[NGTM-1R]

He's using liberalism in the political philosophy sense, not the American left wing sense.

Either way, it's a statement that seems to have been calculated for its irony.

re: Dragon's take on history.

The US is terrible at nation-building. Except for everyone else who's tried; Russia's methodology has only served to make nearly every nation it has ever occupied an eternal enemy. The knowledge of actual conditions and modes of failure here is pretty poor, and ignores the obvious lessons learned nature of things. South Vietnam went under within the year; Iraq is threatened but by how much varies depending on who you ask; the US effort at Afghanistan has gone vastly better than the Soviet one.

Holding up Russia as knowing what they're doing is something easily put the lie to by history, considering Russian methods have turned almost every nation they have ever occupied into an implacable enemy. The Baltic states, Poland, and even the Ukraine demonstrate exactly how well the Russian approach to counterinsurgency has worked: it kept the number of visible incidents to a minimum, perhaps, but it left a legacy of "never again" stamped deep into the collective psyches of those nations. Russia keeps trying to back away from the Ukraine, suppressed as it did in the old days the Crimea and will achieve exactly as it did then: temporary success for long-term hatred.

[The E]

No matter what you think of western-style liberties, if you try to deprive people of them for something as nebulous as "they might be radicalized someday", it's NOT going to end well.

[General Battuta]

When the US did make a national (and fiscal) project out of enormous, comprehensive nation-building, it did pretty well! Japan and Western Europe are still our buddies. But those were 'Western' powers (even in Japan's case) with good reason to be afraid of the USSR.

[Luis Dias]

I think that liberalism is the only world I'm ever to survive in, the only kind of world worth fighting for, for a really big number of reasons.

Now, it's never going to "end well", unless you're prepared to go to the end here. And you had two choices here, as far as I can see. You either did nation building correctly, and allowed for a system to build itself that provided sufficient antibodies to all these ideologues and rebellions, or you are absolutely ruthless.

The US did neither. It was absolutely incompetent at the first (reusing silly ideas they had tried in Russia back in the nineties, placed incompetent people executing them), it was absolutely unable to do the second (Everyone's reaction to Abu Grahib would be a paradise in comparison).

And since Vietnam, it has been clear that any resistance to America, if sufficiently ruthless and persistent, will eventually pay off. And it did. Against drones and a technological disadvantage beyond any hope, this enemy found extreme radicalization as a weapon. ISIS is not just the fruit of its religion, it's a fruit of their own visionaires' desperations. The virus, IOW, is mutating towards total nihilistic terror as means to survive the world hegemon. It mutated from some local radicals to Al Quaeda. And now it mutated to ISIS. I am not entirely sure I want to know its next mutation.

[Flipside]

I will say, I think ISIS and the fact it is an Islamic Offshoot is irrelevant. Islam was the syringe used to inject that way of thinking, a carrier, as it were. The state that the Islamic faith was in, especially in places like Afghanistan, was far more the fault of it being used because it was tool at hand, rather than a directed concept of the Faith.

[Bobboau]

how so? I view Islam's role in the middle east the same way I view christianity's role in the americal south. it enables horrible ideas.

[Flipside]

That's the point, it wouldn't have mattered what religion had been in the area, as long as it acted as a quick, easy way to spread the concept. If the area had been Sikh, we would be talking about 'Sikh Extremists', heck China has violent Buddhist extremists, which is, under the usual image Buddhism holds itself to, an oxymoron.

As you say, abusing a faith system, any faith system, to achieve a political goal is going to end up unpleasant for everyone involved, that's not because of faiths being inherently good or bad, it's about people inherently being people.

[StarSlayer]

I think that liberalism is the only world I'm ever to survive in, the only kind of world worth fighting for, for a really big number of reasons.

Now, it's never going to "end well", unless you're prepared to go to the end here. And you had two choices here, as far as I can see. You either did nation building correctly, and allowed for a system to build itself that provided sufficient antibodies to all these ideologues and rebellions, or you are absolutely ruthless.
 
