Having a Nice Day? I Can Fix That.

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalism has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death. It calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education--in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet. The movement offers, in return, the absurd but seductive promise that those who are right with God will rise to become spiritual and material oligarchs.  They will become the new class.Those who are not right with God, be they poor or Muslim or unsaved, deserve what they get. In the rational world none of this makes sense. But believers have been removed from a reality-based world. They believe that through Jesus all is possible.  It has become a Christian duty to embrace the exploitation of others, to build a Christian America where freedom means the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Since believers see themselves as becoming empowered through faith, the gross injustices and repression that could well boomerang back on most of them are of little concern. They assuage their consciences with the small acts of charity they or their churches dole out to the homeless or the mission fields. The emotion-filled religious spectacles and spiritual bromides compensate for the emptiness of their lives. They are energized by hate campaigns against gays or Muslims or liberals or immigrants. They walk willingly into a totalitarian prison they are helping to construct. They yearn for it. They work for it with passion, self-sacrifice and a blinding self-righteousness. "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. And it is the duty of the Christian foot soldiers to bring about the Christian utopia. When it is finished, when all have been stripped of legal and social protection, it will be too late to resist. This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration. 

Hedges, Chris  American fascists : the Christian Right and the war on America  New York : Free Press, ©2006

If you haven't read this book yet, you really should. No, really. the Christian Right from the inside.

A Buzzing In My Ears

Earlier this year Dawa Steven Sherpa was resting at Everest base camp when he and his companions heard something buzzing. "What the heck is that?" asked the young Nepali climber. They searched and found a big black house fly, something unimaginable just a few years ago when no insect could have survived at 5,360 metres.

So begins this story in the Guardian. It's becoming depressingly familiar at this point; insects where they don't belong, glaciers retreating at an appalling pace, and (in this case) glofs, or glacial lake outburst floods.
So have a read, then pop over to the review of Superfreakonomics and have a read of this:

A large chunk of Superfreakonomics is given over to what Levitt and Dubner present as a simple, cheap alternative to all this depressing futility. They profile Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of sulphur dioxide into the Earth's stratosphere through an 18-mile-long hose, held up by helium balloons, at an initial cost of around $20m. The chemical would reflect some of the sun's rays back into space, cooling the planet, exactly as happened following the massive 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. The primary objection to this plan, as with other "geoengineering" schemes, is that there's no predicting the unknown negative effects of meddling in such a complex natural system. And it's strange, given how much is made in both Freakonomics books of the law of unintended consequences, that they don't mention this in the context of Myhrvold's plan.

This is where we wait and wait and wait and then begin grasping at straws and stupid ideas, looking for the quick fix. The problem is not sunlight falling on the Earth, its the CO2 in the atmosphere. The sulphur dioxide "fix" does nothing but to help buy a little time. The ocean is still gong acidic (as one example), crashing what few food stocks are left. That will not be slowed by altering the amount of sunlight getting through the atmosphere. (Freakonomics; a bunch of untested and unproven correlations and ideas masquerading as breakthrough carved-in-stone facts. Mediocre speculative mutton dressed up as scientific lamb).

Away from the city...why?

Our plan for the weekend was to watch our friend's daughter dance in Mill Bay, but that got cancelled at the last minute. So on the spur of the moment, we decided to go up-Island anyway.
We left about 1:30 and headed north, van loaded with a mish-mash of equipment and etc. Leaving things until the last minute always leads to poor planning. But having a Kia Sedona van, we were able to just dump a lot of stuff in and hope for the best.
The day was calm but overcast, and we stopped at the viewpoint on the Malahat to check out the view over Saanich Inlet. The last time we were here, we were over a major fog bank, looking down on rippling fields of pearl grey. Quite beautiful, but not really what you'd call a view. Saturday was clear, letting us see a lot more than a few mountain tops poking up through the fog.


Seananus Island and Brentwood Bay

It is interesting to see places we've kayaked from an overhead vantage. I got a terrific look at Saanich Inlet and Cowichan Bay from my seat the last time I flew into Victoria.


