Microplastics and the Environment
Microplastics are less than 5mm in diameter and are either produced that way or devolve from larger pieces through environmental degradation. They are ubiquitous but have increased in volume over the last fifty years because, according to one scientific abstract, “annual plastic production has increased dramatically from 1.5 million tonnes in the 1950s to approximately 280 million tonnes in 2011 (PlasticsEurope, 2012)”
The word “plastic” has two meanings: “soft and easily pliable” or the more common use, which is now essentially shorthand for “synthetic polymer.” Plastic was preceeded by a compound of nitrocellulose dissolved in ether and alcohol, known as collodion, which replaced the egg white (albumen) used in photographic plates and was also used for medical dressings. Egg whites were not in limited supply, but as a natural product, it was subject to rapid degradation.
Plastics as such were first produced by Alexander Parkes in 1855 and later by John Wesley Hyatt in the United States. Parkes patented his process but was unable to commercialize it; Hyatt obtained the patent, performed additional experiments, and was able to produce a compound which he made into billiard balls, replacing ivory with celluloid, in 1869.
Hyatt’s replacement was needed because ivory was in limited supply; one set of elephant tusks produced only eight billiard balls. Other compounds were used, but none were as resilient as celluloid. A story has circulated that Hyatt won a $10,000 prize offered by a New York company for his invention, but there is no evidence that he actually received the prize (Wikipedia).
In Parkes’ and Hyatt’s processes, nitrocellulose (from cellulose, a natural polymer of glucose that is found in plant cell walls) is treated with camphor (a natural terpenoid derived from laurel trees or rosemary leaves) to obtain celluloid. When compressed into a ball, celluloid is neither soft nor pliable, but when stretched out into the thickness of movie film, it is indeed soft, pliable, and readily bent and straightened repeatedly.
When formed into film, celluloid is quite flammable, and when exposed to the heat of a movie projector light it will spontaneously burst into flame at 150 degrees Celsius. The problem of burning movie film was not solved until celluloid was replaced by acetate in the 1950’s (Wikipedia) and nearly all film produced on celluloid has probably been destroyed, although copies exist.
The first “completely synthetic” plastic, Bakelite, was invented by Leo Baekelite in 1907 as a substitute for shellac in electric insulation. Again, shellac was in limited supply; it is produced from the secretions of female lac bugs, dissolved in ethanol. It has been known since ancient times, and was used on furniture since at least the 1200’s. Shellac has been largely replaced by nitrocellulose lacquers and polyurethane for furniture applications since the 1920’s. It was used to produce phonograph records at least until the 1950’s, when it was replaced by vinyl. Shellac is still used as an edible coating on pills, candies, and apples.
Bakelite is made from phenol and formaldehyde with heat and pressure, and is called “thermosetting” because its liquid state turns solid on further heating. Bakelite was used for thousands of products, from telephone casings to jewelry. The base material, phenol, is also used in making nylon, which was invented in 1935 and first used for the bristles in toothbrushes. Nylon was used for women’s stockings starting in 1940, and for parachutes since WW II.
Phenol is made from petroleum, which is actually a natural product although it is greatly altered from its original state as the bodies of trees and other dead organisms. These organisms died in catastrophic circumstances which disallowed natural degradation by smaller organisms. Layers of dead material were covered in volcanic lava or sediment and then subducted to great depths under the earth, where heat and pressure under anoxic conditions transformed them into oil.
Formaldehyde is made from methanol, which is produced commercially from the methane in natural gas, or by fermentation of sugar cane, corn, or switchgrass. Methanol was originally produced by the Egyptians for embalming through pyrolysis of wood. “Natural” gas is, of course, naturally produced in the same fashion as petroleum.
Bacteria that can digest nylon were discovered in 1975 in a waste water pool at a nylon factory. It is believed that these bacteria had developed an enzyme to break down nylon from new mutations, as the nylon compounds did not exist in nature before nylon was produced in the laboratory.
