,Re: In case no one else saw this

[Robert Mahnke]

I'm not sure I disagree with that article, Thomas, but I also don't think
it has a lot of explanatory force.  And when the article says, "The
inconvenient truth is that geopolitics is governed as much as is physics by
Newton’s third law of motion: 'For every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction'" it is obviously wrong.  ISIS can't bomb Paris in the
fashion that France is bombing it, so it turns to asymmetric warfare, but
the way that it acts is also obviously a function of its particular
ideology, which is to say its religious doctrines.  To the question of why
ISIS does what it does, I recommend this article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

It was written several months ago, so does not explain the recent turn to
terrorism, but once one starts to think from their perspective, things look
a little different.  I would like to understand better the appeal that ISIS
has for disaffected Europeans and others who travel to Syria to join ISIS
or otherwise offer material support.  Surely the recent terrorism is
intended, at least in part, to further recruiting.  If anyone has seen good
writing on that subject, pointers would be appreciated.

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> I wrote:
>
> "They hate us for our freedoms" is, once again, misleading at best. This
>> was not or only partly about the hedonistic West, I suggest. It was
>> mainly about France's substantial contribution to the Syria clusterfuck,
>> not to mention winning hearts and minds in Libya. I am not talking about
>> justification here, of course, merely about motive.
>>
>
> My argument finds much better expression here:
>
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/17/russian-bombs-terror-vladimir-putin-syria-david-cameron
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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