Musing #63 “Learning from the Strengths of Daesh”
(N.B. I am very ambivalent both about writing this musing, and about
sharing it. This “musing” may turn out to be worth less the paper you’ve
printed it on.)
I have said before and will continue to maintain that the “War on
Terrorism” is a misleading fantasy generated by George W. and his team after
9/11. To what end, for what purpose? I don’t know. Maybe just to cover his
ass as he prepared to finish what he thought his daddy had left unfinished (one
hazard of dynasties). The fact remains that coping with Al Qaida and the
Taliban and now Daesh is not a war. And I’m not just nitpicking word choices,
I’m taking the broad view. We are not confronting massed, armed forces on
battlefields. Nor even guerillas behind trees or in tunnels. We are engaging
(or failing to engage) militias which are less and less territorial, are more
and more driven by ideologies (which, while couched in religious language, are
not really religious, just camouflaged as such), complicated with ages-old
tribal and sectarian disputes, and are increasingly regressive (striving to
return to some fantasized golden era of some imagined past.) Like the “war on
drugs” and the “war on poverty” we have mis-identified the struggle and thereby
have deluded ourselves into using the wrong tools to engage the struggle...so we
are misdirected and unsuccessful.
The Middle East is an unmitigated
disaster rooted first in the last century’s history and second in fighting out
millennia-old struggles, both of them fueled by cultural forces and dynamics of
which we cannot even conceive. And Daesh’s technological tools (which are
ironically its ideological enemies) are increasingly unconventional, such as
social media. This is not ‘war’ as we have even known it, and we cannot fight
it with conventional battlefield weapons.
What I’ve just said is all
repetition. I’ve said it all before. But in the middle of the night I had a
thought. We’re been struggling with Daesh and denying it any validity. What if
we grant it some validity? I don’t mean approval, or agreement, or even
toleration, or anything like that... but grant that it is a movement (however
much we abhor its direction), not simply a headless monster, take a deep breath,
and ask, “How does it work?” Might we learn something...even from this monster
Daesh?
The first thing I notice is that
Daesh has learned how to build community. I probably notice that first because
I’m looking around at our fragmented, fractious, divisive, crumbling,
increasingly self-destructive ‘community’ and muttering “This won’t do.” For
sure, Daesh is not building any kind of community we would want (apart from what
Donald Trump promises to craft for himself), but it is building a community
strong enough, cohesive enough, compelling enough that its members are willing
to do brutal and endless murder and ultimately to blow themselves up
individually into ‘kingdom come’ (they hope). Actually, that’s pretty powerful
stuff !!
This much I learned decades ago: to
increase the bonds, commitment, cohesion within the community the simplest (and
often first) thing you do is invent an enemy and threaten the community with
it. A great builder of cohesiveness; tyrants, fascists and demagogues (Oops,
Donald Trump’s head pops up again) have used it successfully ever since
Pericles. Rally the people by posing an enemy and magnifying the differences
between them and us. That’s an obvious gimmick, and Daesh has used it well; the
whole rest of the world is their enemy, not just the non-Muslim ‘infidels,’ but
also the “gray Muslims’ (those not sharing Daesh’s radicalism and
zealotry-cum-brutality). That’s a considerably daunting enemy.
Perhaps the second thing you do is
provide the community with an ideology, a rationale, that both helps bind the
community together, and gives the sound of reasonableness to the actions you
want the community to take. In Daesh’s case, they wave Allah around a lot much
like a flag (though from the little I’ve read they don’t really waste much time
worshipping Allah, just screaming his name as they commit their mayhem), along
with claims of doctrinal purity (a sort of very regressive reform movement)
shaped by an ideology that affirms immorality, brutality, inhumanity and
self-immolation.
Now I’ll say one more time, for
the record, that I’m utterly convinced that there is absolutely nothing Islamic
about Daesh. I learned more than half a lifetime ago not to take literally the
schizophrenic’s religious ideation and babbling; he thinks he’s talking about
religious matters, but I know that he’s simply using religious language (because
he does know how else to say it) to try to tell me what is tormenting his mind,
something he himself is not able to not understand. I realize it’s usually
inaccurate and misleading to try to explain a social process in terms of
individual psychology, but in this one case I think the analog is useful and
fairly accurate. So I state, pretty unconditionally, that Daesh is NOT a
religious movement, NOT a radical form of Islam: Deash is a bunch of thugs who
have formed a community to enable themselves to do what they love doing (murder,
brutality, misogyny and mayhem), what they get great joy in doing, and are
simply using the language of a minor, giving-permission-to-violence, and
historically suppressed interpretation of an unseemly edge of Islam to give
themselves justification for doing it...and in the process shoving their thumb
(or their ass) in the eye of Islam. Pay no attention to their words; watch
their behavior...it’s neither Islamic nor humane
That’s as far as I can go in trying to divine what Daesh has learned about
community-building; I‘ve reached the limit of my understanding. I’d love to
hear the observations of someone well versed in social processes and well
informed of the available intelligence about Daesh. I think (perhaps wrongly)
that we could learn some things by closely observing Daesh in addition to trying
to contain, diminish and destroy them. Anybody like that out there?
One more thought occurred to me in
this cluster of thinking, though I’m not clear how it fits in here...but my
intuitions says it does. As a young preacher I quickly became aware how
discomforted parents get in church when their small child makes some noise they
think distracting to the congregation. It became one of my missions to convince
those parents that their child was not bothering this preacher, and had as much
place in that worship service as any annoyed adult might, and that the
children’s presence was vital, life-giving to the community. While I did put a
lot of emphasis on the ‘sermon,’ I never thought that what this preacher had to
share was all that important; I understood the role of the ‘sermon’ as
establishing a safe arena for people to be distracted, to wander off mentally
and to do some meditation on whatever they needed most to be carefully
considering. Further, I’d once did a small piece of research about people’s
earliest remembrances of church, and from that study I’d concluded that earliest
childhood experiences in church are crucially important to adults’ faith-lifes.
It’s important for those children to be comfortably in church, and their parents
as well. So, childhood memories of church need to be a plus in their faiths.
What does this have to do with community-building? I don’t know how, but I’m
sure it does.
So, what might we learn from the Daesh incident that’s more helpful than
hateful? Suggestions?