The US did neither. It was absolutely incompetent at the first (reusing silly ideas they had tried in Russia back in the nineties, placed incompetent people executing them), it was absolutely unable to do the second (Everyone's reaction to Abu Grahib would be a paradise in comparison).

And since Vietnam, it has been clear that any resistance to America, if sufficiently ruthless and persistent, will eventually pay off. And it did. Against drones and a technological disadvantage beyond any hope, this enemy found extreme radicalization as a weapon. ISIS is not just the fruit of its religion, it's a fruit of their own visionaires' desperations. The virus, IOW, is mutating towards total nihilistic terror as means to survive the world hegemon. It mutated from some local radicals to Al Quaeda. And now it mutated to ISIS. I am not entirely sure I want to know its next mutation.

None of those actions have been fought on a "lose or draw we forfeit our livelihood/culture" level though, we've withdrawn from conflicts because we could.  On the whole the west has stepped away from the kind of total warfare measures we found acceptable in the past, namely because they are horrible and have not been necessary since.   However, if there were enough domestic terror events that made people day to day feel individually threatened, could ISIS dehumanize themselves to the point the west does accept crushing radical Islam as a national/cultural imperative?  If that came to pass would ISIS, even with their radicalism, be able to withstand the result?  The Axis Powers were just as zealous, even more so in some cases, and they were backed by military industrial complexes somewhat competitive with their opponents.  In the past a liberal society has been pushed to the point were it accepted the costs to themselves and their opponents and take the issue to the last full measure.

I don't know if ISIS will ever actually press the issue to that point, but the Hobbes in me believes their existence still hinges on what the west is willing to endure to retain its scruples.

[666maslo666]

Rise of liberalism since WW2 is part of the reason why we havent yet carpet bombed  Raqqa and thrown a nuclear bomb on Mosul. Well, that and the fact that ISIS is less of a threat. For now, at least.

That's the point, it wouldn't have mattered what religion had been in the area, as long as it acted as a quick, easy way to spread the concept. If the area had been Sikh, we would be talking about 'Sikh Extremists', heck China has violent Buddhist extremists, which is, under the usual image Buddhism holds itself to, an oxymoron.

As you say, abusing a faith system, any faith system, to achieve a political goal is going to end up unpleasant for everyone involved, that's not because of faiths being inherently good or bad, it's about people inherently being people.

I dont agree with that, ideologies are important, especially an ideology so strongly entrenched and expansionist as islamism. It is the single unifying idea of the entire middle east and north Africa. If middle east werent Islamic, or werent prone to such fundamentalist interpretation of islam, we would see much less terrorism and there would be hardly any ISIS. Islamism is the root of the issue, not just the means to a goal. And thats what makes this conflict so persistent, it is hard to beat an idea.

Without nazism, Hitler would be merely yet another corrupt politician and wouldnt make it very far. Without islamism, ISIS would be just yet another insignificant terror cell. It is the sympathies of the masses for their ideology, either overt or silent, that made both of them powerful.

[Luis Dias]

Quite right, the existing phenomena does require a bit more than just some "Extremists" of any given religion. In this case, we can trace the origins of this disease back to Wahhabism and the huge investments Saudi Arabia did for the past decades in building madrastas and theological schools that taught the most severe and radical of these ideas (ironically, the kingdom allowed its most radical wings to do this as a means to avoid having them being built inside Saudi Arabia itself). These ideas trace back to the eighteenth century and their cruelty was not a modern invention.

I'm not saying Flipside hasn't got the right idea, it's just that there are multiple factors involved here, more than just this one big explanation.

[Flipside]

Sunni and Shiite are no more unified than Protestant and Catholic are. Most of the problems in the Middle East are still based on persecution based on which denomination of Islam you are. There is no strongly entrenched isolationist or expansionist version of Islam, any more than there was such a version of Christianity, but it was still used as an excuse to do the Crusades, religion is a medium, and most of the time, its goals are defined by individuals, not the religion itself. (and to clarify that statement, they are both pretty much on a par with their views on expansionism, slavery etc, but Muslims in the Middle East tend to dance to that tune because unpleasant things happen to them if they don't).

