Some reading on Norway

I'm working on a longer post on what happened in Norway in Finnish. I'll try to return to the topic in English later. For now, here's some recommended reading:

New York Times: Breivik and His Enablers

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

Guardian: Anders Breivik's chilling anti-feminism

Breivik's introduction is entirely given over to a half-baked history of political correctness, "no aspect" of which, he tells us, is "more prominent … than feminist ideology". The PC-project is bent on "transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy" and "intends to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males". But more than that, it has succeeded. The "feminisation of European culture" has been underway since the 1830s, and by now, men have been reduced to an "emasculate[d] … touchy-feely subspecies".

The Nation: Europe's Homegrown Terrorists

Unlike Muslims in the wake of Islamist attacks, Christians weren’t called upon to insist upon their moderation. No one argued that white people had to get with the Enlightenment project. But the bombings—and the presumptions about who was responsible—suggest that the true threat to European democracy is not Islam or Muslims but, once again, fascism and racists.

New York Times: Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

BBC: Norway and the politics of hate

Back in 1985, I was in the US reporting on the emergence of right-wing militias. They were springing up across the Mid-West. Some were little more than gun clubs. Others trained men in uniform.

They believed that their idea of America was under threat. Many saw the federal government in Washington as the enemy, staffed with officials who were betraying America's core values.

A strong strain of paranoia ran through their conversation and publications. I recall a man showing me a grainy photograph, claiming it proved there were secret Russian bases in Michigan.

Most of this reflected the margins of a society and could easily be dismissed. But the idea that his government was the real enemy worked away inside the mind of a young man called Timothy McVeigh. Sometime later he packed a van with fertiliser and diesel fuel and blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

And, finally, The Colbert Report.

Brand on Winehouse

I'm shocked, depressed and generally bummed out by what happened in Norway, but I'll get this blog on track in a bit. In the meanwhile, here's a great piece by Russell Brand on the late Amy Winehouse.

A moment of silence

After what happened in Norway this past weekend, this blog is taking a moment of silence. I may write more about this topic later, but for now I merely hope that the hate-mongers in all our countries would also take a moment and think about the consequences of building up a culture of intolerance, racism and hatred. What happened this weekend is a stark reminder of how inhuman and brutal the ideology of "immigration criticism" fundamentally is.

Criminal insanity, online and off

First, a piece of madness I must have missed when it hit the news and just happened to run into.

NY Daily News: Florida mom Alexandra Tobias pleads guilty to murdering baby for crying during her FarmVille game

A Florida woman admitted shaking her 3-month-old baby to death after the little boy's crying distracted her from playing a wildly popular Facebook game.

Alexandra Tobias, 22, told cops she was playing FarmVille and her baby, Dylan Lee Edmondson, wouldn't stop crying.

According to the Florida Times-Union, she confessed to shaking the baby, smoking a cigarette to calm down and then shaking the baby again. The baby may have hit his head during the January incident.

Tobias pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

She later got a 50-year sentence. And here I thought FarmVille was bad for you before I knew about this.

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Here's another example of criminal insanity:

FOX Chicago: Teen Charged with Murder in Police-Involved Shooting, Armed Robbery Case

Ross was charged Thursday evening with murder and armed robbery with a firearm, police News Affairs Officer Robert Perez said.
The incident unfolded about 8 p.m. Wednesday when two police sergeants were stopped by a person saying two people had just committed a robbery near East 70th Street and South Cregier Avenue.

The sergeants saw two people matching the description and ordered them to stop, police said. One of the suspects, with a weapon in his hand, turned in the sergeant’s direction. The sergeant shot the suspect, identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office as 15-year-old Tatioun Williams.

Williams, of 1311 E. 69th St., was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Thursday found he died from a gunshot wound to the back and ruled the death a homicide.

A weapon and proceeds from the robbery were recovered at the scene, police said.

No one else was injured, police said.

So two guys commit an armed robbery, and as they're escaping, the police shoot one of them. Therefore, the surviving criminal is charged with murder.

This is how the felony murder rule works: if one perpetrates a felony, and as a result someone is killed, the perpetrator is charged with the murder. Here, the result even means that if the police shoot your accomplice, you are charged with his murder.

Another example of this idea in action here:

NY Times: Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers

CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.

The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.

Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.

He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.

