“Remarkable” is right

The New Neo Posted on by

I was at a friend’s house yesterday evening when he turned on the television and I heard the ominous words, “An Air France flight with 309 people aboard crashed…” and my whole body immediately braced, expecting bad bad news.

But the news wasn’t very bad at all. As this AP article rightly states, it was remarkable. And so I’m remarking on it. A series of terrible calamities hit this airplane, and somehow there were only a few minor injuries.

A bit less remarkable–but remarkable nevertheless–is the lead sentence in the AP article. It reads like one of those contests New York magazine used to feature, in which the reader tries to submit a ridiculous run-on sentence that could be the plot of an over-the-top disaster movie:

A jetliner carrying 309 people skidded off a runway while landing in a thunderstorm Tuesday, sliding into a ravine and breaking into pieces, but remarkably everyone aboard survived by jumping to safety in the moments before the plane burst into flames.

These people are either very lucky, or the crew and flight attendants on board the plane deserve a medal. Or perhaps both.

Hiroshima anniversary: what might have been

The New Neo Posted on by

A few days from now will be the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The rightness of that decision is still being vigorously debated.

Here’s an article from the Weekly Standard (hat tip: Austin Bay) countering the argument that the bombing was unnecessary because Japan was about to surrender anyway. It makes a fairly convincing case that intelligence of the time actually indicated that the opposite was true.

I grew up in the immediate postwar years with the knowledge of our dropping of the atomic bomb. As I’ve already written, fear of nuclear war colored the childhood of most in my generation. That fear wasn’t simply a fear of the Soviets and what they might do; it was also a fear of what America had already done.

I was very young–perhaps twelve or so–when I read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. It terrified and sickened me. The descriptions of the suffering of the innocent residents of the city, going about their business on a summer day and either instantly incinerated or subject to horrific injuries and sights out of a Bosch painting, were nearly unendurable even in the reading. Multiplied in my mind’s eye by many tens of thousands similarly suffering, they created a symphony of agony that reached such a crescendo it threatened to overwhelm me for a time.

Hersey’s book purposely gives his reportage on Hiroshima no context at all, the better to appreciate the appalling human cost. He simply describes, and the reader identifies with the victims. There is no way to read his book and not feel a deep and visceral revulsion towards what happened there. Even learning (and believing) the justification for the bombing can never do away with the knowledge that the human cost was profound and almost unimaginable.

Hiroshima is an event of such huge significance that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it must be weighed against the most likely alternatives. But it seems almost obscene to do so in light of what actually happened there. How, in the balance of the scales, can such an overwhelmingly heavy reality be weighed against a projected alternative? The preponderance of the evidence now seems to argue that, without the bomb, the carnage would have been far worse. Projections are only best guesses, though; they can never be proven to have been inevitable.

So how can we judge that a projected alternative is worse than those horrors that we know actually did happen? The answer is that it takes a great deal of imagination to do so; the flesh-and-blood realities of Hershey’s book are so vivid that they tend to block out all those other deaths that didn’t happen but probably would have.

From my reading on the subject up to this point, I believe that the use of the bomb did in fact prevent far more deaths than not using it. But it’s hard to wrap my mind around this fact; hard to know it. As I wrote here:

It is so very easy to criticize what is, what has actually been done. The resultant faults and flaws are right before our eyes. The world will always be imperfect; each action will create its own problems. But the even worse (perhaps far worse) things that might have happened but for those actions–those always remain invisible and unknowable, and can only be guessed at.

There’s another aspect to criticism of the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, one that applies to many of those on the left who also have criticized our involvement in Iraq: they believe that the most important thing is to keep our (read: their) hands clean. Sins of commission are judged far more harshly than sins of omission for that reason. The deaths we cause (for whatever reasons, even primarily defensive ones) are considered far greater crimes than the deaths someone else would most likely have caused had we not done what we did. To a person with such a mindset, nothing could ever have justified being the agent of the suffering Hershey described, not even the prevention of far greater suffering.

[ADDENDUM: for further thoughts of mine on the subject of Hiroshima, see this and this.]

