Nemeses: MS-13 and Islamism

Some time ago, after I had explained how LA's violent gang culture spread internationally thanks in part to the US government's policy of deportation, Buttersnatch commented on this blog:

"I've lived here a LONG time and have an MBA (meaning, I’m an educated man), and have never read anything about mass-deportations. Can you imagine the public outcry if we tried to deport people, en mass? You liberal whacko’s would scream bloody murder!"

Well last night FIVE aired a documentary on MS-13 and there on film were those unmarked aeroplanes full of deported mareros landing in Central America's unsuspecting capitals.

The programme various aspects of the Salvatrucha culture, such as Jumping in, the 13 second beating each initiate is treated to and Stacking, the complex system of hand signs the gang uses. The tattoos sported by the members of MS-13 are also said to illustrate their personal gangland biographies (and contain telephone area codes, which in some cases has assisted law enforcers!)

The makers of this film were ultimately unsure whether MS-13 is an organisation consisting of loose territorial cliques or whether there is some kind of central kingpin behind the whole multinational structure. It seemed odd that they also found it hard to explain why the gang members seem so at home on this homicidal gameboard. Why do men of arms everywhere kill (and die) with so much less reflection than the rest of us civilians? Peer pressure, and a hierarchical culture that tells them that it's OK to do so.

Right now, in the globalised world, our Western way of life seems to be genuinely threatened by newly virulent forms of foes that we had considered long vanquished. Islamism is a deadly refurbishment of the ideology behind the West's Old World territorial enemy, and the maras surely deserve the title of Moctezuma's revenge far more than tourist tummy trouble. In both cases the essence of the threat is a nihilistic counter culture, and in both cases a significant strategic error at the close of the Cold War era appears to have seeded it in the first place.

The worst part of it is that the West doesn't yet seem to fully appreciate the present danger. To say that most Muslims are moderate is like consoling yourself that most winds are moderate as you watch your Caribbean cabin being lifted up into the air by a category five hurricane.

My Bulgarian chum was already fully clued up about the "Clash of Civilisations" back when George W. Bush was in rehab. For him and likeminded countrymen it is the primary, atavistic confrontation, and he duly scoffed at all criticism of Dubya's speech on Monday. (Yesterday he sent me this link to a page that recounts the history of the Bulgar's own version of Charles Martel, Khan Tervel.)

He may well be right to suspect that the West is heading into a possibly unavoidable hot war with some of its most unpleasant enemies. Yet he does not however share my view that we ourselves have been stoking that unpleasantness and that we currently lack either the right leadership or the right strategy for the present situation. (Was is so long ago that he complained bitterly about the new global cop when the bombs were raining down on Christian Serbs in order to protect their Muslim neighbours?)

The Neo Conservative strain in the Western approach to the Muslim world seems to me to be especially prone to counter-productivity. Not only is it anti-liberal itself, it appears incapable of thoughts which have not first been run through some ill-fitting paradigm lifted from the past. ("Third World War", "Crusade", "Appeasement") or worse still, the evangelical form of Zionism. This leads to inaccurate understandings, which in turn lead to more strategic errors.