In all seriousness, this is insane. As the New York Times article says, this law doesn't actually seem to have any deterrent effect, by comparison with jurisdictions that don't have it. Furthermore, it blurs the definition of murder; as the paper referenced by the New York Times points out, murder is defined by an intent to kill, except in this case, where you can be guilty of murder by lending your car to someone.

What makes it even more dangerous, in my opinion, is the simple precedent that a person who is in no way directly responsible for a crime, and who may even be totally unaware that it has occurred, can be charged with it. Imagine extending that idea to other crimes.

But most of all, it's completely unrealistic to postulate, even as a system of ethics, that everyone must take responsibility for all consequences of their actions. Responsibility for consequences needs to be within reason; if someone lends a homicidal friend a shotgun, I have no problem with them being held culpable, but lending someone a car doesn't seem to be strictly comparable.

Even crazier is the notion that when the police shoot your accomplice in the back, you're guilty of murder. Yes, I accept the idea that had you not been involved in the armed robbery in the first place, your friend wouldn't have been shot. But is this in any way a realistic standard of ethics? If people are going to be held criminally liable for the actions of others, where on earth do we draw the line? And doesn't this, in fact, give police a virtual blank check when pursuing a felony suspect, because any deaths that occur during the crime and subsequent pursuit will be blamed on the suspect, whether he had anything to do with them or not?

This touches on what I've been thinking about in general with regard to law lately. It seems to me that on the whole, our legislation is essentially random. I've been toying around with the idea of constructing a legal code not as a confusing jumble of separate laws but as a system of principles. Surely one of those principles should be that a person can only be held responsible for his own actions or inactions, not for the actions or inactions of others. In this case, both armed robbers should be responsible for themselves, and the cop who shot one of them responsible for the shooting. If the shooting is deemed justified, then it is, but under no stretch of the imagination should the police officer's decision to use lethal force be the other robber's responsibility.

I'll chalk this up as yet another odd aspect of an increasingly insane US justice system. Here's another example:

Wired: There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information.

The United States seems to be reaching the point where legistlation is classified to protect national security.

I'd comment, but I don't know how.

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Here's some surveillance state news, too.

Nature: Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States

Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.

The tactic has drawn comparisons with the science-fiction concept of 'pre-crime', popularized by the film Minority Report, in which security services can detect someone's intention to commit a crime. Unlike the system in the film, FAST does not rely on a trio of human mutants who can see the future. But the programme has attracted copious criticism from researchers who question the science behind it (see Airport security: Intent to deceive?).

Do, in fact, see the linked article, which starts off with this:

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.

Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.

George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.

It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Again, I'm not sure how to comment on this. It's terrifying.

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It seems fitting that just as my copy of The Gulag Archipelago arrived in the mail, I saw this news item:

Guardian: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

In the Soviet Union, it was gold-mining on the Kolyma: in China, it's World of Warcraft. Surreal. However, they haven't abandoned their efforts at reforming the inmates:

He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.

You can't make this stuff up. It only happens in real life.

Different ID cards for foreigners

According to Helsingin Sanomat, the new Finnish ID card project is getting some bad feedback from European anti-racism coalition ENAR. The new system will feature blue ID cards for Finnish citizens and brown ones for foreigners. Sweden's Nöjesguiden agreed and thought the project was amusing because of Finland's relatively low foreigner population. Finland's Hufvudstadsbladet also questioned the move.

Finnish nationalism being what it is, the social networks are awash with outrage. How dare they criticize us! The sad thing is that attitudes in this country have become so polarized that if someone even implies the word racism, people have a knee-jerk reaction to it and don't even bother to look at the issue. Why on earth should a foreign national living in Finland be forced to broadcast the fact that he's a foreign national? Just a few weeks ago, when Finland won the ice hockey world championship, foreigners and Swedish-speakers were attacked and threatened on the street for, well, being foreign.

"How can anyone possibly be opposed to something like this?" they ask on the social networks, as if they can't understand how it might be discriminating to make a certain part of the population carry distinguishing IDs. A few years ago, the same conversation was had when the Finnish police announced they would be stopping and searching "foreign-looking" people in Helsinki to ensure they were in the country legally. When it's foreigners who are involved, even people who are highly critical of the Finnish government and police will immediately leap to their motherland's defense, especially if it's criticized by foreigners like Swedes.