Saanich Inlet northeast from the viewpoint

This time it was the beauty of a quiet winter's day. While storms are way more frequent during the winter, many of the days rival the summer for quiet perfection. And as an added bonus, there are a lot fewer people out most winter days.
We pulled in at Mill Bay and stopped at Rusticana Coffee (805a Deloume Road, Mill Bay) both so I could get a coffee and so we could pick up another dozen eggs. The last time we were here we got some local free range eggs and they were terrific. When I opened the carton, it was clear the eggs had never been washed, and when I tried to crack one on the side of a bowl, it took two tries to get the shell and membrane to split. The yolks were well-coloured and stood high, so these really were gold-standard eggs. Regretfully, they didn't have any more on hand, but at least they hadn't run out of coffee. Then it was down to the boat launch and out with the kayaks.


Boat launch, Mill Bay

We were here about a week back because I wanted to check out a sailboat for sale (not going to happen, for many varied and good reasons. Not this boat, anyway). Today, the water was again glass-flat, the weather superb. This time I wasn't paddling Paula's inflatable (she was using it), but I'd loaded the Pamlico 100 for the weekend. Somehow the idea of lifting the touring boats on top of the van just wasn't appealing.



I've been reading Robert Morris' book on kayaks Building Skin-On-Frame Boats over the past couple of weeks (just dipping in and out--not reading straight through. The writing is clear and accessible, and the book is terrific, so I don't want to leave any inadvertent impression that its taking me forever to get through it!) and he shows how to build a couple of recovery and retrieval kayaks--one of which is almost identical to the Pam. Robert is the owner of Brewery Creek Boats in Vancouver, and his shop is definitely a stop on my next visit across the Strait.
So back in Mill Bay, just as we were getting ready to launch, this fellow popped up not ten metres off the shore:



Mill Bay seal

He (an assumption, I know, but there you go...) cruised slowly by, having a good long look at us before ducking under and going back to hunting. Having destroyed three cameras in the last 18 months by taking them kayaking with me, I (wisely, I think) decided to leave the camera behind and just be in the moment, rather than spending too much time worrying about the next shot.
It seems that the further up-Island you go, the further back in time you travel. As we paddled across the bay, we saw a couple of seals splaching away, chasing something or other. And then the heads started popping up around us, checking out who we were and just what did we think we were up to? Not just one or two seals, either. Nor the half dozen we sometimes get out around Discovery Island. At times we were surrounded by a dozen seals in Mill Bay. Once you begin to reduce the population pressure on the natural world, which happens as you go north on the island, the more the natural world seems to repopulate. And Mill Bay is not that far out of Victoria--leaving me wondering just how amazingly full of life the coast was even fifty years ago.
Once we got the opening of the bay in to Saanich Inlet, we could see that the glass-flat water stretched out north, south, and east of us as far as we could see. The water was flat enough that you could get into real trouble, lured ever outward into this Suspended World.
It seems that we weren't the only ones out at Mill Bay on saturday. As the light started to go, we pulled back in after a nice but not too-long paddle and saw another kayak crossing out at the opening to the bay. We strongly suspect it was Richard, returning to his van. He was too far away to recognize, and we were fixated on going back to Rusticana for one of their meringues (which are lovely, BTW), so we didn't hook up with him for dinner.
After loading up, we headed toward Nanaimo, where we spent the night at a (gasp!) motel. This is quite unusual for us, as we usually camp or stay with friends when we travel, but it turns out that this was our decadent weekend (meaning we slept indoors, alone, and with a tv. For us, that's decadence!). The next morning, after a quick fuelling stop at Tim Horton's, we parked in Maffeo Park and took a look around.
Maffeo--pronounced maff-eh-oh, not maff-ee-oh, as I quickly learned--is quite a bit smaller than I thought. From the local maps, I expected something about a quarter the size of Beacon Hill Park, but Maffeo is about the size of a city block once you include the parking lots. Very nice, and connected to an extensive sea-walk, there's even an artificial lagoon.


Artificial lagoon, Maffeo Park, Nanaimo

Under the bridge there's a wall to keep the lagoon from draining, and along the sides are pumps and waterfalls to keep the water circulating. At the near end is a beach, the whole thing is meant for kids to swim in, but it looks like a great place (near the washrooms) to practise recoveries.
Down by the bridge is  where we chose to put in. This may not be the most convenient on a busy summer's day, but on a quiet winter's morning it was really quite decent.


