From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
prominently displayed. (And if not, tell them they should!) It's all over Amazon, with a fantastic price for the moment of $14.01 for the beautifully produced hardcover edition, plus a Kindle edition, and an Audible audio version read elegantly and appropriately by a Briton, Antony Ferguson.
The hardcover book also is available at Barnes and Noble, in the stores and online.
Over the past week I have written two essays for The Daily Beast that put "Our Man" in the context of recent events and my own background as a Southerner. The first, "Confederate Madness Then and Now," many of you have seen already. The second was just published this morning:
Today, I will be talking about the book and about the Confederate legacy on NPR's "Here and Now," which airs at noon on Boston's WBUR and in many other parts for the country as well. Tomorrow I will be on the BBC.
I am happy and, yes, more than a little proud to say the early reviews and comments have ranged from good to great, and next week the New York Times Book Review will list "Our Man" as an "Editor's Choice."
"Our Man in Charleston is a joy to discover. It is a perfect book about an imperfect spy." —Joan Didion
"Thoroughly researched and deftly crafted. [Our Man in Charleston will] introduce people to a man who should be better known, one who cannily fought the good fight at a fateful moment in history." —Wall Street Journal
"One heck of a good read." —The Charlotte Observer
"[Bunch is] a brilliant find…Dickey, the foreign editor of The Daily Beast and a former longtime Newsweek correspondent, uses his research well: in a story like this one, point of view is everything, and Bunch's is razor sharp." —American Scholar "Dickey has written a book that is as much suspense and spy adventure as it is a history book... A story as compelling as this one does not come around very often. With so much already written about the Civil War, and more coming every year, originality is a rare thing these days. The story of Robert Bunch is that and more." —The Carolina Chronicles
"A fascinating tale of compromise, political maneuvering, and espionage." —Publishers Weekly "Dickey's comprehension of the mindset of the area, coupled with the enlightening missives from Bunch, provides a rich background to understanding the time period….A great book explaining the workings of what Dickey calls an erratic, cobbled-together coalition of ferociously independent states. It should be in the library of any student of diplomacy, as well as Civil War buffs." —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A fine examination of a superbly skilled diplomat." —Booklist
"Britain's consul in Charleston before and during the first two years of the Civil War was outwardly pro-Southern and earned notoriety in the North. But in secret correspondence with the British Foreign Office he made clear his hostility to slavery and the Confederacy. His dispatches helped prevent British recognition of the Confederacy. Christopher Dickey has skillfully unraveled the threads of this story in an engrossing account of diplomatic derring-do." —James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom
"Did Robert Bunch, Her Majesty's consul in Charleston, keep Britain out of the Confederacy's war? Drawing on Bunch's clandestine correspondence, Christopher Dickey makes a compelling case that this dazzlingly duplicitous, ardent anti-slaver played a key role. A fascinating, little-known shard of vital Civil War history, brought glitteringly alive with all the verve and panache of a master story teller." —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March "In his extraordinary new history Our Man in Charleston, Christopher Dickey has written a book you can't put down. This is a well-researched history with the immense power and sheer element of surprise we find in the finest spy novels. It's like reading a book by Graham Greene, written while he was staying at the house of John le Carré, discussing the fate of nations over drinks. With Charleston consul Robert Bunch, Dickey has introduced a new great man in the great war that haunts America still. I adored this book." —Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini and South of Broad
"Our Man in Charleston is a superlative and entertaining history of the grey area where diplomacy ends and spy craft begins. British Consul Robert Bunch played a secret role in the anti-slavery fight in Charleston, which would remain secret to this day were it not for Christopher Dickey's extraordinary detective skills." —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire and Georgiana
"Wonderfully written and researched, Our Man in Charleston is the best espionage book I've read. I couldn't put it down." —Robert Baer, former CIA case officer and author of See No Evil
"Robert Bunch is an unlikely spy, but his bravery and moral sensibility make him an intriguing hero for Christopher Dickey's Civil War history. Dickey knows his stuff, from spying to the slave trade, and he's a master at telling a fast-paced, gripping yarn." —Evan Thomas, author of John Paul Jones and The Very Best Men "Christopher Dickey has accomplished the near-impossible—exhuming a forgotten but irresistible character from the dustbin of Civil War history, and bringing him back to life with painstaking research and bravura literary flair. This irresistible book opens new windows onto the complicated worlds of wartime diplomacy, intelligence-gathering and outright intrigue, and the result is fresh history and page-turning excitement." —Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press and winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
"A long-needed study of Robert Bunch, British consul in Charleston—a secret agent for the Crown in the Civil War era who outwardly praised the city and its people while privately loathing both, and who discouraged diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy by keeping his superiors abreast of its determination to continue importing slaves. Elegantly written, well researched, an engrossing story." —Howard Jones, author of Blue and Grey Diplomacy
As most of you know, my latest book, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, will be published next week. It may already be in the stores in many parts of the United States, and it's also available on Kindle.
