"--why Osama's will keep coming even if bin Laden dies."

Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play 1932 A.D. to 2030 A.D.

. . . The Athenian strategy moves to the top when things are going well. Spartanism grabs the throne when the world is going to hell. . . .RULES OF THE SUBCULTURE GAME {skiping to bottom} . . . . Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. Reality is a mass hallucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.

. . . On the Internet . . .Muslim terrorists who felt like driving a car bomb into a crowd of civilians could read on the web site of Australia’s The Call of Islam: A Comprehensive Intellectual Magazine why this form of “martyrdom operation . . . will be rewarded in paradise.” 35 . . Nothing grows a subculture faster than opposition to assault.39 Confront two squabbling cliques with a common danger and the two will join to face the adversary.40 Give humans a sense that death is in the air and their individualistic views will ebb in favor of the creeds clasped by the collectivity.41 What's more, they'll go on the attack against those who challenge commonplaces they themselves had doubted in untroubled days.42 Aggression drowns confusion's agonies.43 The German youth of 1914 were lost in anomie. World War I was anesthetic and salvation--redemption from a hell of private pain. Ernst Troeltsch testified to the healing power of warfare when he made the following wildly popular speech: The first victory we won, even before the victories on the battlefield, was the victory over ourselves. . . A higher life seemed to reveal itself to us. Each of us. . . lived for the whole and the whole lived in all of us. Our own ego with its personal interests was dissolved in the great historic being of the nation. The fatherland calls! The parties disappear. . . . Thus a moral elevation of the people preceded the war, the whole nation was gripped by the truth and reality of a suprapersonal, spiritual power.44 If a crisis seems indecipherable, its victims are condemned by their inner-judges to a shutdown, the helpless nail-biting of anxiety. But if the causes of a crisis seem explainable, the result is a surprisingly healthier emotionfear. Fear is a form of arousal which prepares us to fight back rather than give up. And it drives us toward group unity.45 This is true even if an actual solution is nowhere to be seen.46 The leader's ability to create the illusion of a handle on the situation maters more than the reality. And the idea of a demonic foe is often at that handle's core.47 Postmodern fundamentalists are masters at the craft of enemy creation and the manufacture of a siege mentality. Their world abounds in villainsone-worlders with black helicopters, Satanic secular humanists, Beelzebubian New Agers, homosexual conspirators, Zionist bankers, Illuminati, Trilateral commissioners, Great Satans, real estate developers, mink farmers, abortionists, and genetic engineers. Bringing the sense of battle to fever pitch is the myth that we are on the brink of the mother of all subculture wars, that of the final days in which an avenging Nature, Allah, or Jehovah will wipe this old, iniquitous world away. The impure and unbelieving (that means you and me) will die in manners horrible to contemplate. When all is stripped and cleansed through nuclear flame, greenhouse flood, or the bloodbath of the scimitar, the righteous will finally take their place at the right hand of God, of Nature, or of racial destiny.48 Unfortunately, extremists armed with weapons of mass destruction can turn eccentric visions of apocalypse into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Imagine what might happen if a group believing as the Spartans did that death is a noble thing and that adherence to authority is the ultimate salvation of mankind gains control of long-range missiles tipped with atomic weaponry.49 The dedication of those who know that a violent end will bring a kingdom of blessedness could lead to human suicide. This is exactly what one of the first of these groups to get its hands on chemical weapons, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo,50 had in mind. In 1995, Aum Shinrikyo attempted to fill Tokyo's subway system with poisonous sarin gas, and maintained a research and development lab working on weapons designed to literally exterminate humanity. Wrote Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "Aum Shinrikyo . . . had in mind nothing short of worldwide genocide. They wanted to murder everybody in the world."51

Here's how the rain of brimstone forecast looked at the turn of the twenty-first century. Iran, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Sudan were already in Islamic fundamentalist hands. Though the fact had gone largely unpublicized in the West, by the end of the 1990s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had established what it called the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao on the second-largest island of the largely Catholic Philippines, had appointed its own governor, Nur Misuari, and was fighting to gain even more territory. *Mindanao has a population of over 13 million and includes fourteen Filipino provinces.* 52 Afghanistan's Taliban had stripped women of their jobs and rights,53 required that they cower in their homes wrapped in black with their windows curtained and painted over, wear no shoes a man could hear, and possess no reading material outside of pamphlets promoting official religious views.54 Ladies of learning and skill who transgressed were beaten with rifle butts in the streets. The Taliban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Suppression of Vicemodeled on Saudi Arabia's religious policewas known for it's stonings, its amputations, its hangings from mobile cranes so a body could be paraded high above a city's roofs, its deaths by crushing under a wall, and a long list of other "divinely ordered" atrocities.55 Citizens deemed guilty of perjury had their tongues cut out. Even men were allowed an education in only one subject: the Taliban version of the Koran.

