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The Anarchist Guide to IS Psychology

Internationalist Observer | 19.09.2014 10:06 | Analysis | Iraq | Terror War | World

I pretend to put myself behind you in order to make me appear bigger than I really am. (Pretend, because since the Obama-Morales affair airspace servitude is recognized as the unequivocal hallmark of vassal states, and in this instance it is not the case.) With this clownish gesture the Damascus regime has exposed the phoney coalition of hate mongers that the military-industrial complex came up with to out-compete the Islamic State on terms of human rights. Actually not, as the aggressors have literally voiced themselves their ambition is not to improve but to degrade. Apparently the imperialist does not understand the abolitionist rigorousity of the anti-occupation campaign as a consequence of the abuses of Abu Ghraib but is still filling the trough for its uniformed rapists. This immature response proves that by establishing its own foreign policy entirely independent of the nationalist state, the Islamic state has hit a nerve of the military-industrial complex. These empty suits get mad at the mirrors which are being held to them, until the doctor comes to remind everyone that the knife they imagine to see on the screen is merely a metaphor of the artist referring to an eavesdropping warrant in their own hands. In another interpretation, the followers of Mohammed have heated the axe of war in the glowing fire of Abolition, and since they passed it to Obama and Cameron the two are crying out in pain as they both burned their hands.

And this is the grain of real news in the third IS message: Only an information feedback from the previous release to the next victim (in addition to the presence on the scene) can explain why this time the victim did as well. In the footage itself it is blurred by an artificial asynchronicity between the image and sound tracks, but to an observer who already noticed that there was more wind than in the first an less than in the second one, this sudden change of detail in the otherwise still picture is as significant as the landscape view of the Fukushima hydrogen explosion. The part when the victim apparently had touched the axe of war at the wrong end has been cut out in a fashion hat might pass unnoticed to a domestic audience, such as the military coup in Thailand passed overwhelmingly unnoticed in what is calling itself the West. The victims have however been grabbed from roles in which they should be aware of the problems in talking to capitalist state television, that for these people time is money, that it is better to make a short statement than giving the opportunity to pick the most useless bit of a long statement, that employees tend to lie to you about how much time their bosses allow to them because they do lie about that to themselves as well. Social movements should rather focus on their own media, which after all allow everyone to quote from and refer to, and the creative commons licenses that have to be adhered to to categorically exclude any commercial abuse of the declared non-commercial material.

On the other hand the way how the Islamic state messages do enter the attention span of capitalist state media is only the blowback of the penetration of independent media sources by state-sponsored abuse, and unlike the activists in social movements these victims have no choice. It remains to be seen whether the Islamic state develops an ambition to differ from the capitalist state, and the integrity of these messages or lack thereof is a crucial indicator. It should be remembered that the purpose of cutting out the bodily details of dying is to make the audience look at the evidence of the atrocities of the Syrian state, but the effect of cutting out parts of the victim´s message to the politician is that the external audience will instead look at what the Damascus regime is saying. For the Islamic state it is the choice between foreign and domestic policy. If the messages are in fact to an external audience, as the abstention from the depiction of dying for its own purpose indicates, then the deprecation of the victim statement is contrary to that purpose, because this is still a replacement scenario. If the capitalist state criminal who should be executed in place of the victim was voicing deceptive propaganda then it should be corrected, but if the purpose of the message is to make it change its behaviour then the unhampered transmission of the victim speech is essential for the external effect. Only then the public can come to a reliable conclusion as to whether the replacement is appropriate and that is the only language those politicians understand in their meaningless war against Nature.

To which the rank and file IS fighter will of course say the purpose is for Allah. But has Allah spared Arabia of the parasites that rule the land? It is the same as with every other corner of the Earth. Even Kim Jong Un has more power than Allah; the imperialist is repelled from at least half of Korea. In that sense, the Islamic state is typically Arab, reflecting the attitude of an undefeated people whose pride blinds it for the endemic treason in its own house. Of course it is true that prisoners are always miserable, for any other condition it would require freedom. But as a “global player”, the Islamic state is itself in a prisoner dilemma. In this instance the blind brother hits the lame brother before they arrive at their destination. It should be reiterated that the archetypal pattern of the execution messages is very deep-rooted in the tradition not only of Islam, it is in the biography of Abraham and his son Isaac, only that here there is no divine emergency break (apparently Allah is busy cleaning the palace of the Arab king instead). One does not need to imagine what Mohammed would have said to Muslims who could not wait for a man to get rid of his creditors before making a religious proclamation. This is documented as well. Much of the theological debate surrounding it is on the level of whether one species was superior to all others. Even if that is so, it is no reason to deny them.

