The Paris terrorist attacks

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paris-shooting-explosion_564651e4e4b06037734...

Would people be willing to take a moment and put the recent horror in an historical perspective? Looking back in history, what would be a useful context for viewing this event?

What are the implications of this for the future for France, the USA, and elsewhere? Is this going to impact history going forward?

Well, in the aftermath of a vicious attack, do we in the West embrace the "Universal State" stage of our civilization? Do we accept the fact that the world is basically hostile to the western tradition of Democratic Dissent, and free exchange of ideas and wide expression in art and religion and fall back behind walls, electronic and physical, restricting our freedom to be human to the limited goals of an entity driven basically to prize its security above any other goal?
If we do cluster behind the wall of security it will involve yielding up the defined freedoms and we will choose first, a limited expression of those freedoms and then we will watch as they gradually shrink to mere icons in our few remaining "safe locations" of the spirit.
Or do we understand that there is a price in blood to be paid, and it will be extracted relatively haphazardly, and still strive to have the freedom of the spirit we have achieved?
I vote for the second choice rather than the shuttered mentality and withered hopes, but those who have followed the writings of Richard Slotkin, on the idea of the "frontier" and how it has been manipulated in the American and Commercial Society, will realize that much pressure will be exerted in defence of the fortress of the "Universal State" position.

I expect a certain level of assimilation from guests to this and any other country. If you can't live without your booze, don't go to Saudi Arabia and don't expect them to change just to accommodate you.

It's way too early.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-pdf/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/what-will-come-after-paris.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/opinion/paris-and-europes-anti-refugee-backlas...

As of last night, we have twenty-six American State governments and one Canadian Province descending into what seems a level of petty paranoia and regarding "Immigrants" and "refugees" as being ready to subvert the classic American way of life into some Islamist backwater. This is, of course exactly what ISIS wants the Americans and other Western groups to do.
The French, however, seem to be resuming their former way of life with the added frisson that to resume the classic French experience is now more "dangerous" than before, but even more worth doing.
Vive La France!
Boo! to Oklahoma!
And, when I went to find a current list of the Paranoid states, I got a pop-up asking me to sign a petition to ban the refugees from even more states!
People, we are not learning from history here!

> 6

People, we are not learning from history here!

One of the recurring arguments in favor of opening the door to refugees is historical. It's an analogy with the plight of Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939, aboard the St. Louis, who were turned away from U.S. waters and forced back to Europe.

Some eventually found refuge in Britain or other countries, but about 36% of the hundreds on the ship died in Nazi death camps.

Apparently we Americans were afraid the refugees might harm us.

A few refugees from Europe not turned away: The Puritans at Plymouth Rock in 1620

Re: the OP...

David Talbot in The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Hardcover says the Paris attacks have to be viewed historically and sees them as a direct blow back from our policies in the Middle East.

Example:
The CIA overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Am I the only one curious that the Paris attacks are not being viewed in a Longue durée perspective?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e

Longue Durée? As the Dalai Lama said when asked whether he recalled anything about his past lives, "I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast".

That's the modern world though.

Of course you're right. It goes back at a minimum to Sykes-Picot in 1916 doesn't it?

1.
The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. (wikip)

2.
Well I haven't read the Talbot bk. but I saw an interview with him. I am not made of stern enough stuff to read it.

3.
For me, it goes back to the early days of colonialism and the havoc it wrecked on the countries that it preyed upon.

As with Prince Leopold:

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the natives to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime millions of the Congolese people died; modern estimates range from 2 to 15 million, with a consensus growing around 10 million. Human rights abuses under his regime contributed significantly to these deaths.

4.Re Syria see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria#Ancient_antiquity

Isis: In a borderless world, the days when we could fight foreign wars and be safe at home may be long gone

Isis was quick to understand a truth the West must now confront: that the national borders imposed by colonial powers 100 years go are becoming meaningless, says Robert Fisk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-a-borderless-world-t...

In places people on one side are building up the Berlin Wall notwithstanding.

