Chilling!

"He is obviously a braggart, but if a tenth of what he says is true, it is chilling."


Prof. Cole discards nine tenths of it. To discard ten tenths of it would not really so very different, then, would it? Considering that this tale comes before the world with truly bizarre journalistic credentials -- "There's no way to confirm Abu Rusil's accounts, but there's every reason to believe them" --, that odd tenth looks pretty discardable.

A faint whiff of Willi Munzenberg pervades the whole. It is so extremely easy to see why certain interested parties might invent "Abu Rusil" even if he does not exist, that surely one errs on the safe side to guess that in fact he was invented?

It might be objected that mere Arabs with a neo-Iraqi civil war have not yet advanced as far as Willi Munzenberg "journalism" about the Spanish civil war. A weighty point! Yet if mere Arabs are ever to get there eventually -- and why, after all, should they not? what prevents?-- mightn't the first signs of their arrival look rather like this?

P-R-O-V-O-C-A-T-I-O-N: eleven letters, four syllables. Not exactly Groucho Marx's "common word, a word you use everyday," but also a good deal less recondite than almost any noun that significantly figures in Organic Chemistry 101.

But I oversimplify, for this is not provocatio simplex, which mere Arabs knew about way back before they even got religion, when they ruthlessly unleashed their tribal poets' pagan satires upon one another. This is what a political Linné might dub provocatio munzenbergensis, not any familiar and traditional incitement of Spaniard against Spaniard, but an extramural incitement of all the world press against those Spaniards that Willi and Willi's masters thought really worthy to be clobbered. (It's almost a silver lining to the very dark Franquista cloud to reflect that provocatio munzenbergensis didn't in fact work for Willi. Maybe there's hope even now?)

If I am right about what's happening now, -- and I don't absolutely insist that I am, for God knows best! -- about the munzenbergification of the Arabs, then I can easily point you out certain steps that lead up to it, I am by no means reduced to sheer instant baloney like "no way to confirm ... but every reason to believe." First came the Anglo-Arabian Press Trust, expatriated Arab journalism that wasn't immediately and altogether under the thumb of some particular cardboard kingdom or barracks-based republic. Second came al-Jazeera and its tame wannabe. Third came Dr. Ahmad Chelabi, the self-proclaimed Hero of Error, who munzenberged rather successfully (up to a point), though only on a private-sector, behind-closed-doors basis. Plot those three points carefully, please, and extrapolate a little, and then explain to me why my grave doubts about all ten tenths of this alleged "Abu Rusil" are altogether ridiculous. After all that, is not the Arab World well and properly prepared for overt and journalistic munzenbergerizing? For making up defamatory stories from scratch about all those good local civil-war folks that one bitterly loathes, stories that are neither designed to rally one's own local troops nor irritate the bad locals but rather to manipulate the world elsewhere, the world outside the asylum, the "international community"?

Better to take to allegorical fiction at this point:

"It was a dark stormy night. Ibn Willi sat at his desk trying to work out how to lie for the Sunnintern as effectively as the revered Abu Ibn Willi once lied for the Comintern. 'The trouble is,' said Ibn Willi to himself, 'that all their infidel fishwraps are perfectly happy to thunder against the insufferable "death squads" of the ever-abominable Safavids in the abstract, but they never paint a concrete picture of them. Yet invasive infidels always like pictures, everybody knows that! So why don't we paint a pseudo-picture for the infidels our way and then try to finagle things so they find OUR concrete picture what some of them call "fit to print"?'

"How about we pseudo-paint roughly as follows:

'Life is about getting even,' he said coldly, dressed in the all-black uniform of the Mahdi Army militia. 'There is no innocent Sunni.'

"Might not that do the trick? If our own troops ever saw it, they'd no doubt be amazed to find all-black uniforms considered a problem, but amazingly enough, the invasive infidels attach bad connotations to both 'black' and 'coldly,' and if we assure our marks that Safavid death squads are like that, they'll think worse of Safavid death squads. It's something about their own Spanish Inquisition that the marks think of themselves, I suppose, when they shudder at stern dark-robed unforgiving coldnesses -- but that's their problem, not ours. The main practical point is that if we kick that knee of theirs, that knee will jerk. The secondary practical point is that it would be better if our own troops never learned anything about these High Command considerations at all. Should they do so, they might suppose that we at Sunnintern GHQ have gone over to picture-drawing altogether, substituting idolatry for the ’Islám, and so on and so forth. All nonsense, of course, and everything can always be explained, but it would be better that no explanations get demanded in the first place.