A personal note

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually write about events in my purely personal, non-political life, but I’m going to make an exception.

Towards the end of my recent visit to California, my ninety-one-year-old mother had a stroke. Even though she is ninety-one, this was totally unexpected, as she was in vigorous good health and had a blood pressure a twenty-year-old might envy. Nevertheless, it happened.

My brother and sister-in-law raced up to be with her when we learned about it, and I came back from California the next day.

Although it had been explained to me that my mother was very weak on her left side, it was still a shock to see her debility and dependence. She has so rarely been ill that I can hardly remember another time, and she has never even sustained any sort of real injury in a long and active life. Much to be grateful for, of course, but her history had also lulled us all into a false sense of security.

But it never lulled her. Throughout her life her nemesis has been her fear and anxiety about illness and disability, and she never for a moment felt secure in her own good health.

Her luck had held out so long; perhaps it will end up holding out again and she’ll make a decent recovery, as the doctors and physical therapists say she indeed might. But her strong suit—and she has many—was never optimism, especially about illness. At the moment, she’s not buying into it.

I go back to her apartment at the beautiful independent living facility where, until a little more than a week ago, she had happily lived. I have to get clothing, supplies, mail, that sort of thing. Walking in, it feels almost like paradise compared to the rehab facility which now constitutes her world (she continues to call it a nursing home, I continue to tell her it’s a rehab facility; a little war of words, the goal of which is to get her to think of it as a place to get better rather than a warehouse for the disabled). It is so sad, though, to see her apartment, so orderly, an order and routine which had made her feel safe, a safety that is now totally and utterly disrupted. It’s hard to see the bathroom with its wrinkle cream and makeup (reminding me of my explorations in early adolescence into the secret world of women’s primping when I used to experiment with all her stuff); the invitation to the special lobster dinner in two weeks; the smiling photos, the book on techniques to avoid falling.

Her fears—and ours—are many. There is a great deal of indignity, too, despite the fact that she is in one of the best facilities of its type. Sometimes I want to shake the attendants for the condescending and infantilizing attitude they display at times, even though I understand it—and say, “How dare you? You don’t know her—she’s a person of wit and joie de vivre—everyone admires her as a great old person—two weeks ago that’s who she was—when I left for California that’s who she was.” That’s who she still is, when she puts her hearing aids in enough to hear properly, and when her anxiety goes down enough to let her personality shine through again. I hope and trust that’s who she will be more and more as time goes on and physical improvement occurs.

And how upset she is to bother and burden me! Over and over, my mother apologizes to me for this—it’s exactly and precisely what she didn’t want to happen. I just tell her I’m okay, not to think about that. When the doctor asked her whether she was depressed, she said, “If I wasn’t depressed I’d be crazy!”

My mother is very lucky in her roommate (yes, in addition to all the other adjustments, one must adjust to living with a stranger and the constant visits from that stranger’s family). The woman in the other bed in her room is ninety-seven years old and totally lucid. She is one of those elderly people who is almost luminous, a great beauty with a sort of radiance and light that seems to emanate from her. Her family is for the most part quiet, and they bring incredibly beautiful bouquets of flowers from their gardens.

This woman is a great patient, too; unlike my mother, she is very patient. As my mother herself says, patience was never her strong suit. That makes it very difficult, because right now it is what is required.

So, how to engender hope in the hopeless? Why is my mother having to learn this hard lesson now, of patience and of hope, when she is so elderly and debilitated? Will she be able to learn it?

More about that racist card

The New Neo Posted on by

I am hereby amending this post to refer not just to charges of racism, but to include charges of being against a certain culture, ethnicity, group, or people. I wouldn’t want my remarks to be limited only to those who use the word “racist”–after all, there are other cards in the deck.

Here’s a portion of a clarifying and expanding comment I made recently on that thread (and by the words “behind suicide bombing” I don’t mean they are actually plotting with the bombers or giving them money, I mean they support them ideologically):

The majority of Palestinians, as many commenters here have pointed out, are behind suicide bombing and would fervently like Israel to disappear and all the evil Jews to die. The best evidence is that this is not a minority opinion, it’s a majority opinion. I do not think there is a culture on the face of the earth today more devoted to rage, death, destruction, and yes–racism and prejudice, including despising blacks, and promoting the most virulent form of anti-Semitism on the face of the earth today–than the Palestinians at this point. They are not even ashamed or covert about the anti-Semitism part of it; they glorify in it and celebrate it.

