Magical Realism and Information Operations

[slapout9]

One of the things about discussions and how they drift off course, but often lead to something interesting or useful. Stalkers often have charismatic personalities and can exert incredible influence over people almost like a hypnotic trance.
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.
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.

[jcustis]

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.

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...

[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

[Rob Thornton]

Terri, Glad you signed up, you'll find this is a pretty good bunch, and your contributions and wit will be much appreciated. One of the things we've had to work through with our majority Kurdish battalion is that some are Yezidi, which seperates them some from the Sunni Kurds. Not much mention was made of the Yezidi's before we came over, or how it might lead to friction within an organization. As you can see in th elink there are some major points that differ with Islam. In one of the books on Mosul I read since I've been here it talked about mass conversions (the violent kinds) when the caliphates came in.

Well, looks like it will be a busy day today - I'll sign back on later tonight.
Regards, Rob

[Stan]

Hey Folks !

Slapout, I checked, he's not in Latvia !

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.

Marc,
You're not going tell me we went from Djinns and ghosts to Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and psychological type framework, are you ? This would be the same Carl Jung, or another Carl from your "Craft Section" ?

Regards, Stan

[goesh]

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic. Bill Donovan and that old time crowd could have better exploited the potential use of ju-jus and skin changers than we of today can due to the political oversight that guides and directs any engagements we enter into. Guzman from the Shining Path was pretty much considered a Shaman by the locals and we know Noreiga from Panama was heavily into Santeria/Lukumi. 2cd hand reports suggest Che adapted Bolivian ritual magic to wow peasants from time to time and Bustos, one of his henchman, is reported to have been heavily into Santeria. The Jinn are not readily exploitable in the Islamic theatre of operations IMHO because Mohammed didn't employ/exploit them and Islam pretty much tells its followers to ignore the Jinn.

[marct]

Hi Goesh,

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic.

Yupper. Then again, any type of operation like that would be totally outside of the rules of war anyway. If it was done, it would have to be so black an op that it would never appear.

Bill Donovan and that old time crowd could have better exploited the potential use of ju-jus and skin changers than we of today can due to the political oversight that guides and directs any engagements we enter into.

Donnovan also had the advantage of working with Gregory Bateson, who was probably one of the best people to ever come out of academic Anthropology.

Guzman from the Shining Path was pretty much considered a Shaman by the locals and we know Noreiga from Panama was heavily into Santeria/Lukumi. 2cd hand reports suggest Che adapted Bolivian ritual magic to wow peasants from time to time and Bustos, one of his henchman, is reported to have been heavily into Santeria. The Jinn are not readily exploitable in the Islamic theatre of operations IMHO because Mohammed didn't employ/exploit them and Islam pretty much tells its followers to ignore the Jinn.

The profet may not have exploited them, as you put it, but Soloman did. Anyway, it's not so much a case of Islam "ignoring" the djinn, as it is of their existing as "people" who may or may not be Muslims and who are going to take a part in the human world anyway. For a number of Muslims, the djinn are already in this conflict (e.g. for the Northern Alliance).

Marc

[Stan]

Hey goesh !

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic.

I won't for a minute think that one of ours would perform voodu on a corps, but stranger things have happened that will indeed open your eyes. My tours in Korea, somewhere in South American (no tail numbers, no flight plans kinda traveling), and later Sub-Sahara not only opened my eyes, but at times forced me to close them. The dreams will still get you later, no matter how many times you try and close your eyes.

Marc,
Strangely enough, while in Korea and taking night courses in Personnel management (read Pysops 101, first chapter) the instructor insisted we read and retain to memory Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
I would later here about Bateson while undergoing DIA mandatory MBTI evaluations. Wow this Sierra really works

Regards, Stan

[marct]

Hi Stan,

Marc,
You're not going tell me we went from Djinns and ghosts to Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and psychological type framework, are you ? This would be the same Carl Jung, or another Carl from your "Craft Section" ?

The MBTI is really a highly watered down version of Jung's work. I was thinking more of his work in Aion and Vol 9,i of the Collected works on Archetypes. MBTI done well has about a 70% predictive value but, as with all typologies, it is hopelessly outclassed by the more complete (and complex!) dynamic system models.

There has been some specialized, and pretty complex, work done on the relationship between archetypes and neurological structures in the brain - e.g. Charles Laughlin's Biogenetic Structuralism, Michael Persinger's God Helmet, and some of Susan Blackmore's work. Blackmore, along with some of the more conventional symbolic anthropologists, has tended to concentrate on the "programming elements" (i.e. symbols), which Lauglin and Persinger have gone more heavily into the neurology. My own stuff, mainly unpublished, tends to straddle the two although I also put more emphasis on the programming elements.

Probably the easiest way to think about this is that we all have similar "hardware" (actually, it's semi-mutable wetware, but that's another story ), but our programming languages differ. Oh, yeah, one other form of Western djinn that got co-opted about 1600 years ago are what the Greeks called "daemons". In the programmin language metaphor, you could think of them as self-propagating computer programs, some of which are really quite complex and powerful.

Marc

[Tom Odom]

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.

Slap,

This went down in 1978. I was in the 82d at the time and 1st COSCOM sent a unit down to help recover the bodies.