Sykes-Picot and the rest are the conventional wisdom around the history of the Middle East in the 20th and 21 st c. I have been a long time believer in the ripple effects of that exercise in big power hubris. Further reading on the subject since 9/11 and the history of the Ottomans suggest that the Europeans simply accelerated a process that was simmering for centuries. The West's development of the nation state was a long and bloody affair and, if the Popes had had their way, would not have occurred. The emergence of individual rights and a secular approach to life and politics has not been an attribute of Middle Eastern political culture. Yes the nasty and greedy Europeans played a big role in the artificial creation of non states. Alas life and political developments do not happen in a vacuum. Islam is a wonderful, powerful spiritual tradition, but as more expert commentators than I have suggested, it has proven to be a poor source and enricher of political development.

Let's look at the history:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-they-hate-us-real-american-history...

Fascinating and mostly true episodes in this country's misadventure in empire building and post WW II anti communist policing. I fail to see the connection with the political reality of the Middle East. Its too easy to blame western imperialism and economic greed for the current state of the region. An essentially tribal or sectarian system of political organization and loyalties is dry soil for nation building. One only has to look at the challenges in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia over the past 50 years to construct stable nation states. Oh and yes they were subject to some of the same imperialist deprivations as the ME. It is , as they say, complicated. I'm just not ready to ignore the reality of that region's lack of national cohesion and willingness to overcome its very long history. Unfortunately, our nations's political leadership has willfully ignored this reality for 60 years in pursuit of petroleum and votes.

Tribes With Flags. The author got this title from an Arab diplomat (Egyptian, I think) who said Middle East governments are nothing more than Tribes With Flags.

> 16

Its too easy to blame western imperialism and economic greed for the current state of the region. An essentially tribal or sectarian system of political organization and loyalties is dry soil for nation building.

It's too easy to blame "the current state of the region" on allegedly innate deficiencies in the peoples who live there, or their cultures. Indeed, it served British and French imperialists well as they endlessly postponed the day when Arabs would be granted the self-government that those British and French mandates were supposed to lead to.

Not that the imperialists were being cynical. Most of them evidently believed in all sincerity that their efforts were helping inferior peoples advance toward self-government — much as American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan mostly believe they are there to defend freedom, although the intermediate steps between 1) terrorizing people of all ages and conditions, and 2) establishing truth, justice, and the American way don’t receive much explanation. It's kind of like magic.

The only way in which America has advanced beyond the imperialists of 70-plus years ago is in no longer presuming that racial inferiority explains the condition of Middle East denizens. Yes, indeed, we are much more enlightened than that. We blame it all on their deficient cultures: their politics, religion, society, and so on. How are these things deficient? Well, it's obvious. They insufficiently resemble the way we do things in America.

>17 LamSon: an Arab diplomat

Tahseen Bashir

Middle East governments ...

other than Egypt.

I have heard some people, not here, claim that when the boarders were drawn they paid attention to internal divisions. Well, the Kurds were split into three countries, minorities in all of them. It does not look like they payed that much attention to internal divisions. If they were paying attention to them they may not have had the best intentions of the people in the region at heart when they did their drawing. Most of our, USA, problems in the area are thanks to the bumbling CIA. We say we want them to be democracies and have free elections right up until the time they do. Then we rush in, topple the freely elected government and install a despot. The international corporations that that the west coddles also hurts us. They rush in to "develop" the oil fields and other resources and, thanks to their dedication to greed, they never played nice and let the locals have any nice things. The people in general not the despots that take control of the governments. They are just expensive employees of the multinationals in charge of crown control. 