So, every time I or someone else mentions this, do I need to put in a sort of legal disclaimer that says, “Of course there is some minority percentage of Palestinians who don’t feel this way? Who are mostly silent and powerless, and afraid to speak? Who in fact would be killed if they voiced this opinion?”

No doubt the same was true of the Germans, too, in WWII. But when a certain ethos and belief system is the dominant one in a culture, I don’t feel we need to make that disclaimer every time. Those who keep requiring that we do so, in my opinion, are deflecting the issue and closing their eyes to the sad and painful truth about this particular group of people at this point in time.

More on certain churches and Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Via Bookworm, this article from the American Thinker seems to be agreeing with me about the basically leftist, as opposed to the basically anti-Semitic, orientation of some anti-Israel pro-Palestinian Christian ministers (boy, that’s a mouthful!).

Author James Lewis writes:

The day before yesterday, we are told, the Church of the Disciples of Christ demanded that Israel tear down its security fence, which has saved countless of Jewish women and children from being blown to smithereens. Twisting the words of Ronald Reagan, Minister William McDermet III of Panama, N.Y., shouted into the microphone to the assembled delegates,

“Say to Ariel Sharon, ‘Tear down this wall!'”

Well, the Rev. McDermet is either a fool or a demagogue, but I suspect the latter, since even a fool can distinguish between a defensive wall and a prison wall.

I just want to say that I see nothing wrong with the notion that Rev. McDermet is both a fool and a demagogue. Who ever said the two were mutually exclusive?

Playing the racist card

The New Neo Posted on by

In this post of mine about Peretz’s article on the attitude of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian church leaderships towards Israel and the Palestinians, I found this interesting comment from one of my many anonymous readers:

“nihilistic darlings”
“murderous ideologies”
“the most murderous people on the planet”

Just a few gems of some of the most over the top anti-Arab propaganda I’ve seen lately! I find it ironic that, in your attempt to point out Anti-Semitism, you let loose with anti-Arab vitriol.

The first two phrases are quotes from me, the second is from another commenter. In fact, I find it ironic that my post was most decidedly not an attempt to point out anti-Semitism, which makes me question whether “anonymous” even read the post itself with any care. But that’s a side issue.

I call the comment “interesting” because it demonstrates a trend I’ve noticed over and over again among the left and others who disagree with those criticizing Islamofascists: the playing of, not the race card, but the racist card. When in doubt, when all argument and all logic fails, when it’s not possible or when it’s merely difficult to attack an argument on the merits, the preferred approach is to call the writer a racist.

Is it racism to speak truth about a general trend among a group? If someone were to say, for example, that Ethiopians and Kenyans are overrespresented among distance runners–in fact, are probably the best runners, as a group, in the world–is that racist? It’s just a fact. Does it mean that all Ethiopians and Kenyans are good runners? No. Does it mean that the running propensities of Ethiopians and Kenyans are innate and hardwired? Not necessarily. It’s simply an observation borne out by facts–these groups are overrepresented among distance runners.

So it is for the Palestinians. There is a nihilistic strain among Palestinians, and in many other Arab cultures, that is quite powerful. Are nihilists overrepresented in Arab culture? Yes. Are all Arabs nihilists? Of course not. Are all nihilists Arabs? Absolutely not. But to call the Palestinians the “nihilistic darlings” of the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches is simply a statement of fact, and one that, in the original context in which I wrote it, was directed towards critiquing the leadership of those churches (not towards rank and file Episcopalians and Presbyterians, by the way–and would it be racist if it had been? Are all groups races? For that matter, are the Palestinians even a race? Of course not).

