JOURNAL: Primary loyalties

The discovery/destruction of the madhist cult outside Najaf is more proof that, in the words of Richard Feynman, "there's plenty of room at the bottom" when it comes to primary loyalties.

A primary loyalty is a connection to a non-state group that is greater than loyalty to a state. These loyalties include those to clan, religion, tribe, neighborhood gang, etc. Look to globalization to accelerate/catalyze this race to the bottom.

Comments

[3Circle]

Robb,
I read your article, Security, Power To The People. I agreed with your assessments of America by 2016, but I'd like you to touch on the level of violence you anticipate. Many white supremacist refer to a coming race war as the balkanization of america with its regional and race loyalties which falls under your primary loyalties assessment. I'm reading a book entitled, All God's Chidren by Fox Butterfield in which the author chronicles the history of violence in America and its traditions in the south with family, race, and regional loyalties contributing to a culture of violence to preserve personal honor. Butterfield shows this influence on African-American culture and its effect on black males in their quest to uphold respect within their small communities. After reading Butterfield's book, I think the fall out from systems disruption and weakening federal authority will lead to a level of bloodshed similar to the Serbian/Croatian ethnic cleansing of the early 1990s. The history of violence in the American south and the ever present racial tension supports this assessment. It seems we are on the verge of another dark age. With the transnational gangs and White supremacist groups the south and southwest U.S. will be an intense battleground. Latino gangs have been greenlighted by the mexican mafia to begin killing blacks with no gang affiliation in L.A. to ethnically their neighborhoods. Check out, http://www.infowars.com/articles/immigration/mexican_gangs_ethnic_cleansing_blacks_in_la.htm

Keep up the website, I like the analysis.

[Mark]

>there's plenty of room at the bottom" when
>it comes to primary loyalties.

Especially when there are a lot of young men, oil and cheap weapons in the mix.

I wonder if there isn't some sort of energy balance equation one could apply to this. The relative 'rate of change' in '15-18 aged male population', 'oil prices', and 'weapon prices' would be the key factors.

[Azr@el]

Heads up on the 'soldiers of heaven' outfit. They may not be shias afterall, more likely would be sunni mercenaries paid for by certain saudi factions. The whole 'soldiers of heaven' thing is a shallow cover for something else; this group simply never existed before this incident. There's no past incidents period, you don't go from no attacks to launching a demi-battalion sized attack without going thru some intermediary steps, something's up.

[hagen]

mercenaries wanted.
email wrong.r@hotmail for more information.

[Robert Schunk]

I certainly agree with Azr@el's caveat regarding published reports of the "Mahdist Cult" incident, but suggest the following possibility for consideration regarding similar situations we may face at various times and places in the future:

We may expect a proliferation of religious cults under conditions of state failure, such proliferation due, at least in part, to their role as foster primary loyalty groups for individuals who may be alienated from or rejected by their native primary loyalty groups, attracting such individuals who may reject identification with the open criminality of gangs (although their sense of innocence in this regard may be consciously or unconsciously hypocritical, as the cult may subsume these individuals’ sense of moral responsibility for crimes (or lesser wrongs) committed by themselves on behalf of the cult (even as it subsumes the rest of their identities within itself) with the cult, in turn, sanctifying any such wrongs within its ideological system).

[Azr@el]

My thinking is that if this was a shia death cult or al-aqaeda, then where are the suicide bombers? Could you imagine a death cult or al qaeda launching an opeartion of this size without spicing the mix with a few suicide bombers? This suggest whoever launched the attack was planning on living to see another day, i.e. mercenaries. This coupled with the fact that the staging ground for the assault was on property owned by a sunni baathist suggest a saudi hand in this affair. This is speculation on my part, nothing else.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

There are some many different insurgent/militia groups it's really impossible to guess who did it.

You have the whahhabis (the ones supported by the saudis), salafists (I think they hate wahhabis), the Zarqawi AQ, the "real" AQ, AQ wannabes, Iran-friendly shias (Sciri, Al-Dawa, etc), Iran-hostile shias (Sadr's Mahdi army among others), the Baathists, other secular nationalists of diffrent stripes, the Turcomans (against the Kurds in Kirkuk), all the sundry tribal groups who are in it for blood revenge, and all the criminal gangs who hire their guns to all of the above...

People try to see causal patterns, but with so many indepedent actors the complexity is such that interactions are essentially chaotic...

[Azr@el]

...to pull of this attack, someone interjected a lot of order into this chaotic system, and that someone probably has a return address.