The problem of microplastics comes from the universal production and use of plastics; originally in many forms, it breaks down into small particles which, if not captured and recycled, are lost into the environment. Microplastic pellets are produced to be used as abrasives in air-powered sanding guns; pellets are also the starting material for melting into larger aggregates. As noted, there has been an enormous increase in the production of plastics because they are so useful for so many things.
Microplastics are frequently ingested by small organisms in mistake for their normal food, and appears internally. They may either be expelled with digestive products, lodge in the digestive system, or may intrude into the organism’s circulatory system and even into individual cells. Little is known about the toxicity of microplastics; studies to determine how living organisms tolerate this substance are only beginning.
The possible toxicity of microplastics evokes great concern and speculation as to potential mechanisms of damage to living organisms, but there is little solid information. There is a Wikipedia article on microplastics which suggests obstruction of the digestive tract, false satiation, and leaching of plastic components like bisphenol-A (BPA), heavy metals (and many other substances that adhere to plastic during its breakdown) as possible mechanisms of toxicity.
I suspect that there will be much more information on microplastic toxicity in the near future because of the enormous increase in the quantity of this material in the environment over the last fifty years and likely continuing increases. Without hard information, it is difficult to speculate on the degree of toxicity. Larger pieces of plastic have become lodged in the digestive tracts of birds and fish, strangulated animals (think of the rings that hold beer cans together), trapped cetaceans in their meshes (discarded or lost fishing nets and line) and caused unsightly accumulations on beaches and on ocean surfaces.
The problem of microplastic pollution can be ameliorated by recycling of used and damaged plastics. Discarding plastic articles that are no longer useful leads to buildups of resilient but partially degraded pieces of plastic that eventually become microplastics. These are no longer visible but persist in the environment for many years. Microplastics will persist until there is widespread evolution of bacteria and eventually larger micro-organisms which can break down plastics into their component molecules, that can then be metabolized. Creating articles out of cellulose or fungal mycelia (such as experimental packing “peanuts”) will bypass this problem of evolution; this has been tried and is suitable for numerous materials that do not need great structural strength.
An analogous problem (or non-problem) is that natural fibers like cotton and wool also break down into microparticles that appear in fresh water contaminated by the discharge of washing machines. As far as is known, these tiny particles do not cause any environmental damage, although they are mentioned in the scientific literature as a “potential” problem. Concern about microplastics is certainly justified, but I don’t think this problem will approach the dimensions of global warming; recycling durable but broken items and avoiding the use of inherently durable plastics in discardable items are important aspects of harm avoidance.
[Most of the material in this post was obtained thru Wikipedia]
The Justice Department concluded in a formal finding this past July that the 1978 law that set up Inspector Generals for federal government departments did not really mean “all records” when it stated that “all records” were to be open to the Inspector’s review.
This finding grew out of a five year dispute with the FBI in which it began to refuse to turn over records such as grand jury transcripts, wiretap intercepts, and emails to the Inspector General in 2010, following scathing reports in which the Inspector found that the FBI was abusing its power in counter-terrorism investigations. The Inspector General program was begun as a result of the Watergate scandals in which a failed burglary at the Democratic offices in the Watergate Hotel was traced back to the White House and ultimately shown to have resulted from a program directly ordered by then-President Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan fired fifteen Inspectors General in 1981. The program grew to include seventy-two government departments.
Quoting from a New York Times article of November 27:
“This is by far the most aggressive assault on the inspector general concept since the beginning,” said Paul Light, a New York University professor who has studied the system. “It’s the complete evisceration of the concept. You might as well fold them down. They’ve become defanged.”
While President Obama has boasted of running “the most transparent administration in history,” some watchdogs say the clampdown has scaled back scrutiny of government programs.
The article continues with a description of the difficulties in an investigation of how the Corps handled allegations of sexual abuse of Peace Corps volunteers mandated by Congress that began two years ago. The Corps refused to turn over abuse reports to the Inspector General of the Peace Corps, citing confidentiality restrictions. Even after negotiations with the Corps, the Inspector was still only given heavily redacted copies of these reports, critical to an investigation.
Departments under investigation have begun to cite the Justice Department finding, even including records that were not specifically discussed in the finding. The Commerce Department forced the Inspector General to shut down an internal audit of enforcement of international trade agreements because certain business records were “proprietary” and thus not subject to release.
The Obama administration recently volunteered to restore full access to the Justice Department’s Inspector General but left out all the other Inspectors, who have been left hanging with incomplete investigations of the Environmental Protection Agency as well as many other agencies. Congressmen and Senators from both parties have complained that the administration is failing to provide sufficient transparency for the Inspectors General to do their jobs.
The most egregious example of obstruction cited by the article was the drug raids conducted by the Honduran military in cooperation with the DEA that started in 2011. A number of unarmed civilians were killed in questionable circumstances, but the DEA tried to with-hold documents critical to the investigation. The article states that, in 2012, drug agents in a helicopter shot at a boat, killing four people, including a pregnant woman. The agents also shot down several private planes, claiming they were suspected of carrying drugs.
According to CBS news, the Peruvian air force, using CIA spotters, shot down at least fifteen private planes between 1995 and 2001, in many cases without warning. In 2001, a plane carrying an American missionary and her seven-month old baby was shot down, killing both. This past summer, the Peruvian government authorized continued shoot-downs of planes that refused orders to land. It was said that planes from Peru shuttle more than a ton of cocaine to Bolivia daily.
In a report released to the public in November 2008, an Inspector General’s report concluded that the shoot-downs were in many cases done without warnings, and when warnings were given, they were not allowed time to respond. In addition, the CIA withheld that information from Congress, the National Security Council, and the Justice Department. In 2005, internal investigators concluded that no-one should be charged in these incidents. The program of air interdiction was shut down after the missionary was killed, but has been resumed on unanimous approval from the Peruvian Congress this year.
The Justice Department opinion that “all records” does not mean “all records” is insulting to the concept of open, accountable government, and it appears that Congress may pass laws that close this “loophole”. This finding is reminiscent of the Justice Department’s memos authorizing torture that were crafted in 2002 by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and approved by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. These memos were repudiated in 2004 by the Office of Legal Counsel’s Jack Goldsmith, who resigned at the same time. Attorney General John Ashcroft re-authorized torture shortly afterward, and his opinion was confirmed by the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in December 2004. All the findings authorizing “enhanced interrogation” procedures such as waterboarding were finally reversed by President Obama when he took office.
It appears that either President Obama is unclear on the concept of “transparent and accountable government” or else his advisers are leading him astray. I call on him to announce that “all records” means “all records” despite confidentiality agreements and proprietary business information concerns, and to give us really accountable government. The Inspector General can only work when he has full access to all information about his subjects. There should be no over-riding concern about secrecy when sworn, vetted members of the Inspector General’s office need to examine records, and their ability to keep confidential information secret should not be questioned.
An analysis of electoral districts that are turning Republican reveals that these increasingly poor, increasingly dependent on public assistance communities are segregated into two warring camps: those on assistance and those with jobs. The people who are accepting assistance through food stamps, disability, or even kidney dialysis overwhelmingly do not vote. The others, those with jobs, resent the people who are on assistance and falsely believe that many of them are able-bodied and are taking welfare when they could be working. These are the people who vote, and they vote overwhelmingly Republican, with a mean-spirited, nearsighted view of what being disabled is really like.
The problem is that working people think disability is a choice. In fact, disability is a last resort for those who cannot earn a living for any reason. The amount of money or assistance that any individual receives is not even enough to live on; there is no cash cow in disability. A dishonest person would prefer to live on crime rather than accept disability payments because crime pays better.
The only hope for a Democratic resurgence lies in the support of nonwhite voters. Trying to get disabled, poor people to vote is like herding cats.
Here’s an article about voting by minorities, low income, and young people: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2014/11/06/100627/why-young-minority-and-low-income-citizens-dont-vote/ For example, “Almost half—46 percent—of nonvoters have family incomes less than $30,000 per year, while only 19 percent of likely voters are from low-income families.”
The best way for the Democratic party to win, and for poor people to start voting, is to organize at a local level and talk to people who don’t vote. Then, on Election Day, contact these people individually and encourage them, or if necessary, give them rides to the polls. Help with onerous voter ID laws, registration, and obtaining IDs should be part of this organization. Poor people don’t vote because they don’t think it does any good, and to change this, direct contact and help with practical aspects of voting is necessary. This is particularly true of mid-term elections; currently, only a third of eligible voters show up at the polls at mid-terms, and this is when the Republicans make their biggest wins.
If poor and minority people don’t vote, they won’t be represented, and government won’t help them. This problem must be addressed, and eventually a law requiring everyone to vote would drive the point home. Australia, a notoriously conservative country, has a progressive government, partly because they have a law that requires everyone to vote. Before such a law could be passed, however, the Republicans must be driven from office, and the only way to do that is for everyone to vote. A conundrum indeed.
WASHINGTON — Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has long been the most politically active drug maker in Washington, and its representatives have tended to wrap themselves in the American flag while pressing their concerns with lawmakers and regulators.
So when the company announced this week that it would abandon not only the flag but the United States, its planned move to Ireland stunned the medicine industry’s lobbying corps — not the least because Pfizer’s chief lobbyist, Sally Susman, is the daughter of one of President Obama’s biggest, most generous benefactors, Louis Susman.
via Pfizer’s Plan to Leave U.S. Unsettles Drug Lobbyists – The New York Times.
This article in the NYT discusses the pharmaceutical industry’s shift to contributing to Democratic Party candidates and its alliance with the Obama administration. After the industry provided significant contributions to Obama’s first election campaign, Louis Susman, a lawyer and investment banker who directed considerable financial support to the Obama campaign, was appointed ambassador to England, a prize political appointment. He resigned in 2013. His daughter, Sally Susman, Pfizer’s chief lobbyist, assisted in the fundraising and had been a Clinton administration staff member.
Pfizer is now moving its headquarters to Ireland, which will terminate its tax liability to the US government. Ms. Susman is making this argument: “Ironically, an inversion makes it easier for an American company to invest in the U.S. and less likely that it will be encumbered by competitive tax disadvantages — or acquired by a foreign competitor.”
US taxpayers are unlikely to believe this argument and the drug companies are aware that the people are angry about recent drug price increases. For example, the article notes that the last ten new cancer drugs approved cost over $190,000 a year each.
The drug companies have been hit with criminal cases, multi-billion dollar fines, and other scandals, including the revelation that many drug research studies are tainted or fraudulent.
“There’s just too much obvious greed,” said one anonymous lobbyist.
Patent laws have changed and attacks by hedge funds against patents have also put pressure on industry. The Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership will provide less patent protection than current US laws. Previously, drug lobbyists could have prevented or ameliorated such push-back in Congress, but there is less sympathy in Congress than there was in the past and there is no relief coming.
When drug prices caused concern in Washington in 2009, the Affordable Care Act was seen as a solution by providing more people with insurance. The drug industry, allying with the Obama administration got behind the insurance law, but this has not relieved the pressure on prices, which have continued to rise at double-digit rates.
Jon Rappoport’s Demons
This new disease reminded Frances of one of his keenest regrets about the DSM-IV: its role, as he perceives it, in the epidemic of bipolar diagnoses in children over the past decade. Shortly after the book came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes. In 2007, a series of investigative reports revealed that an influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar disorder in kids, the Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, failed to disclose money he’d received from Johnson and Johnson, makers of Risperdal.
via Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness | WIRED.
This is the real reason that Frances said what he did and got quoted by Jon Rappoport: DSM-IV is inadvertantly responsible for the epidemic of bipolar disorder in children. He doesn’t mention Joseph Biederman, who took money from Johnson and Johnson to push Risperdal on “deviant” children. In 2011, Dr. Biederman was disciplined for not reporting $1.6 million in “consulting fees” from J+J as well as $700K given to a research institute he headed which in part studied Risperdal. He is still Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Here are a few selections from Mr. Rappoport’s blog post, “Psychiatric Fasciscm: Notes From Underground” (which are, in turn, selections from his “work-in-progress”, The Underground:
“Since there are no definitive physical tests for any of the 300 officially certified mental disorders—no blood tests, no urine tests, no brain scans, no genetic assays—what we’re left with is a phantasm-map of Nowhere Land, a philosophy of limitation. A translation of human problems and suffering into a professional liar’s language, a made-up nonsensical technical gibberish. And the federal government licenses this as a monopoly.”
“Psychiatry is a system of arbitrary definitions. When you get past all the pseudo-technical nonsense, you’re looking at mind control—the attempt to make people believe consciousness is composed of 300 disorders.”
“But, actually, consciousness is up for grabs. You can have any state of mind you want to. No labels. Does that sound frightening? You’re supposed to feel frightened and crawl back into a little hole. That’s the game.”
“Psychiatry and its government, media, and intelligence-agency allies are saying, ‘See that crazy killer over there? Anybody could turn into that. Even you. So we have to treat the whole population before somebody starts spraying bullets in your neighborhood. We have to sculpt everybody into a good citizen, an average person.’”
“Psychiatry is State control of emotion and thought. And its poor cousin, psychology, has become sentimental hokum for the rubes. Slop.”
“Psychiatry is the action of painting false pictures inside the mind, and obtaining obedience to those images. It’s imposed reality-invention. Meanwhile, under the tons of false information and propaganda that pervade life, the individual is, in fact, intensely creative; he is perfectly capable of inventing and fleshing out his own reality.”
The first line in the above quotes links to another post, entitled, “A Whole Branch of Science Turns Out to be Fake.” Some quotes from this piece:
“THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money…
…But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front in inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for several years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010)…
…Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
That’s an unusual statement, coming from a man partially responsible for the development of DSM-IV, the book that tries to define almost 300 mental disorders. Perhaps that has something to do with the replacement of DSM-IV by DSM-V. To continue:
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY (Dr. Russel Barkley,clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid… There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid. [Emphasis added]
What follows has to be understood as Mr. Rappoport’s personal opinion on the need for a “lab test” to prove that a disorder exists:
Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows an ear-shattering whistle on his own profession.
So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.
Mr. Rappoport goes on to polemicize the “fantasy” of a disorder based purely on history and physical examination, calling psychiatry a complete fraud, and blaming drug companies for supporting this fraud. He makes much of the phrase “chemical imbalance”– and he is partly, unintentionally right here, because there is no proof that any such “chemical imbalance” actually exists: it is a convenient phrase, essentially meaningless yet justifiable by describing serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain, given to patients to help them to understand that there is something physically wrong inside their heads that makes them feel sick.
Just what that is that something, that physical disorder of the brain? We don’t know, and in the hundred and fifty years since Freud first described hysteria, we’ve been frantically trying to figure it out. Small advances have been made. The model of drug treatment has helped some people find relief from the suffering they experience, the suffering of what we call “mental illness.” Cognitive behavioral therapy has helped many others.
To call the entire profession of psychiatry a “fraud” when the vast majority of psychiatrists and researchers are trying to find, if not cures, then at least relief for the suffering of the multitude of people who realize that there is something wrong in their brains, is an insult, a canard, and a distraction from honest attempts to help people.
Labeling the drug industry in this way also detracts from the good that drugs do: in most cases, they relieve suffering and help re-organize disorganized thoughts. There are a significant minority of drugs that either do not belong on the market or need to have their doses and indications changed because they are potentially dangerous or have detrimental long-term side effects. However, the majority of drugs produced give the kind of relief that patients need. The drug industry is corrupt and greedy, but many, if not most, of the drugs they produce are helpful.
The real problem is that psychiatry is in its infancy. Researchers are looking for chemical markers to improve upon the clinical diagnoses that are made. Functional brain scans are teasing apart the pathways through which normal and abnormal people channel their thoughts as they pass through the brain. There is much to be done, and many mysteries to unravel. To describe the psychiatric and drug industries as fraudulent completely misses the good that they do while grossly exaggerating the harms that have been, and will continue to be done on a diminishing scale.
What more can we expect from a man who has been a failure at investigative reporting for thirty years? He is using the Internet to spread his delusions and paranoia because no-one will spend a penny to pick up any of his publications, while he pretends that he is “Underground”, implying that he is an outlaw because his ravings have frightened the Psychiatric-Drug “fascist” organization. You get what you pay for. “Free” information often turns out to be no more valuable than the ramblings of a lunatic.
Two points:
First, diseases without lab tests: there are a few. Chronic fatigue syndrome, or to go by its new name, “Exercise Intolerance Disease” or something like that. Chronic fatigue is a “syndrome” (important word) with the symptoms of severe, disabling fatigue, intolerance to exercise that gets worse with repetition (this is also important), episodes of sore throat and swollen neck glands, and so on. There has (up to now) been no laboratory test that has distinguished sufferer from well. Several years ago, a lab in Nevada, run by the Whittemores who had a daughter with CFS, supposedly found a viral cause and developed a test for it, but it was discredited and a pharmacologist named Judy Mikovits was disgraced and briefly jailed for removing laboratory notebooks without permission… Mr. Whittemore is now in jail for making an illegal contribution to a Senatorial candidate. Chronic fatigue syndrome, or exercise intolerance disorder, has a possible test on the treadmill, but that is all. Yet millions of sufferers all over the world need to know.
Second, and more important, this is the Internet, and you get what you pay for, or in more abstruse terms, “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”
The situation of the Chechens in Russia is very complex; after seeing their national aspirations wiped out, they subsist in abject poverty under a kleptocratic puppet regime controlled by Moscow. In a previous post, I grossly oversimplified their history but I’m afraid the bottom line is true: young Chechens sympathetic to the Islamic State have recently begun emigrating there. There is a lot of propaganda from ISIS that invites people to immigrate to their territory, not just fighters but engineers and other skilled people.
The recent history of Chechnya can be said to have begun on the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Pro-independence forces quickly took control in Chechnya. However, this was not acceptable to the Russian post-Soviet government, and covert attempts to destabilize the Chechen government turned into an invasion in 1994. This was disastrous for the Russians, who were incompetently led. Most Russian troops were withdrawn and the region was allowed to be autonomous for a time, from 1996-9. However, the local government under Mashdakov proved to be unable to protect a crucial oil pipeline and new Russian leader Vladimir Putin decided to invade.
Coincidentally, there were several terrorist attacks in Russia that were blamed on the Chechens, and within days afterwards, the Russians invaded Chechnya, this time successfully. However, the insurgency was very strong and spread to neighboring countries. Then there was the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, after which Putin decided to label the Chechen insurgency as not only Islamist (which was true) but jihadist (which was not.) Then came the Beslan school siege in 2004. This attack by Chechen insurgents, which acutely risked the lives of children, embarrassed the rest of the insurgency and led to a reduction in further attacks. Never mind that the Russians had killed more children in incidents which had never been recorded.
There has always been an active Chechen “mafia” that lives on smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, and other forms of petty terrorism; they are recorded as being active in WW II. The ranks of these outlaws swelled in the period between the two Chechen wars, when fighters had no better targets. They had already penetrated the gang community in Moscow and were known for their violent ways. They were suppressed after the second Russian invasion, although there are still active bands of Chechen mafiosi.
There was no connection between the Chechen insurgency and ISIS except that foreign volunteers came to fight in Chechnya, just as they did in Afghanistan . The shock at popular revulsion to their attack in Beslan and their suspension of attacks shows they didn’t have the psychopathic violence thing down at all. ISIS was born in the heads of Iraqi Sunnis who had been ill-treated by the Americans and the new Shia Iraqi government.