In addition, note that commenter “anonymous” is not particularly careful with his/her quotes and their interpretation. Yes indeed, I did write “nihilistic darlings” about the Palestinians whom the Church leadership favors–meaning, of course, the widespread support of Palestinians in general for the numerous nihilists among them. But here is the context for the quote “murderous ideologies”:

Although some in these particular churches have a history of fellow-traveling with other murderous ideologies such as Communism, Peretz rightly points out that…

To call such a comment “over the top anti-Arab propoganda” and “vitriol” is, quite simply, an absurdity. By “murderous ideologies” I think it’s quite clear that I am referring to terrorism and Islamofascism, not to Arabs or to Islam as a whole, and in this quote I’m especially applying the phrase to Communism. Hardly a race, and certainly not Arabs.

As for the final quote, “the most murderous people on the planet,” the actual quote is from this comment, and it goes like this:

Hoping to be spared the hatred of the most murderous peoples on the planet, they are ready to feed the Jews to the crocodile in the hopes they will be eaten last.

I’m not sure whether it’s important that the word is actually “peoples” and not “people.” But, once again, it’s simply a fact. As Samuel Huntington put it “Islam has bloody borders.”

Why deny it? Is it racist to say anything critical about a group, however true, however obvious, however important it is to know? If the “anonymouses” of the world had their way back in WWII, would we have had to have kept mum about the murderous ideology of Nazism, and its support among the German people?

How do I truly feel about Islam? Well, along with Dr. Sanity, I don’t much care one way or the other about it. I never really noticed it until recently. I only care about it when it’s used by murderers as an excuse to kill me and other innocent people, and to glory in such murders. And Arabs? They’re fine, never had a moment’s problem with them, until I realized that so many of them were celebrating and advocating the death of Americans, Israelis, Jews, and other westerners, and that there is something about the culture that seems to foster and support this sort of thing. It is simply an empirical fact, and if we ignore it or cover it up, we do so, quite literally, at our own peril.

Peretz’s “J’accuse”

The New Neo Posted on by

Via Dean Esmay, here’s a thought-provoking Martin Peretz article from last week’s issue of The New Republic (no subscription necessary in this case).

Peretz’s “J’accuse” is directed towards the support by the hierarchy of the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches of their nihilistic darlings, the Palestinians. Although some in these particular churches have a history of fellow-traveling with other murderous ideologies such as Communism, Peretz rightly points out that, at least at the beginning, it was possible to be a well-meaning useful idiot and believe the ideals of Communism without seeing where it would lead. But he also rightly points out that it’s hard to see how one can ignore the fact that the Palestinians currently demonstrate:

a stagnant class structure, unproductive economic habits, an uncurious and increasingly reactionary culture, deeply cruel relationships between the sexes and toward gays, no notion of an independent judiciary, and a primitive religious mentality that gains prestige in society even as it emphasizes the promise of sexual rewards in paradise for martyrs ”” a crude myth that has served successfully as an incentive for suicide bombings not only in Israel but also in Iraq and throughout the Arab world. And no real challenge to any of these backward actualities has arisen in all of the turmoil the movement has sown.

Hardly the stuff to which the “progressive” UN-loving pacifists in the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches ought to be drawn. So, why are they? Peretz’s conclusion is that they are reacting against something rather than towards something, and the “something” they are reacting against is Israel, through the time-honored tradition of anti-Semitism–not overt this time, but covert.

I agree that anti-Semitism is probably part of what drives them (whether they know it or not) to focus rather obsessively on the Palestinian cause, while many other far more worthwhile causes are ignored.

But I also disagree with Peretz; I don’t think anti-Semitism is their main motivation at all. I think that Peretz’s background on the left may be blinding him to the fact that becoming a Palestinian booster is voguish on the left as a whole. I don’t think it’s possible to ignore the effects of trendiness, propaganda, and above all the idea of Palestinians as impoverished third-world victims vs. the imperialist and Western Jews of Israel. Forgot the reality–for example, the number of impoverished Jewish emigrants in Israel from Arab countries themselves–the triumph of what in my previous post was referred to as “imagology” is a huge part of this belief system.

