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Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Of Monsters and Black Lives
Lonnie David Franklin is a monster.
Franklin, the "Grim Sleeper," is a convicted serial killer who, between 1985 and 2007, murdered 10 to 200 women in Southern California. (I will return to that extraordinarily wide range of estimates later.) The fact that he is an African-American is centrally relevant to my purpose here. He is an appalling object lesson in the lethal power of official racism, past and present. At the same time, though, his case should also serve as a serious caution in current debates about reforming American policing in an age of urban unrest.
On a personal note, one of my odder claims to fame is that in the early 1990s, I pioneered the academic study of serial murders committed by African-Americans. At that time, characters like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer had become worldwide folk villains, but the burgeoning literature on serial killers made next to no reference to black offenders. Some commentators even suggested that such killers did not exist, making this a distinctively white pathology. Knowing what I did about the number of real black offenders, I disagreed strongly. I argued that African-Americans made up perhaps 15 percent of all U.S. serial killers, and subsequent research has supported that figure.
In stressing the abundance of black multiple killers, my goal was not of course to highlight the savagery and cruelty of any particular race, but rather to point to the neglect of minority victims. This actually gets to the issue of how serial murder happens, and why we need to consider much more than the evil or derangement of any given individual. Everything ultimately depends on the availability of victims and the priority that society places on them.
A vicious thug who likes to kill police officers, corporate CEOs, or Catholic priests is unlikely to claim more than one victim before the authorities start paying attention and reacting very forcefully. Hence, the man does not become a serial killer in the first place. If, though, a comparably disturbed offender chooses instead to target "low-value" or disposable individuals, such as street prostitutes, he can kill a great many victims without the police taking much notice.
That is all the more true if we also factor in a social ambience where life is assumed to be short and tenuous, for example in an era of gang wars and rampant drug abuse. If police find a corpse in such circumstances, it simply does not become a high investigative priority. Often, in fact, the dead are not even recognized as murder victims, but are simply dismissed as likely drug overdoses. Even when women survive such attacks and escape from their assailants, police generally pay little attention to any complaints they might make.
This is where race comes in so centrally. One of the golden rules of homicide is that generally, like kills like. People tend to kill within their own social setting, and commonly within their own class and race (and often, their own neighborhood). Throughout American history, some black men have committed savage, random violence against people of their own race, and to that degree, they are exactly the same as their white counterparts. Consistently, though, the fact that their victims are also black, and usually poor, means that police have paid little attention to those crimes, allowing individual offenders to count their kills in the dozens or hundreds. Even if they are arrested and convicted, media bias has meant that such offenders receive little public attention, leading police and government to underplay or ignore the problem of serial violence in minority communities. Racial bias thus contributed to the mass victimization of poor communities, and above all of poor women.
Exhibit A in this story would be Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s, the era of crack wars and rampant gang struggles, when murder rates were skyrocketing. Police focused heavily on those crimes and pathologies, and largely neglected the mass slaughter then underway of poor minority women, whose deaths were basically noted in passing. California media in the 1980s identified a prolific serial killer called the "Southside Slayer," who in retrospect might have been a composite of six or seven independent and unrelated offenders. At more or less the same time, Los Angeles was the hunting ground for several terrifying serial killers, men such as Louis Craine, Michael Hughes, Chester Turner, and Lonnie Franklin himself—all African-American. DNA evidence suggests that other yet unidentified killers were also active in the same years, and often the very same streets.
And that was just Los Angeles. The total number of victims involved here is unknown, and probably unknowable. Lonnie Franklin, as I mentioned, was officially implicated in around ten deaths, but a substantial collection of portrait photographs was found in his possession. If in fact they are trophies of his other, unrecorded victims, then we might be counting his victims in the hundreds—virtually all black and Latina women.
Similar stories could be told of other crisis-ridden inner-city areas across the nation. Other notorious names included Lorenzo Gilyard in Kansas City and Anthony Sowell in Cleveland. Such offenders are not rare, and what they have in common is their choice of marginalized victims: poor, minority, female, and commonly drug users or prostitutes.
The solution would be to reshape police priorities so that forces place a much higher premium on minority victims and are more sensitive to the possible presence of compulsive sexual criminals. There should be no "low value" victims. Put another way, the message would be that black lives matter, and especially black women's lives. Through the years, community-activist groups have made strides in this cause, so that murder series are now more likely to be acknowledged, but much remains to be done.
And this is where we face a paradox. As black communities have protested against violence and discrimination by police, the resulting conflicts have strongly discouraged police from intervening in minority areas, reducing proactive interventions. Although this is debated, much evidence now suggests that the immediate result has been an upsurge of crime and violence in those areas, through the "Ferguson Effect." Police tend to ask why they should go into an area unnecessarily if what they do is going to end up on YouTube and the evening news. In fact, such an idea is by no means new. After the urban rioting of the mid-1960s, police massively reduced their footprint in most inner-city areas, and the consequence was the jaw-dropping escalation of violence and homicide between 1967 and 1971.
Today, we are only beginning to see the first inklings of the Ferguson Effect and the consequences of the reduced police presence. The less police intervene in troubled minority areas, the easier it will be for poor victims to die and disappear, and for men like Lonnie Franklin to hunt without check. In the worst-case scenario, these could be very good times for serial predators, not to mention rapists and domestic abusers.
Less policing means more crime, and more victims. If you reduce levels of policing sufficiently, you will create a perfect ecology for victimization.
Obviously, this is not a simple dichotomy: the choice is not between policing that is interventionist and brutal, on the one hand, versus total neglect on the other. What we need, ideally, is effective, color-blind policing firmly rooted in particular communities, where all groups can rely on the good intentions and law-abiding character of their police forces. Trust is everything.
But that situation will not come overnight. In the interim, withdrawing or reducing the police presence runs the risk of endangering a great many ordinary people, whose lives absolutely must matter. We are talking about equal justice, and equal protection.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Terrorism With the Religion Taken Out
When bombs went off in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday night, state and city officials said some very silly things. But understanding those remarks is actually key to understanding U.S. policy toward terrorism in general.
The immediate response of Mayor Bill de Blasio was to reject possible links to terrorism as such. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, declared that "a bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism, but it's not linked to international terrorism—in other words we find no ISIS connection, etc." Both men also rejected possible linkages to another bombing earlier in the day at Seaside Park, NJ, which had targeted a Marine charity run.
At the time both comments were uttered, nobody had any idea who had undertaken the attacks or what their motives were. Feasibly, the attacks could have been launched by militants working in the cause of international Islamism, or black power, or white supremacy, or none of the above: they might have been the work of a lone mad bomber furious at his maltreatment by the power company. De Blasio was thus right to leave open the question of attribution, but he was wrong to squelch the potential terrorist link. His comment was doubly foolish given that the New Jersey attack had happened the same day and involved similar methods, which in itself indicated that an organized campaign had begun. As Cuomo had no hint who the attackers were, he actually could say nothing whatsoever about whether they had any connections to the Islamic State.
The New York Times, meanwhile, headlined that the explosion was "intentional," which was helpful, as it meant that a New York City garbage can had not detonated spontaneously.
Why on earth would de Blasio and Cuomo make such fatuous comments, especially when their security advisors must have been telling them something radically different? (NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorist operations are superb.) Why, particularly, would they make remarks that are virtually certain to be disproved within days?
Both de Blasio and Cuomo made an instant decision to go the heart of the matter as they saw it, which was not analyzing or discussing terrorism, but rather preventing hate crimes and pre-empting "Islamophobia." In doing this, they were closely echoing the approach of Barack Obama, who has explicitly stated that the danger of terrorism is wildly overblown, as fewer Americans die from terrorism than die from slipping in their bathtubs. (Thank heaven Obama was not president in December 1941, or he would presumably have been lecturing the American people about how small the casualty figures were on the USS Arizona, when set aside road deaths.) In contrast, the real and pressing danger facing the nation is ethnic and religious hatred and bigotry, which is bad in itself, and which also threatens U.S. prestige and diplomatic clout in the wider world.
Combating that threat must take absolute supremacy. That means (among other things) systematically underplaying and under-reporting any and all violent incidents committed by Muslims, or even overtly claimed for Islamist causes. Where Islamist claims are explicitly made, then the waters must be muddied by suggesting other motives—presenting the assailant as a lone berserker, motivated perhaps by psychiatric illness or homophobia. We rarely hear this ubiquitous strategy identified or named, so I offer a name here: this is the U.S. policy of de-Islamization.
With a mixture of bemusement and despair, we watch the extremely limited coverage of the savage attack in St Cloud, Minn., where a Somali man approached strangers in a mall, asked them if they were Muslim, and attacked any and all non-Muslims with a knife while shouting "Allah akbar." The Islamic State rapidly acknowledged the assailant as one of its soldiers. The FBI has labeled the attack "a potential act of terrorism." (You think?) Rather than focusing on the attacker or his motivations, CNN's coverage of the incident emphasizes that "Community leaders fear anti-Muslim backlash, call for unity." If you have the languages, you are much better off accessing French or German news sources for coverage of such American events.
What about Cuomo's "international terrorism" point? This represents a throwback to what should be an extinct classification system for terrorist attacks.
In years gone by, some terror attacks were launched by U.S. citizens working in various causes, while others were the work of international forces. The latter might include an Iraqi militant assassinating dissidents in Michigan. But the label also had ethnic and religious overtones. In the 1980s and 1990s, domestic terrorism usually implied white supremacists or neo-Nazis, while "international" commonly denoted Islamic or Middle Eastern connections.
That distinction made sense when the U.S. had a small Muslim population, very few of whom were tied to international causes or organizations. That situation is now totally different, and most of the numerous Islamist terror attacks on U.S. soil of the past decade have been undertaken by U.S. residents or citizens. Orlando killer Omar Mateen was born in New York State, and Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hassan was a Virginian serving in the U.S. Army. The man currently identified as a suspect in the Chelsea attacks is Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalized U.S. citizen.
All these events are thus domestic terror attacks, but they were committed in the name of global Islamist causes, specifically of the Islamic State. So why does the domestic/international dichotomy matter any more?
When Cuomo said the Chelsea attacks were not international in character, what he meant to imply was that they were neither Islamic nor Islamist in inspiration. His statement was simply deceptive, and was part of the larger campaign to de-Islamize the present terror campaign.
Whoever the next president may be, I am not too concerned about how "tough" they aspire to be toward terrorism in general. I just want them to acknowledge the deadly seriousness of the situation this country faces from domestic guerrilla campaigns, and most importantly, the religious and political causes in which most of that violence is undertaken.
Let's end de-Islamization.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Low-Tech Terror
If a mysterious alien ray swept every gun off the North American continent tomorrow, very ordinary and low-skilled militants could still perpetrate horrendous violence quite comparable to last month's Orlando attacks. In understanding and forestalling terrorist threats, access to weaponry is only one consideration out of a great many, and that fact is crucial to contemporary political debates.
But without guns, without so-called "assault weapons," how could terrorists kill innocents in large numbers? One answer to that question comes from the Chinese city of Kunming, where in 2014 a group of eight Islamist militants from the Uighur people stormed the local rail station, killing 29 civilians. As private access to firearms is extremely difficult in China, the killers used long bladed knives, and used them to devastating effect. That tactic has been repeated, and some horrible Chinese "spectaculars" have reached international attention. Last year, the same Uighur movement attacked a Xinjiang coal mine, reportedly killing 50 workers.
Such mass knife attacks occur quite frequently in China, and by no means always for political motives. Still, the fact that any tactic has been so successful in one country attracts the attention of terrorist social media, such as the Islamic State publication Inspire, which brings them to global attention. IS especially recommends that followers around the world should use whatever means available to attack and kill unbelievers, and if guns and explosives are not easily found, then knives are quite acceptable.
Knife attacks have one major drawback for terror groups, namely the large numbers of people needed to inflict mass casualties. Mobilizing a group of eight attackers is difficult without a high danger of penetration and exposure. Other forms of non-traditional violence, though, can easily be committed by solitary lone wolves, and for that reason they are warmly advocated by IS and al-Qaeda.
The main weapons in question are vehicles, and the U.S. was the scene of one pioneering experiment in this form of terror. In 2006, an Afghan immigrant named Omeed Aziz Popal used his SUV to attack civilians in the San Francisco Bay area, killing one and injuring nineteen. His intentions were very clear: as one observer remarked, "He was trolling for people." After hitting his victims, he returned to run over their prone bodies. Don't worry if you have never heard of the crime, which was poorly reported, and in such a way that made virtually no reference to the driver's ethnicity or religious background. The same year, Iranian Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar used his SUV to attack passers by on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, injuring nine. The driver cited 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta as his special hero.
