I’m stretched thin this month, so this edition of links series will be briefer than usual. Note: I slightly edited this from the emailed version to correct a typo and add some Twitter screenshots.
Days of Rage
My students in the collective violence course recently covered the radical terrorist groups of the 1970s. The required reading was Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, which I’ve already covered on Bullfish Hole (Part I here, Part II here).
Unlike some of the other events we cover (like the Springfield Race Riot of 1908) this stuff is from the time of television, and I was interested to find some contemporary news reports, interviews, and communiques available on Youtube.
For instance, this video on Weather Underground’s Fall Offensive gives us a communique calling for war against the pigs, an interview with Weatherman Bernadine Dohrn’s sister (who approvingly describes big sis is “far out”), and a discussion of the call for new regulations on the sale of dynamite.
This one has a communique from the Patty Hearst boasting of the Symbionese Liberation Army armed bank robbery and denouncing her former fiancé as one of the enemy pigs.
Here’s ABC News coverage of the fatal siege of the SLA in 1974.
And here’s some footage of the aftermath of the Fraunces Tavern bombing in New York in 1975. The Wall Street restaurant was blown up by Puerto Rican Marxist group FALN, killing four.
In terms of fatalities, these radicals were small potatoes compared to the big race riots of earlier decades or the terrorism and rampage killings of later ones. But the scale of the radical ecosystem, its support in legitimate circles, and the sheer wild strangeness of these groups — from revolutionary ambitions to drug-fueled orgies — makes them fascinating.
War
Considering much larger scale violence, it’s hard to get away from talk of the war between Israel and Hamas. It has ignited even more distant partisanship than the war between Russia and Ukraine, which in turn ignited far more than various other wars that aren’t fashionable to talk about.
One of these unfashionable conflicts, by the way, is in Sudan, where after six months an estimated 9,000 are dead and 5 million displaced. And there’s fighting and reportedly mass rape in Democratic Republic of Congo. But in my experience wars and genocides in Africa don’t garner much attention outside of it. I’m old enough to remember no one around me much caring about the Rwandan Genocide.
Meanwhile, one can readily find people with no interest in or knowledge of either warfare or the history of the Near East who suddenly have strong opinions about the Israeli military strategy.
For what I consider a more thoughful opinion, see Tanner Greer’s discussion in Mosaic Magazine on the strategy behind Hamas’s October 7 massacres. A shocking escalation has the benefit of polarizing the conflict, and so forcing moderates to choose sides:
While it is certainly possible to provoke crisis through non-violent means, acts of terrorism are especially effective at sharpening distinctions between us and them. One propogandist for Islamic State laid out this argument explicitly in an apologia for terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians in France. With each attack, he wrote, “the Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices.” Either they “apostatize and adopt the kufrī [infidel] religion propagated by Bush, Obama, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy, and Hollande . . . or they perform hijrah [emigration] to Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens.” In time, he continued, “the grayzone will become extinct and there will be no place for grayish calls and movements. There will only be the camp of īmān [faith] versus the camp of kufr.”
That the Oct.7 massacres immediately resulted in displays of partisanship both for and against the targets might bear out this logic.
While of course I expected various expressions of support for Palestine, I was surprised and disturbed by so much cheerleading for the massacres as such. For instance, a speaker at a rally in Philadelphia called the massacres “a job well done,” while Black Lives Matter Chicago posted an approving memes about the paraglider troops who killed 250 youth at a concert.
Perhaps I was naïve on that score, given that Bradley Campbell and I have written before on the Manichean distinction between oppressor and oppressed that increasingly animates Western morality.
At Persuasion, Yascha Mounk makes similar observations.
Of course the current war is the latest in a long history of conflict. Cremieux Recueil cites several quantitative analyses of this history of violence, asking whether it fits a model of tit-for-tat where individual killings produce retaliatory killings. His answer is not really:
Roughly one-fifth of the fatalities attributable to either side can be ascribed to retaliation for earlier fatalities and only around a ninth of the rockets launched by the Palestinians can be attributed to these fatalities.
He adds:
It’s debatable whether any long-term conflict really ends up being dominated by tit-for-tat.
He points out the optimistic side of that, which is vengeance doesn’t continue indefinitely. Most vengeance plots fail, and upon their failure most plotters get frustrated and move on to other things.
One example he gives is an interesting bit of historical trivia. There was a group of Holocaust survivors who planned reprisal killings of Germans, aiming to kill millions with mass-poisoning. The plan got downgraded to an attempt to poison 3,000 German POWs, and when that didn’t work, they decided to hang it up.
Speaking of bringing cycles of conflict to an end, at Unsafe Science Lee Jussim discusses a paper on how intractable conflicts end in the real world. Psychological variables like hope, understanding, and empathy seem to have little impact. In reality, bloody conflicts seem to end when 1) one side is completely defeated and the other victorious, 2) one or both sides get burned out and quit, or 3) a third party intervenes to end it.
These might overlap in practice, as two burned-out sides might be more receptive to a third party, while one burned-out side withdrawing is effectively a victory for the other.
He details the devastation of Germany and Japan in World War 2 as an example of the first path. I think some people need to be more realistic about the carnage of warfare. WW2 wasn’t Captain America “punching Nazis,” it was bomber squadrons darkening the sky and reigning death on an entire nation. Take whatever position you like on the morality of war in general or this or that war in particular, but don’t pretend that they don’t all involve collective liability and harm to innocents.
Noble and Generous Cetaceans
If you need a break from talk of war, consider this piece from The Conversation on how the Thaua people of New South Whales used to do cooperative hunting with orcas. Like big ocean-going dogs, the orcas would drive prey into shore where the Thaua hunters could spear them. When Europeans whalers showed up, they took advantage of this by hiring Thaua-orca teams to herd baleen whales into range of their harpoons.
Similarly, there’s a fishing community in Brazil that cooperates with dolphin hunting partners.
Nor is cross-species cooperation in hunting limited to humans and cetaceans. On coral reefs, an octopus will team up with one or more groupers to hunt prey. The link is to one of a few Youtube clips of this, and there’s also a good sequence on it in the documentary Blue Planet II. The groupers even have a way of signalling to the octopus where the prey are hiding, hoping to get help in flushing them out. Groupers can also team up with moray eels as well. Again, you can find multiple clips of them doing that.
Friends’ Books
My WVU colleague Christopher Scheitle has a new book out, The Faithful Scientist: Experiences of Anti-Religious Bias in Scientific Training. He started out studying religious scientists and found that the main conflict, as they experienced it, wasn’t between tenets of their faith and scientific facts, but with their less religious colleagues. Which reminds me of the time I heard a fellow academic casually remark that he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe religious people weren’t all stupid. I hope to pin Chris down for an interview soon.
My frequent collaborator Bradley Campbell has announced his forthcoming book, How to Think Better About Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters. The argument here follows up on a chapter from our book Rise of Victimhood Culture where we discuss the potential value of both social justice as a concept and sociology as a field. The idea is that a very narrow branch of sociological thinking and a very particular conception of social justice dominate most discussions of the topic, but there are alternatives out there. See also his article “Social Justice and Sociological Theory.”
Finally, I’ll be attending the annual meeting of the American Society for Criminology in Philadelphia next month to take part in an author meets critics session on Scott Phillips and Mark Cooney’s book Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in America. The book uses data on capital cases to test ideas from Donald Black’s theories of law and conflict about which cases are most likely to result in execution. I’ll probably write more about it in the near future.
Thanks for reading! Stay safe out there!
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; / ; (Unsafe Science)
Sorry your name was mispelled in the email version, Lee. Autocorrect is weird and I'm typo-blind.