This is more about staying in control than being religiously devout, that's why Islam is so forced upon the people there, to perpetuate the groupthink, it's nothing to do with being 'faithful' to the Religion, it's about being falling under the umbrella of the Church, which has a massive presence in Government.

The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition couldn't have happened without Christianity, that doesn't make Christianity an inherently bad religion, the people who twisted it to suit their own sadistic and expansionist needs are the problem, that and the fact that people weren't educated or empowered enough to turn around and say 'not in my name'. As for Nazism, that was responsive social behaviour, a result of the Post WWI conditions that let Hitler rise to power in the first place, Hitler didn't create Fascism, the conditions in Germany at the time created both and allowed them to flourish.

The truth is, there isn't many arguments that cannot be applied to 'Islam' that isn't applicable in the worst situations to every other belief system out there if the conditions are right, but the word Islam is just being used to replace a massive swathe of social, political and educational problems that need fixing in that area, but because those in power use that situation to stay in power, it's unlikely to happen.

[666maslo666]

The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition couldn't have happened without Christianity, that doesn't make Christianity an inherently bad religion

Yes it does, Christianity as it was interpreted in dark ages was a bad and extremely toxic religion and has caused a lot of evil. The situation has changed for the better over the centuries (well, except for those extremist christians in Africa), but that does not erase that Christianity did go through an evil period. I just dont buy these kinds of excuses at all. And yes, it applies to lots of other ideologies, not just Islam. Even atheism in some of its more militant incarnations has killed countless millions. We will probably see some other "evil meme" appear in the future.

But right now, it is Islam and its more radical interpretations that is the problem. And we should not sweep this problem under the rug or make excuses for it. It is just a ****ty ideology. Islam needs to change radically, shed its more fundametalist parts, or there will never be peace.

[Flipside]

Agreed, the Middle East is, socially, highly under-developed and that problem shouldn't be swept under the rug, but nor should it be placed in a big box marked 'Islam', that's as much a problem as trying to make excuses for it. As you yourself said, Islam in some areas of the Middle East is psychologically at a similar phase to Christianity in the Middle Ages, but that's not the fault of its followers, it's the fault of the environment that it exists within. You'll get faster results changing the latter than attacking the former, the complicated part of the problem is that the former is usually standing between you and the latter, that's the whole Middle-Eastern conundrum.

[666maslo666]

Asking whether it is the fault of its followers or the environment is like asking if chicken or egg was sooner. It is the fault of both, as they are largely inseparable.

[Luis Dias]

This relativistic idea that all religions are equally bad or equally good is nonsense talk to me. I gave you a precise reference to look up and you completely flat out ignored it. These "ideas" must have no real bearing on the situation, it's more like the contingencies and human conditions that makes this happen. I say that's absolutely wrong. It would be equally wrong to state that "The problem wasn't communism per se, it's how real politiks played out between countries", etc. We wouldn't get away with such inane falsehood, and yet we seem to get into that problem when the subject matter is Religion.

And I get why that is, it has little to do with empirical observation and more about wishful / pragmatic thinking. There's no way in chance that we are gonna deconvert 1.5 billion muslims, so we might as well focus on other factors. But that's also a misleading viewpoint. The problem is not Islam, but Islamism. The ideology of turning everybody into their Sharia-Law based sect through either political means or through weaponized jihad.

Denying this fact is getting us nowhere, and precisely the lack of calling a spade a spade has had a very unfortunate effect. Whenever Obama talks about this "evil ideology" without naming it properly, many people will assume he's speaking of Islam in the whole through politikspeak, because it would be too unpolite to say it outright. This is wrong. Everyone should name the problem and the problem is Islamism, not Islam. And it's through this abstraction that we can have any glimpse of hope that we can win this in the long term. Identify the ideological enemy, fight it through a battle of ideas and education.

Here, have Maahjid Nawaz speaking about it, he's 100x more eloquent than I could ever be on this subject:

[Flipside]

@666Maslo666

Exactly my point. ISIS isn't so much the fruit of Islam, as it was described, as the fruit of any faith system that happened to be in the area and could be twisted to achieve this goal, it just happened to be Islam.

