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

Apparently police in California are expecting things to get even hairier than they already are, since they’ve carted out military-grade armored tactical vehicles – basically the Barry Bonds version of  the Humvee.  As the level of drug-related violence in Mexico has shot through the roof, perhaps it make sense to assume that it will begin to bleed across the border and into southern California – but all the same it’s gotta be just a wee bit unsettling for the average California to see these things rumbling down their streets.

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

When you are sworn into Federal Court, you are exhorted to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Each of these phrases carries a slightly different angle against any possible lie – not only are you swearing to speak the truth, but also to not hold any part of the truth back, and to not mix in lies among the truth you do tell.

And so by its own standards, the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has been openly and unabashedly lying about the racial divisions that remain within the American penal system for at least the past five years.  It’s a lie so patently absurd that if our current President was incarcerated, the Department of Justice would pretend he wasn’t there, and whitewash his existence from their racial prisoner data entirely.

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

In one of The Dark Knight‘s pivotal scenes, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered and starkly lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn’t fully comprehend the dystopian miasma of violence that the Joker has brought upon Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the the Joker as a rubric for terrorism.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

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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 –

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

Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

But if the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the destruction of the African-American family, why did the decline in married black women triple during the first decade of the War?

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up about half of those in prison for drug offenses.  (When you adjust for the fact that the Department of Justice simply throws prisoners who identify as mixed race half-black and half-white out of their data, the proportion is well over half.)  A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. And by 2006 America had, proportionally, almost six-times as many blacks locked up as South Africa did at the height of Apartheid.

Our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

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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.

The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely to dislike the group.  On top of that, African-Americans are much more likely to feel like they have nothing to lose, 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.  In many cities the foreclosure rate for black families is three times as high as the white rate, and nationwide unemployment is about twice as high.

An almost unfathomable number of African-Americans have passed through our penal system, coming out on the other side much more racist and disposed to violence than they were when they went in.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is three-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

And when the shootings begin, it won’t take much for the establishment to begin reprisals. The level of trust between the police presence in innercity America and it’s African-American inhabitants typically falls somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

Widespread arrests will be made to try and find the terrorists responsible for the violence, and when some of the men – most of them innocent – getting arrested resist and the police respond with force, the flames will be stoked further still.  Based on past precedent, the police probably won’t be the initial targets – Jewish community centers and American military installations likely will be – but once law enforcement officers begin their investigations and raids, inner-city ire will be shifted against their presence.

Especially when such incidents are recorded on camera, as Rodney King and others have already demonstrated.

Rodney King was just one man being smacked around by a few cops, and yet his arrest set inner-city Los Angeles ablaze. Imagine what will happen when dozens of such arrests are recorded and played back not only on the Evening News, but available for free download on YouTube and other internet sites. Another preview of the unrest this will stir was provided when the unarmed Oscar J. Grant III was shot in the back on New Years Day 2009, and the entire incident was recorded on a camera phone and downloaded online.

It’s not hard to imagine what the response will be when some of them inevitably result in the suspects’ deaths – an inevitable result when the police fear for their own lives because they think they’re arresting a devious and sinister terrorist who has already tasted blood.

It won’t take much.  In every major modern insurgency, only about 10% of the fighters have been hardcore ideologues who believe in whatever cause is being championed, while the other 90% of the fighting is done by locals who are simply protecting their own turf against an invasive outside power.  Utilizing martial language like “insurgency” may seem like a bit of a stretch when describing our inner-cities, but it shouldn’t:

The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to police presence in black communities as “The Occupation.”  In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.

And yet when you dig deeper you’ll find that the D.C. Sniper’s blueprint in and of itself wasn’t really novel, as the attacks it was modeled off go back further still – to the first time an imperial Western power attempted what was perceived as colonization of the Middle East…

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

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.