Graeme Wood's article in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic explores the complications and contradictions of the group waging their own 'Crusade' (what else can you call it?) in the Middle East, destroying, enslaving and murdering Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with medieval zeal. Their Islamic beliefs may not reflect those of the more assimilated, law-abiding followers of Islam, but make no mistake, writes Mr. Wood, "The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam."
"The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million." ...
Full article from The Atlantic here
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Friday, February 27, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Solzhenitsyn, Putin and the New Old Russia
In an article in Politico, Peter Eltsov explores the improbably relationship between Russian leader and former KGB official Vladimir Putin and the late author/dissident/KGB target Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
"Indeed, it is one of history’s ironies that the No. 1 internal enemy of the Soviet Union has now become a spiritual guru to a former KGB officer who repeatedly voices nostalgia for Soviet times. For years before his death, the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn suggested that post-Soviet Russia must include Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn did not see the Ukrainians as a separate nation: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood,” he wrote in a 1990 essay, “Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals.”
Full article here
"Indeed, it is one of history’s ironies that the No. 1 internal enemy of the Soviet Union has now become a spiritual guru to a former KGB officer who repeatedly voices nostalgia for Soviet times. For years before his death, the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn suggested that post-Soviet Russia must include Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn did not see the Ukrainians as a separate nation: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood,” he wrote in a 1990 essay, “Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals.”
Full article here