When the systematic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib surfaced a decade ago, it was the first major sign of failure of the “democratisation” propaganda. The material was explosive because, as it soon turned out, it was not limited to reciprocation against a clearly defined caste of regime torturers but outlining an entire new threat against the whole population. For the imperialist apparatus, the leak of the data (at the time there was no Wikileaks yet) was part of an attempted revolt of CIA against NSA that also expressed itself in a propaganda divergence about alleged Persian atomic bombing ambitions. The coup failed and later became the gateway for the coup of NSA against CIA in the Libyan war which brought about much less documented atrocities against which Abu Ghraib might appear as a playground. Of course Libya is the next powder keg waiting to come to the forefront of attention such as Iraq did until recently. The fascist efforts to occupy Africa under the phoney pretext of disease prevention signify that. Yet as painful the Abu Ghraib leak was to the abused prisoners, and as much of an opportunity it was for the rivalling apparatchiks, as significant it became to the public perception because it gave an iconic depiction of how democracy looks like.

It is this and only this achievement of coming out of the Abu Ghraib experience unbroken and unaffected which gives Al Baghdadi the moral authority to liberate Baghdad from the imperialist occupier and its vassal state, that as a claim is being expressed in this name. Unlike in the propaganda, this is not a conflict between Arabs and Shias and Kurds, but between free people and imperialism. For the Islamic state fighter, who only knows Abu Ghraib from the media, wearing the boots that have trampled on his ideal is a largely blind experience the guidance of which requires the spiritual leadership of the movement to teach its followers in the ethics of substitution. Just like when a word is being used as a substitute for a thing or situation (or even another word) there are specific patters of handling it that constitute truth and others that express lie, it is the same when one thing or person are set to replace another. The movement as whole may just be very angry at Christians for example, but the deciders must know that it is a very specific sub-group thereof that is the source of the problems and these are not found locally.

When the capitalist state is being criticised for its abuse of the data of the people, as a reaction it is employing more cops against “abusive bogeyman” in order to be able to commit more abuse to silence the criticism. If the Islamic state is to be different from that, not just in the sense as one brand varies from another but fundamentally, then the ethics of substitution and everything that is required for it must be strengthened from the heart of the movement. Just like on the pictures from the Abu Ghraib leak one person can be substituted with another and it makes no relevant difference, in the global response to that kind of occupation this principle must be self-evident. Even if the third victim in its speech unearthed a historical reference from before Mohammed, the ethics of substitution mandates that it is being delivered to these suffering from Nato Nazis, otherwise the unclear spiritual debt therein would fall to Islam. This becomes finally obvious when it is being remembered that there are Islamic prisoners who have turned against British soldiers in Britain. Why are they being deprived of learning what is being said about their oppressors?

It seems likely that the inheritance left by a married man will always disintegrate due to conflict among the heirs. Certainly if this had not been the case with Rome, Islam would never have become what it is now. At the time of Mohammed the regional tendency towards centralised power was already hampering the recovery from the Roman occupation. The collapse of the empire had not entirely sucked in its mercenaries, and their futile attempts to restore it became a threat not only to its survivors but also to its undefeated neighbours. Yet as it was being achieved, the unification of Arabia fell victim to the family feud of its representative. The Christian tradition, despite the effort to avoid the marriage trap, finally became a mere instrument of fraud in the hands of the imperialist when it came to the first negotiations over oil exploitation. In one instance, the British empire abused the identity of the Catholic church to obtain its status in West Asia. Breaches of legitimacy of that dimension are only unfolding their effects over the time of many generations.

The matter of conflict that rules the world is the permanent shutdown of empires without any remainder. This requires that their legacies are being taken care of. We already see the failing empire abuse health reasons as an excuse for occupation and hide its head in the trash can of fossil fuel space flight. The tragedies of half a century ago repeat as farces. The Islamic state can only discontinue the spying if that is the first thing it does. Otherwise it puts itself at risk to become dominated by it and thereby a traitor of the kind of these Muslims who betrayed the oil exploitation. Everybody knows that the aim for security and stability of the Arabian ruling caste is the most depraved condition, veiling all the evils of the democratic state in an appearance of sovereignty. In yet another instance of substitution, the Islamic state is forming not in the heartland of Islam but in the neighbourhood shattered by the meddling of these animals and their accomplices, to go there and change that only once it is strong enough. In an age of totalitarianism when it is not possible to change a local regime without foreign meddling this is the only possible way.

The expectation of the “Arab Spring” that a society busy with clearing serious internal issues would be left alone by foreign spies turned out to be illusionary. The predictable negative consequences of meddling were not sufficient as an incentive to avoid it. The result of this in Egypt was that a military junta is abusing the country much worse than Mubarak ever did. Ukraine would be better off with Yanukovych, Libya with Gadhafi. These countries got what their fathers warned them against because they knew imperialism. The one-person coup in Baghdad demonstrates that “democracy” and “elections” are not worth the breath, and with it the putschists also discarded the option to get free passage to Persia when the current remainder of the occupation regime is finally dismantled. In this situation, a “regime change” i. e. a transaction of the power of disposal over the existing regime apparatus to an alternative decider who is not corrupted by imperialism does not work technically, and abolition remains the only realistic option. For example, the members of the “faith police of Al-Saud” do not require to be given new instructions by new bosses, but they need to die. And yet it is not possible to destroy the hostile apparatus by merely demolishing one building after another, because that leaves the oppressed people not only without the oppression but also without their stolen memories.

The historical prototype to be looked at for this are the slave rebellions in South and Central America that brought about the divorce of the Northern colonialists from their European masters. When the thievish hand of the capitalist state is being cut off, and it must be done so because it has even abused the religious cause as an excuse for its abuses of the people, it is still clinging to what it has stolen. Hence it cannot go directly into the hell fire as it falls off, but the human souls captured in its clenched fingers must be freed to return to their legitimate owners. People must be enabled to retroactively track any spying activity against them and empowered to annul all the intentions and results thereof. For example, if a person has been spied against and the stolen data was taken for commercials, the life of the perpetrators is in the hands of the target because the proliferation of the booty is not easily reversible, hence the response is to be of the same quality. A product that cannot present itself without stealing from these who do not approve of it must not exist.

For the healing of the capitalist legacy it is essential that in the ending of the exploitation all these who profited from it are being entirely defaced. If that does not happen then the thievish culture might end up as an equal among those it harmed and that cannot be accepted. Abuse does never bring about equality, only the same miserable condition for all, and it cannot be allowed that the most abusive degrade everyone to their own level. The abused must be returned what is theirs without any comment and evaluation because they are the only ones who can really eradicate the abuse – if the same thing was collectively annihilated in their name it might only reappear in another pattern. Only the reversal of the balance of power at the microsociological level guarantees lasting abolition. Merely blowing up a spy agency like the Bamiyan statues would be akin to cutting off fingers from a hand that can grow fresh ones like a frog. Cutting off the entire hand requires to defeat all the fingers at once and to prepare to catch up what they hold.

It should be added, not only that the Anarchist stance on the devotional sculpture is an agnostic one, and that the more appropriate means would have been to clothe them in a burqa until the matter of conflict is sorted out, and even if the final conclusion were to be that they were as much cultural trash and plagiarism as a German garden gnome statue, the Taliban were too depraved for the historical weight of their decision, because at the time they willingly and knowingly collaborated with imperialist eradication efforts against natural species. Yet today everyone knows that the “war on biodiversity” is a planetary suicide scam that was only pushed upon Unitednations and its predecessors by the Mormons. Craftsmanship and engineering are not species though and their loss may be justified, but only if the “frog finger effect” is excluded with certainty and whatever they hold in their hands can thereby return to its legitimate owner. It is no surprise that the decision of Bamiyan was ridiculed by Gadhafi. Before his regime went down, it paved a notorious torture prison of decades. Even if the demolition might have been the right kind of thing, many people in Libya feel it should not have happened in that order. This feeling is now being supplemented with an explanation why that is so. The raging frog had torn off its own finger to save its hand for a little, little more. That Libya exposed to imperialism is now worse off is a typical element of the big picture.

If the missing segment of the Islamic State “Message to Cameron” does not come to the fore, it is reasonable to assume that it was a demand to release a prominent political prisoner Cameron has confined to a gruesome slow death from predictably deteriorating health without even a daily yard walk. But that is too slow for state and commercial media to understand what it is, and so beyond the sensationalism they find no substantial explanations. Yet with item substitution being a construction element of the Islamic state from early on, such as the missing segment of dying can be replaced with any memory of death, the missing segment of speech can be substituted with any situation of dying from oppression that, because it takes more time than the attention span of the depiction, otherwise would not be pointed out as what it is. And what it is is to be inserted into what it appears to be.

* * *

See also:

- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html
- The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html
- Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html
- NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html
- Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html
- The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html
- What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html
- Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
- Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees (21.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516041.html
- The External Cost of Spying (28.3.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516118.html
- How Deep Is the Atlantic Divide Really? (8.4.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/04/516271.html
- Boko Haram – An Image From The Future (4.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516551.html
- The Pacific Fata Morgana and its Imperialist Origins (12.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516662.html
- The German Sustainability Scam and its Fascist Purpose (21.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516731.html
- Hindu Supremacism – A Spent Force of Casino Capitalism (30.5.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516814.html
- Birth of an Independent Hope – the Revolution in West Asia (26.6.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/06/517081.html
- Macropolitical Side-Effects of the Imperialist Occupation of the Philippines (4.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517113.html
- Gaza – Vivisection of a Death Cult (20.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517265.html
- The Japanese Occupation Legacy – A Defining Ingredient of Totalitarian Democracy (28.7.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/07/517363.html
- The Gaza Massacre – Implications and Consequences (5.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517537.html
- Double Emergency Alert: Ebola Acceleration, Internet Smokescreen (8.8) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517551.html
- Must Christians in the Islamic State Suffer Another Bloodbath? (11.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517608.html
- Atomic Testing in the Digital Age (13.8.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/08/517630.html
- The Islamic State Messages in the Light of the Climate Catastrophe (11.9.) -  https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/09/518121.html

Internationalist Observer
- Homepage: https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/12/514459.html

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