It’s time, as usual for Weekend Reflections. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.
55 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”
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John Quiggin 
>Osama bin Laden, the complete and utter wanker that he is, and his backward ilk have not perhaps begun to fathom what it will be like to challenge the rising power that is China.
Yes but he has a powerful ally in the Chinese government itself which has done so much to alienate its Uighur population in Xinjiang and other muslim minorities within China.
Also, I think it is a mistake to characterise Bin Laden as “backward” – let’s settle for evil, vicious, bigoted and unworthy to live. Bin Laden is a qualified engineer. Zawahiri, his second in command, was a highly respected pediatrician in his native Egypt. Al Qadea has shown itself adept at using technology such as mobile phones and websites when they suit their purposes.
Yes, IG.
One of the sillier comments to waft out of the dust of the World Trade Center demolition was that 9-11 signified the “end of postmodernism”.
It served everyone’s purpose at the time to conceive of Al Qaeda as some sort of medieval remnant.
In fact, taking advantage of a wide range of technologies, including the all-pervasive WWW, Al Qaeda is fighting a distinctly postmodern war, decentralised, loose-knit command and control, out-sourcing services, franchising. How cutting-edge is that?
I doubt that any quasi-military force in history has got more bang for its buck than Al Qaeda.
While on the subject of WWW communications, here is the address of a site called “Jihad Unspun”. It was littered with the most poisonous anti-semitism and other affectations of conspiratorial Islamism. Nevertheless, the site had corresponents on the ground in outlying Iraqi towns. The account one of them gave of the recent ambush of US troops was highly circumstantial and had the ring of truth, including the insight that the townsfolk knew what was going down days before. As a result all the young men left town, leaving only the aged to by rounded up by US troops in the retaliatory raids. If this is true, then it does not say much for US military intelligence.
Anyway, the last time I looked, the site was blocked. Here’s the address:
http://www.jihadunspun.com/home.php
IG, nobody could disagree with your point about sophisticated use of technology although the accompanying colourful language is indeed mediaeval and the aims are neanderthal. The thought of letting zawahiri look after your children on the other hand, is altogether something else for which there is perhaps no word. I was also indeed referring to the autonomous regions as IG describes. Oh, I can’t wait to see how the State Council might choose to deal with them, although of course as our own madam fu ying said so recently ‘it’s not the seventies you know’, so of course anything’s possible.
what the,
the Chinese State Council has been trying to deal with the autonomous regions and continues to fail. One of the things they need to learn was from Mao himself, when he said “…the greater the repression, the greater the revolution.” The point IG was making is that it is those attempts at repression that drive the revolt.
The only way to successfully defeat an uprising like that is through carrot and stick. The stick is a short term measure to hold on through the battles, but it is the carrot that will ultimately win the war. The State Council is just using the stick.
Sigh. Sufficient repression, to the point of ethnic cleansing or genocide, alwys works. The trick is doing it.
The Chinese, knowing the difficulties, are using a reverse technique that is not generally available: change a majority into a minority by transmigration. That won’t solve the problem, but it will make a paliative approach indefinitely sustainable until assimilation eventually occurs (you do appreciate that the Han are not the indigenous people of the lower reaches of the great river valleys of China?).