Years ago, Yeats famously wrote in “Among School Children”: Both nuns and mothers worship images. I think the Presbyterian and Episcopalian leaders are hardly immune to another sort of image-worship, that of the political, and I think that’s what is operating here far more powerfully than the latent anti-Semitism that is probably part of the mix.

Imagology vs. reality

The New Neo Posted on by

There are certain authors I keep coming back to. One of them is Milan Kundera, whom I first read and loved about twenty-five years ago, but whose works, on rereading, seem even more loaded with political and philosophical insight than I realized at the time. One can open them randomly and start reading, and find something pertinent on nearly every page.

Here’s a quote from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality that I think bears another look. He is talking about the ascendance of imagery (which he refers to as “imagology,” meaning suggestive images and slogans) over ideology, or even over reality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

Kundera has described a great deal of what drives public opinion today, and how public opinion in turn shapes the perception of reality in a circular feedback loop facilitated by polling. He doesn’t mention the MSM directly here (he does get to it later), but of course it’s a big part of this loop.

I found his analysis of why it is possible for the process to work this way particularly compelling; the scale of modern life makes it impossible to know about things in the way people in a village used to know what was going on in that small arena. And so we are dependent on image shapers and the media to construct a reality for us, and we are often none the wiser that it is a distorted reality.

Kundera follows this passage with another one that discusses the ascendance of imagology over ideology. Even Kundera didn’t quite foresee the way in which sophisticated imagology (the Al Jazeera network, for example) would feed into an ancient ideology (Islamicist supremecy and supercesssionism) along with advanced techniques of terrorism, and create the mess we encounter today.

Avoiding racial profiling at all costs?

The New Neo Posted on by

This editorial is from Tuesday’s New York Times, but the attitude it expresses could have been found in almost any liberal newspaper.

Subsequent to the London subway bombings, New York has had to decide how to increase security on public transit, and so there have been random searches of backpacks and the like. The Times editorial explains:

The police officers must be careful not to give the impression that every rider who looks Arab or South Asian is automatically a subject of suspicion. They will naturally choose to search the bags of those people who appear suspicious, like those wearing bulky clothes in warm weather. But those who are selected simply because they are carrying packages should be chosen in a way that does not raise fears of racial profiling – by, for example, searching every 5th or 12th person, with the exact sequence chosen at random.

This need to avoid racial profiling at all costs, or even the appearance of racial profiling or fears of racial profiling, is puzzling. Yes, of course, it’s true that not all terrorists and suicide bombers fit the profile of a young adult Arab Moslem male–there’s Richard Reid, and the recent Somalian of the second group of London subway bombings. But there is no doubt that most do indeed fit that profile.

And of course no one is suggesting that all who do fit that profile are bombers; the vast majority are not. And yet it is folly, if not insanity, to deny that young adult Arab Moslem males are far more likely than anyone else to be suicide bombers, and that, in a more logical world, they should be subject to greater scrutiny.

In regular police work, usually a crime has already been committed when the police are doing a search. If there is also a witness who has given a description of the subject–let’s say, for example, a young white male of medium height wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and having a huge scar on his forehead–the police are not going to search every fifth person driving through a roadblock. No, they are going to look for young white males fitting the description, or else we would consider our tax money poorly spent and our police hopelessly incompetent. But such a search is not considered racial profiling, because it is based on an actual description of an actual suspect by an actual witness to an actual crime.

Racial profiling is usually done in the context of stopping cars based on the race of the driver and searching them for drugs. Even if members of certain races are statistically somewhat more likely to be dealing drugs than others, it’s not as though drug dealing and race are inextricably linked. There are no races or subsets of races, for example, that have as part of their ideology that members must deal drugs; the racial factors in drug dealing are statistical–social and perhaps economic, but hardly ideological in nature. And the need to prevent drug dealing cannot even remotely be compared to the need to prevent suicide bombings.

Which brings us to the other operative word, prevent. With backpack searches in mass transit, we are not looking to solve a crime by finding a criminal ex post facto. We are looking to prevent a crime that has the potential for mass murder. If this doesn’t justify a bit of racial profiling that acknowledges what type of person is most likely to be a perpetrator, what would?