Steps to the water's edge, Maffeo Park

The steps down to the water are broad and are really well set up for launching. You carry your boat down and put it in the water (woohoo rec boats!) and then just step in as you would at the pool.
Again, I had a mistaken idea as to how far it would be from the launch to Newcastle Island, but the actual paddle was less than 10 minutes across protected water. This is a perfect newbie paddle: you go to someplace, across what looks like real water, but you're never far from help and the waters are very sheltered. And there's a cool destination--Newcastle has trails, camping and picnic areas and gives every impression of being a great place to explore.
This launch point is next to the Newcastle Island ferry dock (that would be it just past the steps above), but the ferry is small and easy to avoid. There are also a tonne of pleasure boats in the area to keep track of, and you have to know where the seaplanes land and take-off (at the right-hand end of the bridge in the first photo), but all of these are things that can be dealt with.


Sea plane heading out for take-off


We made good time over to Newcastle and passed between it and Protection with no trouble (it was, after all, a quiet winter's day). It was not as perfect a day as Saturday had been, but we carried on out around the outside edge of Newcastle. Here the ferries get bigger:


Ferry north of Newcastle Island, Nanaimo


The wake from the ferry is pretty much just fun, although you have to remember to pull your kayak out of the water far enough that it won't grab your boat and take it away (says the man who had that happen on Moresby Island...).
We made it about a third the way around the island  to Kanaka Bay


Kanaka Bay, Newcastle Island

when we noticed the snow was now obscuring Harmac, to the south of us. We neither wanted to paddle through a snow squall, nor drive over the Malahat in a snowstorm, so we turned around and headed back to Maffeo Park. The paddle back, a bit of a breeze came up, and that's really when I missed having my paddling gloves--which were sitting safe at home in my chest of drawers. Last minute decisions make for bad planning, no suprise there. And there would have been worse things to forget--my wetsuit  or fleece underwear, for example.
The snow squall stayed south of us, thankfully, although it was plenty cold. And as we drove home we found that the snow fell about five kilometres south of where we were and stopped about Ladysmith, so the Malahat was clear and dry on the drive home. We even stopped in at the Cobble Hill Farmer's Market on the way back, which is where we picked up some more free-range eggs. All in all, a great weekend.

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New Year's Resolution

I thought that I'd try and make a resolution that I might be able to stick to this year. So I looked at my list of holds at the library (bless the GVPL and all public libraries and those who work in them), and found that I'd let my hold list creep up to thirty items. Now sure, four are media holds and one is for a book that is missing, but still, some of these books have been waiting the better part of a year for me to read them.
So that's my resolution for this year; to read my way through all the books on my hold list before adding any more to it. It's the last part that's going to be the most difficult--I regularly cruise the "new additions" listings at the library's website and add them to my holds in order to keep as much of my reading as current as possible. Many of the books I read over the last year had been published in the previous or current year--something that has been rare over my reading life.
So my last book of 2008 was Margaret Atwood's Payback : debt and the shadow side of wealth, her Massey Lecture from last year. A terrific read, really, exploring our attitudes (both the current societal and the deeper long-term cultural) toward debt and lending. And it could not be more relevant, coming as it did just as the current economic hoo-rah came to the attention of the general public.
So for 2009, the first book I'm currently reading off my holds list is Twinkie, deconstructed : my journey to discover how the ingredients found in processed foods are grown, mined (yes, mined), and manipulated into what America eats. It's interesting, but the author, Steve Ettlinger, is no Michael Pollen (btw, check out the Bill Moyers interview with Pollen. It's available for free download And if you haven't read Pollen's Open Letter to the Farmer in Chief, you really should).
Ettlinger's writing isn't as clear or deep as Pollan's, although his idea, to track the ingredients list of an iconic American food, is a very good one. He is a bit lazy when it comes to questioning the ingredients list, however. When it comes to High Fructose Corn Syrup, he doesn't do much more than suggest that there is some controversy about the use of HFCS in the American diet. So far, at least, this is not a compelling or involving read.
Unlike, say, the book my daughter insisted I read: Smile When You're Lying: confessions of a rougue travel writer by Chuck Thompson.This is just a lot of fun to read. It's not going to change the world, but hopefully it will add a little much-needed balance to our perceptions of those lovely puff-pieces on exotic destinations in magazines and newspapers. This is a book that was worth the couple of hours I invested in it.