If such attacks have not recurred in the United States itself, they have happened repeatedly in other countries, with the clear implication that tactics and methods are being developed through trial and error, awaiting full scale deployment. By far the commonest venue for these assaults has been Israel, presumably because militants there find it all but impossible to obtain guns or explosives. Vehicles, though, are much easier, and Palestinian guerrillas have used cars and also heavier machines such as tractors and bulldozers. Jerusalem alone has witnessed several such attacks since 2008, each with a number of fatalities. Uighurs (again) have used vehicles to ram crowds in Beijing.
2014 marked a turning point in this saga, when IS propagandist Abu Muhammad al-Adnani urged an all-out campaign of lone wolf violence. Find an unbeliever, he said, "Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him." Multiple vehicle attacks occurred around that time. A man yelling "Allahu Akbar!" drove down eleven pedestrians in the city of Dijon, and the very next day, Nantes witnessed an almost identical attack by a separate militant. Also in 2014, a recent Islamic convert in Quebec used his car against two members of the Canadian military.
So far, the most striking thing about these lone wolf vehicular attacks is just how relatively small the casualties have been, but that could change very easily. It would be easy to imagine drivers choosing denser crowds, during busy shopping seasons or major sporting events. In this scenario, long lines of fans or shoppers or travelers represent a target rich environment. On such occasions, a determined driver not afraid of being killed could easily claim twenty or more fatalities.
Whatever else we might say about limiting access to firearms (even assault rifles), such a policy of itself would do nothing whatever to prevent these kinds of low-tech violence. The solution lies in efficient forms of intelligence gathering, monitoring and surveillance, combined with psychological profiling. The danger with such methods is that they will not pick up every potential assailant, while running a serious risk of producing lots of false positives, aggressive blowhards who in reality will never commit a crime. Just how to walk that particular tightrope, between effective prevention and respecting rights to free speech, is going to offer a major challenge to law enforcement agencies of all kinds.
And yet again, it would be very useful if our political leaders felt able to speak the name of the actual cause for which all those murderous guns and knives and cars are being deployed. Perhaps that is too much to hope.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Is Brexit National Suicide?
Over the past week, I have often been asked what I think about the British referendum vote to leave the European Union, or to seek "Brexit." My standard response is that I would be happy to explain, provided the sight of me ranting and shrieking obscenities does not bother my listeners. In my view, Brexit is quite literally nothing short of national suicide. It is a cataclysm that that country must and can avert, at all costs.
In saying this, I run contrary to the view of many conservative writers who seem delighted by the vote. Those observers make some legitimate points about the referendum and the national and anti-globalization values that it proclaimed. Yes, the vote did represent a powerful proclamation by a silent majority who felt utterly betrayed and neglected by global and corporate forces. The Leave vote, they rightly think, was a mighty voice of protest.
Actually leaving, though, is a radically different idea. At its simplest, it means that Britain would abandon its role as a dominant power in Europe, a continent that presently has its effective capital in London, and with English its lingua franca. It also means giving up countless opportunities for young people to work and travel across this vast area.
Alright, perhaps those losses are too tenuous and speculative, so let's be very specific, hard-headed, and present-oriented. How would Britain survive outside the EU? If the country had three or four million people, it could revert to subsistence agriculture, but it doesn't—it has 64 million. That means that the country absolutely has to trade to survive, whether in goods or services. Fantasies of global commercial empires apart, the vast majority of that trade will continue to be what it has been for decades, namely with other European nations. All discussions of Brexit have to begin with that irreducible fact.
So trade on what terms? Since the referendum vote, it has become starkly apparent that none of the Leave militants had given a moment of serious thought to this issue.
One attractive model is that of the associated nation, which enjoys access to the free market, but is exempt from EU laws and regulations. Conservative politician Boris Johnson recently published an op-ed suggesting just such a model, drawing on the example of Norway, in what has been called a kind of EU-Lite. Beyond accessing the single market, he also specified that Britain would be able to maintain continent-wide mobility for its own people, while restricting immigration of foreigners into Britain. He also declared that future fiscal deficits could be solved by the limitless veins of fairy gold to be found under his house. Well, I am making up that last part, but it is perhaps the most plausible part of his scenario. European leaders made it immediately clear that no form of association would be contemplated under which Britain could exclude migrants. Mobility of labor must run both ways.
And that Norwegian example demands closer inspection. What it means in practice is that Norway's government pays a hefty price for its EU relationship and market access, in the form of continuing to pay very substantial sums into the EU, while agreeing to easy immigration policies. The only thing it lacks is any say whatever in EU policy-making.
Let me put this in U.S. terms. Imagine that Texas seceded from the union. The American President is amenable to the scheme, and explains how it would work in practice. Henceforward, he says, Texas would be completely independent! It would however continue to pay federal taxes, while having no control of immigration or border policy. Nor would it benefit in any form from federal aid, support or infrastructure projects. Oh, and Texas would no longer have any Congressional representation in Washington, to decide how its funds were spent. It seems like a bad idea to me, continues the president, but hey, it's your decision. Enjoy your sovereignty!
As they begin to consider the effects of Brexit, the Leave leaders are facing an irreconcilable contradiction. On the one side, you have the more mainstream figures, like Boris Johnson, who will very soon be pleading for a Norway-style association model, with all the negatives I suggested earlier. Against them will be the populists, like Nigel Farage's UKIP, who will accept nothing implying open immigration, no form of EU-Lite. Rejecting that element, though, also means abandoning any hope of access to the single European market. If implemented, that would mean industrial and financial collapse.
But there is a good side to that outcome! As the British economy disintegrated, millions would be forced to leave the country to seek their livelihoods elsewhere, and among those would be many of the recent immigrants whom UKIP so loathes. Who would choose to remain in a beggared and impoverished junkyard? The immigration problem would thus solve itself, almost overnight.
Realistically, the most likely outcome for Britain is some kind of association status, which means many of the burdens of EU membership, but without the essential pluses, of being able to control the process from within at governmental level. And the advantages of seeking that solution rather than the present model of full EU membership are… are… hold on, I'm sure I can finish this sentence somehow. No, in fact, there aren't any advantages.
Full British membership in the EU as constituted presently—with all its manifold flaws—is infinitely superior to any possible alternative outcome.
But surely, one might object, the referendum can be neither reversed or ignored? Actually, it can, easily, if any politician had the guts to do so. Nor do we need a second referendum to achieve that result. Contrary to the impression given by many media reports, the recent referendum was an advisory and nonbinding affair, with no necessary legal consequences whatever. In terms of its necessary impact on legislation, it had precisely the same force as a Cosmopolitan magazine survey on sexual predilections. In the context of constitutional laws and customs established over a millennium or so of British history, the referendum exists for a single purpose, namely to advise the deliberations of the Crown-in-Parliament. Parliament must vote on this issue, and if it decides to overturn the result, then so be it.
If at that point, British parliamentarians still decided to validate the Brexit result, then so be it, and may their country's ruin be on their conscience. But the decision remains entirely theirs.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Who Threatens Democracy?
The United States is currently facing a truly dangerous and unsettling political movement that poses real challenges to traditional concepts of democracy. That phenomenon is, of course, anti-Trumpism. Speaking personally, nothing could induce me to vote for Mr. Trump, but the violent opposition to him is becoming alarming.
"Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say," reads a New York Times headline. Specifically, these experts warn of his "contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law." And if they are experts, and if the Times has bothered to telephone them, then their views are of course impeccably objective. There are multiple issues here, not least that another Clinton presidency would assuredly involve precisely the same hazards, and presumably to the point of impeachable crimes, yet the Times is not seeking expert opinions on those matters.
But right now, let us consider the "rule of law" in the present election. In San Jose, anti-Trump protesters just physically attacked and chased supporters leaving a meeting, and events like that are becoming commonplace. They are assuredly going to escalate over the next few months. That prospect determines attitudes on both sides. Every left-wing activist group knows it is duty-bound to express its opposition to Trump, and supporters know that they are likely to be attacked if they attend meetings.
We can guarantee that certain things are going to happen within the next two months. One is that at least a handful of Trump supporters are not going to turn the other cheek. They know they cannot rely on police protection, and so some will turn up to meetings prepared to defend themselves, possibly with firearms. At that point, someone is going to be wounded or killed. At that point, expect a media outpouring about the inherent violence of Trump, his supporters, and the political Right. These animals are vicious! When attacked, they defend themselves.
The other prediction we can make with fair certainty is that in mid-July, we are going to be facing a major political crisis. The Republican convention will be held in Cleveland July 18-21, and it will assuredly be held in a state of siege. The exact outcome of that event very much depends on police behavior, preparation, and organization. If protesters can be kept sufficiently far removed, then perhaps some semblance of order can be preserved. If not, it is possible that the convention itself might be forced to suspend its activities. Either way, it is highly likely that individual convention delegates and participants are going to be attacked and, conceivably, harmed.
Political protests on some scale are not new, and political conventions are a natural target. But in modern U.S. history, has there ever been a national election where the candidates of one party were simply unable to show their faces without being met by violence? Where mob action simply makes it impossible for one campaign to function? We are not here talking about the candidate of some neo-Nazi sect or Klan group, but the Republican Party itself.
Ultimately, this is all a matter of policing and the workings of the criminal-justice system. In recent years, American police forces have become very conscious of the need to avoid overreaction at protests and public gatherings, for fear of generating embarrassing film that shows up on YouTube. In a version of the notorious "Ferguson Effect," they have become much gentler in their approaches than they were in earlier years. Witness, for instance, the decision to allow groups like Black Lives Matter to block roads without facing even the danger of arrest. The reasons for caution are understandable, but something has to change. If the police cannot maintain public order sufficiently to allow the functioning of something as critical as a national election, have we not ventured into a full-scale national crisis?
If national elections cannot be held in safety, has democracy not ceased to function?
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Nuclear-Free Nightmare
Visiting Hiroshima last week, President Obama expressed the wish that in the future no community would ever have to suffer the horrors inflicted on that city in 1945, and moreover, that the bombing should never be forgotten. Those sentiments were obvious and unexceptionable. Much more debatable, though, was his restatement of his desire to see a world free of nuclear weapons. If expressed as a general platitude, that is fine, but if it represents any kind of serious strategy or policy goal, it is dangerous to the point of insanity. Hard though this may be to hear, we desperately need our nukes.
The year 1945 marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented peace and security in Europe, which with brief interruptions has continued until the present day. That glorious new age did not happen because of a sudden moral improvement, or the rise of the European unification movement, or any ideological tilt. It happened because both superpowers knew that if either broke the security balance within Europe, the result would be a catastrophic nuclear war that would have annihilated Europe, and deeply damaged the homelands of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. That balance of terror removed the vast advantage that the Soviets had from their enormous superiority in land forces. That seventy years of peace is founded on the existence of large numbers of nuclear arms.
If we try to rewrite the history of Europe without assuming the existence of those weapons, it is scarcely possible to imagine such an enduring peace, except on the basis of the permanent total mobilization of all European powers, as well as the nations of the Anglosphere. Such mass mobilization seems bizarre to anyone brought up in our own nuclear world, but the idea was a reality from the Napoleonic Wars onwards. The normal calculation was that for every million people in a nation's population, you could sustain two divisions. Only a society spoiled by the security of Mutual Assured Destruction could have forgotten such brutal mathematics.
A future world without nuclear weapons would have to return to mass mobilization and universal conscription in order to counterbalance the advantages of great continental states unafraid to venture "boots on the ground" in their many millions—China obviously, but also Russia, Pakistan, and India, among others. Fortunately, the modern U.S. would have the blessing of all the women who would happily agree to be drafted to serve alongside the millions of soldiers and sailors the nation would need to keep in uniform to maintain its security. How does a 12 million strong standing U.S. army sound?
Not, of course, that all future wars would necessarily be slogging matches between infantry, or trench warfare. Even without actually using nuclear weapons, we can see clearly how the world would have developed after 1945 without that overwhelming deterrent. By the end of the Second World War, the U.S. and Britain had perfected the art of destroying cities by air raids involving thousands of aircraft, using firebombs and napalm. Even in those early years, they were inflicting death-tolls running into the tens or hundreds of thousands. Those technologies would presumably be much more advanced today, so that any non-nuclear war could be incredibly destructive, and would claim many millions of lives.
During the height of the Cold War, the British also toyed with the idea of quite impressive non-nuclear deterrents. By the early 1950s, the cutting edge of their military thinking was Operation Cauldron, which sought deterrents based on biological warfare. The most promising components in this witches' brew included brucellosis, tularaemia, and also pneumatic and bubonic plague. We know about these efforts today because of the truly chilling 1952 incident in which the trawler Carella inadvertently wandered into British test waters and was exposed to some of these hellish agents. Rather than quarantining the sailors, or even notifying them of the dangers they faced, the military began a covert surveillance to track their health and see whether they might spread infections when they reached British ports. The Carella scandal has shed light on the larger world of Cauldron.