Using the slogan "Film and music leads to moral corruption," the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Suppression of Vice ordered that Afghanistan's citizens destroy their televisions, VCRs, satellite dishes, and other devices of depravity.56 Meanwhile, Taliban troops pursued a war of extermination against heretics, specifically the Hazara Shiites in their northern territories.57 The slaughtered were victims of Allah's order to eliminate unholiness. Human rights organizations reporting on this murder of women and children saw it differently--they called it simple genocide.58

All predictions were that Pakistan's 130 million people (more than the population of England and France combined)59 would be the next to experience fumigation a la Taliban. Pakistan's new leader, it was said, would be someone like the bomber of U.S. embassies and financier of worldwide holy war Osama Bin Laden--the man who had issued this simple order about Americans: "kill them wherever they are." The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan had been secretly financed by the Saudis,60 and now Saudi Arabia was reportedly doing it again, pumping funds into Pakistan to underwrite yet another fundamentalist coup. The suspected source of the cash was none other than Saudi crown prince Abdullah, who, according to British reporter Robert Fisk, was turning Saudi Arabia, the allegedly "moderate" American ally, "into an anti-American nation in front of our eyes. Of course," added Fisk, "we're not told about that."61 Nor were we told that Saudi Arabia had long been yet another fundamentalist theocracy.

Meanwhile, the groups who would purge Pakistan of its sinners were hardening their homicidal skills through bloodbaths in the Punjab, where they chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Democracy." Between guerrilla raids, these holy warriors headed out to spray graffiti slogans on the town walls in their training camps' vicinity: "democracy leads to secularism" and "Jihad [holy war] leads to dominance of Islam." North of Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore, was Muridke, home to the Army of the Pure, which daily drilled recruits in slitting throats, dynamiting bridges, and rocket-attacking with precision blows. The Army of the Pure's goal was death to heretics---Indians, Americans, and Jews. John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail delivered the following message from this arm of the Allah's will made real:62 "We will go to America with the gun," vowed Sultan Atiqur Rehman Allehadi, who quit the Pakistani air force and now guides younger men in the Army of the Pure. "First we will ask them [Americans] to take up Islam. If they don't, then we will use the gun."* Should Pakistan fall to the fundamentalists this would give Islam's ultramilitants a heroic Roto-Rooter with which to extirpate American impiety. Zealots would control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, called by its cheering supporters when it was first tested in 1998, "the Islamic Bomb."64 The result, said Australian journalist Greg Sheridan, could be "devastating."65

Then there was the Saudi-backed Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), which had turned the hinterlands of Egypt into a killing field, slaying tourists, assassinating policemen, stabbing moderate writers, and massacring Christians who'd been in the land of Egypt since long before Muhammad's birth. Russia, China, and the Central Asian republics--Turkmenistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan--feared they were next on Allah's hit list.66 Those fears turned real in 1999 when Chechen guerrillas, led by a Jordanian67 and reportedly financed by the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden,68 opened a war to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state whose borders would range, as Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin put it, "from the North Caucasus to the Pamirs."69 On a Western Internet discussion group, an Islamic militant who spoke for many laid out the Word as he sees it: "The oppression and aggression of the United States of America and its protectorates has no end. So it is time that they pay, and it is time that their people taste . . . torment."70 Meanwhile, America, target number one, slumbered in a state of ignorance.71

On the other side of the religious divide stood the new fundamentalists of racial purity and Christianity, whose leaders skillfully manipulated conformity enforcement mechanisms which impel us to pick on those who are different.72 Typical among these was a group called Russian National Unity,73 which claimed an army of seventy thousand, snapped up members at the age of nine, enrolled them in “military patriotic clubs,” dressed them in fascist uniforms, gave them the insignia of the swastika, taught them the Nazi salute, drilled them in combat maneuvers, honed their marksmanship, and identified the target of their weapons in their anthem:

WE are going down the straight road to believe, desire, and dare death to the cosmopolitan dogs and Jews and masons!