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Books and Reviews 2008

These are the books I felt it worth mentioning that I read during the last quarter of 2008.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
Review of Tar Sands

Philosophy of Science: A VSI
Review of Philosophy of Science: A VSI

The Elements of Library Research
Review of "Elements"

The Age of American Unreason

The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization

Fundamentalism: A VSI

Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Perserving Changed the World

Climate Solutions: A Citizen's Guide
Climate Solutions: A Citizen's Guide (pdf link)

Human Rights: A VSI

The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

Social and Cultural Anthropology: A VSI

Globalization: A VSI

Democracy: A VSI

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction
Review of Terrorism: A VSI

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Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

I count myself lucky to have managed to get my hands on this book already. This may be the most important non-fiction book written in Canada this year. Andrew Nikiforuk has shown once again that he is not afraid of the truth, and will report it. Canada's Greg Palast, if you will. He's already won the Governor General’s Award for his writing, and deserves it again.
Andrew Nikiforuk breaks his book down into a history of the oil sands and their development--a history of which we are all too ignorant. In each chapter he details an aspect of the oil sands history and how the exploitation of the sands has proceeded. The book begins with the "Declaration of a Political Emergency"--note, a political emergency, not an environmental one. That the Tar Sands is an environmental emergency is beyond question: alone, the sands account for why the federal government has spent upwards of six billion dollars on trying to reduce the Canadian carbon footprint and has achieved less than nothing (having actually fallen further behind its stated targets each year). But the most important chapter in Tar Sands is Chapter 12: The First Law of Petropolitics. Simply stated, it is this: as the price per barrel of oil rises, the freedoms, transparency, and democratic nature of a society falls. To quote from the book:
Ross examined a number of social and political measurements, such as taxes and military spending, from 113 different sates between 1971 and 1997 and found that a "single standard deviation rise" in oil wealth directly corresponded with a 0.72 drop on a democracy scale.
You don't have to belive any of this. All you have to do is read the suggestions put forward and then look at the Alberta provincial government and (particularly since the election of the Harper Conservatives) progressively the federal government to see the overwhelming linkages between the First Law of Petropolitics and the evidence of our own country's fall into Third World petrostate status. We are already corrupted.
You can see a preview of the book at Google books, and Andrew Nikiforuk's website contains a wealth of supplementary information. This doesn't do justice to the importance and readability of this major book. Go get it. Read it. Get really angry. And then DO SOMETHING.

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Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction

Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction #67
Samir Okasha
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, ©2002
144 p. Includes bibliographical references and index

    It has been a particular pleasure to read this Very Short Introduction, as many of the philosophers mentioned in it I haven't thought about for quite some time. So to remake their acquaintance has been fun.
    This is not so much a book about scientific investigation as it is an open question about how we know what we know from those investigations.  So I read with delight how David Hume (who's alcohol consumption is apparently legendary, allowing him to out-consume  other philosophers) says simply that we cannot rationally justify inductive reasoning, and although we use inductive reasoning regularly (the sun's come up every day up until now, so it should come up tomorrow), that doesn't make it right.  The idea that arguing in favour of inductive reasoning is, in itself, inductive reasoning and quickly develops circularity, is exciting to me, reminding me that big questions are still out there to be debated.
    Samir Okasha leads us through these Big Questions with assurance ind intelligence. His goal is not to argue in favour of any of them, but to explore the history of ideas and the criticisms of those ideas.  His illustrations are generally deceptively simple and clear, illuminating the philosophical problems under discussion with grace and ease.
    As an example, he presents the problem of  what exactly is scientific explanation? And what does it mean to say that a problem can be explained by science?  Okasha begins with a philosopher I hadn't previously encountered; Carl Hempel. After a brief recap of Hempel's “covering law” model of explanation,  Okasha develops a schematic of Hempel's model:

General laws
Particular facts
=>
Phenomenon to be explained

To quote  Okasha, “...Hempel's model is called the covering law model of explanation. For according to the model, the essence of explanation is to show that the phenomenon to be explained is 'covered' by some general law of nature.”  So far, so good. But there are critics of Hempel who suggest that his covering law model allows in things that should be excluded. As an example,  Okasha writes out a thought experiment:
    Suppose you are lying on the beach on a sunny day, and you notice that a flagpole is casting a shadow of 20 metres across the sand. So why, someone asks, is the shadow 20 metres long?
    The answer is fairly straightforward: The elevation of the sun in 37°, and light travels in a straight line (straight enough for the purposes of this discussion, anyway). The flagpole is 15 metres high. The trig calculation indicates that the shadow will be 20 metres long.
    So far so good. General laws= light travels in straight lines and trigonometric laws. Particular facts= angle of elevation of the sun and height of the flagpole. Phenomenon to be explained=the 20 metre long shadow.
    But what if we change the explanandum (the phenomenon being explained)? Let's change it to the height of the flagpole.  In our case above, this simply swaps the length of the shadow into the “particular facts” group and the height of the flagpole into the “phenomenon being explained” group.  But something odd happens—the explanation doesn't really fit. Mathematically it is true. But as an explanation as to why the flagpole is 15 metres high, well, it falls down. The flagpole is what it is for completely different reasons: the contract to install the flagpole specified the height, that was the only flagpole available, whatever. So while the “answer” conforms to Hempel's model, it allows something to stand as a scientific explanation that is clearly incorrect except mathematically.

    So we have questions raised about whether explanation and prediction are simply two sides of the same coin, or radically different concepts.  And  Okasha opens these questions with a simple example that allows us to see the underlying philosophical questions.   Okasha does this again and again, asking whether a theory is really to describe hidden facts (ie.  gases really do contain molecules in motion) or  are they just a way to predict observations? And what is the difference? Or do we trust scientific paradigms or treat them with a certain amount of scepticism? After all, they do change, and they do change radically (think of the change from the Ptolemaic to Copernican paradigm).
    Reading  Philosophy of Science gave me the feeling of being at play in the realm of pure thought—a lovely place to be, and one I haven't visited all that recently.  Quite the delightful Very Short Introduction.

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The Elements of Library Research

The Elements of Library Research: What Every Student Needs To Know
Mary W. George
©2008 Princeton University Press
GVPL call number: 025.524 GEO


Yes, I read this for fun. The list on the left, Currently Inhabiting My Head, is simply a list of what I've been reading--all of it, except for magazine articles and newspapers. There are no novels for relaxation, or books of poetry hidden away. What you see on the list is my leisure reading.
So why read a book about doing research? I picked this up just to see what Ms. George had to say, and maybe to remind myself of some aspects of reading for information that I've forgotten. And its a good thing I did--this is a terrific book.
Mary George writes accessibly and well, this book intended to serve as a introduction to the library research paper for university and college freshmen. Although it would certainly serve the same function for bright high school students.
The book is fairly short--the main content runs about 144 pages, and then is followed by five appendices, a glossary, selected bibliography, and an index. But in those 144 pages, Ms. George builds a structure that should help take the fear out of writing a paper. Most importantly, she reiterates that professors and librarians not only will help direct and guide, but want to help. In my experience, she may not have emphasized this enough; reference librarians do what they do because they really love finding stuff out and want you to share that excitement.
Much of what Ms. George writes about are approaches to the library that I've so internalized that I would never have thought to mention them; such as looking at the books on either side of the one you were looking for in the stacks (because they are filed by subject and will likely contain information you want to know). On the other hand, she did remind me that I don't make sufficient use of the online databases available through our local library system. But most importantly, Ms. George expands on techniques for locating information. The few words she writes on George Boole and John Venn--and what they are remembered for (Boolean searching and Venn diagrams)--clarifies why Boolean searching works so well: the more terms you enter, the tighter the search results. Coupled with her explanations of more advanced search techniques (and the recommendation to ask the librarian for assistance) certainly pointed me in the direction of better research.
This is an excellent book. A quick read for those experienced in library research just, like me, looking to remind themselves of procedures and approaches they may have forgotten, and a useful reference for those new to serious library use.