The real point is that in this atmosphere, it's a little odd to find Finnish officialdom making a move like this. There's no pressing need to introduce this scheme right now, in the middle of a very acrimonious social divide on immigration and racism. It makes you wonder if they're taking sides. And what's worse is the fact that it's almost certainly impossible to have an actual discussion about this, because a certain, very vocal, class of people in this country immediately fly off the handle at the least implication that something racist might happen in Finland.

There's a good Finnish proverb involving sticks and dogs that would work well here.

"Osama" and the beginning and end of terrorism

That's quite a start to a week: the most wanted man in the world is dead. His name was 'Usāmah bin Lādin, but in 2001 he entered American history as "O-sama", the evil terrorist. Evil he was, too; even though the conspiracy nuts will inevitably crawl out from under their rocks, there doesn't seem to be any substantial reasonable doubt that bin Lādin was indeed behind the September 11th terror attacks.

It's been pointed out by researchers that US history, like all nationalist history, resembles a Biblical narrative. The history of the United States is the history of the chosen American people, wandering through time and facing various enemies, whom they defeat through the help of god and their unique national characteristics that make them superior to other nations. In this perspective, American history is a rogues' gallery of enemies: the King of England and the British, the Kaiser and the Germans, Hitler and the Germans, Stalin and the Soviets, and now "Osama" and the Islamists (or Muslims, for the less discriminating in one sense and more so in another). In each case, the actual factors leading to the conflict, its true nature and the character of both the group and its leader were so hopelessly distorted as to bear almost no resemblance to reality. Instead of actual political processes, events and people, the end result of this process of nationalization of history produced simplistic nursery stories where evil foreigners treacherously attacked virtuous Americans. Any shades of grey and any inconvenient facts were ruthlessly suppressed to make way for a simplistic, flag-waving jingoism.

In the latest case, it's usually presented that after the cold war, there was a brief period of international peace, followed by 9/11, which "ushered in the era of global terrorism" or whatever, making O-sama the designated Great Enemy. Because he, in the memorable phrase-meme, "hated freedom", he orchestrated a terrorist attack that shocked America out of the complacency of the nineties. No doubt in a decade or so, O-sama will achieve an Al Gore-like status of having "invented terrorism" and undoubtedly being somehow responsible for the war in I-raq.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Terrorism is always a question of definition, and like all history-writing, that defining is usually done by the winners. The memorable phrase of the Cold War was "my freedom fighters, your terrorists", and its applicability isn't restricted to those years. If you like, the United States was founded by a terrorist insurgency supported by a foreign power; if you prefer the conventional version, it was founded by heroic freedom fighters. Even characterizing terrorism by its methods is always problematic. Insistence on car bombs, hijackings and suicide attacks restricts terrorism so strictly in time and space that it becomes useless as a general term; focusing on the killing of civilians begs highly inconvenient questions about several wars waged by the defining powers. The terrorist as "non-state actor" would indeed make the American Revolution, as well as the Finnish Civil War, terrorist insurgencies, and make one wonder why the death of an innocent should be more condemnable based on whether his killer was wearing a recognized uniform at the time. Terrorism is very much a cultural phenomenon that eludes strict definition.

If a starting point of sorts had to be selected, my first thought would be to turn to the Russian anarchists of the 19th century. Most people are aware of the caricature of a black-wearing, bomb-throwing ruffian, but few know that it depicts a Russian anarchist. The famous Muhammad caricature depicting the Prophet's turban as a bomb imagined it as exactly the type of cartoon bomb the anarchists were drawn with. Pioneering the non-state-sanctioned political employment of high explosive, the anarchists killed the reforming Czar Alexander II with a bomb thrown into his carriage.

The anarchists had it all: a spectacular terrorist attack gave them a villainous public image, which was seized upon as an excuse for repression around the world. Just as Islamist terrorism is used as fuel for both racist demagoguery and politics today, so back in the day the largely imagined threat of anarchist infiltration of the US was used as an excuse to tighten immigration policies and repress Eastern Europeans.

After the anarchists, various different groups resorted to terrorism as we know it. Some of its most prominent exponents were Zionists in Palestine, who mounted a bombing campaign against the British colonial authorities that is highly reminiscent of what has been happening in the same area over the past half-century. Again, one is terrorism, the other heroic freedom fighting, depending on who you ask.