This essay, published today on The Daily Beast, puts the story of the book in the context of today's debates about the Confederacy and its symbols. It has gotten quite a lot of attention in the few hours since it was published.
I appeared on "Weekends with Alex Witt" Sunday to talk about "Our Man in Charleston," but also a bit about ISIS in Afghanistan and the Iran talks in Vienna—from Paris. You might say we were all over the map...
I have always loved this photograph of Saud al Faisal bin Abdelaziz published in The House of Saud, by David Holden and Richard Johns. It was taken at the United Nations in 1976, I believe, not long after Saud's father King Faisal was murdered and his uncle, King Khalid, appointed him foreign minister. The Western suit, the Princeton education, the worldly ways of the young man — a different time, a different world. As Bruce Riedel writes in The Daily Beast today, Saud will be sorely missed.
There’s a great write-up of Our Man in Charleston in the newest Departures Magazine, which calls the book "masterful." The review is not yet available online, but here’s my favorite part:
“A veteran correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast and the author of several novels, Dickey has a journalist’s nose for the scoop and a thriller writer’s sense of pacing. His debt to Graham Greene is clear not just from the book’s title but also from his grasp of skullduggery and human contradiction.”
This is Jean-Marc Illouz's lovely tribute to the D-Day veteran Irving Smolens who bent Obama's ear about war and peace one year ago this week. Jean-Marc posted it on Facebook and has kindly allowed me to republish it here.
By Jean-Marc ILLOUZ
I have recurringly thought of Irving Smolens since that day.
His was a name I had never heard of in nearly 40 years as a French war correspondent from Vietnam to the Middle East.
Among the last survivors of Utah Beach, he was Private Irving
Smolens Enlisted 1943, 4th Inf.Div. 29th Field Artillery - Army Serial # 31353382.
Almost a name on a stone till that day in June 2014 during D-Day 70th anniversary commemorations at the American Cemetery in Normandy.
The old soldier insisted on approaching his Commander in Chief to deliver a short valetudinary message: "Thank you Mr President for keeping us out of war" [re:The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey original story below]
An echo from a soldier's soldier, I often quoted later when confronted to various Obama critics. Most were "drugstore soldiers" hailing from the Hill and howling for blood, Tea Party cartoon characters or foreign critics unaware of the extent of Congressional power in US Foreign Policy.
Others abroad were the very same that not so long ago would denounce US imperialism and now posited that Uncle Sam's magic firepower could -boom!-cure centuries old divides in their own societies.
To be sure Obama only chose to extensively resort to drones here and more sparingly to air power elsewhere. Not the John Wayne- Bush Jr kinda stuff.
Smart alecks claim "he blew it when the time was ripe to scuttle Syrian dictator Assad and wipe out his Air Force"?
Ripe? To skydive the country into some machismo state of war with Russia over Syria...and Ukraine? A US Vital interest?
Today's challenges are with Russia and China first. Not Dracula and garlic. Containing and crushing the so called Islamic State is a long term business. It will also require their cooperation. And Jihadi terror AND idéology will not be defeated "live from the Pentagon" alone.
Vision at the White House will take really deciding who's the more effective Muslim ally - Iran included - the US needs to lick ISIS in the region. And -before it engulfs Palestine - using some tough love with the Israeli right.
The President clearly understands this. And also that it's not as easy as bombing some video targets in Wadi-Dum.
So far Saudi money and Israeli influence have largely dictated or impeded US policy including this administration's. But perhaps what will remain as this two terms President's greatest merit, will be to have resisted America's natural inclination to wrap Manifest Destiny in testosterone, shoot first and think later, spill blood and billions in non vital, well lobbied "patriotic "wars from Vietnam to Iraq.
