The Management of Savagery

[omarali50]

Links to a new article about the classic text "the management of savagery" and my comments on that article.

http://brownpundits.blogspot.com/201...-savagery.html

Direct link to the original article by Ahmed Humayun (my comment is posted there in the comments too)

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd...arbarism-.html

[omarali50]

The excellent Zenpundit Hipbonegamer has a post about this

http://zenpundit.com/?p=43176

[davidbfpo]

This interview of a book's author sits here best IMHO, even if its focus is mass killing - which is part of savagery.

It starts with:

Abram de Swaan spent his first years of life in the Netherlands, witnessing the horrors of World War II. After dedicating decades to the study of human behavior, the award-winning sociologist was so struck by the 1994 Rwandan genocide’s eerie resemblance to the systematic killings of the Holocaust that he decided to investigate the roots of mass murder. De Swaan’s new book, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder, peers deeply into the minds of those who carry out atrocities, seeking to understand the societal and psychological conditions that give rise to mass murder.

Link to the interview:http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/02...s-happen.html?

Link to the book:http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-Co...tag=sciofus-20

[omarali50]

A bit surprised that he didnt bring up what was probably the most prominent example of "victor's rage" in modern Europe: the Russian victory on the Eastern Front 1944-45..(in the interview, i have obviously not read the book yet)

[davidbfpo]

A UK defence blog 'Think Defence' enters the fray on this issue, with a number of graphics:http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2015/0...ent-savagery/?

[Bill Moore]

The title of the strategy is misleading, yes it promotes violence, but it is tied to political aims. You destroy the existing forms of governance, create chaos, and then the people desire someone, anyone, to establish predictable rules so they can go about their daily lives. It is the competitive control theory.

[davidbfpo]

A rather odd title for an intelbrief from The Soufan Group, which links a number of outrages or attacks where mass casualties result, clearly prompted by last week's attack @ Garissa, Kenya and here is one clear phrase:

The reality is far more troubling, as groups that have little-to-no-connection are linked by a unifying motivation to kill civilians.

The last sentence makes sense:

These groups began as localized insurgencies but have morphed into a homogenized terrorist movement that cares less about local impact than global influence.

Link:http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrie...ion-of-terror/

Unconventional warfare, whether the users are called guerillas or terrorists, often prefers "soft" targets and inhibit the security forces by such tactics as IEDs. Is it 'new' this preference for killing civilians? No. So what is the difference today? Simple we know about it and see the imageery.

[Bill Moore]

A rather odd title for an intelbrief from The Soufan Group, which links a number of outrages or attacks where mass casualties result, clearly prompted by last week's attack @ Garissa, Kenya and here is one clear phrase:

The last sentence makes sense:
Link:http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrie...ion-of-terror/

Unconventional warfare, whether the users are called guerillas or terrorists, often prefers "soft" targets and inhibit the security forces by such tactics as IEDs. Is it 'new' this preference for killing civilians? No. So what is the difference today? Simple we know about it and see the imageery.

Incorrect David, there are changes in their operational and strategic approaches. It is less about what we see, than what they see, how they share information, and how differentiated conflicts become increasingly homogenized. In addition to the Internet and social media increasingly blending tactics, there are new economic factors that shape these conflicts. External state support is less important in many cases. These groups can now sustain themselves multiple ways, not only through illicit activity in a growing and global black market, but via fund rising by competing with other groups to see who can conduct the largest and most dramatic atrocities. This is another difference, in the past local insurgents normally conducted attacks to influence the local audience. Thus their attacks were conducted locally to create relatively local effects, and the scope of their killing was generally limited (not in all cases) to achieve their political objectives. That is not the case now, which is why need to be skeptical about considering the populace as the center of gravity as the default center of gravity for COIN.

[davidbfpo]

Will McCants reviews ISIS and the book's theme after Paris; hat tip to WoTR:http://warontherocks.com/2015/11/how-the-islamic-states-favorite-strategy-book-explains-recent-terrorist-attacks/?

[davidbfpo]

Slap and Outlaw09,

Perhaps this short Scientific American article can help: 'The Science of Mass Shooters: What Drives a Person to Kill? (sub-title) There is no template for the path to violence and rarely can a single cause explain any one atrocity':http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-of-mass-shooters-what-drives-a-person-to-kill/?

It is a quick resume of some research and cites Professor Mia Bloom in particular:

We need to get rid of the bystander effect..We need to find a way that if someone says they are planning to do something, that there are safe mechanisms for the individual to report without themselves becoming a suspect or a person of interest. We need to come up with a way of separating the wheat from the chaff as far as people who are serious.

I note the actions are a mixture of personal, institutional and state surveillance of online activity. Sadly IMHO it would overwhelm law enforcement and intelligence with too much data, let alone "false flags". Plus IF mental health is the focus is that is politically acceptable.

[davidbfpo]

I spotted this article via Twitter and it's application is general to US society, not just these murders:https://warisboring.com/what-on-kill...0f1#.6hssdabyf

It starts with:

Dave Grossman’s 1996 book On Killing is a landmark and studied account of how — and why — human beings have inhibitions toward killing others, and how the U.S. military turned its soldiers into far more lethal killers with intense conditioning following World War II.In an updated edition, he warns that these same psychological inhibitions are eroding within American society, but with fewer safeguards, allowing sociopathic tendencies to arise and enable mass violence.


