All we hear of ISIS
Zany madcap Joyce Carol Oates is stirring up the hornets again.
Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates
All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?
Yes, query is naïve.
Puritanism and the punishments that enforce it are what ISIS is all about. There is of course joy and celebration, when for instance they smash ancient monuments and buildings in Palmyra, or when they seize another town, or when they find more women to rape. But the joy and celebration are for the alpha males, not for anyone else, and their source is not what minimally compassionate people consider healthy. They rejoice in violence and cruelty and conquest.
Was she expecting lyric poetry? Music? Dance? Parties with food and wine? Is it news to her that there are people who hate the world and everything in it?
Strordinary!! Has a once mediocre mind gone?
Hahaha yeah I’ve always found her such a mediocre novelist.
The fact that their total military strength is maybe that of a large village? That they’re kinda an overcooked criminal mob with pretensions of being a ‘nation’? That they’re probably only prominent at all because of a power vacuum and their skill at self-promotion via social media? The fact that they have to count their ‘success’ at gunning down unarmed revelers as evidence their god exists and is helping them? The fact that, since, given all this, they’re little better than angry trolls with guns, and Anonymous is probably the appropriate counterweight? The fact that labeling the countermeasures a ‘war’ is giving them way too much credit?
I mean, that’s all kinda positive, I guess. It’s a bit like reminding yourself most white supremacy groups are pretty sad spectacles at the end of the day, though, even after they’ve blown up the federal building. But perhaps Ms. JCO would like to ask what we can find ‘celebratory and joyous’ about those?
Well, there’s this account of non-alpha-male lives under Daesh. There are a few moments of joy at something besides death in there. The thing that struck me was how willing the women were to make the best of it, to try to be “good girls,” to find what happiness they could. And even them, even people with that attitude, even collaborators, are treated so much like cattle soon to be used for parts that they lose it.
She has tweeted a two-part response to all the justified mockery she is receiving:
“Though much abuse is heaped on those who seek to understand individuals antithetical to ourselves, yet it seems necessary. What is the fear?
“Fortunately scientists who sought to understand what causes virulent infectious diseases like the plague were not consequently demonized.”
Of course, in reality she didn’t seek to understand what created ISIS. She just implied that negative news coverage of them is propaganda and they are actually a bunch of happy-go-lucky, Kumbaya-singing summer camp counselors.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1078401992178261/?l=48ca7738d3
I think JCO’s portrayal of ISIS as Puritan is an insult to Puritans. Puritanism is merely the starting gate for these people.
I can’t fault JCO for the question. I think it’s a wonderful impulse to try to find humanity in the Designated Demons du Jour, and she admitted upfront it might be naïve of her.
Of course, I’m the kind of person who mistrusts the Two Minute Hate phenom even when it occasionally lands on someone utterly deserving. Mistrusted it when it landed on Qaddafi in the 1980s, mistrust it now.
And to be especially pointed: I would think people who hang out here, of all places, would be sympathetic to that mistrust, even if they thought it misguided in this particular instance.
(Technically, I’ve just compared Ophelia to ISIS, which should befuddle the shining wits* at FtB.)
* Spoonerisms are fun
I don’t see that implication. “All we see of” doesn’t automatically imply that Western media are hiding something from us. It can mean, “is there ANYTHING else to them?” [while acknowledging, with “probably naive of me,” that there likely isn’t.])
Ophelia: Oates’s work varies widely. I’ve read novels of hers I found instantly forgettable, and others that have stayed with me for years. When she does horror and dark fantasy, she’s very very good.
Of course being so prolific, her ratio of worthwhile to meh is probably not good. She’s doubtless written a novel and three short stories in the time it’s taken me to write this comment.
Isn’t there something celebratory and joyous in the Gestapo? Can’t we try to understand them?
Isn’t there something celebratory and joyous in the Inquisition?
Isn’t there something celebratory and joyous in the KKK?
It’s actually okay to say that some groups are NOT doing acceptable things. It’s is fine not to look for the good in everyone.
Agreed. And it’s also okay to say that they are doing so much bad that any sliver of good is instantly overwhelmed. This is something I asked someone (Robert Wright, I think) at a humanist conference a few years ago. If a person is working at a soup kitchen (because of their religion) and then goes home and beats their kids nearly to death (because of their religion), does that mean that the good effectively overrules the bad? He said yes. I sat down stunned. I hadn’t even given him an extraordinarily stretched hypothetical that would never happen – I gave him an example from my own life.
In short, if there was one sliver of good, he would excuse someone from torturing and tormenting small children for years on the basis of that sliver.
I guess what I’m saying is, how much good would we need to find in ISIS to overcome the intensity of the bad? Would it be enough to share a slice of bread with a starving person? Or to help a blind old lady across the street? Where do we draw the line?
Ugh, that makes me think of this business ethics course I’m taking right now, where a number of companies are lauded for giving away a few million to charity, but they are exploiting the poor for billions in profits while their policies keep them poor, and poisoning the earth at the same time.
Samantha, I feel like you’ve deliberately taken my comments in the least charitable way possible.
Deciding that the enemy is inhuman is wrong.
Perhaps I’m in the wrong place to discuss this.