That was 1952. Presumably the range of catastrophic biological agents available to even small powers today is vastly greater, and even more lethal.
So exactly what part of the nuclear-free world are we pining for? The constant mobilization and militarization of all major societies? The investment in massed bomber fleets to charbroil the cities of any potential enemies? Or the total dependence on biological deterrence, with the President's finger constantly on the bubonic trigger? Dare I say that none of this actually sounds attractive? The main difference between that hypothetical world and the nuclear-armed world we know is that those alternative weapons would have stood a far greater chance of actually being used.
In 1970, the British heavy rock band, the Groundhogs, issued an album with the seemingly appalling title Thank Christ for the Bomb. Today, we might imagine this as shock for shock's sake, like later punk numbers, but it was anything but that. The thoughtful lyrics of the title song stated a simple thesis, namely that the twentieth century had witnessed two hugely damaging wars that had killed millions, but that since 1945, the advanced nations at least had avoided any recurrence of such a fate. The reason for that sea change, said the Groundhogs, was quite clear, which is why they exclaimed, "Thank Christ for the bomb." That argument demands examination, and respect.
If President Obama wants to reduce the number of nuclear weapons among all powers, he should be encouraged. If he wants to see arsenals of at most a few hundred warheads for even the greatest nations, with correspondingly smaller hoards for smaller nations, all well and good. If, though, he seriously contemplates a world without nuclear weapons, then he is utterly and perilously ignorant of modern history.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Recognize the Islamic State
Few would deny that the recent horrors in Brussels demand action, beginning, certainly, with a thoroughgoing purge of Belgian security and intelligence agencies. Other proposed remedies are shambolic, meaningless, or simply farcical, such as the idea of police patrolling "Muslim areas" in the U.S. (Which areas? Where? With what goal?) I would suggest, though, that one urgent priority is for the U.S. and its European allies to consider immediate political and diplomatic recognition of the Islamic State. Let me explain the grounds for that proposal.
European societies are legendarily open, and most have a strong reluctance to anything that might look like curbing dissent. That willingness to tolerate virtually any opposition to government is vastly enhanced by the commitment to multiculturalism, and the perceived need to avoid persecuting or targeting ethnic and religious minorities. Only that tradition can explain the utterly perplexing comments that regularly appear in media reports of Islamist activities in Europe, especially after major terror attacks. We read that a certain area in Sweden or England or Germany is a notorious trouble spot, with so many local men having traveled to Syria and returned. Elsewhere, we hear that intelligence agencies are stretched to the limit in keeping track of militants. In Britain, for instance, the security services report the hard work of keeping tables on a couple of thousand known jihadis. After an attack, media usually report that the X brothers were "known to the police" as likely militants.
Let me ask the questions that seem obvious to me, but which apparently elude European agencies. Firstly, and most obvious, the category of jihadi is quite distinct from that of political dissenter, or critic of the regime, or radical reformer. Of its nature, it implies being willing and eager to engage in armed violence against democratic regimes, and also the preaching and advocacy of such activities. Given the present terrorist threat in Europe, support or advocacy for such views constitutes a clear and present danger to peace, safety, and public order. It therefore involves conduct that in the Anglo-American legal tradition clearly comes within the ambit of the criminal code, under such labels as sedition and incitement to kill. I am not an expert on Roman Law traditions, but I assume those countries have comparable notions of criminal behavior, of the advocacy of violence falling short of the deed itself.
Why are European governments not enforcing these laws? Why do they not go beyond proscribing organizations to prosecuting and punishing each and every individual member or office holder? Why are there no mass sedition trials? If direct criminal prosecutions are difficult, why can suspects not be interned for the duration of the emergency? Why, in short, are "known jihadi sympathizers" walking the streets?
Leading on from that, if a person has traveled from a European nation to Syria or Iraq in the past four or five years, the presumption is surely that they did so with a willingness to support the activities of the same terror group that has been active on European soil, namely the Islamic State, the Daesh. This places them in the category of jihadi, with the sanctions outlined above. Why are they ever, under any circumstances, allowed re-entry into Europe? Indeed, let us encourage their travels to the Middle East, where they can form a concentrated target for attack and annihilation by multiple nations. But return? Never.
Please understand, I am not naïve about the workings of intelligence, and I realize there are excellent reasons for allowing real or apparent terror suspects to wander loose. I once debated a conservative writer who was appalled that the British allowed a certain blowhard imam to remain free and active in London. My argument was that intelligence services often allow such figures much liberty precisely because they are double agents or informants, and they must be seen to be active in radical movements as a means of facilitating surveillance and penetration of terror organizations. My fear, though, is that the enormous latitude allowed to European jihadis does not, generally, result from such familiar tradecraft. European governments are simply too confused or gutless to round them up and jail them.
All of which brings me to recognizing the Islamic State. Presently, the Daesh is viewed as a dangerous terrorist group, membership in which constitutes illegal behavior in Western nations. But suppose that it was recognized internationally as a state, and its sympathizers and agents continued to advocate or practice violence against Western governments. In that case, they would be advocating or committing acts of irregular warfare, which would constitute treason. That would be all the easier if Western states formally declared war against the Islamic State.
The potential of treason charges would really, seriously, force Islamist thinkers to think very hard about the nature of their propaganda and activism. That redefinition would also make it vastly easier to frame and press charges, and to inflict maximum criminal penalties.
The people who would be happiest with such a development would be the leaders of most European mosques and Islamic organizations, who get very tired of banging their heads against the obstructive attitudes of police agencies. When sane, moderate, imams denounce the troublemakers in their midst, they would like nothing better than to get those fanatics put away for a great many years.
So, please, let's recognize the Islamic State, and force its supporters and adherents to come to terms with the implications of advocating violence on the part of an enemy nation. Let them become traitors and saboteurs, and suffer accordingly.
I do ask one final question. Both Western powers and Russia are commendably anxious to avoid targeting civilian populations with tactics like carpet-bombing Mosul or Raqqa. Fair enough, and hence the countless pinpricks of drone attacks. But why on earth do those cities, and other Daesh strongholds, still have the slightest access to power, water, sewage disposal and desalination, and every other facility that permits the continuation of normal civilized existence? Cutting off those pleasant advantages would force an immediate and irreversible crisis within Daesh territories, pushing those already unhappy with the regime into immediate revolt. I am sure the states allegedly pledged to smashing the Islamic State have good reasons for not striking at such obvious targets, but offhand, I can't think of any.
History and the Limits of the Climate Consensus
I began my career as a historian of the century following 1660, an era of harsh climatic conditions that often affected political and cultural history. Some periods in particular, especially the years around 1680 and 1740, stand out as uniquely stressful. Extreme cold led to crop failures and revolts, social crises and apocalyptic movements, high mortality and epidemics, but it also spawned religious revivals and experimentation. If you write history without taking account of such extreme conditions, you are missing a lot of the story. That background gives me an unusual approach to current debates on climate change, and leads me to ask some questions for which I genuinely do not have answers.
I believe strongly in the supremacy of scientific method: science is what scientists do, and if they don't do it, it's not real science. Based on that principle, I take very seriously the broad consensus among qualified scientific experts that the world's temperature is in a serious upward trend, which will have major consequences for most people on the planet—rising sea levels and desertification are two of the obvious impacts. In many religious traditions, activists see campaigns to stem these trends as a moral and theological necessity. Personally, I love the idea of using advanced technology to drive a decisive shift towards renewable energy sources, creating abundant new jobs in the process.
Speaking as a historian, though, I have some problems with defining the limits of our climate consensus, and how these issues are reported in popular media and political debate.
Climate scientists are usually clear in their definitions, but that precision tends to get lost in popular discourse. To say that global warming is a fact does not, standing alone, mean that we have to accept a particular causation of that trend. Following from that, we must acknowledge that the climate has changed quite radically through the millennia, and that equally is beyond dispute. Climate change of some scale has happened, is happening, and will happen, regardless of any human activity. The issue today is identifying and assessing the human role in accelerating that process.
This point comes to mind in popular debate when people who should know better denounce "climate change" as such. See for instance the recent Papal encyclical Laudato Si, with its much-quoted statement that
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.
Well, not exactly. "Climate change" is a fact and a reality, rather like the movement of tectonic plates, or indeed like evolution. Particular forms of climate change may be exceedingly harmful and demand intervention, but that is a critical difference. It's interesting comparing the English phrase "climate change" with the French phrase that was used at the recent COP21 Paris meetings, the Conférence sur les Changements Climatiques 2015: changes, plural, not change. Do you want to see a world without a changing climate? Look at the Moon.
That then gets to the human contribution to current trends. The basic theory in these matters is straightforward, simple, and (rightly) generally accepted. Carbon emissions create a greenhouse effect, which increases planetary temperatures. It should be said, though, that the correlation between emissions and temperatures is none too close. Rising temperatures do not correlate with any degree of neatness to overall levels of emissions. That is especially true when we look at the phenomenal growth in emissions from India and China since the 1980s, which should in theory have caused a global temperature increase far above anything we actually see. Sure, the effects might be delayed, but the correlation is still not working too well.
That disjunction is particularly telling when we look at the very recent era, from 1998 through 2012, when emissions have carried on rising sharply, but temperature rises have been slow or stagnant. This was a hiatus or slowdown in global warming, and it remains controversial. Some recent studies challenge the whole hiatus idea. Others accept the hiatus, but offer different explanations for its cause. Now, the fact that scientists disagree strongly on a topic certainly does not mean that the underlying theory is wrong. Arguing and nitpicking is what scientists are meant to do. But that lack of correlation does raise questions about the assumptions on which any policy should proceed.
That also gets us into areas of expertise. Climate and atmospheric scientists are not only convinced that the present warming trend is happening, but that it is catastrophic and unprecedented. That belief causes some bemusement to historians and archaeologists, who are very well used to quite dramatic climate changes through history, notably the Medieval Warm Period and the succeeding Little Ice Age. That latter era, which prevailed from the 14th century through the 19th, is a well-studied and universally acknowledged fact, and its traumatic effects are often cited. The opening years of that era, in the early-mid 14th century, included some of the worst social disasters and famines in post-Roman Europe, which were in turn followed by the massacre and persecution of dissidents and minorities—Jews in Europe, Christians in the Middle East, heretics and witches in many parts of the world. A cold and hungry world needed scapegoats.
Contemporary scientists tend to dismiss or underplay these past climate cycles, suggesting for instance that the medieval warm period was confined to Europe. Historians, in their turn, are deeply suspicious, and the evidence they cite is hard to dismiss. Do note also that the very substantial Little Ice Age literature certainly does not stem from cranky "climate deniers," but is absolutely mainstream among historians. Are we seeing a situation where some "qualified and credentialed scientific experts" stand head to head with the "qualified and credentialed social scientific experts" known as historians?
If in fact the medieval world experienced a warming trend comparable to what we are seeing today, albeit without human intervention, that fact does challenge contemporary assumptions. Ditto for the Little Ice Age, which really and genuinely was a global phenomenon. Incidentally, that era involved a drop in temperature of some 2 degrees Celsius, roughly the same as the rise that is projected for coming decades.
The 2015 Paris Conference declared a target of restricting "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." It's very important to set a baseline for such efforts, certainly, but what on earth is intended here? Which pre-industrial levels are we talking about? The levels of AD 900, of 1150, of 1350, of 1680, of 1740? All those eras were assuredly pre-industrial, but the levels were significantly different in each of those years. Do they want us to return to the temperatures of the Little Ice Age, and even of the depths of cold in the 1680s? The Winter of 1684, for instance, still remains the worst recorded in England, ever. Or are the bureaucrats aiming to get us back to the warmer medieval period, around 1150?
Seriously, does any serious climate scientist claim that "pre-industrial" temperature levels had been broadly constant globally for millennia, in fact since the end of the last true Ice Age some 12,000 years ago, and that they only moved seriously upwards at the start of industrialization? Really? And they would try to defend that? In that case, we should just junk the past few decades of writing on the impact of climate on history, undertaken by first rate scholars.
If pre-industrial temperature levels really varied as much as they actually did, why did the Paris conference so blithely incorporate this meaningless phrase into their final agreement? Did the participants intend "pre-industrial levels" to be roughly equivalent to "the good old days"?
I offer one speculation. Maybe the "Little Ice Age" was the planet's "new normal," a natural trend towards a colder world, and we should in theory be living in those conditions today. All that saved us was the post-1800 rise in temperatures caused by massive carbon emissions from an industrializing West. If that's correct—and I say it without any degree of assurance—then I for one have no wish whatever to return to pre-industrial conditions. Climate scientists, please advise me on that?
Historical approaches are also useful in pointing to the causes of these changes, and therefore of much climate change that originates quite independently of human action. One critical factor is solar activity, and historians usually cite the Maunder Minimum. Between 1645 and 1715, sunspot activity virtually ceased altogether, and that cosmic phenomenon coincided neatly with a major cooling on Earth, which now reached the depths of the Little Ice Age. In fact, we can see this era as an acute ice age within the larger ice age. If you point out that correlation does not of itself indicate causation, you would be quite right. But the correlation is worth investigating.
So do I challenge the global warming consensus? Absolutely not. But that does not mean that all critical questions have been satisfactorily answered, and many of them depend on historical research and analysis. Pace the New York Times and large sections of the media, there is no such thing as "established science," which is immune to criticism. If it is "established" beyond criticism and questioning, it's not science.
Scientific claims must not be taken on faith.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Islamic State's Retro Map
Policymakers and media people—as well as anyone interested in the Middle East, Islam, terrorism, and related issues—need to be talking about al-Jazira. I am not talking here about the Qatar-based media operation that we usually call al-Jazeera. Rather, I am referring to those regions of Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq that have been in the news so much recently because they are the main stamping grounds of ISIL, and the core of the Islamic State, the Daesh.
This is not just a question of applying a handy geographical label. If we don't understand the Jazira, and its deep historical implications, we are missing so much of the present story.
The area spans major portions of the old states of Iraq and Syria (can I now assume these states are defunct as actual units?), and has its main centers at Ar-Raqqah, Mosul and Deir ez-Zor. Those territories feature very prominently on the military maps and targeting charts of most major Western air forces, not to mention Russian and Syrian militaries. When those cities feature in Western media, it is usually in the context of the slaughter of hostages or the expulsion of religious minorities.
Looking at a map of the Islamic State, Westerners find it hard to describe, except in terms of "fragments of old Syria and Iraq." Actually, though, these regions belong to a specific and old-established unit with its own well defined, if turbulent history, that is very well known in Middle Eastern history. Ever since the early days of Islam, commentators have used the term al-Jazira ("the island") for these parts, together with the southeastern corner of present Turkey. The term derives from the "island" between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Originally, it referred to Northern Mesopotamia, that area which combined with the "black land" further down the rivers to invent the state of Iraq. By extension, though, it also included those other borderland countries that eventually found their way into Syria and Turkey.
To say this area has a substantial history is a gross understatement. That story would include, for instance, most of the early development of Near Eastern civilization, not to mention the whole of early Syriac Christianity. Once upon a time, the area was as densely packed with churches and monasteries as any region of Europe, and cities like Nisibis were vital intellectual and spiritual powerhouses. Ar-Raqqah itself was once the mighty early Christian city of Kallinikos, with its bishopric and monastery. Mosul itself was, until very recent years, one of the greatest Christian centers in the whole Middle East.
In Islamic times, of course, that history took a very different direction, but it has always served as a distinct region, with a natural unity and geographical logic. The more you read this history, from the seventh century through the 20th, the more this fundamental unity becomes apparent. Any Muslim ruler seeking to establish wider power had to control the Jazira, even if their natural base was much further afield, in Baghdad or Damascus. Meanwhile, Byzantine and Islamic Empires contended to secure dominance here.
Yet that task was far from easy. The rough and complex terrain made it difficult to suppress independent-minded dissidents, who found a natural home here. That meant ethnic minorities, but also religious sects. Over the centuries, this is where you found the strongholds of the apocalyptic Kharijite sect, the Yezidis, Assyrian Christians, and (more generally) the Kurdish people.
Of its nature, this is warrior country, from which hard-bitten fighters expanded to conquer what they viewed as the effete city dwellers to the south and west. To those city dwellers, al-Jazira always has been dangerous borderland or bandit country. Anyone familiar with the long history of the U.S.-Mexican border will have an excellent sense of the mutual prejudices and stereotypes that prevail here, not to mention the subcultures of endemic violence.
Modern policy-makers should take many significant lessons from this history, but two in particular stand out. One is that the limits of al-Jazira certainly do not end on the old Syria/Iraq borders, but extend deep into Turkey, and that this is the natural direction for any future expansion of the Islamic State. That fact must be central to the thinking of any Turkish policymakers. If the Islamic State is a continuing fact, then it is imperative to maintain good relations with its rulers, and to draw firm boundaries. That entity will still be in place long after the Americans, Russians, and French have lost interest and gone home.
The other great fact is that al-Jazira is now starkly divided between two competing forces, namely ISIS and the Kurds, both of whom operate freely across the three states that notionally control the area. Any projections of the future of this region must centrally emphasize that reality, rather than the role of the ghost states operating from Baghdad and Damascus.
If any Western regime is thinking of restoring old Syria and Iraq, it is operating in a world of delusion. The central issue in the Middle East is the unity of the Jazira, and just who will control this critical heartland.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Challenge of Lone Wolf Terrorism
The horrific recent attack in San Bernardino has attracted a good deal of bafflement from media and government alike. What kind of Islamist assault was this? If Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were not acting together with a "real" terror group or network, were they really terrorists? Were they taking orders from some mysterious head or group, still unidentified? Actually, there is an easy and unsettling answer to all these questions. Yes, they certainly were terrorists, and they were following one of the most dangerous tactics known in that world, "leaderless resistance." The fact that U.S. law enforcement is still so startled by this method, and so utterly unprepared, is deeply alarming.
Do not for a second think that by using the term "resistance," I am justifying these disgusting crimes, or comparing them to guerrilla resistance movements. Rather, I am using a well known technical term, albeit one with a very odd history.
Amazingly, the story goes back to the U.S. ultra-Right in the 1980s. Far Rightists and neo-Nazis tried to organize guerrilla campaigns against the U.S. government, which caused some damage but soon collapsed ignominiously. The problem was the federal agencies had these movements thoroughly penetrated, so that every time someone planned an attack, it was immediately discovered by means of either electronic or human intelligence. The groups were thoroughly penetrated by informers.
The collapse of that endeavor led to some serious rethinking by the movement's intellectual leaders. Extremist theorists now evolved a shrewd if desperate strategy of "leaderless resistance," based on what they called the "Phantom Cell or individual action." If even the tightest of cell systems could be penetrated by federal agents, why have a hierarchical structure at all? Why have a chain of command? Why not simply move to a non-structure, in which individual groups circulate propaganda, manuals and broad suggestions for activities, which can be taken up or adapted according to need by particular groups or even individuals?
To quote far Right theorist Louis Beam,
Utilizing the leaderless resistance concept, all individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction … No-one need issue an order to anyone.
The strategy is almost perfect in that attacks can neither be predicted nor prevented, and that there are no ringleaders who can be prosecuted. The Internet offered the perfect means to disseminate information. Already in the mid-1980s, the neo-Nazi networks were pioneering early adapters of the electronic bulletin boards that preceded the World Wide Web.
In 1989, Rightist intellectual William Pierce published a book that provides a prophetic description of leaderless resistance in action. Hunter, published in 1989, portrays a lone terrorist named Oscar Yeager (German, Jäger) who assassinates mixed-race couples. The book is dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, "the Lone Hunter, who saw his duty as a white man, and did what a responsible son of his race must do." Franklin, for the uninitiated, was a racist assassin who launched a private three year war in the late 1970s, in which he murdered interracial couples and bombed synagogues. The fictional Yeager likewise launches armed attacks against the liberal media, and against groups attempting to foster good relations among different races and creeds.
Central to the book is the notion of revolutionary contagion. Although the hero (for hero he is meant to be) cannot by himself bring down the government or the society that he detests, his "commando raids" serve as a detonator, to inspire other individuals or small groups by his example. "Very few men were capable of operating a pirate broadcasting station or carrying out an aerial bombing raid on the Capitol, but many could shoot down a miscegenating couple on the street." He aimed at the creation of a never-ending cycle of "lone hunters," berserkers prepared to sacrifice their lives in order to destroy a society they believe to be wholly evil.
Politically, the U.S. ultra-Right was too weak in the 1990s to follow Pierce's model, and the movement never fully recovered from the Oklahoma City attack. But the Hunter tactics live on, precisely, in the modern Islamist world, and specifically in the influence of Yemeni-American propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by U.S. action in 2011. Reading texts from al-Qaeda's online magazine Inspire, we so often hear what sound like direct echoes of Pierce, and especially of leaderless resistance.
That connection is actually not hard to explain. We know that al-Awlaki spent the 1990s in the U.S., where he would have had easy access to the rich array of paramilitary books and manuals circulated by far Right and survivalist mail order firms, which also sold anti-Semitic tracts. Both kinds of writing would have appealed to a budding jihadi. If he dabbled at all in this subculture, he would very soon have encountered the books of Pierce, who was a best-seller in these catalogues. Particularly in the early nineties, Hunter was the hottest name in this literary underworld. If not Hunter itself, al-Awlaki would certainly have heard discussions of leaderless resistance, which was all the rage on the paramilitary Right in those years.
In light of that, look at the domestic terror attacks in the U.S. in the past decade, all of "lone wolves" or of tiny hermetic cells, made up of siblings or married couples. Think of the Tsarnaevs in Boston, of Nidal Hassan in Fort Hood, of Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez in Chattanooga, and now of Farook and Malik in San Berndardino. Think also of the many instances—never fully catalogued and collated—of Islamist "lone wolves" driving cars into crowds. Call it "self-radicalization" if you must, but what we have in progress, in the contemporary United States, is a textbook example of a Hunter-inspired campaign of leaderless resistance.
What that means is that virtually none of the counter-terror tactics currently deployed by U.S. agencies have the slightest relevance to detecting or preventing future attacks. You can't track leaders because there aren't any, you can't infiltrate the group or turn participants, and all the propaganda and terror methods needed are on the Internet. They are getting their training and propaganda online from Qaeda sites like Inspire, and more recently by the ISIS/Daesh magazine Dabiq.
For the sake of argument, let us accept the optimistic view that 99 percent of American Muslims flatly reject terrorism. Not counting any future migration, that would still leave one percent of the whole, or some 30,000 potential Islamist militants. That is enough people for 10,000 leaderless cells.
Addressing this issue would seem to be the absolute number one priority of U.S. law enforcement in the coming years. Shall we begin, at least, by naming the enemy?
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Case for Mosque Surveillance
I am about to do something highly uncharacteristic, namely to agree with Donald Trump on something. Recently, Trump made a statement, apparently shocking to many, that "I want surveillance of certain mosques." If you know anything about terrorism and counter-terrorism, there is only one thing shocking about this remark, namely that anybody is disturbed by it. Only the shock shocks.
Put another way, look at another recent remark from British film-maker Frankie Boyle, who complains about the French and Russian bombing campaign in the Middle East. Wrong solution, he says. What we really need is "an urgent debate about how to make public spaces safer and marginalized groups less vulnerable to radicalization." Those are excellent and critical suggestions. Lacking extensive surveillance and intelligence operations, though, such strategies are irrelevant and suicidally dangerous.
Here is the problem. In order to investigate terrorism, law enforcement agencies absolutely must use various clandestine methods, including surveillance, infiltration and double-agent tactics. Agencies wishing to suppress terrorism must, of necessity, operate in a complex and dirty clandestine world. In order to succeed, they must often do things that they cannot publicize frankly.
The best and perhaps only means to defeat subversive or terrorist groups is to keep them under detailed and constant surveillance, a strategy that must be coupled with infiltration and penetration. This needs to be stated because of the common official emphasis on enhancing security to protect airports and public buildings against terrorist attacks. At least, that is what agencies say publicly.
Americans are all too familiar with the searches they deal with before flying on commercial airlines. Some of these precautions are useful and necessary, but most have no impact whatever on the likelihood of a terrorist assault. If you fortify aircraft, terrorists attack airports; if you fortify airports, they can bring down aircraft with missiles fired from remote locations; if you defend aircraft, they attack ships; and so on. Does TSA operate perfect security at its checkpoints? Then gun down the long lines waiting to pass through the checkpoints.
It is a near miracle that nobody has yet blown up a ship packed with high explosives in a U.S. port, creating something close to the effects of a nuclear blast. To see what I am talking about, just Google "Halifax 1917".
Overwhelmingly, security precautions and airport searches are solely designed to raise public consciousness, a feel-good strategy without any real effects or benefits. The fact that we have not to date had "another 9/11" has next to nothing to do with airport security operations. It is the result of intelligence, pure and simple.
No government can defend itself against terrorism solely by means of protection and security. This is all the more true when we consider the international dimension. Even if we assume the impossible, and the U.S. became wholly invulnerable from terrorist attack, this would still leave an almost infinite number of targets worldwide.