>20 TLCrawford:: Good post, I especially like the final "They are just expensive employees of the multinationals in charge of crown control. " Did you mean "Crowd Control?" :-)
To further define the crowd to be controlled I'll add the following.
I can't give you a reference on this, as I'm still attempting to get my bookshelves up and organized, but I am of the opinion that those hoping to understand the ethnic positioning in the middle East should look at the 1914 ethnic map of the Balkans, I think a copy can be found in "The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, Vol.II" by Frenand Braudel. The visual impression created by this should be carried in your head while you read the next and subsequent sentences:
"The aim of the Ottoman government was to create in every city and province of their empire a model of the ethnic and religious structure of their empire overall." Their goal, all the way from Algeria to modern Croatia and Moldavia, was to find everywhere, a peasantry formed ethnically of Syrians, Lebanese, Greeks, Iraqis, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen herdsmen, Romanians, Bulgars, Macedonians, Anatolians, Armenians, Albanians, Bosniaks and Serbians. The countryside was cut up into as many small enclaves of these ethnic groups as could be assembled in an area. The Cities, should have a skin of Turks on top, Greek, Syrian and Armenian bureaucrats and large merchants, Then tradesmen who could be Kurds, Bosnians, Greeks, Armenians, Sephardi Jews, Buglars, Syrians, Lebanese, etc...."
Since 1918, or there-abouts, these various ethnic groups have been trying to sort themselves into something resembling the relatively tidy ethnically based states of Britain, France, Spain and Germany in 1919. The tininess of the pieces of the mosaic is hard to get one's head around if one is of the Western heritage. There is also a counter-current of not so nationalistic areas where the population attempted to retain the sometimes peaceful mix-up that the Ottomans had left behind. Then we add the struggle between secularists and religious, and the two versions of Islam and left-over divisions between the surviving Christian groups.
While it is much easier to blame the simplistic image suggested by the Sykes Picot agreement floating over relative discrete national and religious groups the reality is the stew that I have attempted to describe in the short space above. The cost of sorting this ethnic mixing out, is being paid in blood.
And the messy process raises the question of whether it is worthwhile to sort this all out into Western style nation-states, or is the real answer be to help this area to evolve some relatively new but not-nationally based polity that could be relatively peaceful?

>21 DinadansFriend:

This is exactly why we need more Ottoman historians writing in English, and for a wider audience.

Leads me to wonder what kind of U.S. and European history is currently available in Arabic, Turkish, Albanian, Bosnian, and so on. I feel pretty sure that it compares favorably with our perpetual reprints of Lord Kinross and Lawrence of Arabia. But it would be interesting to know for certain.

I'd also like to know what Turks are writing. My specifically Ottoman stuff is "Lawrence in Arabia" by Scott Anderson, and a battered "the Emergence of Modern Turkey" (c) 1961 by Bernard Lewis, which I hope is now an old war-horse, replaced by new stuff. But other than guide books to Modern Turkey, I just haven't seen much since I read the Kinross' "Ataturk"!

>23 DinadansFriend:

This is a bit OT, but I know from conversations with Turkish frends at an American university that many of them were raised with a historical myth of kinship with American Indians — i.e., that Turks and Indians share the same ancestors, and not just in the sense that all humans are related.

It's an absurd idea, if you examine it with detachment for more than a few minutes, but apparently it's a cherished one all the same. I don’t know how far back in time it goes or whether a particular Turkish author is to blame.

OT, like I said. But it's a reminder that we all inherited filters and biases that distort our view of history.

We're normally unaware of our own filters, but confident that we fully understand the deficiencies in other people's thinking. There's a name for this cognitive bias, which I forget.

>24 Muscogulus::
As we've often gotten a bit too serious for line-chat lookie here!
http://asbarez.com/104352/dna-study-busts-myth-that-one-million-appalachians-are...
This is a net reference to the entire construction of relating modern Turks with Noble north Americans of First Nations descent...proof of Sturgeon's law ("90% of everything is wildly untrue (clean wording)) is alive and well in the present welter of "ethno-genetic" (is that really a term? Well it is now!) electronic pseudo inflormation. "Inflormation" (noun) the present explosion of not quite proven factoids floating around the internet and likely to become Gospel in the backwoods somewhere.
Maybe,I should quit surfing and take a nap?

>25 DinadansFriend:

Well, DF, you just sent me on a merry chase after more about N. Brent Kennedy and his tendentious narratives of Melungeon origins. I think I'll shift that topic to the "They came before Columbus" thred.

Anyway, thanks. I'm on the lookout these days for pseudohistory with a following. Thinking of building a course around Internet pseudohistory. What better way to teach historical reasoning and use of evidence than to tackle some of these "wildly untrue" narratives and dig down to their foundations.

>21 DinadansFriend: Yes, "crowd control" Thanks for catching that.