National Unity’s founder, karate coach Alexander Barkashov, quoted yet another tune when giving interviews on the dangers of world Jewry and of the United States:

Plunge your knife in the vampire’s throat And the world will become good again.

Many parents welcomed National Unity’s training for mass murder. With crime rampant and all order gone, at least groups like Unity Kept their children off the streets and lived up to the promise enunciated by one local Unity leader, Andrei Dudinov, who declared that the movement would “drag” the young “away from drugs and vodka.”

Meanwhile, like their Nazi models in the early 1930s, Russian Unity’s leaders were taking advantage of their country’s feeble democracy. They won elections in Vladimir, curried favor with the militia of Krasnodar (which let Unity use its facilities), and earned such approbation from the 101st Internal Brigade and from the 22nd Airborne Brigade that government soldiers trained Unity troops in Stavropol. Unity contingents were welcomed by the militia of Voronezh to officially patrol the town, and were under contract with the police to perform similar services in Moscow itself. National Unity leader Barkashov, quoting a book he says is “a must for any intelligent man,” Hitler’s Mein Kampf, explained that “he who controls the streets controls the politics.”

As of 1998, there were roughly eighty-five similar fascist groups in the former Soviet Union with enough sympathizers to support 140 newspapers. London’s Economist declared that it was just a matter of time before the proponents of the iron fist would seize the reins of government. The result, at its best, would be

a kind of extreme nationalism: intensely prickly and Pan-Slavic, anti-Semitic, hostile to foreigners, and eager to reabsorb the Slav heartlands of Ukraine and Belarus within the Russian fold. . . The armed forces and the KGB would be raised again to special eminence. The press and television would be corralled. Russia would become an angry place—neither democratic, nor prosperous, nor kind to its neighbors. It is a nightmare scenario.74

For a preview of how such “angry nationalists” would behave, the assembled journalists in a 1998 issue of the magazine World Press Review urged us to look at the margins of the Slav territories, where rehearsals for the new millennium were already taking place. The future, they said, was Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic writ large: ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, mass graves, and blood in the streets; cities and towns destroyed; everything we’d learned to loathe about the Balkans, but this time with a nuclear brigade.

Then there was the United States, where the Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord Christian Identity enclave in Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas, had planned the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building in the 1980s, and where a Christian Identity hanger-on named Timothy McVeigh, guided by phone calls to another Christian Identity stronghold in the Ozark Mountains, had followed up on the Oklahoma bombing strategy and killed 168 [75] enemies of Yahweh’s chosen Aryan race.76 Not far away, the Bible-toting Christians of Oklahoma’s bunker-and-arsenal-riddled Elohim City were reputed to have armed every man, woman, and child to the teeth. The Aryan Republic Army was on a rampage of Midwest bank robberies designed to finance triumph for the one true form of Christianity. Sandpoint, Idaho’s Promise Ministries77 were charged with planning similar holdups, the bombing of a newspaper, and the demolition of an abortion facility. The Phineas Priesthood provided encouragement to a network of lone killers “cleansing” in the Bible’s name. Christian Reconstructionists insisted that women who undergo abortion be hanged or stoned to death.78 The Aryan Nations movement79 was determined to seize the mountains of the West as a new Canaan80 for pure Anglo-Saxon whites.81 The North American Militia of Southwest Michigan was accused in court of having targeted the Battle Creek Federal Building, an IRS office in Portage, Michigan, and, in the words of one militia member, “anybody in higher ranks of politics,” including the state’s two senators.82 At the same time, self-styled eco-“warriors” were setting up clandestine “direct action cells” devoted, as one anonymous cell organizer put it, to ever “bigger and better actions . . . with more severe amounts of damage being done to the target. This, of course, includes arson.”83

America was the land where Eric Rudolph, the accused bomber of abortion clinics and of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, roamed free in the mountains of North Carolina, supported by the local populace.84 Ours was the nation where two young men in Wyoming had tied a twenty-one-year-old gay college student to a fence post and beaten him to death, encouraged by Christian guardians of righteousness who said all homosexuals must die,85 where a Buffalo, New York, obstetrician had been killed by a sniper as he stood with his wife and children in his kitchen, and where this murder had been cheered by the organizer of the Christian Gallery, a web site dedicated to such causes as “secession via nuclear weapons” and the replacement of the two-party system with “God’s plan for government.” The Gallery had posted the medical practitioner on a cyber-hit-list of “child-killers” whom it declared to be in the “war zone.”86 In the hinter-lands of fifty states,87 extremist Christian militias drilled their doppelgangers in Pakistan and in the former Soviet states, aiming for the day when the use of violence would eradicate the blemish of secular democracy and allow the True Believers to structure the ways of men according to the dictates of an unforgiving Deity.88 The Spartan premise Plato had stated in his Laws was very much alive again: “In reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting.”89

