trade Center’s “Twin Towers” are visible in the backdrop. On 9/1101 Al Qaeda terrorists attacked sites in Washington and New York, most famously the WTC. The United States responded by invading Afghanistan in an effort to get Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden. Missing their punch, the Americans became bogged down in a long struggle that hasn’t yet ended.[3] Then, in 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq on the grounds that the country possessed a program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that contact had been alleged between al Qaeda and Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. Here the Americans became embroiled in an even worse conflict than in Afghanistan.[4]

Where does vengeance lead? Does it lead to “justice” and “closure”? Does it lead to an open-ended conflict with an ever-rising death toll? Are we captives of our past experiences? Are we even conscious of how our views of the past shape our present actions and our future?

[1] George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

[2] “Sword of Gideon” (1986, dir. Michael Anderson). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvemVhD_M3k

[3] See: “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Lone Survivor” (2013, dir. Peter Berg).

[4] See: “Generation Kill” (2008, HBO); “The Hurt Locker” (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow); “Green Zone” (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass); “American Sniper” (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood).

The Secret History of Mother’s Day.

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Ann Reeves (1832-1905) was one hell of a mother. She was born in western Virginia, married a merchant named Granville Reeves, bore 11-13 children[1] and lost all but four of them to childhood diseases. These deaths got her interested in maternal health and public sanitation. In the nature of reform movements of the time, most of her efforts concentrated on “voluntaristic” education directed at local mothers. She proved to be tireless. During the Civil War and afterward, Ann Reeves clung to a strictly non-partisan stance that offended partisans, but eventually won wide respect. In 1868 she sponsored a “Mothers Friendship Day” in Taylor County, West Virginia to bring together the veterans and their families of the two sides in the “recent unpleasantness.”

Other people shared the general notion of celebrating mothers, even if they did not follow the same exact course. In 1870, the suffragette Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) published a “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called on the women of the world to unite for peace. Subsequently, she campaigned for 2 June to be celebrated as Mother’s Day.” Her efforts bore no fruit.[2]

Anna Reeves’ surviving children migrated to Philadelphia, where they prospered. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis (1864-1948) spent two years at what would later become Mary Baldwin College, then went to Philadelphia to join her brothers. An intelligent, determined woman like her mother, Anna became the advertising editor for an insurance company. Despite the physical distance between mother and daughter, they remained in close contact through the now-lost skill of written correspondence. When her husband died in 1902 Ann Jarvis moved to Philadelphia herself. She spent her last days in the City of Brotherly Love. She died there on 8 May 1905.[3]

In 1908, on the third anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna Jarvis began a campaign to make Mother’s Day a national holiday. She chose the second Sunday in May as the date because it was the day on which her mother had died. She chose the white carnation as the day’s symbol because ti had been her mother’s favorite flower. She lobbied church groups, businesses, and all levels of government to this end. Her first convert was John Wanamaker, the master of the great Philadelphia department store. Wanamaker held a service in his store’s auditorium to coincide with a service held by Jarvis in her home town of Grafton, West Virginia. Fifteen thousand people attended. Soon the West Virginia legislature got on board. Other states followed. In May 1913 Congress passed a resolution calling on all government officials to wear a white carnation to celebrate Mother’s Day. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday.

Florists, candy-makers, and greeting-card publishers loved the new holiday.[4] (Later on, jewelers, restaurant owners, and spa-operators came to love it as well.) This appalled Anna Jarvis. She regarded greeting cards as a convenience for people too lazy to write a letter. She spent the rest of her life shoveling sand against the commercial tide. In 1948, just before her death, she was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace for publically protesting against the commercialization of Mother’s Day. Worn out and aging, she died in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on the day before Thanksgiving, 1948. She had never married, so Mother’s Day was her only child.

[1] Nineteenth Century Southern record-keeping being what it was.

[2] Even less than did her song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

[3] I am, by pure coincidence, writing this near Philadelphia on 8 May 2015.

[4] Later came Father’s Day and National Grandparent’s Day.

The Islamic Brigades II.

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In 2007, more than twenty men—most from the large Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis–went to join Al Shabab, the Somali Islamist militia. Federal authorities launched an investigation. They ended up prosecuting eight men as facilitators and recruiters.

In recent years, eight young men from the Norwegian town of Frederikstad have gone to Syria. Norwegian authorities have investigated the role of an Islamist group called Prophet’s Umma for its role in recruiting jihadis and facilitating their movement toward the battlefront.

Investigating the recruiters and facilitators is important to the fight against radical Islamism. So, too, is trying to understand why some people are open to recruitment. There aren’t any good answers here so far. Mostly, there are just some anecdotes about human beings. Can we learn anything from looking at them?

Two friends from the same neighborhood in Minneapolis; high-school drops outs; in minor trouble with the law; converts to Islam; and soldiers of jihad.[1]

Troy Kastigar (1981-2009) went from being a funny, energetic, boundary-testing kid to smoking weed, drinking, and failing his high-school classes.[2] He dropped out of high school, later got a G.E.D., and worked fitfully between bouts of unemployment. He went back to school to become an X-Ray tech, but he was told that it would be difficult for him to get a job in the field because of his criminal record. His friend, Doug McCain, also dropped out of high school, then had some run-ins with the law over drugs, moving violations, and theft.

In about 2004, both men converted to Islam. There is a large Somali community in Minneapolis, so Islam presented itself more prominently there than in many other American cities. After a while, they moved beyond Islam to Islamism. In November 2008, Kastigar went to Kenya. He said he was going to study the Koran. In fact, he soon crossed the border to join Al Shabab. He was killed fighting with the group in September 2009. In 2009, Doug McCain moved to San Diego. He had family out there, he worked in restaurants, and he took some classes at a community college. In 2014 he went to Syria. In August 2014 he was killed fighting with ISIS.

At least one other man from the same social circle also traveled to Syria. Abdirahmaan Muhumed, worked at the airport from November 2001 to May 2011. At different times he worked at refueling planes and on cleaning crews. Acquaintances had seen him as a more secular than a religious man. He worked out a lot and played basketball. Then he started to become exercised over the fighting in Gaza and in Libya. Muslim people suffering under assault from Western powers. Muslim or not, Muhumed drank—and to excess—on some occasions. Drinking just enflamed him all the more on the issues. He went to Syria and died in the same fight as did Doug McCain.

The little town of Frederickstad, Norway, is south of Oslo. It is a more diverse place than one might expect of a small town. The Muslim community is largely made up of Somali refugees, but there also are immigrants from Algeria, Pakistan, Kurdistan, and Chechnya.[3]

The Chaib family came from Algeria to Frederickstad. Their son Abdullah (1989-2012) grew into a popular figure in his school and neighborhood. His ability at soccer enhanced a general “cool guy” demeanor.   At some point and by some means, Abdullah Chaib became committed to jihad. A then-radical Norwegian Muslim who visited Frederikstad recalled Chaib as “a real fanatic…[who] talked about jihad all the time.” In November 2012 Abdullah Chaib went to Syria. In December 2012 he died fighting there.

Chaib’s death in battle set an example for some other boys in the town. Among them was Adu Edelbijev. His parents came to Norway from Chechnya in 2002. He attended the same school as Chaib and, like Chaib, was a good athlete. He didn’t feel estranged from Norway, but his hopes to join the army were foiled by bad eyesight. He began to take religion seriously. By 2013 he had begun to prepare to go to Syria. He left in August 2013. In November 2014, he died while fighting with ISIS near Kobani.

Rebecca Sanchez Hammer was a Filipina who came to Norway and married a Norwegian who later died. They had a son, Torlief Sanchez Hammer. A group of goofy dopers used Torlief Hammer’s basement as a place to bake their heads. For several years, the police regularly broke up their parties and confiscated their drugs and pipes.

When, before he left for Syria, Adu Edelbijev lectured Torlief Hammer about his bad habits, the boy listened. Hammer converted to Islam, took the new first name Abdul, and suddenly stopped using drugs. His run-ins with the police ended, but his satisfaction with life did not improve. “”I have no friends, no job, nothing,” he told his mother. This did not cause him to reject Islam however. It only deepened his commitment. In December 2013, the young man took the road to Syria.

The parents of Samiullah Khan (1991- ) came from Pakistan to Norway, but did not prosper. His father murdered someone, did a stretch in prison, then accidentally killed someone else while driving drunk. This background left Khan feeling marked and excluded by native Norwegians and Pakistani immigrants. He went to fight in Syria, was wounded, returned to Norway, and was arrested for belonging to a terrorist organization.

It is easy to write off these people as failures who made foolish—and fatal–decisions. But is it possible that there foolish and fatal decision reflected an aspiration for a more satisfying life than what the larger societies in which they lived could offer?

A friend of Kastigar and McLean argued that “They just wanted to be a part of something. They were just trying to find something that just accepted them for who they were.” A friend of Abdirahman said that “He always wanted to be a freedom fighter, he always wanted to be a hero,” recalled a friend.

“None of them ever even mentioned religion when we knew them,” recalled one policeman speaking about the group around Torlief Hammer. “The only thing they had in common is that they did not function in society. But they wanted to be able to do something, to be good at something.” Torlief Hammer told his mother that “he wanted to fix himself after too much disco, too many girlfriends and too much smoking.”

In March 1940, George Orwell published a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In it, Orwell argued that Hitler “has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.”[4]

As the United States lugubriously embarks on the election campaign of 2016, will any of the candidates offer voters “struggle and self-sacrifice”? Or will they promise “ease, security and avoidance of pain”? That is an easy question to answer. But what if there are a lot of people who would never consider radical Islam, yet still feel some longing for something more ennobling than the next entitlement or the next tax cut?

[1] Jack Healy, “For Jihad Recruits, a Pipeline From Minnesota to Militancy,” NYT, 7 September 2014.

[2] I wondered if these were signs of Depression. His mother describes him as having had a “sadness and a darkness” move into his life.

[3] Andrew Higgins, “A Norway Town And Its Pipeline to Jihad in Syria,” NYT, 5 April 2015.

[4] http://genius.com/George-orwell-review-of-mein-kampf-annotated

Libya Again.

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Libya was always something of a make-believe country. It really consists of tribes. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi employed guile and violence to rule the country for over forty years.[1] In Spring 2011 there were uprisings against the established powers in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.[2] The Obama administration imagined that a new “Springtime of the Peoples” had arrived. In Summer 2011, that “Arab Spring” reached Libya. The Libyan tyrant Qaddafi fought back and a blood-bath loomed. To forestall this (and an immense flight of refugees across the Mediterranean toward neighboring Italy[3]), in Fall 2011 an American-led coalition of NATO air forces bombed out of existence Qaddafi’s military forces. The rebels triumphed. Had there been any American–or British, or French, or even Italian–troops on the ground, they would have been welcomed with bouquets of flowers. However, there weren’t any foreign troops on the ground.

Instead, the Western powers wagered on a “national” government that represented no one. “We’re under no illusions,” said President Obama at the time. “Libya will travel a long and winding road to democracy.”[4] (In short, cue the “Wicked Witch of the East” in a burka.) Instead, the rebels were left to themselves to make the best of it. They made the worst of it. Regional and tribal militias proliferated, arming themselves from the huge stockpile of weapons that the Qaddafi regime had accumulated. In the West, “Libya Dawn” rallied the Islamists. Their gunmen seized control of the capital city, Tripoli.[5] In the East, “Dignity” rallied the anti-Islamists, many of them former supporters of the Qaddafi regime. Then the factions made contact with (or were pre-emptively contacted by) outside powers. Saudi Arabia and Egypt sought out “moderates.” Turkey and Qatar sought out “Islamists or “immoderates.” Some of them began to contact Al Qaeda or ISIS.[6] Currently, the country seems headed toward partition. Meanwhile, the gunmen demanded and got stipends from the government.[7] There is a nominal government, acceptable to the bureaucracies of the West, which has proposed a new constitution. The gun-men don’t seem too interested.

Increasingly, the struggle is about money. On the one hand, Libya has rich oil reserves.. the two sides have fought for control of the oil fields and of the oil ports. On the other hand, since the collapse of the regime, perhaps as many as a million Arab and African migrants to Europe have piled up in the coastal cities. They await the opportunity to embark and will pay whatever they can to buy passage.

President Obama recently has said that the intervening powers “underestimated” how much further resources would have to be committed to stabilizing Libya.[8] And how.

[1] “The collapse of Libya,” The Week, 1 May 2015.

[2] What lay at the root of this unrest? Stalled economic development. One serious consequence of this appeared in mass youth unemployment. Without an income, however, young people cannot get their own apartment and get married. Hence, sad to say, Cpl. Ray Person has a point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKZ1DlcmHMI

[3] In English Comp this is referred to as “irony.”

[4] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqu9qhBHWNs The President is a child of the Seventies.

[5] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJeA4fpXwM0

[6] The Islamists have taken to butchering foreign Christians who fall into their clutches. Since we are in a secular age, no one gives a rip about something that would have pitched William Gladstone over the edge.

[7] To be clear, I’m not saying that this is the solution to the problems facing graduate students at Ivy League universities.

[8] Similarly, his economists have said that they “underestimated” how much stimulus would be needed to get the country out of the Great Recession. That underestimation involved ignoring Paul Krugman and other economists who said that the stimulus needed to be twice as big and loaded into the first year, not spread over two years.

The owl and the pussycat 2.

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After Libya collapsed, power passed to the hands of various militia groups.[1] Politics soon merged with crime. Italian criminal organizations—the Mafia—struck a deal with many of the militia commanders to move people from Libya to Italy. Some 31 percent are refugees from the civil war in Syria. Some are refugees from Iraq, either from the earlier fighting following the American invasion or from the more recent disaster following the rise of ISIS. Most are “economic refugees” from the failed or failing states of Sahelian Africa. In 2014, about 170,000 illegal immigrants paid an estimated $170 million to reach Europe from Libya.

Responsibility for dealing with this problem fell first to the Italians. After 300 migrants drowned near the island of Lampedusa in October 2013, the Italian Navy and Coast Guard launched Operation “Mare Nostrum.”  Italian vessels collected about 140,000 migrants during 2014. The death toll fell from 300 in October 2013 to 56 in April 2014.

While this might be regarded as a remarkable humanitarian achievement, not everyone was best pleased. “Mare Nostrum” (“Our Sea”) cost almost $10 million a month at a time when Italy was trying to fend off recession and imposing a degree of budget austerity. Operation “Mare Nostrum” started to look like Operation “Tasse Nostrum” (“Our Taxes”). Northern Europeans weren’t happy with Italy serving as an open door for illegal immigrants. The Navy landed the immigrants in mainland Italy. Most of them then continued their search for better lives by heading for Northern Europe.[2] Britain argued that “Mare Nostrum” created a kind of insurance policy for the migrants: the boats might not be sea-worthy, but the captains could always hunt up a rescue ship soon after leaving port. Once they were “rescued,” the migrants were put ashore in a country that maintained no serious watch over their further movements. Inevitably, they flooded North. These arguments resonated with other EU countries. When the Italian government asked the European Union for financial assistance, the EU called on the Italians to stop giving the immigrants a free lift. “Mare Nostrum” ended with the return of winter weather to the Mediterranean.

In place of “Mare Nostrum,” the EU both strengthened its controls on land border and launched “Operation Triton.” “Triton” restricted the rescue zone of naval patrols to within 30 miles of the Italian coast. “Make it more dangerous. That’ll stop them.”   It didn’t.

By early 2015, perhaps as many as a million potential immigrants were waiting in Libya to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. In economic terms, Demand vastly outstrips Supply. There are critical shortages of vessels, crews, and competent captains. Older and smaller vessels are used, crewed by men working beyond their skill-level, and packed to the gun-whales with passengers. A ticket on one of these death traps has risen from $1,000 in 2014 to $2,000 today.

Over-loaded and under-ballasted vessels are top heavy. Even passenger movements can lead to a capsizing, but so can heavy seas or a collision with another vessel or taking on water. In the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,750 people drowned from the sinking of boats carrying illegal immigrants from North Africa to Europe.

The appalling death-toll caused an up-roar and a belated response from the EU. Two realities present themselves. First, while an aging Europe needs immigrants, the cultural resistance to increased diversity is very strong. Second, the core problem here is the failure of many African states to provide security and prosperity to their citizens. Even taking the risks of crossing the Sahara, then crossing the Mediterranean seems preferable.

[1] “Europe’s migrant crisis,” The Week, 8 May 2015, p. 11.

[2] A further 45,000 reached Europe by other routes.