At the outset of his presidency,Obama was - as we all remember - rather embarrassed to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
As of today he has brought neither peace nor victories. Rescuing the US economy and not Ramboing around may not be Iwo Jima's stuff but survivor Irving Smolens words of thanks still ring to me as the greatest National Award a resilient President Obama could ever dream of.
ps: Irving Smolens passed away on April 11th 2015, at 90 in Melrose, Mass.RIP.
He had actively opposed both the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
I am happy to report that the Amazon.com James Dickey page is shaping up nicely. Both "The Complete Poems" and "Death, and the Day's Light" are now displayed prominently.
The biography is an abbreviated version of one on the site of The Poetry Foundation and emphasizes the poetry over the novels. There is a blog feed and a Twitter feed, and there will be several photographs, changed frequently.
Suggestions welcome, but in the meantime please spread the word on Twitter, FB, etc.!
Also, interesting to note the Amazon page already is number two when you search James Dickey on Google (without quotes), right after the Wikipedia entry. (For some reason when the name is in quotes it's not coming up on the first page of the search. Go figure.)
The first time I visited the Normandy beaches, almost 20 years ago, I went with my father-in-law, who'd landed there on D-Day. We walked on the wide sand and through the green, wind-blown fields, and he looked a little lost, as many veterans do when they wander those cross-covered cliffs.
You could see him gazing out to sea, but searching inside himself for the buddies who'd died, and for that young man who used to be him. Since then, we've visited other sites where he fought and his friends perished. The experience is always heartbreaking, not only because of the sad fact that death is, but because of the terrible scale of it in these places—a spectacle of killing which, thank God, we haven't seen in my generation's many wars. At least, not yet.
The chronicler of G.I. Joe's World War II was Ernie Pyle. When he was killed by a machine-gunner on the little Japanese island of Ie Shima in April 1945, after so many years reporting on the fighting, he had a draft column in his pocket that describes as eloquently as anything I've ever read the weight of the carnage on those who survived it. He was thinking back on Normandy:
"Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks," Pyle wrote. "But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
"Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
"These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
"We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference. . . ."
He well and truly hated war because he saw what it was from so close. Pyle, the son of a tenant farmer, mixed easily in the enormous conscript army mustered by the United States to take on what was, truly, an Axis of Evil. He knew what his country was fighting for, and his columns never doubted the rightness of the cause, even though he admitted he lost sight of it sometimes in the middle of all the killing. The way Pyle wrote about the common soldiers' lives, sharing their pains and frustrations and horrors as well as their good humor and common sense and uncommon valor, made him probably the most widely read and best-loved correspondent of his time. But he well and truly hated war because he saw what it was from so close.
Pyle understood that even the highest ideals get worn down by endless fighting. "I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion," he wrote in 1943, when he began a brief trip back to the States. "I couldn't find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers."
When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we're going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we've entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who've never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen "dead men by mass production," would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today.
The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values--those were the people we called the enemy.
But let's be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that's not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they're making the best of a bad situation.
In his day, Ernie Pyle's columns read like the letters every soldier wanted to send. But today's soldiers, at least the ones who write to Shadowland (shadowland@newsweek.com), do a pretty good job of telling the story themselves.
Last week, for instance, I got a long letter from Lt. Col. Richard Allinger in Baghdad. ...
"The American soldier in Iraq is a fine human being," he writes. "Young men and women, a zillion miles from home, watching their friends die day after day, being mortared..., eating lousy food, baking in the unbelievable heat. Young men and women who are attending too many memorials and last roll calls. These young men and women suffer these indignities routinely and go out each day to help rebuild a school, build a water line, repair a bridge, fix the substations, install air conditioners in orphanages, the list goes on and on. These young men and women are heroes, not prison guards gone wild. They are the bravest most incredible people I have ever had the pleasure to know."
More excerpts from draft speech by Christopher Dickey, "Call of Duty / Call of Da'esh," at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, 28 April 2015 We'll come back to the question of whether and how we in the press should address the communication challenge of ISIS—this information insurgency, but first perhaps we need to look at the evolution of what we in the United States call "the mainstream media."
That is my world and my frame of reference, and I'd like to start our quick tour of history about 150 years ago, around the time of the American Civil War. (At The Daily Beast, when I write about this period in book reviews, I sometimes have to assure my young colleagues that I did not actually cover that war myself.)