The Russians had Chechnya firmly under control when the insurgency died down as a result of shame after the Beslan attack. The discovery of numerous mass graves, most of them containing Russian victims, has had little effect on their administration. They installed a puppet named Ramzan Kadyrov, and allocated large amounts of money for reconstruction of the destroyed country. However, Kadyrov embezzled most of it and built himself a magnificent mansion; even the Russians have begun to lost patience with him.
The Wikipedia article has much, much more about the history of Chechnya, including this summary statement about Chechnya now: “The two wars have left millions of people living in poverty, up to half a million refugees (particularly ethnic Russians), and most of the infrastructure destroyed.” The people left in this repeatedly devastated country now report that their young people are gradually disappearing, emigrating to the Islamic State. This is according to an article in the New York Times, and I see little reason to doubt it.
The analysts said problems in Iraq were rooted in deep political and religious divides that could not easily be solved with a military campaign, current and former officials have said. Yet Centcom’s official posture remained generally upbeat.
via Pentagon Expands Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS Surge – The New York Times.
And that’s because ISIS isn’t about a finite pantheon of ruthless puppeteers. It’s about a region in violent disarray, a culture in crisis and all sorts of brutal crosscurrents that no drone alone can address. Our assault on ISIS must be multifaceted, and it was good at least to hear an appreciation of that in Hillary Clinton’s speech on Thursday.
We lose the war against ISIS by being simplistic. We lose it by letting emotion overtake reason.
via How ISIS Defeats Us – The New York Times.
ISIS is as good an acronym as any– we forget that an acronym, by definition, must be pronounceable and ISIS certainly is pronounceable, unlike DAESH– but it’s a mistake to try to sum this phenomenon up in words of two syllables.
The way to beat this threat to secular society is to make society so good that its allure is unbeatable. The tactics we need to use most are propaganda. Flooding the connections with propaganda about the good life– we are already doing that with our commercial programming today. That is why the Islamic State, in its founding document, bans satellite TV as an agent of the devil.
It is only a short step to developing deliberate propaganda such as was used during the Second World War against Hitler. In fact, there is an odd parallel between Hitler and the movement of violent jihad. Both looked back to ancient precedents for their ideology. Nazism has never been completely stamped out and there are pockets of Nazis in the guise of white supremacists living in the United States today.
It is time to resume the production of deliberately propagandistic films such as Casablanca, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the like. Repeated play of films such as these online and distribution of DVDs to follow.
The Russians have tried to stamp out jihadis in their territories, especially Chechnya, for many years. A famous series of terrorist attacks prompted the Russian government to strike back by applying their military heavy-handedly on the Chechen populace. They succeeded in quieting the area, and the terrorist attacks have ceased. But the Islamists who were left in Chechnya who had not been shot or arrested have been gradually emigrating to Syria and now to the Islamic State. The potential terrorists who were living in Chechnya under Russian control have simply left town for a more congenial venue.
Australia’s approach has been different; possibly due to the isolation of their island, they have been able to confiscate the passports of known jihadis and place them under close observation. They respond to these restrictions with an elaborate omission of any direct support for the Islamic State or for emigration there, since that would be against the law. But the rest of their speech is full of the hate and delusions that characterize their rants.
Another problem is that bombing will inevitably cause civilian casualties because the Islamic State fighters have many hostages, women, and children with whom they mix. There has been talk of “loosening the rules of engagement”, that is, allowing more civilian casualties, because the strikes so far have hit nothing but empty buildings. Only the Americans have been precise enough to kill a few leaders, including “Jihadi John”, the notorious narrator of terrorist videos.
According to adherents.com, there are 1.5 professed Muslims in the world; if 1/10 of 1 percent were committed to violent jihad, that would be 1.5 million people. The only way to prevent that many people from causing serious damage to the rest of the world without murdering them all is to convince them that it is in their best interests to respect the rights of the rest of the people. Demonstrating to them that life in the secular world is good is not enough, unless Australia is not a decent place to live, as demonstrated by those who have had their passports confiscated to prevent them from emigrating to the Islamic State. Military means are clearly necessary but it is possible that there is no completely successful way to eliminate them.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 