Things like this are why I caution folks about looking at events in Africa or elsewhere as "out of world" impossible in the "sophisticated West."

Look at Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, and Operation Blessing's gold and diamond smuggling in Zaire or other groups...

best

Tom

[slapout9]

Slap,

This went down in 1978. I was in the 82d at the time and 1st COSCOM sent a unit down to help recover the bodies.

Things like this are why I caution folks about looking at events in Africa or elsewhere as "out of world" impossible in the "sophisticated West."

Look at Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, and Operation Blessing's gold and diamond smuggling in Zaire or other groups...

best

Tom

Hi guys, busy day at work so I am just catching up on this thread. Tom, you may remember if this was ever proved or not, but wasn't Jones maintaining large deposits in a Soviet bank at their Embassy? I have always thought that religion is one the easiest ways to raise a guerrilla force. Look at Jones they would do anything he said, they were already living in the jungle in what was similar to army compound. One more step with arms from Russia, a little training and oops there goes another country and the US is standing around trying to figure out what happened. I agree completely about Pat Robertson, his Operation Blessing has been involved in several enterprises of a dubious nature.


Stan, the women may be nice where you are, but 9.5 sure isn't much of a selection Bubba wants to know if they have all their teeth? Later guys I am beat.

[Rob Thornton]

The thread has taken some interesting turns, but it all seems related - since you had to start from the original place to get there anyway.

Stan considered the bit about thought processes, then Marc brought up the bit about almost every culture having a recent past (a generation that is still alive) that grew up with some incarnation of the fantastic. Stan then pointed out that anyone below the age of 30 would just shrug it off as being unrealisitc.

Slapout had pointed out the links with the criminally insane, and various folks had mentioned charismatic leaders who for one reason or another had used "magic" like associations to influence populations and groups to accomplish things in their name.

From the reverse angle, who are the groups at risk (I think describing their characeristics) that the enemy might be targeting as part of their own PsyOps? I think this is important because while we bring (and try to impose to some degree) our sense of order through science and technology we are competing with not only ignorance and fear (fear of lots of things), but in some cases practices that have lasted centuries because they either work or give the appearance of working.

I've known some interesting folks that were going to these places to help do other things, but their "competition" was usually from within the group, now we may be talking about competition from outside the group - ex. a group gets targeted by an AQ like group because its conditions fit what they are looking for.

It would not have to be an Islamic terror group. I suspect we will come up against various incarnations of AQ like groups (modeled like) over time. As resources become scarce, and the profit margin for getting to and extracting those resources fall in the black, remote places with groups that had been alienated will become more important. Are those the same groups where the 30 something crowd my still be influenced by "magical realism" or by people using PsyOps to play to / against those beliefs? The enemy has a good targeting process, they have a pretty good understanding of our strengths and weaknesses and the perceptions of the rest of the world regarding us. They work their own IO and PsyOps pretty well. Groups like Hezbullah have a pretty good CA program as well.

The folks I've asked about Djinn here - they are between the ages of 20-40. They are a sampling of the beliefs here - Shiite, Sunni & Yezidi. They are not ignorant in the sense of being cut off - indeed they have better sattelite reception then I do (all we get is AFN with its great commercials), although I do sit with the interpreters sometimes and watch T.V. with them. You could say they are ingorant in that until recently (since 2003) they did not have such access - however I'd argue that U.S. T.V is somewhat narrow as well since they will run the same stories because they are competing for very similiar audiences - we see what they thnk we want to see in order to sell air time.

I think its important to understand these belief systems. It has allot to do with avoiding misunderstandings that lead to bad assumptions and bad decisions.

Also - look at the geography this thread has covered! The discussion has taken us just about all over. I have not heard anybody bring up the Japanese group that tried to gas the subway, and what about all the US (North American) groups? We've got our share of cults, etc. and they are also vulnerable and a reasonable source of manpower, some with good connections.
Regards, Rob

[marct]

Hi Rob,

Great summation!

From the reverse angle, who are the groups at risk (I think describing their characeristics) that the enemy might be targeting as part of their own PsyOps? I think this is important because while we bring (and try to impose to some degree) our sense of order through science and technology we are competing with not only ignorance and fear (fear of lots of things), but in some cases practices that have lasted centuries because they either work or give the appearance of working.

There is a general personality type called the "seeker" that was identified in the 1970's. Usually fairly well off, middle class kids who felt that they had no real sense of identity or meaning in their life. These were the main population root of the new religious movements of the 60's, 70's and 80's. I am about 90% certain that this is the main target group in materially affluent areas, outside of the standard "disenfranchised" crowd.

Also - look at the geography this thread has covered! The discussion has taken us just about all over. I have not heard anybody bring up the Japanese group that tried to gas the subway, and what about all the US (North American) groups? We've got our share of cults, etc. and they are also vulnerable and a reasonable source of manpower, some with good connections.

Definately, especially in North America and Europe. You may want to look at a book by Faydra Shapiro called Building Jewish Roots for a model of how these kids can be recruited and chanelized. If I remember correctly, Faydra was looking at some of the more extreme Jewish "revivalist" groups in the late 1980's as an undergrad.

Marc