US Navy Laser Destroys Drone

Some Sirius Shit: Mali (Updated)

The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning, Timbuktu

UPDATE: 2/1. Multiple news outlets are reporting that most of the manuscripts were saved by intrepid and courageous citizens!! The wonderfulness of this news makes the post below seem quite cynical, but I think there is still a kernel of truth in it. :)    

       Yesterday, Islamist rebels in Mali burned two libraries in Timbuktu before the town was retaken by the French. The libraries contained priceless manuscripts, many dating back to a golden age of Islamic civilization. Why burn them?

       I first learned about the Dogon tribe of Mali through Sun City Girls and their song Space Prophet Dogon.

       The Dogon were interesting to Sun City Girls because of their beliefs about Sirius, the dual star system that appears as the brightest star in the sky. The Dogon lore about Sirius is fascinating to many esoterics, who see evidence of extra-terrestrial contact. The best presentation of this view is by far Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... The Dark Star

  

               The Dogon are some of the most researched and visited people on earth. One of the common threads in all this research is the cultural threat that the Dogon face from the West and, more locally, Islam. The Dogon religion involves many representational sculptures, which are anathema to Islam. Many Dogon have converted to Islam and no longer produce the art that fascinates the West.

                Almost all of this research is based on the work of Marcel Griaule, the first chair of anthropology at the Sorbonne. Griaule was a pilot (supposedly he used to lecture in his flight uniform) in World War I , and first met the Dogon on an ambitious journey across Africa. He was the first to write about the Dogon beliefs about Sirius, and most of the esoteric theories about extra-terrestrial contact are based on his work. Unfortunately, Griaule may have been full of shit.

                  In the film (helpfully posted on YouTube by dmthead2012) Tracking the Pale Fox: Studies on the Dogon, we can see two of Griaule's disciples, the filmmaker Jean Rouch and the anthropologist Germaine Detierlen, interacting with Dogon informants. The condescending attitudes of the two towards their Dogon contacts becomes pretty clear at minute 32:00. Rouch and Detierlen basically lecture a Dogon elder on his own cosmology in a one-sided conversation. By the end of the film, the Dogon landscape has literally become a backdrop for Rouch's philosophizing.

                The Dogon and the Timbuktu manuscripts both represent an idealized, static Africa that only really exists in the minds of Westerners. This Africa exists for the cultural purposes of the West, not for its own intrinsic reasons. Timbuktu is a UNESCO world heritage site, preserved in amber for tourists and scholars.

                 It is of course impossible to understand why these unnamed rebels burned down the libraries. They had destroyed many Sufi sites because they considered them idolatrous and outside of the Salafist version of Islam. Perhaps the libraries were burnt for the same reasons. But why wait until the day before the French arrive to burn down the libraries if they had been destroying shrines already?

                  I think the libraries were burned because they were valuable to the West, not because they were religiously impure. The libraries represented the static Africa that we in the West desire for our own purposes, not the fluid Africa that actually is.

Balaclavas

          Some of you have probably noticed the bizarre coincidence of a NYT article on Chinese women sporting neon balaclavas at the beach right in the middle of the Pussy Riot trial.
         Pussy Riot have made brightly colored balaclavas their trademark. It seems that anyone donning such a mask can be in Pussy Riot, or at least show support. Madonna's was black, which I guess matched her outfit. It seemed to be the wrong note to me, as I'll explain below.

          Balaclavas have been associated with violence for a long time. Balaclavas conceal the identity of the wearer, but also strike fear into opponents. The early Klan hoods pictured above conceal the wearers identities, protecting them from reprisal. The masks also seem intended to terrify, with large mustaches and other strange markings. It is impossible to tell from the image what color they were, but on the whole the outfits seem deliberately outlandish and garish. It would not be hard to imagine them brightly colored.

          The image above of a Black September gunman at the Olympic Village in Munich is the defining moment of the balaclava as a symbol of fear. The balaclava is transcending its functional role and becoming purely symbolic. It represents a certain worldview, a certain philosophy that runs across a wide spectrum of post-1968 radicalism. The wearer is above responsibility to his community. The ends justify the means.

           The balaclava was so connected with the militant left that it became part of the official "uniform" of many groups, like the IRA gunmen above. The well educated and media-savvy Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas , on the right, made the woolen mask one of the first symbols of his movement, directly connecting it to post-68 radical groups.

              Once something becomes so removed from its original function, it's easy for its symbolic meaning to be subverted or co-opted. This is certainly the case with the balaclava, which was co-opted by the elite state security units developed to combat the left-wing militants of the late 20th century. The mask is still used as a symbol of fear. It means all bets are off, you can forget about due process or your civil rights, the shit is going down and it is time to get out of here. Russian security forces routinely wear masks. The mask is totally disconnected from any leftist connotations and only represents extreme violence with impunity.

       Enter Pussy Riot, who flip the symbol completely, breaking it out of the world of masculine political terror and creating a totally fresh set of associations. The rejection of militarized violence is indicated in the shift from black or olive drab to neon. In this case the mask is not a symbol of fear or intimdation, but exuberant energies that cannot be contained.

         Then we have Chinese women at the beach. In a strange reversal of the Western standard, women in China try to stay pale to appear wealthy enough not to have to work outside. Women in the west of course use machines to make them darker. This is to appear wealthy enough to go on vacation.
          In order to stay pale, many Chinese women have begun to wear neon balaclavas to the beach. At this point, we have reached the level of total semiotic absurdity that seems to me to be the defining characteristic of the 21st century.

            

Assad's Helicopter

As I write this, the Syrian military is mounting an offensive against the city of Aleppo. A statement from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights  (or this one?) quoted in the Guardian reads,

"Helicopters are participating in clashes at the entrance of Salaheddine district and bombarding it," the group said in an emailed statement on Saturday. "There are also violent clashes at the entrances to Sakhour district."

The helicopters in question may be the Russian-made Mi-25 gunship. The  embedded clip is of Indian Mi-25s at a military demonstration. The Guardian reported that two high-level commanders defected to Turkey after being ordered to turn this weapon on civilians in Aleppo. According to the article, the big choppers

 "are remorseless killing machines able to fire 64 rockets on each mission and 2,000 machine gun rounds of varying calibres. They can stay in the air for four and a half hours."

More importantly for the lightly armed FSA fighters opposing them, one of the defectors states,

"You can't shoot them down. It's impossible. They fly at an altitude of 4.5kms, above the range of a Kalashnikov."

The helicopter was famously used by the Soviets against the mujahideen in Afghanistan. According the helicopter's wikipedia page, the mujahideen nickname for the aircraft was "Shaitan-Arba", or the devil's chariot. Fighters on the ground could only avoid the aircraft until they received the famous "Stinger" heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles from the CIA. After the introduction of the Stinger, the helicopter crews suffered very high casualty rates. The basic method can be seen in the creepy Chechen home video below.