This was the second great age of mass communications. The first had come with moveable type in Europe, the Gutenberg revolution. The innovation of the 19th century, during the industrial revolution, was the industrialization of information. Paper got cheap, presses grew much more efficient, advertising became ubiquitous, helping to finance the publications, and suddenly it seemed just about anyone could put out a broadsheet. In major cities in the United States there were dozens of papers. And because copyrights were weak, nonexistent of unenforced, they picked up articles wherever they found them and reprinted them.
This may sound familiar. A little like the aggregation and blogging that goes on today. And there are indeed some important similarities. In that fiercely competitive market what we saw was fracturing of the news, sensationalizing it and making it more partisan in order to lock in one corner of the market or another. And those who were most successful with these strategies came to wield enormous power, which they used for political and profit-making purposes. By the end of the 19th century this yellow journalism was at its height — and it was dangerous.
Perhaps you have seen the great Orson Welles movie "Citizen Kane." It is based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the king of yellow journalism, who for various reasons wanted the United States to go to war against Spain and seize its colonies, most notably Cuba and the Philippines.
[[One sequence begins with a headline saying Spanish warships are off the coast of New Jersey. Kane’s guardian protests: There is no proof of that! Kane asks if the guardian can prove there are not! Then a telegram comes in from the paper's correspondent in Havana saying he can write prose poems about the palm trees, but there is no war there. Kane dictates a response: “You give me the tone poems, I'll give you the war.”]]
The idea that began to take a strong hold after World War I — that a newspaper should be a "newspaper of record," carefully balancing all the facts in its articles and keeping the stated political positions of the owners in a separate editorial-page isolation ward — had been around for a long time. People grew tired of the excesses of yellow journalism. But the idea of "responsibility" really started to dominate discussions of the media when the marketplace began to change with the appearance of new forms of communication and, therefore, of competition. In this case: radio, which brought a level of accessibility to the illiterate —still a very large part of the American and European population in the 1930s—and a kind of immediacy that newspapers found it hard to match.
Under the combined pressure of the Great Depression and the home radio, newspapers collapsed one after another and fewer, bigger companies emerged, so that by the 1950s, with television now added to the media mix as well, we saw the development in the United States of a small and immensely powerful oligarchy that not only dominated the news business, but the news judgment of the nation. Really, we're talking about half a dozen newspapers, three TV and radio networks, plus a couple of weekly news magazines. Many of the most influential organs, moreover, were controlled by rich and powerful families: the Sulzbergers at the New York Times, the Grahams at The Washington Post, the Chandlers at the Los Angeles Times, and so on.
They watched each other, they competed with each other, and they kept score not just with scoops and revenues, but by vying to see who could be judged more responsible in the exercise of their great mission to inform the public. The crowning glory was a Pulitzer Prize "for public service."
At the height of their power in the late 1960s and early 1970s they exposed the hypocrisy and lies surrounding the Vietnam war with the so-called "Pentagon Papers" and brought down the president of the United States with "Watergate."
That moment—the summer when Richard Nixon resigned—was the moment I started my journalistic career at The Washington Post. (And you might say that ever since the American press has been in decline....)
Of course the driver of change was not really internal, it was external to the newspaper business: the advent first of cable news and satellite television in the 1980s and then the Internet in the 1990s, which not only diversified the sources of news, but, by the mid-2000s, had destroyed the advertising base that funded the reporting.
So, perhaps a bit of personal history, to give a sense of just how much things have changed for a reporter in the field.
In 1980, after six years with The Washington Post in Washington, I became a foreign correspondent covering a series of wars and revolutions in Central America.
These were the first wars the United States had edged into after the fall of Saigon in 1975, memories were fresh, and bitter, and so was the partisanship among the public and, yes, among some reporters.
For my part, I learned very quickly to hate war, to see almost nothing about it that was noble or, perhaps more to the point, that was necessary. It was based on illusions and delusions manipulated by a few ambitious and powerful men (and sometimes women).
On the ground, I saw again and again that my own government lied, that the governments it was fighting lied, that the guerrillas we wanted defeated lied and the guerrillas whose wars we supported lied, and all the while the people — those people who just wanted to get on with their lives — died.
The job of a correspondent then, as now, was to try to extract some verifiable facts and perhaps some larger, necessary, useful truths from all this suffering.
The combination of casual obliviousness and willful ignorance is, of course, extraordinarily dangerous in a country that can have the kind of huge impact on global affairs that the United States has.
In those days of the communication oligarchy in America the good news for a correspondent was that he’d have the money to go where he needed to go to get the story, and every side in the conflict knew to some extent that it needed the correspondent if it wanted to get its story out to the wider world. Many reporters were killed and injured in combat, but the because we were needed by all parties at some point there was some degree of protection.
The bad news was that it was damn hard to communicate that story from the field back to the home office. You basically had two options: telex or dictation.
The worse news was that even when your story was published, showing the lies of one side or the other, a great many people preferred to believe those lies. Indeed, they cherished them.
I came away from my early years with two firm convictions about the reading public.
First—and this is especially but not uniquely true of American—what people want from the rest of the world is to forget about it. They do not want to have to care, and given the chance, they will turn the page, change the channel, click on a different site.
Secondly—that people believe what they want to believe, and refuse to believe what they do not want to believe.
The combination of casual obliviousness and willful ignorance is, of course, extraordinarily dangerous in a country that can have the kind of huge impact on global affairs that the United States has. But we journalists, who are fighting against obliviousness and ignorance, see them triumph despite everything we do and try to do.
We saw it in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of people died in Somalia – and then in Bosnia – and then in Rwanda.
We may communicate now on computers, tablets and smartphones, but that doesn’t mean people will listen to what we say or be convinced by facts when they read them or take action to change those facts even when they are convinced.
Very often reporters have warned about ethnic cleansing, horrific war crimes and genocide to come, and then they take place right before our eyes and—nothing or almost nothing is done to stop them. “Never again,” people say — again and again and again.
So, let us turn, now, to this part of the world, which has become well known for the means of communication known as terrorism.
Yes, you heard correctly.
What is terror but a means of conveying a message?
Brutal, savage, unforgivable perhaps (although often it is forgiven), terror can be used as a tool used to warn off enemies and build support among allies.
When I first started covering the Middle East 30 years ago, governments, through various proxy groups, used terrorism to send messages to each other. In the mid 1980s, when Jordan’s King Hussein was trying to cut a peace deal with Israel, Palestinian terrorists backed by Syria murdered some of the people involved and blew up Jordanian airline offices around the Middle East, among other targets. King Hussein, in the meantime, supported Muslim Brothers blowing up targets in Syria.
When the Syrians murdered the French ambassador to Lebanon, the French responded by helping the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services blow up a military headquarters in Damascus, killing scores of senior officers. Also see: Call of Duty / Call of Da'esh
These were acts of terrorism by all sides—but they were also intended as communications, much stronger than diplomatic notes, but not so great a commitment as open war.
After the first intifada began in 1987, the Israelis carried out a systematic program of assassinations, murdering Palestinian leaders in Cyprus, Tunis, Athens and elsewhere.
In the late 1980s there seemed to be some sort of terrorist incident just about every week. Airliners were hijacked or, in some cases, bombed. A cruise boat was hijacked and one of the passengers murdered. Westerners, including several reporters, were kidnapped in Lebanon.
The answer of the United States to the threat of terrorism and other challenges to its interests was a series of wars and military actions around the globe. From the 1982 landing in Lebanon and the invasion of tiny Grenada and the Contra guerrilla operations in Nicaragua in 1983 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States carried out acts of war, either overt or covert, on average about once a year.
Did these American acts of war make the world a safer place? Did they even make it a safer place for Americans? In many cases, absolutely and certifiably not. And yet they were claimed as victories, and such actions were repeated, again and again.
And here is what is most striking about those military operations if you are in America: almost nobody remembers them. I covered many of them and even I can’t name all of them off the top of my head. But the Libyans did not forget that we bombed their country in 1986. The Iranians did not forget that we backed Saddam Hussein on the waters of the Persian Gulf and blew up an Iranian airliner full of Iranian men, women and children on its way to Dubai in 1988.
A couple of years later, when Saddam suddenly made himself the enemy by invading Kuwait, we had Desert Storm. People read about that in history books. But less often do they hear about the aftermath, which included repeated bombings of Baghdad throughout the 1990s, including the campaign called Desert Fox in 1998, which was entirely counterproductive. After the withdrawal of all UN weapons inspectors that accompanied that action, the United States had no idea what was going on with Saddam’s programs to try to build weapons of mass destruction. So that in 2003, the US invaded, not because of what it knew but because of what it did not know: it couldn’t be sure there was no threat until it occupied the whole country.