Think of Europe, an area somewhat smaller than the continental U.S., though divided into over 30 separate nations, with competing police jurisdictions. Most also operate within the Schengen system, so that there are effectively no internal border controls. This makes it easy for activists to escape detection, to operate freely across several countries, and to drive across several countries in a day. Meanwhile, Europe is host to hundreds of major U.S. targets, including embassies, military bases, business offices, airline offices, and tourist resorts. Add to that tourist sites where Americans gather in large numbers.
And that is just Europe: American targets are just as exposed in the Middle East, in the Asia-Pacific region, or in Latin America. There is simply no way that the U.S. can mobilize forces to defend every single potential target in the world against a global organization like ISIL/Daesh or al-Qaeda, or to place U.S. troops at every port and airport, every embassy and tourist destination. Of itself, talking about "making public spaces safer" is delusional.
Let me say this simply: in a terrorist war, any effort that is solely defensive is bound to fail. Just to protect is to lose.
The only way to defeat attacks is to prevent them being launched, and that means finding out what the extremists are going to do before they do it, and stopping them. This demands the use of surveillance and infiltrators, both what is known as electronic intelligence, and human intelligence.
But surveillance over what? In an ideal world, terrorists would wear T-shirts with the word TERRORIST printed in large letters, so they could be picked out easily by the security forces. Unfortunately, they do not do so, and strenuously resist attempts to isolate them from the people. They operate through above-ground organizations and institutions.
One critical concept here is insulation, which British counter-terrorism expert Frank Kitson defines as "a functional system of associations, clubs and other groupings designed to carry out specific tasks." It is, in short, a means by which terrorists can hide among the larger population. Through legal and above-ground organizations, terrorists spread propaganda, and recruit. The groups can be used as testing grounds, to observe the efficiency and dedication of young militants who might eventually be drafted into the terrorist organization. In advanced stages of a campaign, they can be used to smuggle and store weaponry, and train militants in their use.
Depending on the context, those above-ground groups might take many forms—labor unions, political parties, social clubs, ethnic and religious pressure groups—but in the Islamist world, that chiefly (but not exclusively) means mosques. I could easily list a hundred European mosques that presently serve this crypto-terrorist function, and many do so quite flagrantly.
This point might be obvious, but let me say it clearly. The vast majority of U.S. mosques presently serves no such role, and their members would utterly reject radicalism, extremism, or violence. Even where there is an extremist presence, that would be absolutely contrary to the wishes of the mainstream in the congregation. The main thing the imams in those places want is to have the police help them kick out the extremists, and not to be too gentle doing so.
But any terrorist Islamist presence in the U.S., present or future, does and will use mosques in this way. If you do not maintain such mosques under surveillance—and particular "certain mosques" already leaning in radical Salafist directions—you might as well abandon any and all pretense of trying to limit or suppress terrorism on U.S. soil.
"Surveillance" in this instance emphatically means human intelligence within the mosque. That means recruiting informants within it, and trying to bring radicals over to your own side, to see what extremists are going to do before they do it. Just how and where is radicalization being undertaken? Who are the key militants? Are there weapons present? What are the overseas connections? And if that means recruiting and controlling imams and religious teachers, all the better.
These tactics are absolutely fundamental to European counter-terrorism approaches, and nobody has the slightest doubt of that fact. That fact is public knowledge, and effectively beyond political criticism. If U.S. agencies claim that they are not doing the same things right now, in American mosques, they are simply deluding the public. They will worry about the freedom of religion lawsuits later.
So, God help me on this, in this instance, Trump is right. The only thing he is doing wrong is talking about it publicly.
Again: In a terrorist war, any effort that is solely defensive is bound to fail. To protect is to lose. We must understand and accept all the necessary consequences of that fact.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Fertility and the Fate of Nations
When seeking to understand national security issues, demographics is commonly the missing dimension. The fertility of a particular population not only determines its overall numbers, but also contributes mightily to determining the balance of ethnic and linguistic groups, and a country's chances of achieving any kind of lasting stability. Wise governments count their children. And without knowing something about demographic factors, we are going to be baffled by the behavior of some key players in the current Middle Eastern imbroglio.
A society's population is shaped by both birth and death rates, but at present, I will focus on births, and especially on fertility. One key measure used by demographers is the total fertility rate, TFR, the total number of children that an average woman will bear during her lifetime. If that rate is around 2.1, then the population is stable, and that figure is known as the replacement rate. If it is significantly higher than replacement, say at 4.0 or 5.0, then we have a fast expanding population, a lot of young people, and probably a lot of instability. A rate below replacement points to an aging and shrinking population, and also a crying need for immigrants and new blood. From the 1960s, European countries moved to sub-replacement rates, and that situation is now spreading rapidly—though far from uniformly—around the world.
Those rates also tell us a lot about religious behavior, and there is a close if poorly understood linkage between fertility and faith. Populations with very high fertility rates tend to be highly religious in very traditional ways, while "modern" and educated populations have far fewer children, and those societies are usually very secular. Over time, high fertility gives way to low, and religion declines accordingly. The poster child for that story is resolutely secular Denmark, with a TFR around 1.7, but a similar process has swept over most of modern Catholic Europe.
We can argue at length about whether the religious change follows fertility, or vice versa. Perhaps a decline in religious ideologies weakens commitment to family as a primary means of defining identity; or else declining numbers of children reduce the community ties that bind families to religious institutions. Either way, growing numbers of people define their interests against those of traditional religious values, spawning numerous conflicts over issues of morality, sexuality, and sexual identity. Ireland's TFR, for instance, has halved since 1971, and the decline is much steeper if we just consider old stock Irish families, rather than immigrants. The same years have witnessed repeated brushfire wars over such issues as contraception, divorce, and same sex marriage.
But changes in fertility do not affect all parts of a nation equally or simultaneously, especially when different regions show very different patterns of wealth and economic development. Over time, the higher birth rates of poorer and more religious populations will gain in relative numbers, and over two or three generations, that pattern of differential growth can have far-reaching consequences. In Europe, for instance, even without the migrant boom of the past couple of years, the proportion of Muslims in Europe was certain to grow significantly.
Many Westerners still think of Global South countries in terms of classic Third World population profiles, with very high fertility and teeming masses of small children. That perception is correct for some areas, particularly in Africa, but it is radically wrong for others. In fact, many Asian and Latin American countries now look thoroughly "European" in their demographics.
India offers a startling example of this change, and its explosive political consequences. Half of that country's component states now have sub-replacement fertility rates comparable to Denmark, or even lower. Meanwhile, some very populous states (like vast Uttar Pradesh or Bihar) retain the old Third World model. That stark schism is the essential basis for any understanding of modern Indian politics. As we might have predicted, the high fertility states are firmly and traditionally religious, and provide the base for reactionary and even fascist Hindu supremacist movements. Those currents are quite alien to the "European" low fertility states, located chiefly in the south, which tend to be secular-minded, progressive, and tolerant. Balancing those different regions would pose a nightmarish choice for any government, but the current Hindu nationalist BJP regime aligns decisively with the high fertility regions that provide its electoral bastions. The lesson is grim, but obvious: when you have to choose between two such distinct demographic regions, it is overwhelmingly tempting to turn to the one with all the voters, and all the young party militants. Invest in growth!
With some variations, that situation is closely echoed in Turkey, and understanding that parallel helps us explain the otherwise puzzling behavior of the nation's current Islamist AKP government. Why, for Heaven's sake, is Turkey not more concerned about the ISIS threat? Why, when its air forces go into action, do they strike at Kurdish forces, rather than ISIS? Is the government deranged?
Here is the essential demographic background: Overall, Turkey's fertility rate is a little below replacement, but that simple fact obscures enormous regional variations. The country can be divided into four zones, stretching from west to east. The Western quarter is thoroughly European in demographic terms, with stunningly low sub-Danish fertility rates of around 1.5. The rates rise steadily as we turn east, until the upland east has very high rates resembling those of neighboring Iraq or Syria. "Europe" and the Third World thus jostle each other within one nation.
High-fertility eastern Turkey is of course much more religious than the secular west, and this is where we find the Qur'an Belt that so regularly supports Islamic and even fundamentalist causes. It simply makes electoral sense for the government to respond to the interests of that populous growing area, and to drift ever more steadily in Islamist directions.
But there is a complicating fact. Those fast-breeding eastern regions are also home to what the Turkish government euphemistically calls the "Mountain Turks," but which everyone else on the planet calls "Kurds." Turkey's Kurdish minority, usually estimated at around 15-20 percent of the population, is expanding very rapidly—to the point that, within a generation or two, it will actually be a majority within the Turkish state. This nightmare prospect is front and center in the mind of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who a couple of years ago issued an apocalyptic warning of a national Kurdish majority no later than 2038. That date is a little implausibly soon, but the principle stands.
In the face of seemingly imminent demographic catastrophe, what can Turkey do? One solution is for the government to plead with citizens to start breeding again—even those western secularists—and to get the national fertility rate closer to 3 than 2. But since that outcome is highly unlikely, the government must resort to short term solutions, and to extol religious, Islamic identities over ethnicity. Ideally, a return to Islam might even provide an incentive for families to reassert traditional values, and to have more children. Alongside that policy, the government has an absolute need to suppress stirrings of Kurdish nationhood or separatism on Turkish soil.
From a demographic perspective, the Turkish government is going to find any manifestations of Kurdish identity terrifying, far more than even the hardest-edged Islamism. ISIS is an irritant; the Kurds pose an existential demographic threat.
And in large measure, that explains why Turkish jets are targeting the Kurdish PKK militias, rather than ISIS.
It's the fertility, stupid.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Britain's Botched Child Abuse Scandal
To put it mildly, it was an awkward social situation. After murdering a small boy during a pedophile orgy, a senior Member of Parliament determined to castrate another victim with a knife. He was prevented from this act by a former British Prime Minister who was present at the event. That fellow-pervert suggested that this was going a little far, even for a group that had already murdered several other children. How far we have traveled from Downton Abbey.
If I seem to be treating such a horrific story sarcastically, I honestly do not know how else to respond to such a monstrous and fantastic allegation, or the fact that senior ranks of the British police have treated this phantasmagoric tale—and countless others of the same sort—as sober fact. Lives and reputations have been ruined. Fortunately, it now seems that the whole disastrous saga of falsehoods is about to collapse amidst purges and resignations, with growing warnings about police reliance on "narcissists and fantasists." The main question presently is how much of the British legal and criminal justice system will go down with this horribly flawed investigation. Dare we hope that common sense will at last prevail?
Some months ago, I outlined the mythology of "elite pedophile rings" that had been circulating in Britain for some years. The allegedly homicidal MP in question was Harvey Proctor, the former Premier was Edward Heath, while other rumored perpetrators from the early 1980s included multiple figures at the highest ranks of politics, intelligence and the military. One of the accused was former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, others were the heads of MI5 and MI6. As the saying goes, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and that was certainly applicable in this instance—but what was extraordinary was how incredibly weak-to-non-existent was the evidence offered.
The whole "Westminster Pedophile Ring" extravaganza depends on the unsupported testimony of one anonymous man, "Nick," a 47-year old administrator in the National Health Service, and a former nurse, who reports being present at various events as an abused child victim. His claims may theoretically be correct, but as yet, no corroboration has been found to support them. Even so, he became the star witness for a special police investigative unit, Operation Midland, and last year one leading officer described Nick's testimony as "credible and true." As even the Metropolitan Police has now admitted, the prejudicial word "true" should never have been uttered in this context—but how convenient never to have to take any of these cases to trial! If the police were able simply to declare the charges true then ideally, nothing would be left except to build the bonfire for the accused.
Over the months, Nick's tales have faced increasing skepticism, and major new exposés should be forthcoming within the coming weeks, as long-postponed investigative documentaries finally appear on British television. Nick's many critics point out that he had for years reported suffering extensive abuse as a child, but only very recently did he add the charges about elite offenders and MPs. So why on earth did the police call Nick "credible"? Later statements explained what this meant. Yes, police might sometimes encounter serial liars and hopeless fantasists, but in police eyes, "Nick" did not fit that bill, as he is a respectable, well-spoken, middle class guy not actually slavering at the mouth. Therefore, he could not be lying. Even if he is reporting events factually, it is surely very bad practice to judge someone's reliability or truthfulness wholly on their demeanor and speech habits.
We have to be cautious about using the word "lying," which implies deliberately and knowingly making false statements. It is simple, though, to cite examples where people have falsely reported child abuse, without actually lying. In the 1990s, many thousands of patients of so-called recovered memory treatment recounted atrocious sufferings at the hands of ritualized and Satanic abuse rings. Some of those patients presumably had been abused in some form, but we can say with total confidence that the vast majority of the episodes they were reporting never happened as objective realities. These people, too, generally presented as rational, well-balanced adults, often from decent professional backgrounds, and they genuinely believed what they were saying. But what they described still never happened.