It’s not that random searches have no place in the prevention of suicide bombings–they do. As terrorists turn more and more to those who don’t fit the traditional profile (Somalis, as in London; women, as in Palestine/Israel), the random search becomes more and more valuable, especially as a possible deterrent. It’s unlikely that the police would happen upon an actual bomber by chance in a random search, but the knowledge that such searches are occurring might act to keep any non-Arab bombers from feeling safe, and could perhaps discourage some of them from even trying an attack. So I would not be one to argue against random searches–they are one more weapon in an arsenal that needs to be varied.

But it’s not an either/or proposition. There’s no reason not to do the most reasonable thing: random searches plus racial (or, in this case, religious and even gender) profiling. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.

But political correctness often trumps common sense nowadays. The NY Times doesn’t seem to feel, in the quoted editorial, that there is even a need to explain why being careful to avoid any hint of racial profiling is more important than the need to protect people who ride public transit against a terrorist attack. The authors of the editiorial seem to think the reasons are self-evident. I, for one, would like to hear their argument, because those reasons are certainly not evident to me.

And yes, I understand the need to protect our civil rights. But we are not talking about throwing young Moslem males of Arab origin into detention camps like those that housed Japanese Americans during WWII. We are talking about subjecting them to greater scrutiny in backpack searches; not exactly the most terrible violation of a person’s rights. I like to think that, if I were a young Moslem Arab male in the US who was not a terrorist, I would understand and freely cooperate with such a need on the part of law enforcement.

Egyptians mugged by reality?

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been a number of recent demonstrations in Egypt against terrorism. Blogger Big Pharaoh describes some of the goings-on here and here.

Big Pharaoh found the experience exhilarating and empowering:

Today was a great day for me. I feel very satisfied with myself. Today I felt that I really did something against the terrorists even if what I did was not so huge and lasted for 20 to 30 minutes…We stood on the pavement facing the passing cars and held those placards. I felt as if I looked like the guy who carries the “The End is Near” sign!!

Well, carrying and displaying the “No to Terrorism” sign made me feel soooo good. At last I did something. I felt as if I was poking my finger into the eyes of an ugly terrorist. People started looking and reading what was written. A number slowed down just to read what we were displaying. Others sounded their car horns…

I predict (and certainly hope) that more and more in the Moslem and Arab world will come to see that the terrorists are their sworn enemies who do not care one whit if they blow up thousands of their own people. It appears that, drunk on their own blood lust, the terrorists may have overplayed their hand.

As I wrote on this thread of Roger Simon’s:

As time goes on, it becomes clearer and clearer that the terrorists are not as “strategic” and “smart” as some think they are. In fact, they appear to be motivated mainly by a deeply murderous nihilism. If they had just kept to killing Israelis and Americans, they might not have let the world know what they were about. But the more they commit acts such as these, the more unequivocally clear it becomes that–whatever excuses and motivations they may try to give for their actions–they are at war with all of humanity.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest primate of them all?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ever since Koko the gorilla learned a rudimentary form of sign language years ago, our concept of animal consciousness has expanded. Putting aside for a moment the debate over whether animal communication can ever constitute actual language itself–whatever you call it, it’s still pretty amazing. When Koko coined new signs such as “drink fruit” for watermelon, or asked for a replacement pet cat when hers died, it’s hard to imagine that there wasn’t something quite advanced happening in that construct we would almost have to refer to as her mind.

And then there’s the topic of mirrors, which can be used to measure an animal’s consciousness of self, or self-consciousness. According to this NY Times article, humans, apes, and perhaps dolphins have the ability to recognize their own images in a mirror, and now there is new evidence that monkeys may have some capacity to do so, too.

Dr. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta has done research that challenges the idea that capuchin monkeys only see strangers when they look in a mirror. The behavior of the capuchins indicated some awareness that the image was not a stranger, although it stopped short of showing a sense of self. The monkeys’ behavior front of the mirror varied according to their gender (I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us too much):

The female capuchins, the researchers found, avoided eye contact with a strange monkey while also making friendly overtures. But in front of a mirror their behavior was different. They looked often at their image, almost as if trying to flirt with it. The male capuchins, in contrast, were seriously bothered by their image. Unlike Narcissus, they “appeared confused and distraught by their reflections” and often tried to escape from the testing room, the Yerkes team reports.