Obliviousness and ignorance.
If there is anything that makes the United States perceived as a great enemy by many people around the world, that is it. In 1997, in a work of fiction, a novel, I wrote about an Al Qaeda terrorist recruiting an American soldier to his cause: "In America you don't feel what you do,” he said, repeating a line I heard often fro jihadists. “You are in the eye of a hurricane that you create. Pain and suffering and injustice all over the world, and all you see is blue skies."
That was not the least of the reasons that, four years later, Osama bin Laden filled the blue skies over Manhattan with the smoke of crashing planes and collapsing towers. It was an atrocity, yes. It was also an act of communication that changed the world.
And all that was before … Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and smartphones. ...
Call of Duty / Call of Da'esh:
The Press, the Mideast, and the Global Information War
Excerpts from draft speech by Christopher Dickey at Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, 28 April 2015
For
the foreseeable future one of the central preoccupations of the global press,
and certainly of the American press, is going to be the communications
challenge presented by the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da'esh,
the acronyms we use when we don't want to dignify this group with a name that makes it sound like a
national entity.
And let’s make no mistake, the danger it poses is, first and
foremost, one of communications. Its military victories have mostly been
against hollow armies rife with corruption or weakened by other insurgencies.
Its impact on global opinion, however, is based on its creative exploitation of
media and myths, some old and some new, all wrapped up in an iconography that
is deeply seductive for many young people in many different parts of the
world.
I think all of us here can agree that we do not agree with
almost anything that Da'esh represents, but we would be making a major mistake, as
people who work in the media, if we did not admit the agility and creativity of
its messaging, which is much more supple and much more focused than most of the
media when we are trying to tell something like the truth
about the events that surround us.
If you want to understand one key aspect of the way Da'esh
gets its message across, you would do well to spend a little time playing "Call of Duty," which has gamers enraptured all over the world.
Start at 00:33
If you then look at any of the highly produced films by
Da'esh showing the actual murder of Western hostages, Syrian soldiers, Egyptian
and other Christians, crucifixions, stonings, people thrown from towers and,
most notably, the burning alive of a captured Jordanian pilot — then you, as a
player of "Call of Duty," will find yourself in very familiar territory.
In Call
of Da'esh real people really are dying these gruesome deaths, but the video
presentation has moved all that into a more accessible and, for a certain
mindset, more acceptable dimension. ...
While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly have been revolutionary
communications tools, relatively few people in the press have understood how to exploit them
effectively.
Journalists are probably the least imaginative users of
social media. We employ them to gather information partly to compensate for the
fact we no longer have the budgets to go ourselves to the places where the
story is happening. Thus when the earthquake hit Nepal on Saturday, I saw three
of my few thousand Facebook “friends” were there and notifying the world that
they survived. I asked them to write about it and one of their excellent pieces
is on The Daily Beast today.
Blurring intentionally and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.
But the most imaginative and effective users of social media
as a tool to try to change the world are not doing what journalists do—grabbing
bits of fact here and there to try to discover a truth—they are creating
narratives to engage a following. And the most successful of all are those who
create a narrative for a targeted audience that can be moved to action that
then reinforces the narrative.
Barack Obama won the presidency this way in 2008. His
campaign’s use of social media first engaged people who might only be vaguely
interested in supporting him. Then it asked them to carry out specific acts, ringing
specific doorbells to talk to people face to face to raise money and encourage
voting. Then itasked people to
record the results so it could gauge where their performance might be improved.
And the narrative? The election of the first black president of the United
States, a young man who said, “Yes, we can.” (Ironically, since he has been in
office, he has found it difficult to construct such effective narratives around
his key programs.)
I actually wrote in 2008 that these same kinds of tactics
could be employed by terrorists. It's a question of tools, after all, not of ideology. At the time I was thinking of Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda, who had first used CD-Roms and DVDs to spread their narrative, then
satellite television, and who had just begun to experiment with YouTube.