Quite apart from recovered memory cases, other people do indeed tell false tales—although we might again cavil that they are not consciously lying. Of course serial liars exist, and some genuinely reach the point where they do not know the difference between truth and fiction. Britain's Daily Telegraph recently exposed one alleged abuse victim, "who also claimed to have evidence of two murders, had been convicted of making hoax bomb calls, had falsely confessed to murder, and been accused by a judge of telling 'whopping lies'."
In the real world, such a career history would devastate the witness's credibility, but in the mirror universe of child abuse investigation, it actually bolsters the claims. Let me explain that paradox. Central to that whole mindset is one simple statement that has achieved the status of a religious creed: victims never lie about child abuse. Children don't lie, nor do adults reporting their childhood sufferings. If you doubt this fact—if you use a word like "alleged" victim—then you are an accomplice to that abuse. If you seek to challenge or discredit statements about abuse, then you are also striking at all future victims and survivors who would be discouraged from reporting their experiences. Doubt is of the devil.
That approach helps us understand the extreme tolerance granted to purported victims who on the face of it sound deeply unconvincing: the ones with lengthy records of psychiatric treatment and commitment; with multiple convictions for petty crime and fraud; with decades-long involvement with substance abuse, including the hardest and most destructive drugs; and the serial liars. What about the ones who utter not a word about the alleged crimes until 20 or 30 years after the event? Surely, these are not credible?
Oh ye of little faith. Listen to the experts, read the professional journals, and you shall know the truth. In fact, we are told, the degree of mental disorder and social malfunction in adult life is a direct and inevitable consequence of the childhood abuse, and the severity of that abuse is directly proportionate to the degree of adult dysfunction. In simple terms, the worse the acts of childhood molestation and rape, the more likely the lying and substance abuse. Of course they seem to be crazy people, drug addicts, and persistent liars, and that fact proves the truth of their claims. Got that? Equally, the worse the abuse, the longer the time period before they might feel able to expose it to the world.
Then, we add the last critical element, of anonymity. No abuse victim wishes to be exposed to scorn, so of course he or she is granted anonymity in making charges, a luxury not afforded to the alleged abuser. That protection is doubly necessary when the victim is exposing the horrors attributed to politicians and intelligence officers, who might seek revenge. In practice, then, we have the perfect situation for the generation of accusations: the more improbable or ludicrous the charges, the more likely they are to be believed, and all accusations can be lodged from behind a wall of secrecy.
In a powerful press conference, Harvey Proctor gave the police a simple choice. Charge him immediately with murder and let the case go before a jury—or else identify "Nick" publicly, and prosecute him for wasting police time. And let the police involved be moved to some other function where their skills can be used more profitably, such as traffic duty.
His challenge stands.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (Basic Books, forthcoming Fall 2015). He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Germany's Coming Demographic Revolution
They still haven't got it.
European media and policymakers have correctly realized that the present refugee crisis is an enormous challenge to the assumptions that have guided the continent for decades, to the point of potentially breaking the European Union. But apparently they still are not prepared to confront the specifically religious revolution now under way.
This issue places me in a strange and unprecedented position. Over the past decade, I have written about the presence of Islam in Europe, arguing repeatedly that the threat of "Islamization" is overblown. Overall, I have argued, Europe's Muslim population is presently around 4.5 percent of the whole, which by U.S. standards is in no sense a massive minority presence. It might rise to 10 or 15 percent later in the century, but the change will be gradual, allowing plenty of time for assimilation.
My moderate position on this has been heavily criticized by various right-wing outlets such as FrontPage Magazine, a publication with which I agree on basically nothing. On most issues, I find FrontPage's tone hysterical and alarmist. Now, suddenly, I myself have to criticize that magazine for being insufficiently concerned about Islam. These are strange times.
Here is the problem. Germany recently declared that it would take 800,000 refugees this year. That is a very large figure, but as the government points out, that is only one percent of the population of 80 million. In FrontPage, Daniel Greenfield stresses that the issue is much graver than it appears, since the refugees are mainly young men, who will massively raise the Muslim presence among that section of Germany's population. Other writers like Christopher Caldwell also raise alarms about the massive security threats posed by the present crisis. He warns that European politicians "are trying to pass off a migration crisis as a humanitarian crisis. It may be on the verge of turning into a military crisis."
Both Greenfield and Caldwell are right, but they are still missing large parts of the story, which are available to anyone who has followed German media over the past two weeks. The first point made repeatedly by German officials and journalists is that no sane person really believes in that 800,000 figure for this present year. Even as Germany has introduced "temporary" border controls in the past few days, the estimates for the actual number of migrants expected continues to grow. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel now tells his party that, "There are many indications that in this year we will not see 800,000 refugees, as predicted, but a million."
Also, such officials are explicitly saying that something like this influx will continue more or less indefinitely. Sigmar Gabriel has also said that "we could certainly deal with something in the order of a half a million for several years." If the present experience is anything to go by, that is likely to mean something like a million a year for how long? Five years? Ten?
However obvious this may be to say, there is no logical end to this process, even if the Syrian crisis ended tomorrow. As it becomes known that Germany is so open to migrants, that fact offers an irresistible invitation to anyone living in a country roiled by violence or economic crisis, which basically means most lands from Libya to Pakistan. There is no terminal point at which the nations sending migrants would ever run out of candidates seeking refuge and asylum. And even that projection takes no account of the likely spread of open warfare and terrorism into Turkey and Egypt in the coming decade.
So let's put those numbers in context. Germany's population is about a quarter that of the United States, so multiply all those refugee figures by four. Imagine if a U.S. president declared that the country would commit itself to taking between two and four million new refugees and migrants, annually, over the coming years—and that over and above other forms of immigration. Even given the diversity of the U.S. population, that would represent an inconceivably large social transformation.
Germany is also describing an epochal religious revolution. That point might not be clear from reading the very extensive articles in mainstream German media that discuss every aspect of the strains posed by the crisis, but somehow never mention the words Islam or Muslim. That reticence is understandable, given that Germans, more than any people, do not want to appear nativist or racist. But despite the taboos, that religious element is critical.
Who are the immigrants? On the good side, a sizable number are Syrians who are fleeing the rise of radical Islamism in their country because they are themselves non-Muslims, or at least non-Sunnis. Before the present post-2011 meltdown, perhaps 40 percent of Syria's people fell into the various non-Sunni categories, including a great many Christians. Their presence in Germany might actually strengthen Christian traditions.
But these non-Sunni migrants will be an ever-smaller component of a migrant wave that is increasingly and overwhelmingly Muslim. Many of the present migrants are not in fact Syrian, and they adopt that description to win the sympathy of host nations (a thoroughly understandable decision). Many are in fact Iraqis and Turks, Libyans or Afghans. All those groups, incidentally, come from countries with very young populations and extremely high fertility rates, so their numbers would likely grow rapidly in their new European homes.
Before 2015, Germany's Muslim population was around 5 percent of the whole, potentially rising to 7 percent or so by 2030. If the present wave of migrants and refugees continues, that figure could well be 15 or 20 percent by the 2030s, and it would be rising fast. For the first time ever, we would seriously be looking at something like the Islamization of Europe that has been a nativist nightmare for a generation. And in the German context, that process would be squeezed into just a couple of decades. That is radically destabilizing.
Personally, I don't believe that the presence of Islam in Europe need of itself be harmful or even negative, nor that it would necessarily lead to violence. But I am quite certain that numerical changes on this scale do portend a cultural and social revolution without precedent.
Shouldn't the Germans, and other Europeans, at least be allowed to discuss this openly?
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (Basic Books, forthcoming Fall 2015). He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Blinded by the 'Red Scare'
Spot the odd one out: a) Orcs; b) Communists; c) Griffins; d) Velociraptors; e) Gorgons.
The answer is d) Velociraptors. Although all five are terrifying monsters, velociraptors are the only one that actually existed on the Earth at one point, many millions of years ago. The others are all wholly products of the imagination. Communists, Gorgons, and the rest are apparently mythical bugbears invented to terrify children. This lesson about the mythical nature of communism is brought home to you if you belong to any kind of professional organization in academe or education.
Regularly, one will read the obituary of some venerable hack who, circa 1950, faced terrible difficulties for his courageous stands on behalf of civil rights or labor unions. This was all part of the "Red Scare," when Inquisitors sought out such brave freethinkers under the guise of pursuing those illusory "Communists." Very rarely is it mentioned that, yes indeed, said hack was in fact a prominent and highly active member of the Communist Party, or a knowing sympathizer of several of its front organizations. And all this at a time when anyone with basic literacy skills knew exactly the nature of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
But you see, it was all a "Scare" and all Americans under 40 have been brought up to see the phenomenon in those terms. "Witch Hunt" is another common term, and what sane person accepts the reality of witches?
You can get a good sense of this rhetorical trick if you watch the 2012 film "The Act of Killing," one of the most acclaimed documentaries of recent decades. The film examines the Indonesian massacres of 1965-66 by focusing on some of the surviving perpetrators, a bunch of elderly gangsters who in their day led lethal death squads. According to the film, these purges killed a million victims, which is roughly double the figure that most historians accept, but let that pass. So triumphantly successful was "The Act of Killing" that in the past year it has spawned a sequel, "The Look of Silence." Expect multiple prizes and awards to once again follow.
"The Act of Killing" is a multiply fascinating film, and essential viewing for anyone interested in official repression. Particularly fascinating are the close linkages portrayed between the venerable gangsters and ultra-right patriotic parties, with their paramilitary youth wing, and with media magnates. The film looks like a case-study of the Marxist theory of organized crime. And none of those depicted come off at all favorably, not gangsters, not magnates, not politicos. Let's not argue: they are all very bad people.
But what about their victims? It's a reasonable assumption that very few Westerners watching the film will have any great sense of Indonesian history or politics, and will thus accept the brief sketch offered in the introductory titles. In 1965, we are told, the Indonesian generals overthrew the nation's government, before launching a deadly purge aimed against so-called Communists. "Anyone opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a Communist: union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese." So, we think, there was a coup, and the new regime unleashed its gangsters and paramilitaries against the innocent and idealistic, all as part of a mindless, paranoid, Red Scare. Any suggestion that actual Communists might have been targeted is scarcely considered, nor the possibility that such mythical creatures might have been genuinely dangerous. What decent person could fail to oppose a military dictatorship?
From multiple perspectives, that sketch is baloney. Let me explain.
A new nation born in the aftermath of the Second World War, Indonesia's politics were tumultuous from their beginning. The country had a very active and militant Communist Party, the PKI, which prior to 1965 was three-million strong. That made it, in fact, the world's largest nonruling Communist Party. It also had a potent tradition of ruthless revolutionary violence and putschism. Notoriously, a PKI rising at Madiun in 1948 resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of rivals. The organization was, in short, terrifying, and parallels to the Khmer Rouge are quite plausible.
In 1965, Indonesia's ruler was Sukarno, a classic Third World dictator. In order to counter political rivals, he decided to lurch to the radical left and to seek the support of the PKI. Internationally, Sukarno aligned with Mao's China, the most homicidal regime on the planet, which was then on the verge of launching its horrendous Cultural Revolution. Fearing a repetition of Madiun on a national scale, Indonesia's armed forces intervened, overthrowing Sukarno and beginning a national purge of the PKI. Although "The Act of Killing" looks exclusively at the role of gangsters and paramilitaries, the reaction was in fact a national affair, with Islamic and even Catholic movements coming to the fore.
The repression killed around half a million people, the vast majority of whom were certainly PKI leaders and cadres. So yes indeed, they were Communists, and not just harmless labor organizers, landless farmers, or dissident intellectuals. Many were Party organizers and fighters, who were the mirror image of the gangsters we see in that documentary. If circumstances had been slightly different, they would have committed identical acts of repression and murder against the political right. Instead of random massacres, it is better to see the 1965 slaughter as an ideological civil war, which was fought with savage ferocity. Fanatics slew fanatics.
Beyond doubt, the repression was a brutal affair, which claimed far too many lives. Was it in any way justified? Legally, certainly not. But looking at history, I wonder how critics might feel if, in 1932, the German government had decided to massacre thousands of leaders and paramilitaries of the surging Nazi Party. Could such a pre-emptive mass repression ever have been tolerable to Western opinion? I do wonder.
The problem at hand, however, is that we have become so accustomed to the "Red Scare" mythology that it leads us to ignore the existence of truly dangerous extremists, and the lethal peril they pose.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (Basic Books, forthcoming Fall 2015). He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Disastrous Economics of Scottish Independence
Political commentators are still spellbound by the amazing success of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the recent British election, when it took 56 of the country's 59 Parliamentary seats. Suddenly, independence is back on the political agenda, and a second independence referendum is possible in the next couple of years. Whatever you may think about this prospect in the abstract, though, we can certainly agree on the simple fact that the current SNP leadership is utterly unqualified to lead such a venture. If independence were to be achieved in the next four or five years, the new state would soon come to envy more successful smaller European countries, such as Greece.