This blog post discusses the “them and us” dilemma that I think Chris is concerned about:
http://andrewelder.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/who-do-we-burn.html
ISIS wants political, economic and physical power over people. It will replace one unjust system with its own. That’s a political goal that’s hard to accept: it’s not like having sympathy for the PLO or IRA, where the goal is to replace the system with one that balances the rights of citizens better.
ISIS also doesn’t paint itself as joyful or celebratory: they want people to take an ‘us or them’ view, and they want their “them” to fear them.
I don’t think they’re inhuman, but I can’t think of them as just flawed humans like the rest of us. I think their actions and goals are evil and abhorrent. They’re recruiting children to shoot accountants outside police stations, here in Australia.
Huh? Chris, I wasn’t reacting to you at all. I was reacting to Joyce. The enemy isn’t inhuman, but the things they do are terrible. Terrible enough that asking about what hidden good they have just seems irrelevant to me. You should have noticed I never compared them to *anything* inhuman, only to human organizations most people are in agreement do bad things.
But the KKK guy takes off his hood and seems like a nice guy. The Gestapo officer writes home to his mother so she doesn’t worry about him. Torquemada surely took joy in contemplating how many souls he was saving.
@Chris Christie, understanding: http://anothermanicsunday.blogspot.fi/2015/11/swimming-to-caliphate.html
For starters, let me repeat the original question:
Here is my immediate reaction: no, actually it’s a good question. Moreover, many people are asking it – the journalists, the social workers, probably also the intelligence officers! What’s so special about Joyce Carol Oates? Why is it „stirring up the hornets” when she does it? (Or is my query naïve?)
Gestapo was mentioned here. I think it’s a bad analogy (if anything, Stalinism would be a better one). Here is the difference: there was no steady influx of people from all over the world attracted by the Gestapo, no phenomenon of volunteers travelling to Nazi Germany to join the Gestapo, no English and American teenagers – both male and female – seeing in the Gestapo the fulfillment of their dreams. On the other hand, that’s what we’ve got now, right? That’s also what so many journalists, social workers – and probably also the intelligence officers! – have been trying to understand. What’s the attraction? What’s so celebratory & joyous for those people about the Islamic state? How can we understand them with the picture of ISIS as gruesome, puritanical and punitive only? Oh, come on, so many people have been searching for answers! It’s a good question!
Chris Clarke #7, yes to what you wrote. But it’s not just a general humanistic concern – it’s also a practical issue. How can we counteract – that’s the worry lurking in the background. And the point is that we *do* need some understanding in order to counteract.
Still, such questions can be difficult to ask. Sometimes they are automatically seen as attempts to justify the atrocities or to blame the West. (What makes the situation even worse is that sometimes they do indeed function in this way.)
So, what’s so special about the initial quote? Is it something about the formulation? Is it about the moment or the medium used? Or is it something about Joyce Carol Oates in particular?
Seriously asking. I know very little about Joyce Carol Oates.
Okay, Ariel, good point, if it’s being asked in order to understand how it has an appeal to recruit people from outside the area they have under control, that makes sense as part of an overall strategy. I got the impression Joyce Carol Oates was saying something very different, though, that we were missing the part that makes them people we should like.
Samantha:
I didn’t have this impression, but that’s maybe because I’m missing some context. All I saw were the tweets.
I know that she doesn’t explicitly mention ISIS’ recruiting success – this is my addition. In her second tweet we read “Though much abuse is heaped on those who seek to understand individuals antithetical to ourselves, yet it seems necessary. What is the fear?”. However, she doesn’t provide any explanation of why it seems necessary. In a still another tweet she says that “Fortunately scientists who sought to understand what causes virulent infectious diseases like the plague were not consequently demonized”. Here she *seems* to suggest that the understanding in question might be practically oriented (towards curing the plague) – but “seems” is the key word and I’m not sure at all how to interpret all of this.
Ok, the final outcome for me is that… Twitter sucks and I’m not able to guess her intentions. From now on, I won’t even try. Looking at her initial tweet, I can only repeat “good question” – as I understand it. That’s it, I’m afraid.
After Charlie Hebdo it’s hard to take seriously anything this person says. The typical clueless bleeding-heart liberal twit.
@justinr 22
Yes. If her track record were otherwise, her tweet about ISIS might be open to more interesting – and charitable – interpretations. But as she showed with her “explanation” of opposition to the PEN award, there’s just “no there there.”
Yes, this did seem like just another chapter of her Charlie Hebdo nonsense.
Ah, ok, now I better understand why she received such reactions.
Is there no joy in ISIS? Is there no humanity in ISIS?
Am I a bad person if my answer is “Who cares?”
If they enjoy raping and indiscriminately murdering people and their goal is subjugating everyone under their totalitarian regime, I don’t care what nice things they might do or what simple pleasures they might enjoy. I mean, if I find out they enjoy lavish gift giving and they help the elderly across busy streets, what am I supposed to do with that?
Are they human? Yes, they are. Now what?
That’s actually what makes it so frightening. When you look at the people who followed Hitler…most of them were ordinary people with wives and children and grandchildren, people who might be your next door neighbor and were totally likable as people. The fact that humans can do that to other humans makes it even more frightening.