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Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction
Charles Townshend
2002, Oxford University Press
GVPL call number: 303.625 TOW

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction by Charles Townshend, is a dispassionate overview of a political process that generates some of the deepest fears and excesses of emotion. And this from a series of actions that “...can in principle be minimal. Even in Israel, it has been pointed out, the fatalities and injuries to Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks since the 1967 war would barely deserve a separate line in the national mortality and morbidity statistics if their significance were purely quantitative.”¹

The question of just what is terrorism is one that seems to defy actual definition. As Townshend points out, “efforts to get to grips with terrorism have repeatedly been hung up on the issue of definition, of distinguishing terrorism from criminal violence or military action.” This problem with definitions is summed up by Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) and ambassador to Mauritania:

In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us — this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group — they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says — one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.²

---

Townshend points out that while “state definitions simply assume that the use of violence by 'subnational groups' (as the US Department of State's definition has it) is automatically illegal. In the state's view, only the state has the right to use force—it has, as academics tend to say, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” ³ But the most prolific use of terror is by the state against its own people. Where terrorist acts by non-state actors would, with the exception of the attack of the World Trade Centers in 2001, “ barely deserve a separate line in the national mortality and morbidity statistics,” terror practised by the Peron regime in the 1970s (sponsored and supported by the US), killed between 10,000 and 30,000 of its own citizens. “This regime involved a definite shift form the traditional terrorism of the shock groups—primarily assassination—to a large scale campaign to root out 'subversion'. Its breadth stemmed from the characteristically broad notion of subversion held by military officers: general Videla defined as a terrorist 'not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization'.”4 This is an example of what is referred to as “white terror” — reactionary or right-wing terror that is characteristically pro-state.

While Townshend provides an overview of the political goals of terrorism (he defines the elements of the terror process as 1. Seizing attention: shock, horror, fear or revulsion 2. Getting the message: what do terrorists want? And 3. Fight or flight? — the response), he makes note of the fact that terror is really a spent force politically. Terror generally fails to have any effect on politics—unless it is state-sponsored terror (as in the example of Argentina, above, where it has a chilling effect on society and the body politic). Recent terror organizations in the West, such as Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, or even the IRA, have failed in any of their attendant goals, with the exception of the “sacralization of violence”, the “purity” of action over talk. Terror must be a component part of a larger political and transformational movement, it cannot and does not succeed on its own.

Even religious terrorist groups—almost unknown before 1980, but comprising nearly a third of terrorist organizations by 1994—have a difficult time communicating their aims to those they wish to terrorize. The attacks on the World Trade Centers have been explained as having been “intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat”(President G.W. Bush) or “they hate us because we elect our leaders” (special counsellor to the President Karen Hughes). As Townshend says;

“Retreat from what, or where? American commentators, both official and unofficial, showed a marked reluctance to accept the fairly well-established view that Osama bin Laden's primary casus belli against the USA was the defilement of Saudi Arabia by the presence of US troops....Even if bin Laden or the shadowy al-Qaida had issued a statement of specific demands, in such a climate of interpretation it would quite likely not have been believed. ”5

Townshend also looks at the responses of the State to violence by non-state actors, and concludes that in fact terrorists are quite correct on one point: often terrorist acts emphasize and increase fascist or anti-democratic actions n the part of the government. He specifically cites both American and British actions since the attacks on the World Trade Centers in 2001 as examples, and discusses what this means for democracies and their responses to violence.

At the end of the day, this proves to be—as so many of the Very Short Introductions have proven to be—an essential read before one can reasonably discuss a given topic. I found the book to be quite free of cant or axe-grinding (although I trust many state actors in both the Bush and Blair administrations would disagree, as Townshend sees no basis in fact or evidence in reality for many of their claims), and at 139 pages of text (less endnotes, further reading, and index), proves to be very information dense for a book so reasonable in length.

1: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 15

2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism retrieved 03 June 2008

3: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press pp. 3-5

4: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 47

5: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Charles Townshend, 2002, Oxford University Press p. 9

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