We can illustrate this from many points of view, but let us take one issue above all, namely the currency. The SNP has no idea what it is doing, or the risks it is running. Worse, nor does it seem to care.
During a debate in the referendum campaign last fall, then-SNP leader Alex Salmond was asked simply what currency an independent Scotland would have. That would be no problem, he said. We would carry on using the pound, together with the rest of the United Kingdom, and we would share control of a central bank. Absolutely not, said his unionist opponent. Every British political party has made it starkly clear that they would never accept such an outcome. By the way, that was last year, when the rest of Britain was feeling much less aggrieved than it is now by the SNP's general demagoguery and hate campaigns.
So, given that the shared pound is not a starter, asked his critics, what was Salmond's Plan B? Repeated questioning failed to shift Salmond at this point, demonstrating to all but his most unyielding supporters that there was no Plan B, and that the SNP had never even thought through the currency issue. That might have been the single moment at which the referendum campaign was lost. Salmond resigned as SNP leader after that debacle, but he has been very visible in recent days, repeating the familiar claims and boasts.
Fortunately, Scotland never had to confront the consequences of this insanity, but let us assume that, after the recent elections, they do become independent. What about the currency?
In the referendum debates, Salmond's next option was a threat, something at which the SNP is expert. If the United Kingdom refused to share the pound, he said, then the new Scotland would refuse to pay its share of the national debt. The problem there is that an independent Scotland would begin its career as a nation in default, unable to raise credit even for its existing commitments, never mind covering the expense of the ever-expanding welfare state promised by Salmond's party. The likely consequence would be social collapse and mass unemployment. Presumably English and European aid would prevent actual food riots.
There are indeed other options. Scotland could, if it wished, keep on using the pound without English consent, in the same way that countries like Panama use the U.S. dollar.
Sterlingization is possible, and England could not prevent it. But the only way to Sterlingize is to cut public spending enough to generate sufficient amounts of the master currency. Scotland, as I say, is a very generous welfare state, and has ambitions to become even more so. Thus, see my remarks earlier about the prospects for social collapse and civil disorder. And why Scotland would want to give control of its economy to a foreign central bank is a master of some mystery. Moreover, the fact that Scotland's currency would not be under the control of any central bank of its own automatically closes the door on possible membership in the European Union.
Ah yes, the European Union. All SNP rhetoric is founded on the principle of a close and continuing link with Europe, and EU membership. In the referendum campaign, though, European officials made it clear that any breakup of the existing UK would preserve the continuing membership of the London government, while the new Scotland would be forced to apply for membership afresh. That opens multiple cans of worms. No solution for Scotland, whether political or economic, is possible without full and early EU membership. But the application process can take years or decades, and is only possible if no existing state raises difficulties. It is very much in the interests of some countries–Spain and Belgium, notably–to avoid giving the slightest encouragement to potential secessionists on their own territory, and they would likely oppose or delay Scottish aspirations. For several years, at least, Scotland would be outside all European trading blocs.
Even if Scotland did jump those complex hurdles, the EU is quite clear that any new member is strictly required to accept the Euro as its currency. That solves the currency issue neatly, but it also means that Scotland would be forced to accept all the EU's stringent rules about public expenditure and debt. Hard though this may be for Scots to believe presently, the English would no longer be subsidizing their welfare systems with their present generosity. Again we see the fundamental dilemma that would suddenly become the central issue in Scottish politics, whether to accept huge social spending cuts, or national bankruptcy.
Scotland does have a serious alternative to all these nightmare scenarios. Accept independence outside Europe, and set up an autonomous currency under its own central bank–call it the Scottish Dollar. The currency would take years to establish, and when it did come fully into operation, it would be a very risky venture. Norway manages to stay outside the EU with its own currency, but it has immensely more oil reserves than the Scots could ever dream of. This policy would mean decades of penury for the new Scotland, but it would mean authentic independence. Why they would want that is a question of emotions and rhetoric, not economics.
Or maybe–just maybe–Scotland could enter a political and currency union with its large neighbor to the south, which is already a major European player, and which currently donates disproportionately to the Scottish economy! No, I'm sorry, that's just too absurd to be contemplated.
Philip Jenkins is the author of The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels (Basic Books, forthcoming Fall 2015). He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Myth of the Inevitable War
U.S. military forces planned to ultimately seize Canada's rich mineral resources around Sudbury, Ontario, but in the interim, they would launch surprise attacks on the key ports of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Vancouver. While many planners disliked the prospect of using poison gas on civilians, it was essential to knock out those strategic centers swiftly, before the British mounted their inevitable counter-offensive. The British amphibious invasion would most likely land between Ocean City, Md., and Rehoboth Beach, Del.
If the above sounds like a Harry Turtledove alternative history scenario, it isn't. What I have just described is the War Plan Red developed by the U.S. armed forces in the late 1920s, which remained on the books as a formal contingency plan through 1939. Such planning—and many other imaginary scenarios developed before it—reminds us of how frequently the U.S. and other nations have identified particular foes who would certainly demand to be defeated and destroyed. Often has the refrain gone: if war with such an enemy is utterly inevitable, why not start it now, and get it over with?
A little historical perspective, though, should make us quite humble about the whole notion of "inevitability," not to mention the prospect of perpetual enemies.
Two centuries ago, in 1815, the British Empire was fighting two key enemies, respectively: France's Emperor Napoleon and the new United States of America. Although Britain and the U.S. formally concluded hostilities the previous year, the culminating Battle of New Orleans did not occur until the start of 1815. The decisive British victory at Waterloo followed in June.
Had you told any informed observer in 1815 that Britain would never again engage in formal hostilities against either of those nations—not even in two entire centuries—you would have probably have been labeled as insane. Rivalry with the French had been the absolutely consistent factor in British affairs since 1689, and was clearly not going to vanish overnight. As historian Jules Michelet sagely remarked later in the 19th century, in understanding world affairs, there is France and Britain, and that is all.
For the rest of the 19th century, the question of the next Anglo-French war would be when, not if. Tensions reached ugly heights in the late 1850s, immediately after the Anglo-French cooperation in the Crimean War. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, patriotic French newspapers suggested immediately sending the fleet to help the rebels evict the British Raj. Britain suffered a full-scale invasion scare in 1859-60, when volunteer rifle companies sprang up across the country to resist the threat of French occupation. The two countries came within an ace of open warfare in 1898, over colonial rivalries on the Nile.
Somehow, though, the inevitable struggle never occurred. One can legitimately point out that the two armed forces were at war in the 1940s, when the British fought to evict the Vichy French from colonial territories like Syria and Madagascar. Technically, though, this fell short of actual declared warfare, and the resulting battles have slipped into the realm of polite oblivion.
But even if the French menace could somehow be contained, surely the next American war was truly only a matter of time.
In Herman Melville's books, especially White-Jacket (1850), we repeatedly are given the sense that conflict on the seas was imminent and inevitable. Naval and imperial rivalries made warfare certain, as did U.S.-Canadian border rivalries: frontier disputes in the Oregon territory stirred American war fever in the 1840s. Between 1840 and 1900, serious war scares were running at about one per decade.
At the start of the Civil War, heavy-handed U.S. actions against Confederate envoys on the high seas almost brought the British into the struggle. The U.S. owes an immense debt to Prince Albert, who drafted the diplomatic documents that kept the British out of war, and presumably saved the American Union. Time and again, from the 1860s onwards, border-crossing activities by Irish guerrillas threatened to sabotage the fragile U.S.-British modus vivendi. The two countries once more came close to war over Venezuela's borders in the 1890s.
And that brings us to the 1920s, the era of War Plan Red. To U.S. commanders observing the likely military future at that time, by far the deadliest danger they could foresee was a British-Japanese alliance that would overwhelm the U.S. Navy. Canada, tragically, would be the battleground between the two great English-speaking nations, those inevitable foes destined to fight until only one survived. Who can withstand destiny?
Needless to say, none of those nightmare scenarios ever came to fruition. Somehow, the British evolved from being our eternal foes to becoming those nice folk across the pond who send us Masterpiece Theatre and Benedict Cumberbatch.
Other seemingly inevitable crises likewise failed to materialize.
People of the boomer generation might remember the hyperventilated coverage of Chinese events during the Cultural Revolution of the post-1966 decade. According to most reports, the country had seemingly created a generation of tens of millions of crazed fanatics pledged to world conquest. How could they be stopped, short of a nuclear pre-emptive strike (which the Russians were actually contemplating in 1969)?
The Cultural Revolution was indeed a ghastly tragedy for the Chinese people, but the feared external aggressions never occurred. By the late 1970s, the main organizers of that fanaticism were themselves discredited and imprisoned, and China was ready to rejoin the world community. Again, the "inevitable" proved to be an illusion. Somehow, too, the "unavoidable" global clash between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was, well, avoided.
We can debate the best means of preventing wars, and sometimes, a strong and vigilant military might indeed be the best way of keeping the peace. But if anyone ever says today that conflict with a particular nation or cause is "inevitable," whether that contemporary foe is Iran, China or Russia, history offers plenty of reasons to doubt such claims. Somewhere down the road, in fact, those adversaries might become our best friends. Never say never.
Or to quote Lord Palmerston, speaking of England: We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.
Philip Jenkins is the author of Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know About Terrorism. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
The Long Hot Summer of 2015
In the late-1980s, I was teaching criminal justice, and my most popular course focused on Terrorism and Political Violence. In that course, one of my regular lectures concerned the impact of racial conflict and urban rioting on the U.S. presidential election in the then-inconceivably distant year of 2016. My discussion was firmly tongue-in-cheek, a theoretical exercise in postulating cyclical patterns in American violence. In light of recent events in Baltimore and elsewhere, though, and with spreading tensions between police and African-American communities, I wonder if the time has come to brush off my crystal ball.
My choice of 2016 was anything but random. Over the past century or so, racially-based rioting in the U.S. has followed chronological patterns that are remarkably consistent, although the reasons underlying these cycles are anything but clear. Particularly serious and major events occur at intervals of about 48 years, with more minor and sporadic outbreaks at the mid-point of that long cycle. Do understand that I am not offering any mystical forms of numerological interpretation here. I merely remark that, for whatever reasons, events have followed this pattern.
Although the pattern can be traced back into the mid-1890s, we might begin our observation in 1919, the hideous year of racial rioting and lethal pogroms in Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, and other centers. James Weldon Johnson memorably called it the Red Summer. Moving forward 24 years, we note serious but more localized outbreaks of racial conflict in 1943, with upheavals in Harlem and Detroit.
Another 24 years beyond that takes us to 1967, by far the worst year of the urban rioting of that decade. That was the legendary Long Hot Summer, when observers tabulated 159 riots across the nation. It was in 1967 that Newark burned, while the U.S. government sent the 82nd Airborne into Detroit.
Twenty-four years later, historically-inclined observers breathed a sigh of relief when 1991 passed without any grave outbreaks. The following Spring, though, brought the Los Angeles riots, and many lesser copycat events around the country. I stress that the pattern suggests gaps of roughly 24 years, rather than following a precise chronology.
It is not difficult to trace long-term historical patterns and even mystical dates. All you need to is to cherry-pick particular events, while ignoring others that do not fit the scheme. In this case, though, a pattern seems to emerge without such special pleading, as is suggested by the rarity of riots between the various peak years. Between the mid-1960s wave of riots and the Los Angeles events, for instance, American suffered remarkably few racial disturbances, the only real exception being the Miami riot of 1980.
Assuming they are grounded in some reality, what might account for such cycles? The obvious linkage is demographic, in that 24 years is roughly the span of a generation. We might for instance suggest that racial tensions rise to the point where they provoke severe violence, but that violence has far-reaching consequences. The sheer scale of loss and destruction deters people from seeking any recurrence of the event. Meanwhile, governments act to prevent such repetitions. The 1943 riots profoundly affected the thinking of liberals, inspiring the civil rights drive of the following two decades. Over time, though, new generations arise, lacking direct memories of the earlier carnage, and thus prepared to risk open confrontations with authority.
And so we list the years of major national violence: the Red Summer of 1919, the Long Hot Summer of 1967… and 2015? That was the theme of my long-ago lecture, and why I was speculating about whether those imaginary events might indeed have an impact on the presidential election immediately following. Hence my choice of 2016.
If this speculation proves unfounded, I look forward to publishing a groveling apology this time next year. I would love to be wrong.
Philip Jenkins is the author of Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know About Terrorism. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Putin's Corrupted Orthodoxy
If you remember nothing else about Andrei Zvyagintsev's film "Leviathan", the whale will remain with you.
