(read the book free online – read the Reddit AMA)

As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws and the prison system they’ve perpetuated are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight. But so what. It’s not like the War on Drugs, which started over forty-years ago in 1973, has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America… right?

A lot happened in 1973.

It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, and the year we began to disentangle ourselves from Vietnam. But it also marks the genesis of the War on Drugs: the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed. And that same year something funny happened: the income gap between black and white began to widen back out, instead of closing – as it had been up until 1973.

Did the start of the War on Drugs play a significant role in creating our present economic and social realities – where the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison?

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(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

A little while back al-Qaeda’s American-born spokesman “Adam the American” released a video exhorting Muslims in America to wage the “death by a-thousand cuts” version of jihad.  Instead of looking to stage large dramatic attacks which would require months of preparation and planning, he implored would-be jihadis to simply buy guns and start shooting people:

Muslims in the West have to remember that they are perfectly placed to play an important and decisive part in the jihad against the Zionists and Crusaders, and to do major damage to the enemies of Islam waging war on their religion, sacred places, and brethren.  This is a golden opportunity.

“The way to show one’s appreciation and thanks for this blessing, is to rush to discharge one’s duty to his [community] and fight on its behalf with everything at his disposal.  And in the West you’ve got a lot at your disposal. Let’s take America as an example, American is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms…

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(learn more about the book at the “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit)

It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine that the sky really is falling this time.

A few decades ago Malcolm X basically threw himself under the political bus by speculating that JFK’s assassination was simply the proverbial chickens coming home to roost, a statement that got him all but kicked out of the Nation of Islam.  After the fact he claimed that the statement just referred to the fact he wasn’t surprised an assassination occurred given the pervasive climate of hatred in America at the time, although it doesn’t seem too much of a jump to imagine that perhaps he might have been referring to American interventionism abroad finally returning to bite the nation in her backside.

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The Italian theorist saw every act of Symbolic Terror as a “chimera,” due to the paradoxical belief that “the people will not be free when they are educated but educated when they are free.” In simpler parlance: violent acts are necessary to first free the People from their manacling to false social assumptions both in terms of what is possible and what is Right.

It is violence that opens minds to new revolutionary ideas.

Minds that otherwise would remain locked by the bars of what is socially acceptable. Minds aren’t changed by ideas, but are changed after actions open them up to the possibility of new ideas. Actions, then, are what rewires minds and makes them capable of accepting, forming, and eventually implementing new ideas.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th weren’t the maniacal actions of an apocalyptic sect madly bent on the annihilation of America and its people, nor were they fueled by hatred and an irrational predilection with death and mayhem. Neither death nor mayhem were even main goals of al-Qaeda. They did not seek to kill as many innocents as possible, but to dramatically attack buildings which served as the most vivid symbols of America’s dominance and control over the world. The people inside the buildings were invisible to the attackers, and so were largely incidental.

And their attacks were meant not to cause mayhem per say, but a coordinated and documentable violence that would be broadcast to the entire world. Violence that would show their people, the audience was not only the American public but Muslims across the world, and the message was that American hegemony was not invincible and could be successfully assaulted.

It is almost universally assumed that 9/11 was aimed at the American public. We interpret it in terms of how many lives were lost, in what it meant to us, in how it affected us, and it resulted in us asking the question Why Do They Hate Us? It is assumed that 9/11 wrought a destructive toll – in terms of fathers and friends and loved-ones lost, billions of dollars of damage done, airline revenues turning into debt, even a destruction of our own national innocence.

But if you really look at it, 9/11 very clearly wasn’t just about killing innocents.

It was about lighting torches. It was about empowering a disaffected and largely hopeless group, and rallying them to the vanguard and the ideas of a man who was seen by many of those who share his faith as one of the most devout and pious men alive at the time.

Understanding how this could be possible is based on two rather distant predicates. The first is the fate of the Narodnaya Volya. After their assassination of the Tsar in 1881, Russia soon became a police state as the Tsar implemented oppressive polices to try and destroy the group. Soon thousands of police forces were sent into the furthest corners of the Motherland, on the hunt against a “tiny, clandestine band that had the advantages of mobility, surprise, and relative invisibility.”¹¹ And although the Narodnaya Volya was soon destroyed, the propaganda of their deed lived on.

Later that same year, American president James Garfield was assassinated by anarchists inspired by the actions of the Narodnaya Volya. And two decades after that, terrorists managed to kill President William McKinley. Soon the techniques of the Narodnaya Volya which had caused the Tsarist regime to expend resources on repression which might’ve been used to extend its stay in power, were copied across the world. Much of the violent anarchism that swept across early 20th Century Europe can arguably trace its roots back to the Narodnaya Volya and the propaganda of their deed. Bin Ladin is hijacking their fundamental manifestation of the propaganda by deed, but mixing in elements unique to our modern era.

The second concept needed to understand bin Ladin’s own take on propaganda by deed that hasn’t been explained yet requires returning back to the Middle East of the 1970s. Then, at the same time as city buses were serving as multi-ton wheeled canaries for the fumes of civil discontent, international jetliners were being directed in a different direction and on a more cosmopolitan course – although for many of the same purposes.

And, perhaps more importantly, they provide the necessary vehicles for conveying the tale of how bin Ladin began to act his dreams with open eyes.

It’s widely accepted that small class sizes, especially at the very start of schooling, lead to a better education.  And yet, nationwide, minority kids are enrolled in schools with larger kindergarten classes than whites.

So that’s public schooling, what about American private schools?  Well, things aren’t any different there. White kids attend private schools at a rate of 1 in 10, for blacks the rate is 1 in 25.  And in interviews white parents exhibit a clear and unbroken pattern: white families use their financial resources to place their kids in “whiter, wealthier, and less diverse school environments.”

The chairman of Shelby County’s school board, David Pickler, insists that race isn’t a factor and that “socioeconomics” are really what’s behind  his community’s opposition.  But with the median wealth gap between black and white families doubling during the recession and now reaching the point where white families have twenty-times as much wealth as black families, trying to separate the “socio” from the “economic” is at best ignorant, and at worst willfully bigoted.

The court system will shortly rule on whether the planned merger will go forward this year or if it will have to wait until the 2013 school year.  But regardless of this individual ruling, when you look at the deluge of data outlining the vast gulf between black and white educations in America, it becomes all too apparent that not only are our schools still separate, we’re still a desperately long way from equal.

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.⁸

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this snowballed into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.⁹

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” however the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

available in print next week, like on Facebook or follow on Twitter to get the announcement!!

– what Amazon readers are saying about Tremble the Devil –

“The most accessible book on terrorism ever written  –  An eye-opening read, deeply philosophical and scathing in the  best way  –  Brilliant, and wonderfully written on top of that  –  No right or left, just facts and history  –  A hugely absorbing and very timely offering – There is no question that when it comes to terrorism, Tremble the Devil  is the textbook  –  I highly recommend this book for those who want to  know more about terrorism, the origin of radical Islam and its  fingerprint in the world today  – Cuts through the media blather to give an honest accounting of  the sort of complexity inherent in analyzing and understanding the  phenomenon of terror  –  No other author has so intricately written about terrorism in such detail”

Tremble the Devil tells terrorism’s story using engaging allusions to everyone and everything from Jesus Christ to Beer Pong and from Malcolm X to Friday the Thirteenth. Each chapter begins with a hook taken from artists ranging from the Rolling Stones and Jay-Z, to William Blake and Tupac Shakur. And it packages the social insights of The Tipping Point along with the compelling colloquial style of Freakonomics.

All of this is woven together in an intriguing and salient book that reads like a novel.

It is, however, a work of non-fiction that divides the aforementioned three levels of comprehension into three parts, and illustrates terrorism theory by recounting the most important modern attacks and tying them to the past, each other, and the future – in the process creating the richest and most complete work on terrorism to date, a book that will change the way you look at everything from organized religion to sports drinks.

Tremble the Devil is a lucid explanation of terrorism in all its forms, you can get yourself a copy below, or spend as much time as you’d like reading the entire book online – totally for free.