Neither Islamic or Islamist terrorism begins with O-sama either. The contemporary world was introduced to the figure of the Muslim terrorist by the plane hijackings and other attacks that started in the early Cold War era. Most of the active groups were motivated more by revolutionary socialism than any form of Islamism, and their goal was to publicize the Palestinians' struggle against Israel. These campaigns successfully internationalized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and planted the seeds of the coming conflict. The global Islamist terror movement as we know it today sprung from these roots and coalesced in the insurgency against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and gathered force in the bitter civil war in Bosnia and the Russian invasions of Chechnya.

Two opposing theories on the fundamental origins of terror are usually put forward. In the religious-apocalyptic view, very popular with the Christian and racist right wings of Western politics, terrorism is simply the inevitable result of Islam, which to them represents pure evil. On the other hand, various left-wing instances champion the idea that terrorism is born from some combination of economic underpriviledge and Western imperialism; in the leftist-apocalyptic view, O-sama is nemesis to Western capitalism's hubris.

Both of these theories are far too simplistic, epistemologically consisting of little else but a dogged determination to explain everything through one's chosen worldview. By the combined logic of these explanations, every Muslim making less than minimum wage should be an enthusiastic terrorist. Taking each theory separately yields the even less plausible dieas that everyone making less than minimum wage anywhere, or every Muslim in the world, should be a potential terrorist. While such a view, especially the latter one, is extremely attractive to many people as a justification for religious persecution, it is also obviously untrue.

The real fons et origo of terrorism as we know it is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is perhaps the most highly politicized conflict of our time, which has a fantastic ability to suck people thousands of miles away into taking an uncompromisingly blinkered view of it. For several generations now, it has played just such a role for millions of Arab Muslims all over the world. Who could remain unmoved by TV images of bulldozers crashing through living rooms, missiles slamming into apartment blocks and soldiers gunning down rock-throwing children? On the other side, images of schoolchildren killed by suicide bombs and rockets streaking into Israeli suburbs serve precisely the same propaganda function. As a result, anyone prepared beforehand to identify with either side will find ample reason to do so.

This polarization meets with reinforcing tendencies from all over society. For one side, resentment at the Israeli occupation can easily link up with a conspiracy theory mindset that attributes everything from third world poverty on down to a vast Jewish-capitalist-Western conspiracy; for the other, a portrayal of Israel as an innocent victim of terrorism draws strength from memories of the Holocaust, reinforced with islamophobic and racist notions of the barbarian hordes of the third world.

It is this uncompromising, entrenched politicization that is at the root of everything al-Qaida and any other Islamist terror organization stands for: it provides the great narrative of the war between the persecuted true believers and their implacable enemy. Without Palestine, it is impossible to imagine an insurgency in Afghanistan having such global resonance and impact. Without Palestine, there would have been no pre-existing international networks of organizations, people and resources that ibn Ladin could build on to found his terrorist operation. Most crucially, without Palestine, there would be no gripping story to politicize new generations of Muslims into a worldwide conflict against the west. It is Palestine that links the disparate battles fought by Muslims all over Asia into one giant Islamist struggle against the infidel.

Most importantly for America, it is the United States' unwavering support of Israel that irrevocably paints them as the Great Satan. As implausible as the thought no doubt seems to the islamophobes of today, reformists in Muslim countries once looked up to the United States as an example and a source of aid. In the heady anticolonialist days following the Second World War, America's stand against the old colonial powers bought them immense goodwill across the Third World. As the battlelines of the Cold War hardened, more and more of that goodwill was squandered by a foolish insistence on backing anyone who publicly professed anticommunism, no matter what the actual policies they supported. The final nail in the coffin was the politicization of the Israeli-Arab conflict as a part of the Cold War. When the United States threw itself unquestioningly behind Israel, the Soviets became the only source of aid for the Arab countries, and America became their ultimate enemy.

This is why terrorism will not end with the death of 'Usāmah bin Lādin, or why indeed the global terrorism we know today will not end with any single death. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to keep the fire of Islamist anti-Americanism burning until a resolution can be found. In their recent refusal to capitalize on the truce negotiated by the new Egyptian government, and more generally the total failure of successive US administrations to make any progress in bringing Israel to the negotiating table, the United States have shown that they still refuse to acknowledge the crucial role of this conflict. Really bringing an end to global terror requires a solution in the Middle East, and only the Americans have the political clout with Israel to make it happen. Because they refuse to, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue to create new "O-samas" to fight the Great Enemy. In that sense, his death means nothing.