That doesn't mean mainstream Islam doesn't have a big role to play in dealing with it (though, it should be noted that ISIS in general has no more respect for those they see as 'Westernized Muslims' than they do for anyone else not part of their group), but this really is far more a social and political issue than an Islamic one, or at least it started that way, part of ISIS' goal is actually to get people thinking of it as being about Islam, and generating tension between moderate Islam and other cultures. So far, it seems to have been super-effective.

@Luis, it isn't so much a question of saying, as you put it "The problem wasn't communism per se, it's how real politiks played out between countries", it's more a case of being very careful not to take that falsehood and let it turn into McCarthyism.

As for people going to fight in other countries, it's partly about obedience, it's also partly about the fact that this is the first period in time where people can actively travel around the globe to do things like this. Who knows how many people would have defected to the Nazis from the UK if the option had been available pre-war, Germany was actually quite popular in Britain at the time. When Russian troops were reported in the Ukraine, voluntary travel to fight in a foreign war was the official excuse given, America had to deal with Freelance Bin-Laden hunters in Afghanistan. It is a worrying trend, but I don't think it says as much about Islam as it does about people and the world in general.

[General Battuta]

I really like this column about how to think about IS/IS/IL.

[Flipside]

I really like this column about how to think about IS/IS/IL.

That's a pretty good read. I think people sometimes get so focused on the whole 'Islam' aspect of ISIS (since it is rubbed in their faces by both sides), that it can distract from looking deeper and asking the difficult questions. I remember the PLO hijacking planes when I was a kid, it was all part of the same, ongoing problem, but it certainly wasn't about Islam as a religion back then, and it wasn't wanting to subjugate or kill those who opposed them, that's recent, and reeks of a desperate situation to adopt such a self-destructive pose.

[Luis Dias]

Precisely because I don't want it to become McCarthyism is that I am advocating for the acceptance of this distinction! This much was, I thought, obvious.

Regarding that column Battuta provides, sigh. TL DR, it's all about material wealth resentment and this is established through various encarnations of the same ideas throughout the eons. Very unstructured piece, but what really irks me is this dismissal of all those "Professional politicians, and their intellectual menials" who will "blather" on regarding “Islamic fundamentalism” and so on, as if this theory of how it all stems from material resentment isn't, at the very best, contentious as well.

Not that I don't see something in it. I just don't take this idea that these notions explain the situation entirely seriously. It's not serious. It's putting one's head inside the sand. So fascinated the westerners are with this notion that it's all "their fault", that even these guys can't really **** up in their own, no, it's all our fault anyways, some kind of 21st century version of "white man's burden", which in turn, and paradoxically, Objectifies these peoples, as if they are merely puppets being thrown around by "our" Global Minotaur or something. If such theory were true, then one should ask why isn't this happening throughout the non-islamist parts of Africa, why isn't this happening in China or India. Why is Vietnam so quiet? Why, oh why, aren't the southern americas in similar dire straits?

Definitely not the ideology. Never an assessment of the ideology. Always ignoring it. I say, this is not helpful. And one day everyone with an interest in these questions will have to face it, but then again, even in 1938 there were people who insisted that any grievances, any beligerances we were seeing in Germany was all the product of Versailles. Nothing to do with ideologies and how they fooled people into their own interpretations of History. And of course, even now, people still insist that this treaty was the sole producer of the nazi phenomena.

[666maslo666]

@666Maslo666
Exactly my point. ISIS isn't so much the fruit of Islam, as it was described, as the fruit of any faith system that happened to be in the area and could be twisted to achieve this goal, it just happened to be Islam.

Well, thats not my point, my point is more like the opposite. ISIS is the fruit of Islamism, which is a fairly large and influential subset of Islam, dominant in middle east. As I said, if some other faith was in the area, there would probably be no ISIS, and the situation would look much different (probably much better).

Ideology is of as much importance as realpolitik, much more so for religious terrorist organizations. We will not truly understand the emergence of deplorable regimes such as ISIS if we only concentrate on material and economic factors.