– get the e-book for your Kindle –

(or download the free Kindle app for your iPad, Blackberry, iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone)

– get the e-book for your Nook –

– get the e-book for your Sony Reader –

Tremble the Devil is the first work of non-fiction that’s available up online in its entirety for free, but after reading a bit and deciding you’d like to keep going offline you can purchase a lend-able copy for your Kindle from Amazon, and if you don’t have a Kindle but would still like to read the book offline you can always download the free Kindle app for your iPhone, PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.  Besides reading Tremble the Devil that’ll also allow you to download and read anything off of Amazon, including their selection of free books – including dozens of the classics.

Whites could drink as much as they pleased – as well as use opiates and cocaine, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing or using any drug at all.

At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn’t control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all “uncivilized races.”

In this case, “uncivilized” was synonymous with “dark.” At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant.

Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a “cocaine-crazed negro.” Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON’T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn’t large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty.

However blacks weren’t singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether.

Nixon’s public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, fueled an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black – with 90% of those incarcerated under the Rockefeller laws either Latino or black – and only growing to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years blacks went from making up 39% of our drug-related prison population to 53% of it.²

Today that number’s down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You’d receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there’re only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.³

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn’t novel, it’s simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England’s level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours.

We have, proportionally, six-times the population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners.²² And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you’ve almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Iran, on the other hand, soon proved itself a master of irregular warfare. The furnace of the Revolution burnt away any element of Iranian society which might have weakened the new regime, and allowed it to sharpen Iran’s military into a formidable and deft weapon.  In 1983 the Iranian military masterminded the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, one of the most devastating surprise attacks in American military history. And then throughout the 1980’s Iranian sponsored terror took lives in Jerusalem, Rome, and countless other Western cities – soon becoming classified by the United States as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist attacks.

But what is state-sponsored terrorism really?

On a purely analytical level, it’s simply another term for irregular warfare. Whether or not an act of violence breaks the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be the judge of whether or not it’s considered “terrorism.” Certainly not whether it’s considered an act of Political Terrorism, a phenomenon that has clearly defined boundaries.

Because terrorism, as a means, has such a broad nature you have to categorize terrorist violence within a framework before you make any sort of analysis if it’s going to mean anything at all.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes. It’s the outcome of violence used with precise timing and targeting in the right set of social circumstances. Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism. Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates his ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

And in just the last year, a new term has been coined to describe what happens when the cycle of Political Terrorism is triggered within an international context of warfare that allows travel between nations and cultures, and the instantaneous transmission of events from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world.

Before coining the term “accidental guerrilla,” David Killcullen fought as a member of the Australian military in theatres of war on multiple continents, and served as a counterterrorism adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, as well as serving as the chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department. The term accidental guerrilla has its origins in the native resistance to the War on Terror that began after 9/11.

As Killcullen traveled to areas where there was ongoing military action against declared “terrorists,” he noticed an odd phenomenon.

Many, in fact most, of the men fighting against American forces didn’t actually ascribe to the violent jihadi ideology that led al-Qaida to perpetrate 9/11. They were just average locals who found outsiders engaged in a shooting war on their turf, and felt compelled to join in. In the words of one Afghani villager who spontaneously joined in with the Taliban in an ambush against American troops, “when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in? …This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years. It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out.”¹

As outlined in his ground-breaking book The Accidental Guerrilla, the phenomena follows a four step cycle that’s nearly identical to Political Terrorism, and that can be simply understood as Political Terrorism within a specific framework. Kilcullen describes accidental guerrillas as the result of a syndrome, and illustrates it using biological analogies and four stages:

1. infecting an area where the State has a waning influence
2. reaching a virulent potential for widespread media dissemination by carrying out acts of captivating violence
3. drawing in outside intervention to deal with this new virulent threat
4. a rejection of the heavyhanded outside intervention by the local population, which wins the infectious agents sympathizers and followers

And so accidental guerrillas are born when they become infected by the virulent influence of al-Qaida or any other radical ideology, and fight back against any outside intervention that follows. Not necessarily because they agree with the radicals, but because they feel compelled to reject what they’ve come to see as an unjust and illegitimate outside power.  At most, they make up about 10% of an insurgency at any given time.