(Later the author asks) But the question we need to ask is, What makes today’s children bring those guns to school when their parents did not? And the answer to that question may be that the important ingredient, the vital, new, different ingredient in killing in modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the systematic process of defeating the normal individual’s age-old, psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one’s own species. Are we taking the safety catch off of a nation, just as surely and easily as we would take the safety catch off of a gun, and with the same results?

A UK academic psychologist offers a viewpoint:https://theconversation.com/can-we-predict-who-will-become-mass-shooters-60969?

[slapout9]

We have to find another General Sherman. Sherman wrote that European style war would not work( aka Clausewitze) He decided to wage war against the entire Southern/British slave culture Infrastructure........we will have to do something similar against Radical Islam

[AdamG]

Do you people fully appreciate who - or rather, what - you're dealing with?

A French government committee has heard testimony, suppressed by the French government at the time and not published online until this week, that the killers in the Bataclan tortured their victims on the second floor of the club.

The chief police witness in Parliament said that an investigating officer, tears streaming down his face, rushed out of the Bataclan and vomited in front of him just after seeing the disfigured bodies.

According to this testimony, Wahhabist killers apparently gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths. They may also have disemboweled some poor souls. Women were stabbed in the genitals – and the torture was, victims told police, filmed for Daesh or Islamic State propaganda. For that reason, medics did not release the bodies of torture victims to the families, investigators said.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/07...d-victims.html


In just the recent past, ISIS has put 25 Iraqi 'spies in muriatic acid (May 19th), in Mosul burned 19 women to death in cages in front of hundreds of #people after they refused to have sex with them (June 10th), skinned alive an Afghan (June 12th), tossed a few gay guys off a roof (June 29th), and boiled alive seven of it's own deserters (July 5th).

[AdamG]

We have to find another General Sherman. Sherman wrote that European style war would not work( aka Clausewitze) He decided to wage war against the entire Southern/British slave culture Infrastructure........we will have to do something similar against Radical Islam

What Sherman had going for him was that when it was time to go Delenda Est on the Confederates, he didn't pull his punches but as soon as resistance stopped, he was compassionate (eg; had 50,000 rations found in captured reb warehouses immediately distributed to starving civilians).

For 21st century comparison, see also

[davidbfpo]

The author is with ICSR @ Kings College and attempts to answer so many questions. The title is: How religion can drive someone to slaughter his fellow citizens – and believe they deserve it.

A key passage:

The movement is, however, millenarian; its followers believe that they are helping bring about the change of a corrupt society, transforming it from evil to good. Once they accept this as their mission, almost any act which is perceived as helping further the project, no matter how horrific, becomes acceptable and legitimate.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...-citizens--an/

[davidbfpo]

Will McCants has this short article in TIME:http://time.com/4408926/the-differen...-and-isis-ish/

[AdamG]

Once again, people are blatantly ignoring the overlap of the 'front line' ISIS psychopaths and these lone wolf 'fellow traveler' psychopaths. The only difference between someone who drives a truck through a crowd of people having fun and a muj who dunks prisoners in muriatic acid is one plane ticket.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/in-...imply-deranged

[AdamG]

Videos have emerged online that appear to show Syrian rebels taunting and then beheading a boy they say is a captured Palestinian pro-government fighter.

One video shows five men posing with the frightened child, who could be as young as 10, in the back of a truck. One of the men grips him by the hair.

The same man is later filmed apparently cutting the boy's head off.

The incident is reported to have taken place in Handarat, north of Aleppo, where there has been heavy fighting.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36835678

Life imitates art?

I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.

Colonel Kurtz, APOCALYPSE NOW

[davidbfpo]

A WoTR article, good in places and sometimes speculative. One short passage:

While almost all of these attacks were claimed by ISIL, observers have expressed skepticism about the extent of the organization’s involvement. Some argued that ISIL’s role in most attacks during Ramadan was limited to providing ideological inspiration and encouragement to so-called lone wolves or wolf packs, who may have mobilized in response to Adnani’s call to arms but did not coordinate with ISIL operatives. Yet, a growing body of evidence suggests that the Ramadan offensive was largely a coordinated and deliberate ISIL campaign.

(Concludes) In essence, ISIL operates a professionalized external operations wing that is capable of directing and coordinating operations across the globe. Attacks that seem disparate or disconnected may actually be part of a broader campaign. Attackers who appear, at first glance, to have acted alone may be linked with a clandestine network. As we investigate the heinous assault in Nice, we should keep this in mind.

Link:http://warontherocks.com/2016/07/blo...rist-campaign/

WoTR article refers to a key ISIS text:

Adnani exhorted ISIL’s supporters to make Ramadan “a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers” and urged everyone considering migrating to the caliphate to instead carry out attacks in their home countries.

There is full SWJ article on Adnani's call:http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...21-2016-speech

[AdamG]

After an end-of-the-year video showing pre-teens hunt down and kill bound prisoners in an abandoned building, the Islamic State today released an even more gory follow-up with children as young as preschool age murdering prisoners tied to broken carnival rides.
The 18-minute highly produced video out of ISIS' Khayr province in Syria was distributed through publicly accessible Islamic State#media channels, social media and file-sharing sites, including Google Drive and, briefly, YouTube.
It begins by showing adults training in a bombed-out building, but transitions into adults leading small children in exercises. A boy about#9 or 10 years old is shown gleefully participating in a public stoning.
Like previous ISIS videos featuring children, the video argues that coalition bombing is a reason for kids to join jihad and kill Americans.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-securit...ival-ball-pit/