ISIS Recruits

Hero, role model, traitor: at Yale

Amidst the dormitories at Yale is a statue of Nathan Hale, a Yale graduate of 1773.  It is well kept and prominently placed, a fitting place for a role model for idealistic youth.  I remember being struck by it in 1972 as I dealt with the hazards of the military draft and the Vietnam war I thought was wrong.

I remember learning as a schoolboy he was young, handsome, tall, and that he volunteered for a dangerous assignment from General Washington to investigate and report back on British troop movements on Long Island.  He was captured as a spy, scheduled to be hanged, and chose as his last words, "I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country."

Nathan Hale was a patriot.  His brief life is taught in schools.   There are statues of him at Yale, at Nathan Hale Park in New Haven harbor, in Chicago in front of the Tribune Building, in front of the Justice Department in Washington D.C, and at Langley at CIA Headquarters.

Hero, role model, traitor: in Chicago

What was not taught was that George Washington was a traitor to his country, that he lead an armed insurrection against lawful government that took the lives of loyal soldiers and civilians, and that Nathan Hale's intention, if carried out, would have meant more casualties among courageous soldiers doing hazardous duty attempting to keep order in their country.

I experienced youthful idealism.   The feeling has persisted but in a much quieter way diminished by age, habit, and accommodation to the notion that some of the good important work of the world --feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, struggling toward world peace--is done by the workaday tasks of cooking a meal, bandaging a wound, casting a vote.   

The young are especially susceptible to appeals to idealism. Youth wants change now, and a life of significance now.  On balance it is a good thing, but in any case it is probably an inevitable thing, a part of the development process from infancy to decrepitude.   

Hillary Clinton was chosen by her Wellesley classmates to speak at graduation.   She, and her talk, got national attention.  Two sentences from it:

"We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest.  We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living."

It was 1969.   I don't really know what "immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living" means but I understand the mood suggested by her words.   We could make a difference, we could change the world!   It wasn't enough to seek mere money or comfort or contentment with our lives;  we would seek greatness, a life of significance. 

Nathan Hale is not remembered as a terrorist or traitor.  He is remembered as a hero and role model, who said his own death was well worth it, for a cause greater than himself.   But looked at from the perspective of his own time, he was doing a capital crime.

Which brings me to ISIS and terror recruits.   America is at war with an ideological movement, not with a nation or a religion.  The people who put on suicide vests or who shoot up Christmas parties are generally young people doing it out of idealism shaped by a movement borne out of a radical interpretation of Islam and a rejection of the modern post-Enlightenment secular world view.   

America has a job to do, ending the the ideology and the people who nurture and amplify the idea of jihad against us.  We have experience with great popular enthusiasms.  There were Great Awakenings in the 18th and 19th Centuries, those great waves of popular religious revival.  Consider also the awakening that motivated the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.  There were waves of enthusiasm and belief that motivated the Know Nothing Party in the 19th Century and the Ku Klux Klan in the 20th.  Plus, the Russian Revolution and its experiment with communism.   The Cultural Revolution in China.  These ideas did not end with bombs.   But they ended.   The movements evolved.  They lost energy and burned out.  The purpose and enthusiasm that sustained them dissipated then moved on in another form, and become part of history.  There will always be problems and ideological movements, but the problems will take new shape to be observed as history rather than news.  

We are confronting an idea and a movement, not a nation state.  We cannot occupy Germany or Japan and end a threat, because the threat is an ideology not a land mass.

It is easiest to think of it as "war" because we have the military structures to fight a war against a land mass.  Armies, navy, an air force.    And we have a political structure that encourages candidates to compete over who will use that military most fiercely.  Great tool, wrong enemy.  

Our challenge is to shape a struggle to defeat an idea.   Let's watch to see which candidates posit a policy on how to defeat an ideological movement.