The long Western legacy of violence against Asian Americans

[Dill]

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Tucker Carlson's opinion is not germane to our discussion, nor would I care what it is.

It is not relevant in the sense that it contributes knowledge. But it is relevant as a benchmark for bad practice. We don't want to make the kind of hasty generalization he does. 

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Quote:Not just because they have been denounced as un-Islamic by every Muslim-majority nation in the world. In the first place, their emergence was rather unique--created by the mismanaged and unnecessary war in Iraq, out of an ideology developed in another mismanaged war in Afghanistan decades earlier. Like our own white supremacist militants, the original group were individuals suffering from acute identity crises, a sense of diminished future. ISIS itself emerged in the cauldron of Sunni demotion and dispossession which followed the ousting of Saddam. Their outreach was to identity-stressed and dispossessed Muslims wherever they can find them. Only a trickle responded, though. The inter-organizational competitions intensified their extremism as did their initial success in acquiring territory in the power vacuum of two broken states, making them an international pariah beyond the pale even of North Korea. 

How they were able to come into being is important, but it's not nearly as important as the number of people who flocked to join it afterwards.  Interestingly enough, you appear to be laying the blame on the, admitted shit show, war and subsequent managing of Iraq.  However, you don't mention the Syrian civil war that really spawned the movement.  Unless your assertion is that Assad and his policies had nothing to do with ISIS coming into existence and everything would have been fine there if Saddam was still in power in Iraq.

1. In comparison to the total number of Muslims in the world, it is a trickle statistically. In terms of damage they were definitely punching above their weight. In emphasizing the minimal number, I don't mean to minimize the problem. The damage to the region, under-reported horror inflicted upon civilians, is just jaw-dropping. 

2. And yes, I am assigning sufficient cause to the Iraq shit show. What drew Zarkawi to Iraq? The U.S invasion. Who would join ISIS? Neither Shia nor Kurds. Their membership and chain of command comes from the collapse of the Baathist government and the Iraqi military, and subsequent domination of the State by Shia. If Saddam were still in power--No ISIS, though a small AQ in Iraq cell may have eventually developed there to fight Saddam, with little support from Saddam's Sunni backers. 

3. Notice I mention the power vacuum of "two broken states." The other broken state is not Turkey or Iran or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Jordan. It is Syria, which offered relatively safe refuge.  The vacuum created by the Syrian Civil War might be a necessary condition for the emergence of ISIS, but it was not a cause.

(03-20-2021, 12:27 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Most, absolutely.  So we appear to be on the same page.  That the Capitol rioters are no more representative of white people or conservatives in the US than ISIS is for Muslims.

Quote:So, hard to get to ISIS just from Islam; easy to get there, if one compares the phenomenon to other insurgencies arising from radical destruction of immediate social environment--e.g., the Tamil Tigers, Khmer Rouge, Shining Path, the Sierra Leone Civil War, Nauxalites in India. Nazi Germany might figure here too, though their seizure of power was not an insurgency. I am thinking of circumstances that produced both a particularly ruthless political machine and the opportunities it needed to assume control of a state (though that was not a necessary outcome).

Actually Islam is absolutely essential to ISIS's existence.  While it may express a twisted and militant understanding of the religion, the religion itself is required for someone to interpret it in the first place.  In addition there are widely followed, virulent sects, within it, such as Wahabism.  As we have discussed on many instances Saudi Arabia provides a near perfect petri dish for radical interpretations of Islam, as decades worth of events have shown.  Also, just like the Bible, there are passage in the Quran and the Hadith that absolutely lend themselves to the kind of aggressive militancy expressed, at it's most vile, by ISIS.  So I don't think you can completely divorce Islam from the conduct of ISIS as readily as you would like.

We might be on the same page about a lot here, if we sift through the issues carefully.

One cannot understand the ISIS phenomenon, it's political agenda and attraction/revulsion for Muslims in particular, without reference to Islam, certainly. They did not attract Southern Baptists or Chinese Communists. Their first and most numerous victims were other Muslims. The passages you mention regarding war, captives etc. are indeed there and became very literal criteria of jurisprudence and governance. So I agree with you--there is no "understanding" ISIS without reference to Islam, as one might understand, say, the Pinochet Coup in Chile without reference to Catholicism.  And as you say, Wahabism, Saudi funded, has been an incredibly destabilizing force in the region. The most virulent Islamists in the Gulf region tend to have Wahabist roots.

But Islamism gets to be a force by, among other things, bad governance in the region and destabilizing wars. And this may be where we diverge when assigning causes. Some 5-6 years ago I read a report that some 20% of the Egyptian population espoused Islamist views. That would be roughly 16 million people. The vast majority however, like many fundamentalist Christians, feel the fight against Satan is a spiritual one, to be fought by distancing oneself from material possessions and temptations, and not participating in politics. 

So when I say one cannot get to ISIS from Islam, I mean that, while certainly required for understanding, Islam alone cannot "cause" the kind of thing ISIS became. It requires a sufficient mass of traumatized, deprived, and twisted individuals who then reciprocally drive each others' extremism. It requires security and space  to operate and grow, but also enough resistance to keep existence a life and death issue.  Saddam's intelligence officers, who constructed ISIS' intel department, did not join ISIS to fight to the death because they suddenly read the Qu'ran and the Hadith passages you mentioned, which had been there for them all their lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents. They joined because their careers were destroyed, their family members dead, their property forfeit, and they'd spent months or years in captivity, deprived of food and respect and often tortured. And then found a space to gather strength, re-organize, and identify with an apocalyptic movement. God-backed revenge.

Perhaps you agree with this though, and just want to be sure that I don't rattle on as if Islam were not even in the picture, as if they only chose the black flag because Al Baghdadi liked the color.