The threat of today’s Spartan storm troopers turned some defenders of democracy toward what in better times could have been dismissed as paranoid delusion. However, when one is up against a real-life conspiracy, paranoid thinking can produce accurate predictions of reality.90 Those who despise alarmism forget the lesson of 1933, when a Keystone Kops political party which had been able to boast a mere twenty-five thousand members in 1925 declared itself ruler of the German nation and swept democracy away. Democrats use words. Zealots use weaponry. With guns and bludgeons, twenty-five thousand rapidly de factos into a majority. Hitler seemed preposterous to his opponents. There was no way, they felt, that someone with such outlandish views could take over the nation of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Handel, and Brahms. Lack of paranoia lost these defenders of reason their lives, their homes, their children, and their wives. The Germany they were sure could never fall to lunatics soon plunged beyond the fringe of sanity. It was the sane, the sober, and the complacent who were erased from Germany’s collectively enforced reality.91

When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartansfundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalistscan freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy.92 Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within tits grasp.93 Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: “No schooling is better than secular schooling.” Then there’s the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden “narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments.”94 Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They often goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways.95

Here are the implications of a neural net simulation carried out at Tokai University in Kanagawa, Japan.96 If citizens combine civility’s self-restraint with social freedom, the neural net in which they’re twined spills forth solutions of the finest kind—those which produce a host of winning strategies. If citizens rage out of control when left alone but are held in check by a police state, the neural net goes blank. All power seeps into the hands of a central commander. This maximum leader, implies the research, can be a previous fringe figure and an utter incompetent. What’s worse, complexity pioneer Stuart Kauffman has shown with yet another mathematical model how a “Stalinist” chief and his morality enforcers can give the collective brainwork a lobotomy.97

The Kanagawa simulation implies that fundamentalist strategies of beating up on others for their sins rather than controlling one’s self drags us all toward authoritarian ferocity. The trick is to reassert the right to self-restraint and to the definition of one’s own boundaries of behavior and of privacy, boundaries which include consideration toward those who disagree with us—the virtue which we call civility.

The consequences of imposing control on others rather than controlling one’s self show up in the traditional American South, where culture pushes a disproportionate number of men to discipline those who wrong them while letting their own instincts rip. A University of Michigan study demonstrates that when they are threatened, the testosterone level of old-style southern males shoots up to almost three times the level of males in northern society.98 Northern males have a greater grip on their emotionality. One result: “Forty-three percent of the murders in the United States occur in the sixteen southern states,” according to an ABC-TV Weekend News report digging into the phenomenon.99 In an interview on the broadcast, Southerastern Louisiana University historian Samuel C. Hyde explained that “here in the South violence is not merely an accepted response, it’s an expected response.”100 Both Hyde and sociologist Dr. Edward Shihadeh101 agreed that when one’s honor was violated, a southern male had to retaliate, even if it meant the end of his own life. If the simulations of neural net researchers are correct, this helps explain why the southern swath of the country is the so-called Bible Belt.

Other research indicates that the wider the horizons of a culture, the more its citizens are likely to exercise self-control.102 This self-control, in turn, tweaks a group brain to top strength.103 In large-horizon situations among ants, each worker is a law unto herself, exploring the landscape in the way that she feels best. This allows the collective mind to test a maximum of new possibilities. In small-horizon ant colonies, each worker seems restricted by the presence of others, puts the clamps on her rambunctiousness, crimps her path, and with her tightened focus becomes a thread in a search web which zeroes in on just one thing.104 In human groups, a society open to distant horizons also produces those who will probe for the next great uplift, a soar into the wonders of dreamworked possibilities.