Theories about what might cause these differences aren’t all that convincing:

The male capuchins, particularly the high-ranking ones, may be discomfited by their reflection because it fails to play by the rules of the monkey hierarchy and show them due deference. On the other hand, this realization might be expected to build up gradually in the minds of the male monkeys, making it hard to explain why they instantly perceive that the image is not a stranger…Male capuchins probably react differently from females because they take their mirror image more seriously and don’t know how to handle it, Dr. de Waal said.

But female chimpanzees, members of the ape rather than the monkey family, have no such problems. Far from being discomfited or distraught, they react to mirrors as though they’ve been waiting for one all their lives:

Give a female chimp a mirror, and one can have no doubt she knows just what it is for. The chimp will look at the two important parts of her body that she can usually never see, Dr. de Waal said. One is the inside of her mouth; the other is her rear end.

Apparently, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Child’s play

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a short while after the Afghan war ended, the articles began. They screamed “The Taliban are back;” “The Taliban are taking over;” The Taliban are currently in control of most of the country,” (or they soon will be).

So, what’s the truth? Are the Taliban like the phoenix, rising renewed in vigor from the ashes of their own seeming destruction? Or are the Taliban like the dying snake sinking its fangs into its enemies during its own death throes, as in Austin Bay’s metaphor about the Iraqi “insurgency”?

This recent article about the Taliban is a good indication that they are suffering from the sort of desperation that indicates the latter rather than the former:

Fierce fighting in recent months has devastated the ranks of the Taliban, prompting the rebels to recruit children and force some families to provide a son to fight with them, a US commander said yesterday.

The fighting has fractured the Taliban’s command structure, preventing the militants from regrouping, even though there has been an upsurge in violence, Major General Jason Kamiya, the US military operational commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview.

Despite the setback — more than 500 rebels have been killed since March — the militants are likely to step up attacks in the run-up to the Sept. 18 legislative elections, he said. ”The Taliban and Al Qaeda feel that this is their final chance to impede Afghanistan’s progress to . . . becoming a nation,” Kamiya said. ”They will challenge us all the way through Sept. 18.”

He said the rebels were desperately trying to recruit fighters to replace those killed recently, and have forced families in some areas ”to give up one son to fight.”

”They have been hit so hard, they now have to recruit more fighters. They are recruiting younger and younger fighters: 14, 15, and 16 years old,” Kamiya said. ”The enemy is having a hard time keeping its recruit rates up.”

The fact that the source of the article is the AP makes the information therein even more impressive, since the AP has hardly been known for being overly optimistic about either the Afghan or the Iraqi wars. If the AP is reporting this much, my guess is that the actual situation for the Taliban might even be worse than indicated.

Traditionally, the use of younger and younger soldiers is a sign of desperation in a military movement, the end of the road. This website of WWII Nazi posters features the following recruiting poster from a time very late in the war when the Germans were using boys hardly removed from adolescence:


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Sad, and strange.

This post began with an article about the Taliban. But, as often happens, my research on one topic led to some unexpected findings on a related, but broader subject. It turns out that, far from being exceptional, the pernicious practice of using child soldiers appears to be increasing, not just in Afghanistan but in many third world countries, especially in Africa.

I have only scratched the surface of these websites, so I can’t vouch for their content, but take a look at this one, for example. And even though I have had some disagreements with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch lately, this work reminds me of the reasons I originally joined Amnesty many long years ago (see also this, and this).

There used to be a lower limit to the age of soldiers. Strength was required–originally for hand-to-hand fighting, and later for carrying and operating the heavy weapons. The balooning use of child soldiers lately has been made possible in part because of advancements in armaments, making weapons easier to operate and carry (one example of the law of unexpected consequences, I suppose). There is also evidence that their youth makes them more likely, not less, to commit atrocities. Chilling, and sobering.