From 2009 to 2011, we saw the power of narrative combined
with social media and satellite to create diplomatic uprisings in Iran,
Tunisia, Egypt and much of the rest of the deeply frustrated Arab world. But
their narrative was a short one—to gather, to protest, to try to bring down the
government—with no real strategy for what might come after. I remember when I was in Tahrir Square in Egypt
people talking about “crowd sourcing” the leadership of the revolution. Well,
we know that doesn’t work. Militant groups with long histories of discipline
and organization move into the vacuum and, more often than not, frustrate
entirely the hopes of the free-thinking crowd on Facebook and Twitter. Also see: In an Age of Information Insurgency, Notes on My History in the Mainstream Media
In fact, coming full circle, we have to understand that the people
who truly mastered the new media are those associated with the Al Qaeda
spin-off that we’ve been calling Da’esh, because it understood its
audiences—there are several; it knew how to develop narratives that they would
feel compelling; and it has the leadership to continue an organized drive to
create a new state in the Middle East that has goals far outside the region.
I want to focus here on the Da’esh narrative that has proved
so seductive to young people in the West, because that is the one that Western
governments have found so surprising.
In fact, today’s terrorists have certain common
characteristics. I think of them as testosterone, narrative, and theater, or,
if you will, TNT.
Testosterone because they are predominantly young men, often
frustrated in their work lives and sex lives, who want an outlet for their
energies. (This is true of many recruits in conventional armies. But one of the
things Da’esh adds to the mix is the promise of wives and even slave girls.)
Narrative, which we keep coming back to, is absolutely
central. Almost all terrorist recruits over the years, whether in the IRA, the
Sendero Luminoso or Black September, have been convinced they were fighting to
defend an oppressed people. They were not necessarily oppressed themselves, but
they identified with those who were, and they see themselves in noble, even
chivalric terms, like knights in shining armor coming to the rescue, which
gives them the ability to justify, as knights often did, absolutely horrific
acts. It is no accident that Al Qaeda’s core book of ideology by Ayman al
Zawahiri bears the title Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner. Young men and
women are inspired to answer their call of duty.
Theater? This is another area where social media have become
so important. The recruits of modern terrorist organizations want to project
themselves and their actions on the world stage, even if they are not going to
be around on this earth to see the result. Social media have made this effect
incalculably easier to achieve.
Fifteen years ago, Bin Laden and his men spent a lot of time
watching disaster movies like “Independence Day,” and they plotted their
attacks to imitate that sort of iconography. Without huge spectaculars, they
knew they could never command the kind of global attention that they and their
suicide troops wanted.
Ten years ago, when Abu Musab al Zarqawi was decapitating
his enemies in Iraq, he had to depend on satellite news networks to show clips
of the grotesque videotapes that preached about his sense of justice and were
intended to horrify his enemies. Terrorists of those earlier generations had to depend on others, even on the "mainstream media," to get their message out. But no longer.
Today, Da’esh has so many more tools at its disposal to sicken its enemies and glorify its knights in blood-spattered balaclavas, and
not only the soft social media like Facebook and Twitter, but the hard core
violent excitement of shared video games.
It isn’t so much that Da’esh produces its own version of “Grand
Theft Auto,” although it has done that, it is the way it uses the imagery and
iconography of video games to put its message across, blurring intentionally
and cruelly the lines between the Xbox and the execution grounds of Raqqa.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from Da'esh video that climaxes with burning of Jordanian pilot.
Screen shot from trailer of Call of Duty: Black Ops II
You may have noticed I have barely mentioned religion.
When we talk about Al Qaeda and Da’esh, there is often a lot
of discussion about what the Qur’an says or does not say. And there is a lot of
tweeting from this Surah or that one. But, of course, the Qur’an can say or not
say just about anything these organizations want.
Do the Qur’an and the hadith
warn against the worship of idols? Yes. So let’s destroy Nimrud and Hatra. But have
those same lines been interpreted by scholars for many centuries to warn
against the portrayal of the human form? Absolutely. You can see the result in
mosques all over this city and the world. And earlier radical movements, like
the Saudi Ikhwan, not only fought and died to keep television out of the
kingdom in the 1960s for that reason, earlier on they smashed every mirror they
could find in Hijaz. But Da’esh has no problem with the human form because it
is so vital to its new media narrative—it won’t motivate many young men or
women with calligraphy and arabesques—and Da’esh is a very practical
organization.
So, here’s my question for you—and it is not a rhetorical
one:
Is there a narrative that we liberal-thinkers can use to
counter the TNT that Da’esh offers its recruits? Maybe that is not exactly our
duty, but it is something we have to think about in the name of humanity and,
yes, even in the name of journalism.
