Magical Realism and Information Operations

[marct]

One of the things about discussions and how they drift off course, but often lead to something interesting or useful....
This got me to thinking about one of the absolute masters and that was Jim Jones and his ability to convince 908 people to commit mass suicide by drinking poisoned Kool Aid down in Guyana. I think this is what the expression "drinking the Kool Aid" actually means but perhaps people don't realize it. In the late 70's or 80's when this happened it was considered impossible, but it happened.

I remember that <wry grin>. Everyone thought Jim Jones was "impossible", but I kept remembering a conversation I had had years before in the mid-60's with a guy who had heard Hitler speak in person. He told me that even though he was Jewish (and spent most of the war in Dachau), Hitler still impressed him with his charisma. He said it was like being the victim of a snake watching, hypnotized.

Think of all the Guerrilla leaders or terrorists leaders like UBL that have the same type of charisma and his ability to influence people. They have that Jinn like quality that can make them very formidable Psy-Op enemies. In contrast if we could come up with a Lawrence of Arabia type we could wheel and deal. So where is the Jinn of Lawrence?? Rob,Stan,Marct need to find him we need him. Might be over there Latville hanging around.

Well, I'm convinced that Stan is the anti-UBL dhinn - it'sthe bike, mon!

I saw a history or discovery channel show on the Jim Jones stuff last night. I can very vaguely remember it when I was a kid. Scared the bejezzus out of me. Jungles, spooky voodoo, cultism. I can remember seeing it on the news and eventually the 60 minutes expose. I have no idea if my parents knew I was watching it, but it was spooky.

Yeah, it can definately have hat effect.

This djinn stuff speaks to an interesting conversation I had with one of my former platoon commanders during OIF 2.0. We had since moved on to other billets, but he was outside the wire almost every day. Because he knew Arabic and was a Middle Eastern studies major, he had a fresh perspective on what was going on.

When discussions turned to Zarqawi, he told me that a lot of Iraqis he'd met during ops didn't believe there was a Zarqawi. It seems that early on many had equated him with an Islamic version of the boogeyman. The notion of Zarqawi was quickly used to scare the heck out of Iraqi kids and keep them in line. If they didn't, Zarqawi would "get them" in the middle of the night. The point to this rambling is that maybe we don't need a djinn, but the counter-djinn, like an Aladdin...

We've seen this effect time and time again over the course of history. This was the sort of thing I was talking about when I said that people play out stories with recognizable plots (or something like that). Both Claude Levi-Strauss (no relation to the Jeans family) and Carl Jung looked at this. I think Levi-Strauss got the structural aspects right (see his Structural Study of Myth) while Jung got the rest of it right.

If you want a counter-djinn, try The Phantom from the 30's-50's. Ideally, a counter-djinn would operate outside of any constituted force and would use assasination combined with psyops - e.g. track down an AIQ cell leader, kill him and display the body in a public place with a listing of his crimes - think Batman after he went psycho. This would fit the mythic patterns. If you really want to freak the Iranian agents and the AQ crowd, have him use the name "Zurvan".

Marc