>24 Muscogulus: I would like to see a DNA comparison between Amerinds and Turks. The Turks were a nomadic people from the Eurasian Steppes, it is not impossible that some of there ancestors made the trek to the "New World" during the ice age.

>25 DinadansFriend: Using language sound-a-likes to track ancestry is ridiculous but it is one reason that Ohio colleges are so good at recruiting Chinese students. "Ohio" and a few other words sound Chinese to the Chinese.

>26 Muscogulus: Look for "Tri-racial-isolates" My great grandmother was born and raised in Owsley county Kentucky, she looked, and told us, that her ancestry was mixed but my DNA did not back her up. Possibly because of my 100% German mother.

>9 Urquhart: 'David Talbot in The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government Hardcover says the Paris attacks have to be viewed historically and sees them as a direct blow back from our policies in the Middle East'

The world lives in constant state of blow back to everyone's policies. It is just a convenient excuse to kill, maim, and destroy; activities that will change nothing.

The book is an interesting read.

Did you see Talbot on c-span today also? I found him very convincing.

I think it fair to say we both agree to disagree on the book and the necessity of having the Dulles brothers in the DNA of one's country.

To have no morals whatsoever and to be totally predatory, as the Dulles bros. were, forces our country into a category alongside of Russia, China, etc. At some point, a country must forego the race to the bottom.

I think we agree more than you think. From what I've read so far, I would say that at least Allen was a psychopath. He used people without compassion.
The Dulles brothers were probably the inspiration for "first kill all the lawyers". Shakespeare was a visionary.

>30 LamSon:

N.B. The line about killing all the lawyers was not given to one of Shakespeare's good guys. It's spoken by Dick the Butcher, one of the audience as the rebel Jack Cade harangues the crowd about what a paradise England will be once he, Jack Cade, is their king. (Henry VI, Part II).

Of course, it's not a pro-lawyer quip either, as some lawyers and politicians like to claim. There's a pretty good discussion of the line, in context, at this page: http://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html

I'm currently reading The war that ended peace, by Margaret Macmillan. She says that between 1890 and 1914 (a bit longer than between 9/11 and now) terrorists killed a President of France (Carnot), 2 Prime Ministers of Spain (Canovas and Canalejas), a King of Italy (Umberto), a US President (McKinley), an Empress of Austria (Elisabeth, wife of Franz Joseph), a Russian Premier (Stolypin) and a Russian Grand Duke (Sergei). And of course the Crown Prince of Austria (Franz Ferdinand). They failed to kill King Alfonso of Spain at his wedding, but killed 36 onlookers instead. Paris suffered 2 years of terrorist attacks in the early 1890's - judges and prosecutors from a trial that jailed anarchists were blown up, a cafe where a witness worked was also blown up. Most of these acts were committed by anarchists.

The current generation of Islamist terrorists don't seem to target the rich or the powerful, or even the Kardashians.

>32 dajashby:
So, are we charging the current terrorists with lack of good political analysis? Or are we charging them with lack of good taste? :-).
They seem, at least the terrorists the USA is now pursuing, lacking in ability to bring the war to their proper opponents, in either case. Or are the security forces of the world actually doing well in reducing terrorists to relative ineffectiveness? Or has you-know-how sucked up all the available journalistic talent and resources in his quest for cheap publicity and the Republican party?
>30 LamSon:
I wonder if there is an anti-lawyer quip scrawled on a pyramid by some discontented Assyrian invader of Egypt? The legals seem to attract a lot of adverse comment from far back in literature. Is there anything on this from the Iliad?

>33 DinadansFriend: Maybe it's that the powers that be are pretty good at protecting themselves, but not us? Or maybe the terrorists seriously don't know what they're doing. Saw a pretty good British film a while ago called "Four Lions" that painted a fairly pathetic picture of your average home grown terrorist.

Allen Dulles was (probably) a sociopath, not a psychopath. We seemed to have created bureaucratic systems that make it easier for sociopaths to get to the top of the heap.

Terrorism is inchoate rage against 'them'. The people who manipulate terrorists are often politically astute (cf. Osama bin Laden; whatever you may think of his grand scheme, he achieved his initial short term goals), but the terrorists themselves....not so much. Imagine Ammon Bundy as a typical unguided terrorist.