Fundamentalism and its fellow militancies are one way in which authoritarian small-town subcultures like that of the South, of Muridke, of Elm Hollow, or of Voronezh assert themselves in the national and the global body politic. This was true of ancient Greece, in which liberty-loving Athens was a big city for its time, while Sparta—home of the muzzled mind—was an encampment of remarkably small size. It’s true of the United States, where Christian Fundamentalism has been called a suburban upheaval of nostalgia for small-town certainties.105 The authoritarian small-town mind-set seems to have pervaded the Nazi Party, whose leaders were so parochial that few had ever traveled internationally.106 Small-town closed-mindedness bedevils the Middle East, whose fundamentalisms hark back to the days when Ibn Khaldun’s desert nomads came in to “purify” the corrup dcities through a control-the-other-rather-than-yourself sweep with a broom of sword and flame.107 Small-town authoritarianism even reigns in the West’s major metropolitan centers. It hold sway in small, parochial enclaves like Boston’s Southie, New York’s Howard Beach, and L.A.’s Orange County. The inhabitants of these neighborhoods frequently have never seen the centers of their own hometowns. Yet they periodically wage subculture wars against their cities’ cosmopolites—--the movers and shakers whose connections snake across continents and seas.108

Open-minded internationalists are part of the massive social brew. The folks who’ve seldom traveled outside their neighborhood are part of a tiny social stew. Sometimes a society needs the cutting focus of small-town single-mindedness. But more often it benefits from pluralism’s many points of view, from carrying many arrows in its quiver, not just one or two.

As in Elm Hollow, the new Spartans are poised for a kidnap of mass mind. Each fundamentalist army has its weapons ready: the Internet, Armies of Virtue, and instruments of massacre. And each feels chosen to impose its purged and regimented paradise on all humanity. But the mass mind needs its Faustian introverts, its oddballs, kooks, and deviants, its challengers of holy Mother Earth, of sectarian righteousness, and of traditional ways. It needs its internationalists, cross-cultural floaters, homosexuals, abortion supporters, cosmopolitans, explorers, and imagineers, those who extend their reach beyond old boundaries and open new frontiers. The blasphemers the fundamentalists feel God-bound to eliminate are the mass mind’s option makers, its catalysts of new hypotheses. In an atmosphere of debate, new approaches thrive. But when bullets replace words as disagreement-settlers, the mass intelligence nose divers. Totalitarian Spartans must be stopped by pluralists. This is a task which falls to our century’s Atheniansupholders of diversity in a sea of harsh conformity. <>

Howard Bloom Visiting Scholar--New York University www.howardbloom.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.

705 President Street Brooklyn, NY 11215 phone 718 622 2278 fax 718 398 2551 e-mail howard@paleopsych.org

For two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net <>

The EXCERPT (transcription by myself) ATTACHED with this mail is worth the reading . . . even if you think you’re bored in some part - keep reading! I can guarantee you will find your mouth open, and your eyes widening, SOMEWHERE.

While reading, recall that this information was published in 2000. . . makes one wonder, truly. You’ll see what I’m talking about IF you read this short -- history is tyring to repeat itself -- piece.

"Islam's 1,350 year long Jihad against the West--why Osama's will keep coming even if bin Laden dies."

I am passing this along to different investigative reporters, talk-radio hosts, and editorial writers for their further ‘enlightenment’.

Possibly this will help them in their research for future public pieces. Hopefully, this information will be read by someone ‘in charge’ who will use it for this country’s further protection.

IF you know someone in the media business you believe ought to read this...please send me the address or FORWARD this to them w/attachment!

OPEN ATTACHMENT FOR: GLOBAL BRAIN By HOWARD BLOOM Chapter 19 - THE KIDNAP OF MASS MIND …… militant Islam, ...and other perils of the 21st century --------------------------

...Unfortunately, extremists armed with weapons of mass destruction can turn eccentric visions of apocalypse into self-fulfilling prophecies.

...The age of extremist outsiders armed with atomic, biological, and chemical weapons had already come upon us as early as 1998, declared no less an authority than Foreign Affairs -- "Catastrophic Terrorism." Foreign Affairs, November/ December 1998)

...Should Pakistan fall to the Fundamentalists this would give Islam's ultra-militants ….control [of] Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, called by its cheering supporters when it was first tested in 1998, "The Islamic Bomb."

...Those fears turned real in 1999 when Chechen guerrillas, led by a Jordanian and reportedly financed by the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, opened a war to establish a Fundamentalist Islamic state whose borders would range, from the North Caucasus to the Pamirs.

...Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord Christian Identity enclave in Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas, had planned the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building in the 1980s

Other books by Howard Bloom:

Islam's War Against The West

Osama bin Laden and the Taliban--Holy War Goes Global

Web site -- http://howardbloom.net/

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