In a squalid coastal town in Russia's frigid north, a man gazes over the skeleton of a beached whale, the bones stark in their white purity. Although clearly suggesting death, the skeleton's beauty and majesty stands in sharp contrast to the ugly trivialities of the town's human population, lost in their obsessions with power and greed, in their corruption and hypocrisy. In the context of the film, it is hard not to see that "leviathan" as a symbol of the gigantic aspirations of the old Soviet Union, that other dead monster. Although the film-maker does not for a moment suggest that the former Soviet Union represented any kind of lost glory, "Leviathan" does portray a modern Russian society stumbling through a contemporary world utterly devoid of standards, morality, or hope. Most startling for a Western audience, that society now camouflages its vulgar graspings not in the language of Marxism-Leninism, but of Christianity.
Although "Leviathan" has been widely reviewed in both Europe and the U.S., few commentators have picked up that central religious message. "Leviathan" stands among the greatest films ever made about the corruption of religion. (Warning: the film concludes with a major twist, which will be revealed here).
"Leviathan" is set in the small fishing port of Pribrezhny, which is recreated in horrifyingly convincing detail. The story focuses on Kolya, an auto mechanic who spends most of his life in a drunken haze. Tragically for him, he owns a property that is coveted by the local mayor, Vadim, who gets everything he wants, and who readily deploys thugs to enforce his will. Ultimately, Kolya is railroaded on false charges and loses his home. Most viewers take Vadim as a transparent stand-in for Vladimir Putin, who similarly rules through violence and extra-legal trickery. For both men, law is merely a tool for the powerful.
Beyond that obvious satire, the film places these everyday Russian evils in a cosmic context. "Leviathan" is immersed in Biblical symbolism, drawing both on the Book of Job and the story of Naboth's Vineyard, in which an evil king trumps up false charges to seize the belongings of a poor neighbor. To a Westerner, the name Leviathan recalls Thomas Hobbes's vision of the all-powerful state, but in this case we should rather turn directly to the Old Testament. The Biblical leviathan is mentioned on several occasions, sometimes as a seagoing animal, but of occasion as a fearsome monster of evil, slain by God himself in cosmic warfare. In this apocalyptic vision, the image becomes "the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent." Modern Russians live in the shadow of the slain leviathan.
Putin's Russia is a deeply inhospitable environment for political satire, and the country's media have largely ignored the international sensation that the film has created, including its prestigious awards in Europe and the U.S. Most controversial of all, though, has been the film's treatment of the church, which is far more innovative and daring than the critique of Putin. So he's corrupt and thuggish? Yes, we knew that.
The film's other central character is the local Orthodox bishop. The most chilling scene is an intimate dialogue between Vadim and the bishop, a spiritual adviser who not only justifies the boss's excesses but actually drives him to worse deeds. Is Vadim a good Christian, asks the cleric? Well, says Vadim, he tries. As a Christian ruler then, says the bishop, he must know that all power comes from God. Vadim has the absolute duty to exercise the power given to him, to solve all his issues and problems himself, and with all his might, lest the Enemy think he is weak. All is in God's hands, it is all His will. We almost hear the voice of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.
If the priest is not actually the driving force behind Vadim's evils, he is at least an accomplice, and an enabler. In a devastating climax, we see exactly why Vadim was so desperate to steal Kolya's property: he (and more specifically, the bishop) needed it to build a gaudy new Orthodox cathedral, as a shrine to Power. The film concludes with a splendid and utterly hypocritical sermon by the bishop, who thoroughly unites Russian nationalism with the interests of the Orthodox Church. His sermon calls for values of truth and justice, in a venue that exists solely because such values do not exist within Russia.
If Vadim is meant to be Putin, then Russian audiences waste little time before linking the priest to another prominent national figure, namely Kirill [Cyril], Metropolitan of the country's Orthodox Church. He has also led his church into an intimate and, most would say, a profoundly unhealthy alliance with the post-Soviet regime.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist government savagely persecuted the Orthodox Church, killings many thousands of clergy and monastics, and closing the vast majority of churches and monasteries. When Communism fell, the church returned to visibility, and the last quarter-century has witnessed a startling and many-sided revival. Places of worship have been rebuilt, monasteries flourish again, and pilgrimage shrines have begun a new era of mass popularity. The post-Soviet religious restoration was supervised by the then-Patriarch Alexy II (1990-2008) and by his successor, Kirill.
In exchange for so many blessings, the church has of course given fervent support to the Putin government, lavishly praising it and providing ideological justifications for a strong government at home, and expansion beyond its borders. But such enthusiasm goes far beyond mere payback. Support for authoritarian regimes is deeply embedded in Orthodox political thought, and Russian Orthodoxy in particular has always been tinged with mystical and millenarian nationalism.
When Kirill presents Orthodox Russia as a bastion of true faith, besieged by the false values and immorality of a secularized West, his words are deeply appreciated by both the state and the church. The apocalyptic character of that conflict is made evident by the West's embrace of homosexual rights, especially same-sex marriage. As so often in past centuries, Holy Russia confronts a Godless and decadent West. It is Putin, not Kirill, who has warned that "Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan."
We should not see Kirill as a rogue cleric abandoning the interests of his church to seek political favors: he really believes every word. Whether Putin and his circle literally believe the religious rhetoric is not relevant: they act as if they do. The solidly Orthodox framing of Russian nationalism also ensures that powerful Rightist groups happily rally around Putin and his not-so-ex-KGB clique.
Over the past few years, the nature of Russia's military-ecclesiastical complex has repeatedly become evident. Kirill extended the church's blessings to the pro-Moscow regime in Belarus after a highly troubling election. In Ukraine, Kirill completely echoed Putin's line that the Russian-sponsored separatist guerrillas were well-intentioned local citizens who justifiably feared oppression by the Kiev regime. Kirill even granted church honors to Cuba's Castro brothers. All is in God's hands, it is all His will.
So egregious is the portrayal of the priest in Leviathan, and so blatantly based on real life circumstances, that Orthodox activists have been the leading advocates for suppressing the film altogether.
The United States spends a great deal of time worrying about the state of Iran, which is dominated by theocratic cliques who relish apocalyptic dreams, and who hope someday to obtain a handful of nuclear weapons. We don't have to travel too far from Iran to find another state where ambitious theocrats shape the national ideology of a government that presently disposes of some 1,500 active nuclear weapons, not to mention another 8,000 or so in storage.
In Russia's case, like Iran's, we will not understand the state's ideological motivations without appreciating that religious dimension.
Philip Jenkins is the author of Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know About Terrorism. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Pedophile Rings in Thatcher's Britain—Myth or Fact?
Leon Brittan, who died last week, had a very distinguished career in British public life. Among other things, he served as Margaret Thatcher's Home Secretary and later became a member of the European Commission. It is startling, then, to find that among the standard eulogies for the great and the good, some news headlines reporting his death feature such unexpected words as "abuse ring," "pedophile," and "child murder." Brittan had the misfortune to play a starring role in a long-simmering sex scandal currently fascinating that country's media.
For years now, rumors have been floating about a "Westminster Pedophile Ring" that supposedly operated in the 1970s and 1980s and which included senior politicians, civil servants, and military figures, mainly right-wing Conservatives. Recently allegations reached new heights when police said they were seriously considering claims that the group had murdered several young boys. As the Independent headlined, "Tory MP Killed Boy During Sex Attack." In themselves, these horrific charges contain nothing flagrantly impossible. Yet we need to be very careful indeed about accepting a story that depends on thorny issues of evidence and credibility that will be deeply familiar to American observers of our own country's sexual politics.
The whole dreadful affair has now developed a complete mythology, with two pivotal hero figures. One was flamboyant Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens, who in 1984 compiled a massive dossier about pedophilia in British public life, with details on some 40 allegedly tainted politicians. He gave this to Home Secretary Leon Brittan, whose department promptly misplaced or buried it, supposedly as part of a general establishment cover-up. Only in recent years has the affair returned to life. The other key figure is the pseudonymous "Nick," supposedly one of the abused boys from that earlier era. Finding his chilling account of witnessing murders "credible and true," British police have now reopened the investigation, in the process generating sensational headlines.
Parts of the story are plausible. We know that in that era—roughly, the decade following 1975—several British public figures were indeed involved in outrageous and exploitative sexual misbehavior, including some cases of child abuse and child pornography. One horrific example was Liberal MP Cyril Smith, a 300-pound blimp with a penchant for spanking teenaged boys. Although such cases of sexual malfeasance were well-known to police and media, they were thoroughly hushed up, a process made vastly easier by draconian British libel laws.
The "pedophile ring" rhetoric is, though, misleading. If we look at the known sexual scandals from the politics of this era, they tended not to be "pedophile," in the sense of involving someone sexually focused on children at or below the age of puberty. The word is thus chosen to maximize seriousness, implying young child victims, compulsive serial offending, and incorrigibility. In fact, the recorded cases commonly involved homosexual men interested in male teenagers or young adults, usually male prostitutes. That does not for a second excuse the behavior, but it does put it in a different category from molesters preying on infants.
That distinction is significant in light of the claims made about Geoffrey Dickens, who is today presented as a near-prophetic champion of decency and child protection confronting a perverted ruling class. Dickens was in fact an outrageous demagogue, who never found a sensational issue or moral panic that he failed to leap on. His special bugbear was homosexuality, a broad category that, for him, included pedophilia as one of its subsets. If we actually had a copy of the legendary dossier, we can be quite sure that it included very few actual pedophiles and a great many homosexuals. Almost certainly, too, the impressive-sounding term "dossier" dignifies a generalized rant.
Charges of rings and conspiracies should also be treated circumspectly. The "elite pedophilia" charges circulated very widely in tabloid media of the 1980s, usually in the context of lunatic theories of Satanism and supposed "ritual child abuse," sometimes linked to anti-Masonic hysteria. Then as now, these fevered rumors Named Names, including Cabinet members and members of the royal family, as well as prominent Jews, like Brittan himself. It's not surprising, then, that law-enforcement officials at the time were profoundly (and rightly) skeptical of any new nuggets Dickens had to offer.
But let's move to the present day, and especially to "Nick," the main (and seemingly only) source of the murder charges. I personally have no idea of Nick's identity, or of his veracity, and it is possible that every appalling word he is uttering is grounded in truth. But based on the extensive media reports of the affair, I do have concerns.
I read, for instance, the accounts of the homicidal orgies attributed to the elite ring, in which at least one boy was strangled. This gives me a mighty sense of déjà vu because I know identical stories of actual, confirmed incidents that happened in London at this exact time and which have been known in the public domain for decades. Those crimes, though, involved a quite genuine pedophile crime network that was as far from "elite" as it was possible to be, a group of underclass trash who hung around fairgrounds to find child victims. They indeed killed repeatedly, in exactly the ways now credited to our "elite" perverts, and the similarity between those stories and the current charges bothers me. If someone were inventing "pedophile ring" crimes, this is what they would come up with.
Recently, one of the leading detectives in the renewed investigation remarked that "I believe what Nick is saying to be credible and true." Based on reports to date, police have never referred to any actual corroboration of the charges, any piece of evidence that Nick gave that he would not have known if he had not been present at these crimes. Rather, we hear repeatedly of his "credibility," a word that is thoroughly subjective: "I believe."
When I say that X is "credible," what we mean is that I find what he has to say believable, and that fact depends as much on my willingness to accept his statement as on any quality in his character or demeanor. This is a familiar theme in contemporary American debates over sexual assault, as when Rolling Stone found a witness who recounted fraternity rape stories, declaring her "credible" because it fitted their ideological needs to do so. Editors and journalists simply wanted and needed to believe. Seeking corroboration was unnecessary, and the mere suggestion of doing so would have blamed and demeaned the victim.
In Britain, too, there are ample reasons why authorities would now find Nick "credible" in the way they would not have done a decade or so back. The main new factor is the appalling case of disc jockey Jimmy Savile, who used his celebrity status to carry out a career of rape and molestation lasting half a century. Since 2012, desperately anxious to avoid new attacks on their integrity and competence, law-enforcement agencies have sought out and prosecuted celebrity sexual crimes from bygone years, commonly relying on the uncorroborated testimony of reported victim and survivors.
Sometimes, this exhumation of past horrors has undoubtedly served the cause of justice, but questions remain. Should an individual really be tried and convicted on the unsupported, uncorroborated evidence of alleged victims who report crimes from 30 or 40 years ago? Surely, we can now point to enough cases where such testimony has proved to be wholly fictitious, and malicious, so that real injustice resulted. Witnesses fantasize, and witnesses lie.
Perhaps British politicians of the Thatcher era were indeed sexual monsters. But we should pause before accepting what, on its surface, looks like a deranged fantasy.
Philip Jenkins is the author of Images of Terror: What We Can and Can't Know About Terrorism. He is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University and serves as co-director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion.