Showing posts with label partly inbred extended family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label partly inbred extended family. Show all posts

April 7, 2008

"I and My Brother against My Cousin"

Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz has a long, useful article in The Weekly Standard about Middle Eastern tribalism, "I and My Brother against My Cousin." He argues that we've overstated the importance of Islam in our recent troubles and understated the importance of tribal behaviors, rooted in nomadism, that are older than the Koran. (Indeed, Islam can be seen as both assuming but also criticizing the low-level feuding that was endemic to that difficult-to-police part of the world.) Fans of "The Man Who Would Be King" and "Lawrence of Arabia" won't be terribly surprised, but will still find the essay provides a solid framework for understanding.

I agree with Kurtz's article on just about everything other than the scale of the threat posed to the U.S. by Middle Eastern tribal tendencies. My view is that the danger, while not negligible (obviously), tends to be self-limiting due to the fractiousness exemplified in the title of the article. These guys aren't the Russians with 10,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ICBMs. It's not like Al-Qaeda is going to build its own fleet of jetliners to fly into our skyscrapers. They're only a danger to us to the extent that we let them be a danger to us. To stop the Russians, we had to build a fleet of Poseidon subs. What we needed to stop Mohamed Atta and Co., in contrast, was a memo to Customs agents telling them to not let terroristy-looking guys through the gates at JFK.

Late last summer, with no decent new movies out, I wrote a retrospective review for The American Conservative of "Lawrence of Arabia" that discussed how we get a glimpse in the second half of the movie of the end of the ancient struggle between the regular armies of settled nations and the irregular warriors of tribal nations:
Among its numerous virtues, "Lawrence" provides insight into America's quandary in Iraq by offering a vivid primer on what William S. Lind calls "asymmetrical" war.

In "Lawrence," regular warfare, with its drilling and decisive battles, is exemplified by the stolid Turkish infantry, while irregular warfare, with its interminable raids and retreats, is embodied in the mercurial Arab camel cavalry.

In the famous screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, the British high command wants Lawrence to trick the Bedouin Arabs into enlisting as cannon fodder in the grinding British attack on the Ottomans at Gaza. Lawrence insubordinately devises a more culturally appropriate strategy for the nomads: "'The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped' and on this ocean the Bedu go where they please and strike where they please." They will harass the Turkish railway to Medina with hit-and-run attacks, avoiding the pitched battles, for which the tribesmen, no fools, wouldn't even show up.

In 1917, in the first two-thirds of the movie, Lawrence's insight works wonderfully. In the 1918 conclusion, however, although the British and Arabs win, the failures of irregularity become clearer. The victorious but still fractious clans can't competently manage the hospitals and waterworks of Damascus. Even before then, there are hints that irregular desert warfare is doomed by the new age of mechanized mobility. When the Turks can get their hands on enough German armored cars and airplanes, they negate the traditional Bedouin advantage in mobility and elusiveness.

Subsequently, it turned out that cultures that were good at regular warfare, like the Israelis and Americans, were also better at building and maintaining the tanks and planes that gave regular militaries the mobility of irregular warriors.


But history never ends; losers adapt. As Lawrence tells Omar Sharif's Sherif Ali, "Nothing is written." Now, after two easy victories in open country over Iraq's derisible regular army, America has bogged down in Iraq's urban jungles fighting countless irregular units that disappear into the alleys as Lawrence's mounted warriors vanished into the dunes.

In other words, while irregular warriors from the Middle East long harassed Christendom due to their often superior mobility (such as that provided by the camel), the mechanization of military mobility in the 20th Century meant that the cultures that fostered cooperation and discipline were much better at building and maintaining the tanks and planes that have determined victory since WWI. Now, though, tactics have evolved, and we're bogged down in places like Basra ... but only because we're in places like Basra.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 6, 2008

It's all relative

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column:

Back in 2006, I wrote in VDARE.com:

Sam Quinones' July 28 article—6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence: An illegal immigrant couple with six children were already living in poverty. Then the quadruplets arrived. They're still in a daze—just might be the best in the rather dull history of the Los Angeles Times.”

Now, Quinones has a new article in the L.A. Times—A familial mean street: Networks of relatives have bred crime on once-peaceful Drew Street, police say—that's worthy of comparison. Once again, Quinones demonstrates that you can't understand immigration, crime, poverty, or the world in general without thinking hard about extended family ties. Who is related to whom?

In Southern California, wealthy people live in or near the hills, while poor people live on the endless flat lands. So it was a matter of some surprise to many Angelenos last February 21 when a running gun battle between cops and gangbangers armed in a style worthy of a big budget action movie broke out just north of Downtown LA between Dodger Stadium and the beautiful Forest Lawn cemetery.

Quinones explains the extended family relations that have made Glassell Park, despite its seemingly prime location, one of the smallest but nastiest slums in America. He focuses on "Mama" Leon, the mother of a gang-banger who was killed by cops in February for firing his AK-47 automatic rifle at them:

"An illegal immigrant and mother of 13, [Maria] Leon has a lengthy arrest record and three convictions for drug-related crimes—for which she's served no prison time, according to court documents. …

"Police said Leon, 44, and her extended family were deeply involved in the drug trade that has made Drew Street among L.A.'s most notorious."

As I've long argued, the most overlooked factor in better understanding a host of hot-button issues, such as race, crime, immigration, even the chaos in Iraq, are family ties. Who one's relatives are turns out to have endless ramifications that are mostly ignored by the media.

Those of us who come from law-abiding backgrounds in which nuclear families get together with their extended family relatives mostly just on holidays have a hard time imagining ourselves in situations where we can't call 911, where we've done something so wrong that the only people we can turn to are our mafia of relatives.

Still, people in those situations create most of the news in this world. Quinones is one of the few reporters who gets it:

"The Leons—and members of several other immigrant families on Drew Street whom authorities have charged with criminal acts—hail from the town of Tlalchapa in the state of Guerrero, which has a reputation as one of Mexico's most violent regions. Police estimate that dozens of members of these extended families belong to the Avenues gang."

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 29, 2008

NYT: "Jews are best understood as a 'large extended family'"

In the NYT Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg has an article entitled "How Do You Prove You're a Jew" that echoes what I've been saying about the definition of what a racial group is for years:

Zvi Zohar, a professor of law and Jewish studies at Bar-Ilan University, told me that in Judaism’s classical view of itself, Jews are best understood as a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God. Those who didn’t practice the faith remained part of the family, even if traditionally they were regarded as black sheep. Converts were adopted members of the clan.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 15, 2007

The Steveosphere in The New Republic

The New Republic recently published an article entitled "Why genes don't determine race: Race Against History" by Merlin Chowkwanyun that's a lot of the same old same old.

I've long felt my single biggest contribution was coming up with a definition of "racial group" that was both rigorous and common-sensical ("a partly inbred extended family"). Simply having a useful definition should do much to dispel the hysteria, bad-faith, status-seeking, and general air of nonsense surrounding the topic of race.

On the other hand, my definition hasn't exactly swept like wildfire through the intellectual world as Chowkwanyun. But that's the way it generally is. You don't persuade famous thinkers, like, say, Richard Rorty, you outlive them. A new generation then comes along that doesn't have their egos invested in bad old ideas.

So, I was pleased to see in TNR a reply to the article by Justin Shubow that demonstrates a good familiarity with state-of-the-art thinking on the subject.

(By the way, Steven Pinker was mistaken in attributing the phrase a "a race is just a very large and partly inbred family" to my friend Vince Sarich -- Sarich was the first to draw the analogy of races to fuzzy sets in math.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer