Newsletter January, 06

Table of Contents:

[On Street Gangs and Guns] [On the Reality of Evil] [The Fundamentals of Terrorism] [Alexander Mackenzie’s Bookshelf] [Voices of Freedom]

In a time when ethnically based criminal societies and terrorist movements have become major threats, it becomes impossible to address them without being constantly reminded – thanks to the diktats of contemporary post-modernist thinking – that taking action (or engaging in self-defence) is somehow ‘intolerant’.

It appears hypocritical when demands for tolerance are extended from the likes of Pro-Jihadist Muslim clerics or those who cannot say ‘American’ without sneering. There are two things one should always remember about demands for tolerance.

It helps to think of tolerance as being like credit – default on your loans, max-out your credit cards, and then go see how ‘tolerant’ your bank manager has become. Indeed, tolerance is a loan of acceptance extended against the time one actually starts coining real respect.

Tolerance is deferred respect advanced on credit, and respect eventually has to be both earned and returned. A callow Army 2^nd Lieutenant (aren’t they all?), the new neighbor with the loud stereo, an immigrant in a new country; they all have to learn this lesson or else they learn a harder one. For those who refuse to earn respect or to give it, intolerance eventually becomes their natural due, and there’s nothing wrong about saying so.

Introduction

The gang ‘crisis’ in several major Canadian cities is real enough – and it is becoming a growing problem. There are examples from many other countries of just how bad a gang problem can become if left unchecked. However, in a hysterical rush to action by politicians who should have been paying attention to a growing trend for, lo, these past 15 years, it is clear that very little is understood about the phenomenon. As one citizen observed to the author, “If Johnny Lunchpail can figure out what’s going on by watching the 6:00 news, how come the politicians can’t? ” Indeed.

To begin with, since much in this exposition could be dismissed by the usual suspects as being ‘inappropriate’ (i.e. politically incorrect), a piece of my family history might be entirely appropriate. One of my grandfathers and a granduncle grew up in the Irish slums on lower Manhattan at the close of the 19^th Century. Their father had died earlier (after inhaling live steam in an industrial accident); and as there was no social welfare system to pick up the slack, their mother turned to brewing bootleg whiskey to make a living – tantamount in those days and that setting to dealing in drugs now. The neighborhood was desperately poor, crime-ridden and the authorities were scarce on the ground.

Consequently, both boys were at considerable risk of being drawn into one of the many criminal gangs in the area. My granduncle did, and ended up as a thief, extortionist, fraud artist (he rigged minor sporting events for the punters) and gunman before his career choice killed him in 1917. My grandfather foreswore alcohol, worked hard, stayed law-abiding, and made his own way out of the slums. His three children and ward all made good, even despite the vicissitudes of the Great Depression and the Second World War during their own young lives.

There are three points to draw from this:

This also means that a community with a gang problem has let it either develop or worsen through its own inactivity and that – while circumstances of society and community often will contribute to a gang problem – nobody in the Crips, Bloods, AK Kanon, the Indian Posse or whatever, can claim environment and upbringing as a defence for his conduct.

In one of the many episodes of ‘The Simpsons’, the town of Springfield is menaced by an impending comet strike. Predictably, much panic ensues until the event actually happens and turns out not to have been doomsday after all; whereupon a number of the citizens decide “Let’s burn down the observatory to make sure this never happens again!”

In the aftermath of a startling year of gang violence in Toronto – not to mention growing problems in Edmonton, Vancouver and Winnipeg – the issue has finally become important. However, gang violence is not a simple problem with a simple solution. It represents numerous failures in our immigration, welfare, education, judicial and aboriginal policies; and tackling the gangs will not be easy. Human nature being what it is, ad hoc responses from some politicians (notably Paul Martin and Toronto Mayor David Miller) tried to blame the Americans and Canadian handgun owners for the problem. These two could feel right at home in the fictional cartoon town of Springfield.

Yes, it is true that the street gangs in much of Canada are armed, and that their indiscriminate gunplay have been killing and wounded citizens all over our streets. In Toronto in 2005 there were 78 homicides (a record for the city – but still a much lower murder rate than many other North American cities experience). Toronto’s 2005 homicides could be broken down – loosely – in the following manner.

Manner of Homicide

Caution: Both categories are simplifications; ‘Domestic’ extends to situations where the deceased was murdered by a tenant, room-mate, spouse, parent, child, neighbor, or ex-lover. The deceased in the second category are presumed to have been killed by criminals or gang members, and often seemed to have no relationship of any kind with their killers.

Apparent Identity of Victims

The South Asian category includes Middle Easterners, and “White” was a catch-all for some victims who didn’t have a photo published and whose rough identity could not be determined from their name or appearance.

Male/Female Victims by Age

Strangling and stabbing remain constant favorites for those with the urge to murder their spouses, irritating room-mates or inconvenient relatives. The gangs don’t seem to go in for these approaches all that often and their favorite weapons are handguns, which have been heavily controlled in Canada since the 1930s, so it seems reasonable to ask where are they coming from?

Legal Owners?

Toronto’s Mayor Miller has made much of what he keeps calling “so-called legitimate” owners of firearms as the source of the City’s gun violence. The so-called legitimate mayor of the city might want to educate himself on a few facts first.

For those Canadians who would like to purchase a legal handgun in Canada, they should find a qualified and licensed firearms instructor and take both of the training courses to handle non-restricted (i.e. hunting arms) and restricted (i.e. handguns) firearms. Attention must be paid to the courses, there are both written and practical exams for all would be gun-owners with a mandatory passing grade of 80%. Then they must apply for a Federal ‘Possession and Acquisition License’ (PAL) and wait a couple of months for this – while a background check is conducted.

The next step is to join a licensed gun club and pass their scrutiny. As no club is interested in accepting potential murders who have made it this far, they will want to do their own assessments, usually by allowing only a probationary membership while they size candidates up and run their own tests of a new member’s safe-handling standards. Once content with that, one can go to a gun store (now increasingly rare) and purchase a hand-gun… but the buyer can’t carry it home just yet.

The store (or gun owner if this is a private transaction) must then transfer the ownership of the gun to the new owner through the Federal firearms registry and who must then get an ATT – Authority to Transport – allowing them to carry it home provided the safe transport requirements are met. As all owners must have passed their exams to get a PAL, they have no excuse for remaining ignorant of these requirements. Each handgun must have a locking mechanism on the gun itself, be transported in a locked container, and any ammunition must be carried in a separate locked container. Storage requirements at home are identical, although a good safe or vault will meet the needs of the law too.

As nobody can long retain a legal handgun in their ownership without belonging to a recognized pistol club, a new shooter needs to contact his Club’s secretary. He or she will then write to the appropriate provincial firearms officer, requesting another ATT which allows the shooter to carry it (again, with the same transport requirements being observed) to and from officially recognized ranges only. Firing it anywhere else is an offense.

As a Canadian’s choice of handgun and ammunition is much limited by law, the chance of being able to purchase a snub-nosed pistol with a 20 round magazine full of black-talon ammunition (a particularly nasty variant of hollow-point bullets, which police can carry, but citizens may not) would be nil. A few people, mostly ‘grandfathered’ under existing legislation, can legally acquire shorter barreled handguns of specific prohibited calibers; a new owner can’t -- unless they were left Dad’s old war souvenir Walther PP in his will. In which case, they can jump through all the same hoops to get this specific prohibited gun only.

So you want to be a Crip or Blood gangstah with a Glock tucked in your belt? Well, your magazines cannot hold more than ten rounds (and no store will sell you a high capacity clip). Toting around the two lock boxes is inconvenient – for a start they really don’t look like ‘bling’; and legal owner or not, woe betide your gun collection if you ever fire your pistol anywhere except at a licensed range.

Now suppose a gang member does take all these steps and now illegally carries around his legally-owned firearm. Gang members do get arrested from time to time, and police continually develop intelligence on members… surely the database of owners and the registration system would be routinely consulted against the membership rolls of the Crips, Bloods, Posses, etcetera. Otherwise, what has all the expense of the registration system been for?

Stolen Guns and Pistols from America

Are gangs stealing legally owned guns? Yes, it does happen from time to time – although not nearly as often as Mayor Miller or Paul Martin believe. Both have cited a figure from some police sources that claims 50% of the guns they recover in Canada were legally owned. The source (whatever it was) wasn’t being entirely accurate.

Police ‘recover’ a lot of guns in Canada. When a widow brings in the pistols her late husband brought back from WW-II, even if legally owned and registered, they are now ‘recovered’ firearms. A duck hunter involved in an acrimonious divorce might have to surrender his shotguns for a while, based on an allegation from his wife that he threatened her. These become recovered weapons even though they may well be returned later. Likewise, a gun collector with legally owned prohibited weapons whose home caught fire may hand over her firearms to police for temporary safe storage– and these too are ‘recovered’.

If there is a recent report on the status – legal or black market – of all guns seized as the result of street arrests or police investigations into gangs, it doesn’t seem to be publicly available. However, in 1992-93, Operation Gunrunner (a police intelligence project in Southern Ontario) resulted in the purchase of 17 black market handguns – 16 of which had been diverted to the underground from within the United States.

Later, in 1994 at the trial of a Vermont gun-dealer who was diverting firearms into the Canadian black market (via the Mohawk Warriors) details were provided from Canadian police about 102 handguns – out of something ranging from 700 to 2,000 pistols which were smuggled into Canada. The Canadian police who recovered these weapons in arrests all across the country also retrieved 45 other weapons at the time; at least seven of which had also been smuggled into Canada from the US.

For those who cannot do the arithmetic, 16 out of 17 equates to 94 percent, not 50%. And 107 (at least) out of 145 comes to 74 percent. The usual estimate of street cops is that at least 80% of the pistols in the hands of Canadian criminals come from American sources. Anecdotal evidence from street cops and coroners in 2004-5 across Canada suggest this trend is holding.

So what is new about this? Actually there is a lot of good news from the last decade.

Black Market Dynamics

Besides irrationally blaming Canadian firearms owners for the violence in Toronto, both Paul Martin and Toronto mayor David Miller sounded on the Americans – blaming them for the “export of their gun violence.” This criticism wasn’t fair either. The Americans have done a lot to choke off the supply of black market handguns in the last decade.

Economics 101 – the laws of supply and demand – work as much for black markets as they do for legal ones. If the demand for a commodity outstrips the supply, the price goes up. The price for black market handguns on Canada’s streets seems to have doubled in the last decade, but the driving force behind what may be sometimes as much as a 400% markup from legal American prices has little or nothing to do with our own gun laws.

To be sure, this price mark-up is not universal. It’s hard to get that gang swagger going if you only have an itty-bitty .22 target pistol tucked in your waistband, so a .22 caliber pistol might only get a 200% markup from its US over-the counter price. The cheap ‘Saturday Night Special’ .25 and .32 calibre automatics (such as the Bryco and Sundance Models) which are smaller than a pack of cigarettes appear to get a 300% markup. The full 400% markup is reserved for 9mm, .40 or .45 calibre semi-automatics like the Glock or Tec-9, especially for ‘prestige’ guns (meaning they look cool and often appear in movies and videos).

In the past decade, the number of licensed gun dealers in the United States has shrunk by about two thirds. Essentially, new regulations enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) closed down dealers who operated without licensed and inspected business premises – the “kitchen table dealers” or characters who would sell from their cars. Paperwork is inspected more often than it used to be and tougher regulations govern the export (and import) of firearms.

The BATF also maintains liaison officers in several jurisdictions outside of the US, including Canada, to facilitate the tracing of US made firearms which surface in the Black Market. The US government and most American gun manufacturers are eager to shut down those who divert firearms into the underground supply. It is these American actions and not our failed 1994 gun control law that escalated gun prices on Canada’s streets.

In 2004, the Israelis were making a tremendous effort to choke off the supply of weapons going to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Their effort enjoyed mixed success. According to some media sources (and notes the author made in a May 2004 interview with the then-head of counter-terrorism with the Israeli National Police), the price of an AK-47 assault rifle in Gaza had risen to some $2,500 US and bullets were going for a dollar apiece. There are places in the world where AK-47s normally go for less than $200 with a bonus box of cartridges thrown in.

However, it said much that there was no shortage of AK-47s in Gaza, and that Palestinians would give up buying a taxicab or opening a shop just so they could get an assault rifle (which explains much about the Palestinian state of mind and economy). Again, a high demand and restricted supply had no other effect than to inflate the price.

The ultimate folly – almost as bizarre as burning down observatories to prevent comet impacts – is to work towards a stronger abolition of privately owned firearms. The British went this route after the 1996 Dunblaine Massacre of schoolchildren by a disappointed near pedophile and found that their violent crime rate has shot up enormously. Criminal gangs (of which the UK has no shortage) are still quite able to procure firearms even though legal ownership of everything but some basic sporting shotguns has been banned.

When faced with supply problems, the black market can be innovative too – on Toronto’s streets many aspiring gangstahs cannot now afford a gun; so they rent one for a while from an underground dealer. So they can flash the gun, get the swagger, bust caps at a rival (in their inimitable let’s-shoot-up-the-neighborhood style that hits everybody but their target), and then return the gun later. Of course, there is a lottery of sorts with this practice. Eventually, some kid gets caught holding the gun that’s wanted in a half a dozen shooting episodes and the police get to tell their wannabe thug just who is going to be holding the bag for all these other offenses.

British police have already seen similar practices, plus a wide variety of home-made guns, drilled-out starter pistols and other improvised firearms. Sawed off rifles and shotguns are common in the UK and not unknown in Canada either (Kids! Only very very very silly people saw off rifles and shotguns and use them as pistols. Yes, it looks cool in the movies, but you won’t hit a thing beyond arm’s reach, the gun will eventually blow up in your face and/or break your arm, and you have just turned a perfectly acceptable non-restricted sporting firearm into a useless prohibited weapon.)

Gangs that are involved in narcotics don’t have to bother with these improvisations. Cash flow is no problem and they already have a clandestine pipeline for their product. It is not that difficult to move handguns into the pipeline and to pay for them. Moreover, in contrast to legally manufactured handguns from legitimate European and US suppliers, a plentiful supply of high quality weapons for the gangs of the world is starting to emerge. The Glock-17 that came off a production line in Austria has a serial number stamped on it and a documented history. The cloned copy from some unknown manufacturer in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America or from China might be just as good, and it is thoroughly untraceable and much cheaper. These are already emerging throughout Europe and are now appearing in North America’s cities.

If Paul Martin and David Miller actually “burn down the observatory to make sure this never happens again”, be sure that the abolition of legal handgun ownership will have no effect whatsoever on gang violence on Canada’s streets.

-- John Thompson

On the Reality of Evil

-- John Robson is a columnist (The Ottawa Citizen), radio commentator (CFRB) and television show host (the I Channel).

Hitler. There, I said it right away. So the internet rule against resorting to Hitler analogies in an argument won’t apply to me because I’m starting with one instead. Adolf Hitler proves there is, at least sometimes, evil in the world. Raw, howling evil. Worse than 10 werewolves.

It’s important to be clear and direct on this point because if you say the word ‘evil’ while discussing foreign policy you are liable to be scoffed at as not merely wrong but vulgar. This reaction is distinctly unhelpful, but unfortunately very common.

The loudest scoffing comes from post-modern leftists who deny there is such a thing as evil. But there is also quiet snickering from Realpolitik right-wingers, who might well agree that evil exists but deny that the concept has legitimate application in foreign affairs. A third kind of bitter laughter comes from those who think “George Bush is the real war criminal” but their implicit commitment to the notion that war crimes are evil-like objects allows me, for the purposes of this article, to declare that Q.E.D. With those people we can have a useful argument if, but only if, we first clear away the first two objections.

Let us start with the postmodernists, since obviously we should not be talking about evil in foreign policy if there is in principle no such thing as evil. Here we are not primarily quarrelling about diplomacy. Instead, we are curtly summarizing a vast philosophical debate. As we must, not only for its theoretical importance but because (an easily testable hypothesis) calling things evil, in domestic or foreign affairs, provokes scorn and outrage not for mislabelling things but for using the label at all.

Most non-judgemental people are also sanctimonious foes of racism, sexism and homophobia, plus drugs, tobacco, obesity, and any number of other apparently victimless vices. Their curious mixture of high dudgeon and refusal to use blunt language results in peculiar verbal acrobatics like a quaint, even pathetic wielding of the anodyne ‘inappropriate’ where ‘depraved’ or ‘wicked’ would be far more natural. But it is not entirely illogical.

There are two essentially materialist grounds for denying the validity of ‘evil’ as a concept. First is the ‘behaviourist’ argument that anyone knowing the position and velocity of each particle at the time of the Big Bang could predict the electrical activity in our brains now. Even if no one could in fact know these things, all our thoughts and actions are predetermined and inevitable including the illusion that we make choices so logically there is no possibility of human agency and no good actions or bad ones. There is something peculiar about the vehemence with which behaviourists insist they are mere spectators at the puppet-show of their own existence, but presumably it’s predetermined too.

The second, ‘therapeutic’ type of materialist shares with traditional moralists the belief that no one could really understand good yet do evil. But where traditionalists blame a disordered will that refuses to understand good, therapists blame a disordered understanding that cannot do so, and insist that some form of therapy, psychological or pharmaceutical, could in principle make all wrongdoers benign whether or not we can find and administer such therapy in practice. There is something peculiar about the outrage they exhibit when wronged, but presumably it’s curable as well.

It’s a tangled web. But at the risk of reducing a vast library of philosophical speculation to ashes, I say with C.S. Lewis that empirically it is not possible to live according to such beliefs nor even to hold them. Look inside your own head, he insists, and you will find belief in right and wrong there as an inescapable empirical fact: Even the most devoted relativist does not merely hope I will not terminate our debate by shooting him, he firmly believes I should not .

The argument is not necessarily religious. People like Lewis and J. Budziszewski argue not from theology to moral law but the other way around. It is enough to mention pedophile rape-murder to prove that evil exists, whatever you proceed to make of it. Here I stand on the basic question of evil; I can do no other. And neither can you. Certain things are simply, radically and deeply wrong whether or not there is a God. In short, they are evil. And genocide is among them.

To establish that evil exists does not resolve the question of what it includes nor what we are to do about it. This problem is complex, to put it mildly, especially when we turn our attention to the scoffing of the Realpolitikers who consider it naïve to import moralistic concepts into diplomacy.

Their objection is not on the face of it unreasonable. It is perfectly possible for a concept to be legitimate and important in some areas of life without being applicable in others. You can’t run a draw play [a deceptive advance in Rugby – ed.] in the kitchen. And while it is possible to put poison in the punch bowl, there is no more place for an index entry ‘Evil’ in a cookbook than for ‘Flour, sifting’ in a work of metaphysics. Moreover, most of those traditionally considered idealists or moralists in international affairs, from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter, have usually made an appalling hash of things. Not always; Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire then promptly demolished it. And the fact that a concept does not necessarily apply is not the same as it necessarily not applying. We need to weigh the Realpolitikers’ specific objection and see if we cannot deal with it.

A Nixonian Realpolitiker shudders at the use of moralistic language in foreign policy on the grounds that whatever our purposes, instrumentally there are only state interests defended well or badly. Another nation threatens us because it is powerful not because it is evil. If we slide into error on this point it distorts our analysis and undermines our effectiveness even if we are fighting communism or Nazism as best we can because, teleologically, it is evil.

Aside from postmodern Realpolitikers (if any such exist), the real objection here is that even if some regimes have worse motives than others, it does not affect how they pursue the elements of power nor the nature of those elements. As a professor of mine observed, the October Revolution did not cause Russia to fly to South America, so Lenin and Stalin cared as much as any Czar about the Bosphorus and access for Russia to the Mediterranean.

Let me therefore run a draw play of my own and let this objection pass through my defences then run right by it. As I have argued elsewhere, the essence of Realpolitik is to view nations the way the sensible economist views individuals: They have goals we cannot do much to change and which do vary enormously, but we can profoundly alter the way they pursue those goals by altering (and only by altering) the incentives they face. All nations are less likely to invade their neighbour if threatened by nuclear retaliation, whatever their underlying propensity to invasion, and more likely to do so if their neighbour’s most powerful ally suffers a paralyzing economic or moral collapse.

From this point of view it does not matter whether the nature of an adversary’s goals, and his overall understanding of the cosmos, affect his methods. I think they do: For instance the Soviet conviction that history was on their side made them more relentlessly aggressive in the long run than the Czars but, at the same time, their atheism had the salutary effect of making them reasonably cautious in the short run. If so we have far more to fear from nuclear-armed adversaries who think blowing up the world the right way may be precisely the ticket to paradise. But it is not a question we need to settle here, because either way the essence of Realpolitik is a method: that in attempting to shape the conduct of any nation, from Britain to Byzantium, we ought like Adam Smith to talk not of our necessities but of their advantage. Such a conclusion is unaffected by, and has no effect on, the proposition that an adversary is evil, which depends on other considerations -- which abound.

Take Genghis Khan, please. Would one call him evil? Would one do so while discussing foreign policy? Certainly conquest by the Mongol Horde seems to fulfil all evil’s essential functions. It was qualitatively different from being conquered by the French, let alone the British, largely because the Mongols evilly held human life cheaper and the suffering of others more entertaining. According to a story in the Globe and Mail in August 2000, Genghis’ “ philosophy of life was that a man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat an enemy, seizing his possessions, riding his horses and using the bodies of his women as nightshirts”. As he grew old and worried about mortality, Genghis took an interest in Taoism. With regret, he realized he couldn’t make the lifestyle changes. To call raping half the young women in Asia a ‘lifestyle’ is typical of the verbal and moral contortions of the non-judgemental. For the rest of us, the question was how to stop Genghis Khan, not whether or why.

Complex practical and moral questions remain. God did not go away and leave us in charge. Richard Nixon was right to think he was president of the United States not the world, and while he certainly had the moral and legal right, and possibly the political power, to defend it against its enemies he did not have the moral and legal right, or the political power, to straighten out the entire world. It is difficult to say when pre-emptive action is justified in self-defence, let alone to stop genocide elsewhere. But no one said the job would be easy. And none of these questions affect the fundamental fact that there is evil in the world.

Among the resulting perils is the risk of complicity with raw evil, which can take various forms. In addition to the hard-core supporters; those who dally in geopolitical ‘rough trade’ for the thrill and those who serve evil for money, I suspect there is also a circle of Hell reserved for those whose reaction to evil is neither co-conspiracy nor complicity but frivolity. For instance the reaction of many in the west to the declaration by Iran’s new president that “ Israel must be wiped off the map .” He wasn’t kidding, and his election opponent, Hashemi Rafsanjani, had called Israel “the most hideous occurrence in history ” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst ”. Should the Iranian government string along the silly pseudo-statesmen of the West until its rockets are ready and then annihilate Tel Aviv, those who laughed off Tehran’s threats and reserved their dudgeon for George Bush and Tony Blair will stand convicted of evil no less grotesque for being frivolous.

Cowardice in the face of evil is more complicated. Aristotle called courage first among virtues because without it we exercise the others only where convenient. But its one thing to praise resistance to tyranny from a comfy armchair and quite another to march into Red Square in 1937 and yell that Stalin killed Kirov. However there is a different kind of cowardice that flourishes not under duress but pre-emptively and elaborately disguises pusillanimity as a higher bravery, like Woodrow Wilson being “too proud to fight”. In the long run it is physically dangerous; as Hillaire Belloc said, “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight/ But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right .” But it is immediately disgraceful.

Before we go, is there not a prudential concern that by using terms such as evil we will become sanctimonious, absolutist and warlike? I think not. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “If a war is not a holy war, it is an unholy war .” His reason was that “ No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol. ” I don’t even understand, if there aren’t right and wrong, what we’re all so worked up about? And few things scare me more than someone who thinks if he can beat the posse to his coffin and slam down the lid, he is beyond any punishment. Of course, as Lincoln reminds us, the trick is to make sure you are on the side of the right God. Ba’al won’t do.

We also have to remember Chesterton’s brief answer when asked what is wrong with the world: “I am.” That our enemies are evil by no means guarantees that we are good. But nor does the fact that we are not always good mean our enemies are not evil. They are, and it matters in foreign policy. If it was wrong for Jean-Bedel Bokassa to eat his own citizens it is wrong for him to eat ours, and vice versa. And while it may or may not require us to alter our approach to containing him it certainly affects the urgency.

It was not ‘inappropriate’ of Adolf Hitler to want to exterminate the Jews within Germany and in Germany’s neighbours, to put homosexuals in concentration camps, along with dissidents, and gypsies, murder his opponents and invade his neighbours. It was evil.

I don’t have a simple solution to the problems of evil, let alone an easy one. But I do have a problem of evil, and so do you, at home and abroad. If you’re tempted to doubt it, remember: Hitler.

In life, particularly during some crisis or emergency, people often get so caught up in the details that they forget both common-sense and the big picture about the problem that confronts them. This is particularly true in dealing with terrorism.

One can get the sense today that, with the looming threat of Iranian nuclear weapons, a Hamas election win among the Palestinians, a impending offensive against Canada’s troops in Afghanistan, the potential for more Muslim riots in Europe, etcetera, we are becoming bewildered by a series of crises. Indeed, it is not impossible that these are all linked by a design which hopes to achieve this effect and hopes that 2006-7 might be pivotal years in Human history. A Jihadist atrocity in Canada is also very possible in the next two years, and one can predict the hysterical reactions of opinion from some sectors of the public.

In preparing for what may be a very tumultuous time, it would be helpful to remember the basics of terrorism, insurgency, and psychological warfare (particularly when it comes from front groups). Sticking to common sense and the fundamentals is always a sure guide in times of crisis.

Terrorism is as terrorism does

Terrorism is not radicalism or protest; nor are terrorists ‘soldiers’ – they are thugs on the make. The characteristics of terrorism involve deceit, concealment and violent atrocity in pursuit of an abstract agenda. They only seek to tear down. Building up is not something that they are focused on except in the most general ‘after I win everything will be better’ sense.

Remember that terrorists lie to themselves

So why expect them to be truthful to the rest of us? Terrorists allow themselves to become caught in an artificial worldview, convince themselves that their violent actions are for the purest of motives, and believe that they are heroic figures and agents of destiny. The longer they stay in their group, the more real these self-deceptions become and the more unlikely it is that they will ever abandon their course. One should then also remember that:

There are no root causes, okay ?

If somebody is talking about root causes, you can automatically dismiss their viewpoint as being unhelpful (at least). Terrorism always involves choice. Terrorists always deliberately select to identify with an ideology that lets them act out in the way that they chose to. Carlos the Jackal, Yasser Arafat and Bin Laden each could have been anything they wanted to be, but they each chose to be a terrorist.

The terrorist’s first victims are his own people

If you think taking measures against al Qaeda is disrespectful to Muslims, think again. Jihadists have killed far more Muslims in the last 20 years than the United States and Israel combined. Then add American and other Western emergency aid and interventions that have saved Muslim lives to the total. How many Muslims has al Qaeda saved from famine and want?

The terrorist's claims of leadership are always suspect

If a terrorist is claiming to be speaking for an entire people, it’s usually because he silenced the moderate leaders among them. Terrorists want to lead societies and don’t want compromise – the first killing by the leader of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers was of a federalist Tamil politician… and they’re still being murdered there.

We are the good guys. Terrorists are not

If you don’t understand this yet, you may be afflicted with “Fuzzy-Thinkingitis” a common problem in the Post Modernist environment where no values are concrete, context is irrelevant and all opinions are to be regarded as being equal. Please restrain yourself from public commentary in order to protect others from your condition.

Self-Defence is not immoral

If a terrorist thinks it is worth his while to attack you, surely it is worth your while to defend yourself? The terrorist thinks passivity is weakness and holds it in contempt, and despises tolerance except when using it as a shield. There is no real hope of political negotiation, so you might as well look to your defences.

Their idea of peace is not your idea of peace

This is especially true with the Jihadis – for them peace can only come when the whole world is under the rule of a restored Caliphate (which, frankly, will spell an end to human progress).

We can't protect everything all the time; make your choices carefully

Terrorists will always get through somehow, and the cost of greater protection comes with a very steep price-tag. We can only expect so much of our police and security without turning into a totalitarian state, so think carefully about what you ask for. However, we can spend more than we have been and Canada’s new anti-terror laws are a reasonable response.

The terrorist wants you to feel afraid and helpless

Here is how you fight back against terrorism – refuse to be terrorized. Live as normally as you can. Don’t fear the abstract threat but respect the real one (e.g. go touring in Europe but don’t go backpacking in northwestern Pakistan). If and when your city gets hit, make a visible show of resolute calm.

Those who note a tendency towards military history in this version might guess correctly that some holiday reading appears here. -- JT

Reading William Sampson’s Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2005) is an infuriating exercise. Arrested in 2000 as a face-saving measure by Saudi authorities who refused to admit Jihadi terrorists were at work in their kingdom, he was mercilessly abused and tortured until his release in 2003 (after al Qaeda’s presence could no longer be denied). His greatest contempt is not for his captors and torturers – hell, we know the Saudis are not far removed from their barbarian grandfathers -- but is rightly aimed at our own Department of Foreign Affairs and their “hypocrisy, downright dishonesty, and treachery…” We pay our civil servants to protect our citizens, and we have no need to tolerate those who forget this.

As we roll into the 90^th anniversaries of the giant battles of the First World War, there is a re-think underway concerning many of the common assumptions about the conduct of the war (particularly in the British/Dominion armies) and some of the stereotypes are falling thick and fast. Paddy Griffith’s Battle Tactics of the Western Front (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994) led the charge – pointing out the constant innovation and experimentation by Britain’s supposedly hide-bound generals in finding a solution to the paradigm of the trenches. Incidentally, the proportion of British general officers killed or wounded in battle was higher in World War One than in any other conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. One of the books in the second wave of attacks on traditional views is Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock (Cassel, London, 2003). One minor point among the many major arguments Corrigan presented is that, actually, there were a number of engagements when cavalry were decisive on the Western Front, even in 1918!

Another unusual contribution to military and social history comes from the editing work of Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova: A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-45. (Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto, 2005). Grossman was an extraordinary man – and extraordinarily lucky. He was a Soviet Jewish journalist who wrote candidly from the front-lines in the Second World War, who wasn’t a party member, never praised Stalin in print… and narrowly escaped encirclement on several occasions during 1941 (his shot-up truck testified to a number of close encounters, he also spent months inside Stalingrad during the battle). His columns in the Soviet Red Army Newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda were extremely popular during the war and reflect a humanity and decency that the brutality and horror of Stalin’s rule and the war with Hitler never quite managed to crush. Grossman is a man to admire.

Old classics should never be neglected and the shelves of a serious student of terrorism should hold them. The Institute has frequently cited Jacque Ellul and his classic Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes for good reason – even the Soviets liked it, telling Canadian communists on a course there in the 1970s that Ellul was “dialectically wrong, but still very good.”. The Random House 1965 edition is still occasionally seen on bookshelves and is worth hunting for. Ellul carefully maps out what is, and is not, propaganda and how it is transmitted. For the practitioner of psychological warfare, Ellul also gives excellent advice on how to stick a spoke through the propagandist’s wheels.

“We are not fighting so that you will offer us something, we are fighting to eliminate you.”

“We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world"

“Guerillas never win wars, but their adversaries often lose them.”

And this just in from the ‘You-got-that-right buddy, er, Your Highness’ Department…

“If you install a burglar alarm in your household, it is only the burglar who can get annoyed.”

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca