Normally, the New York Post is the king of this genre.
Comics Blogger Defends Cagle
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Alan Gardner produces a cartooning-news blog called The Daily Cartoonist. It’s painfully boosterish and unprofessionally written, which is why most professionals have stopped posting, or reading, it. Today, in an incredibly tacky move – even for a guy widely known throughout cartooning as a miserable hack – he runs interference for Daryl Cagle.
I’ll let you be the judge of whatever sins Daryl is guilty of.
Well, not really. Gardner has barely scratched the surface of the allegations.
He certainly has critics and detractors in the business, but in this case I find no evidence that this was a premeditated effort to capture more market space or syndicate dollars. For those cartoonists who profess to be journalists, whatever happened to asking questions, and getting context before rushing judgement to the presses?
Well, Alan, those of us who profess to be real journalists might start by seeking comment from people like me and Matt Bors, who have been at the forefront of the movement to restore professional ethics to editorial cartooning – you know, instead of childishly denying me the “privilege” of a link (it hurts, it hurts!).
Cagle has zero credibility. And now, neither does Gardner.
Daryl Cagle: The Osama bin Laden of Editorial Cartooning
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I’m a busy guy. Freelance cartoons for two major newspapers, three syndicated cartoons a week, a weekly column, books, comics journalism, freelance illustrations, media appearances, and trying to catch up with my favorite shows (Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, the Partridge Family). But every now and then an existential threat presents itself that requires you to stop whatever you’re doing and respond.
Daryl Cagle is an existential threat, the Osama bin Laden of American editorial cartooning. His relentless quest to squeeze every cent out of the industry keeps leading him to new lows: aggregating cartoons into huge packages in which the cartoonists make pennies but he’s a multimillionaire (like Arianna!), repurposing editorial cartoons over and over to save time, encouraging the worst ethical practices, including undercutting already rock-bottom reprint rates, censoring comments posted by fellow political cartoonists who disagree with him from online forums, and of course plagiarism.
Now he’s sunk to a new low.
Most cartoonists can only sell to one ideological market. For example, I don’t get much traction with conservative papers. Mike Ramirez, the right-wing cartoonist, can’t sell to many liberal papers. But Daryl has come up with “Cartooning-by-Numbers.” That’s right: he sells the same exact cartoon to BOTH liberal and conservative papers! All he has to do is change a minor detail.
Here’s a cartoon he released yesterday. This is very, very, far-right stuff. After all, the whole point of Miranda Rights is that they’re a right. They’re not called the Miranda Privileges. Everyone gets them. Including accused mass murderers.
At the same exact time, Daryl released this ACLU-friendly version of the same cartoon:
At the same exact time, Daryl released this ACLU-friendly version of the same cartoon:
Daryl isn’t a good cartoonist, and does not have the respect of his colleagues, yet he is an extremely powerful man in the profession. This is because his aggregated syndication package, Cagle Cartoons, is so cheap that it is sold to about 800 newspapers (out of 1400 total) in the United States, and also overseas. His blog, which encourages cartoonists to self-plagiarize, is widely read by younger cartoonists and very influential. So this sort of thing could easily catch on. After all, who wouldn’t want to double their marketshare with a few strokes of Photoshop?
Fortunately, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) will consider taking a stand against this sort of thing at its annual convention in Salt Lake City in June. A strong code of ethics will be discussed and possibly enacted. In the meantime, however, we are seeing cartooning at the precipice of disaster, commodifying a once-proud profession dedicated to political ideas into a meaningless pile of plug-in-your-own-beliefs garbage.
Crappy Toons
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Another day, another dollar, and the not-so-great cartoons keep pouring in.
What, no sanitation workers? They had a hell of a mess to clean up after the bombing. More joyless pandering from American editorial cartoonists richest plagiarist. Again, remember the test for an editorial cartoon: if it doesn’t make any political statement, if there wouldn’t be a substantial number of people disagreeing with what it has to say, it isn’t a political cartoon, it is a greeting card. Calling first responders heroes has been standard operating procedure for lame political cartoonists ever since 9/11, and apparently it’s going to go on until the last crappy cartoonist dies.
I hate to pick on Nate Beeler: He’s a nice guy and a good sport. Just the luck of the draw this week. Again, this one is a combo cartoon – one that praises our saintly first responders – what a risk! – But also one that makes kind of a silly point. There was a lot of reason to think that the bombings were carried out by domestic right-wing terrorists: Boston, tax day, Patriots’ Day. Those Tea Party types, they don’t like paying their taxes. You can hardly blame the media for looking into that connection.
Not an editorial cartoon. An illustration. All it does is tell you what is going on. It doesn’t take a stance. It doesn’t come out against or for anything. There are lots of threats. Yes. We know this. Big problem: anything that appears in a newspaper should tell you something that you didn’t already know.
Now here’s something you don’t see all the time – a thoughtful, intelligent mainstream editorial cartoonist. Naturally he was recently laid off by his newspaper.
Setting aside the ridiculous politics – it’s not like there haven’t been true blue American born domestic terrorists – this is a cartoon that reflects the thought process that helps ensure that there will be many more terrorist attacks against the United States in the future. Plus not try to understand what motivates these people. Let’s just dismiss them as misguided, fanatical, zealous, wicked, and my personal favorite, ungrateful. Out of curiosity, why should anybody be grateful to a country?
Again, an editorial illustration. A lot of people feel united with Boston. Sports were a way for people to express that. That’s what this cartoon reflects. But it doesn’t make any statement. (Finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize)
And finally, let’s leave off with a statement of straightforward fascism. Yes, it’s just so awesome to know that the government can see our every move, I am so excited I can hardly stand it.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: If We Learn Geography, the Terrorists Have Won
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When You Ask “Why?,” Mean It.
Why?
Why would anybody want to kill innocent people?
That’s what Americans — led by the media reporters and pundits who set the agenda for discussion — ask after every terrorist attack, particularly those carried out by foreigners.
Our mystified national cluelessness begs the question. Why do people blow up our embassies, bomb our ships, fly planes into our buildings, (try to) blow up their shoes and their underwear? They do it (partly) because we can’t imagine why anyone would do such a thing.
Studies, particularly the ones the media trots out at times like these, point to a number of factors. Some of these may help trigger the kind of violent “self-radicalization” that initial reports indicate may have led Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Kyrgyzstani brothers of Chechen descent, to detonate a pair of bombs at the Boston Marathon last week.
Was it psychological alienation? “I don’t have a single American friend,” Tamerlan, 26, supposedly the instigator of the attack, said. A traumatic event, like a job loss or the break-up of a romantic relationship? Some studies find that some self-radicalized (as opposed to those who are recruited into an organization) terrorists are made after they suffer a disappointment that sets them off, causing a person with political rage to graduate to violent direct action. After the Fort Hood shooting, the Pentagon concluded that substance abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome or brain injuries sustained in an IED blast could be triggers. Some even blame the involvement of Dzhokhar, 19 and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, on reports that he was a pothead.
But hey, one could just as easily ask what drove state terrorist Barack Obama to murder thousands of innocent people with killer drones. Was the president sad after failing to win a second Nobel Prize? Did Michelle stop putting out? Did cocaine and/or marijuana scramble his right temporo-parietal junction, the part of the brain that controls the moral judgments of human beings? It’s pretty safe to say we’ll never be able to point to one, or two, or 17 discrete factors as the “causes” for the conscious choice to kill another person.
Like the drone war, the Boston Marathon bombings were a political act.
At this point, my best guess is that this was an attempt to strike back at the U.S. in its post-9/11 “great war of civilizations,” or Christian “crusade,” as George W. Bush called it. Authorities who questioned Dzhokhar in his hospital bed say that he and Tamerlan wanted to defend Islam from attack.
You can argue that the Tsarnaev brothers’ politics were wrong. That their tactics were counterproductive. That they were just “losers,” as their uncle called them. But we can’t understand why unless we dig into those politics.
Which is something that, 12 years after 9/11, the American media still refuses to do. Which increases the odds of future attacks.
Terrorism is not prima facie the act of a nut. Serial killers don’t detonate bombs. Terrorists don’t terrorize for fun.
“Terrorism [as opposed to state terrorism, like the drone wars] is the tool of the weak, used by disaffected groups or minorities to oppose the rule and (as they see it) the oppression of an established and militarily superior power,” Mark Nicholson wrote. “Because it is resistance on the cheap, terrorism often emerges out of civil society rather than state sponsorship, because oppressed civilian groups, lacking control over governmental machinery, can summon little or no regular military force able to confront their ‘oppressor’ in conventional military terms.”
We like terrorists. Some of them, anyway. During World War II German occupation forces characterized the leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising as “terrorists.” We view these doomed Jews, who fought to the death, as noble. The Afghan mujahedeen who struggled against the Soviets during the 1980s were terrorists to the USSR, “freedom fighters” to Ronald Reagan. The French Resistance assassinated public officials and robbed banks and bombed trains, and we love ’em for it. In movies like “Red Dawn,” we cheer the patriotic American “terrorists” who wage guerilla warfare against the invaders.
This, of course, is how radical Islamists see themselves: as heroic fighters in a resistance movement against a rapacious, cruel oppressor. (And if they prevail, that’s how history will read.) They’re not psychotic. They’re principled, willing to sacrifice everything for their cause.
Since 9/11 our leaders have repeatedly told us that “they” “hate our freedoms,” but of course this is nonsense. As Osama bin Laden remarked, if the Islamists resented liberal societies, if they wanted the world’s women all under burqas, Amsterdam would have been blown to bits. “We only killed Russians after they invaded Afghanistan and Chechnya, we only killed Europeans after they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq,” bin Laden wrote in 2004.
To ask why Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did what they did (if indeed they did it), to research their political motivations with an open mind, without dismissing them as random (friendless, stoned, loser) crazies, does not legitimize their tactics.
Self-styled Islamist resistance organizations like Al Qaeda haven’t garnered widespread support because terrorism against civilians is counterproductive. As Ché Guevara wrote, “terrorism [is] a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution.”
However, as Ché continued, terrorism directed against government or military officials can be legitimate: “Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful.” After 9/11, for example, even some Americans viewed the Pentagon as a legitimate military target. Conversely, arguments that the World Trade Center, as a hub of a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire,” was an acceptable target, were rejected. The WTC victims enjoy an exalted sainthood in popular culture; grief over the Pentagon victims has always been relatively muted.
No would-be revolutionary who knows history would have targeted a civilian target like the Boston Marathon.
So, let’s agree that the brothers’ tactics sucked. That what they did was evil. But what of their political motivations?
One would have to be blind not to understand why Muslims are enraged at the U.S.: Gitmo, drones, propping up dictators, Palestine, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, Iraq, the list goes on and on…and yes, Chechnya — where the Russians slaughtered thousands of innocents while their American allies silently cheered them on.
But few of us know about that. Because our media didn’t report it.
Which gets us back to:
Why’d the Boston bombers do it?
To get us to pay attention.
So we’ll force “our” government to stop what they’re doing in Muslim countries.
But that’ll never happen until we know “we’re” doing.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
And Now the Good Stuff
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So we know what shitty editorial cartoons look like. How about good ones? What makes the best cartoonists in the profession different than the dross that wins most of the prizes and hold all of the jobs? Let’s take a look.
Stephanie McMillan’s “Minimum Security” is – pardon the pun – a stripped-down version of the more complicated serial narrative version that ran for several years. But it retains its power through deceptively simple and hilariously designed characters provoking us to think about things in a different way. First of all, she’s ignoring Boston in favor of what is arguably a bigger story: the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas. And she’s showing how corporate America benefits from the media’s synergistic attempts to distract us with bullshit nationalism and terrorism.
You might not think of the dating implications that follow the revelation that Boston’s bombers were ethnic Chechens, but Matt Bors did. By personalizing xenophobia, he’s pointing out our stupidity – and implying the way to a better society, one in which people are judged as individuals.
Jen Sorensen is at her best with social commentary work. I love her takes on class warfare. Here, she takes on gentrification, a topic with sweeping political implications that no editorial cartoonist (including me) ever does work about. And she does it with a hilarious there’s-always-someone-higher-up-the-totem-pole take.
Tom Tomorrow is the undisputed king of desconstructing right-wing and Republican talking points. His retro-1950s-esque art style has traveled well from its late 1980s origins, oddly reminding us how far we’ve come from a country that once had certain democratic traits.
Ruben Bolling is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, the person the best of the best point to when asked “Who’s better than you?” Seeking to reinvent the form every week, he takes artistic and compositional risks. Personally, I love his social commentary work even more than his political stuff. But it’s all worth reading.
Shannon Wheeler does the best gag cartoons published by The New Yorker. Here is his strip. You really feel like you’re in the hands of a seasoned humorist when you read his stuff.
What I want to know is: Why doesn’t the Pulitzer committee reward this kind of work? Why isn’t there a single newspaper in the nation willing to hire these artists?
Cartoonists Demand Action
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I am one of several cartoonists who contributed work to a new video called “Cartoonists Demand Action,” which calls for increased gun control in the wake of the Newtown shootings in Connecticut. Organized by the brilliant Ruben Bolling, the other cartoonists who participated include Tom Tomorrow, Garry Trudeau, Mo Willems, Lalo Alcaraz, Steven Brodner, Peter Kuper, Stephan Pastis, Lincoln Pierce, Mike Luckovich, Mike Peters, Jerry Scott, Dan Piraro, Roz Chast and – get this – Art Spiegelman.
This is definitely the first-ever joint Spiegelman-Rall appearance.
My participation may come as a surprise to readers who know I am a strong advocate of the Second Amendment. History teaches us that revolutionaries and those to seek to resist foreign invasion rely on guns that were in circulation before the conflicts they fought against oppression and tyranny. This is why I believe that it’s important for Americans to have the right to own weapons.
Guns, it hardly need be said, are dangerous. So I believe that they need to be controlled and regulated the same way cars are. Motorists are required to receive training before they are allowed to drive. They must carry insurance to cover people they injure or kill with their car. They must take new tests, such as vision, to ensure they are qualified to drive. And of course cars are regulated. No one would suggest that cars be unregulated.
Like a car, guns can kill and maim. So people who buy guns should be required to pass a safety test, receive proper training, register their firearms and carry insurance in case they shoot someone or something they shouldn’t.
There is an argument that regulation is a first step toward government seizure. If they know who has guns, they can take them away. Which is true.
I don’t trust the government. No one should. But I’m counting on the fact that, if and when the time comes for armed resistance, it will be possible for patriotic Americans to keep their weapons out of the hands of government agents who seek to take them away. The situation will likely be chaotic and anarchic.
Moreover, we have to live in the present. Right now, as things stand, we have hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of anyone with a couple of hundred dollars. That’s madness.
I believe in cars. But I also believe in regulation of cars.
Guns are no less lethal than cars.
Cartoon Critique Returns
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I don’t know if I will keep doing this, but the reaction to Friday’s cartoon critique was so interesting and mostly positive but I thought I would keep it up with this latest batch. If you’re just joining the program, you probably already know my own work. But what you don’t know is what I’m reacting against: the so-called mainstream editorial cartoons that run in most major newspapers and on most major media websites, almost always to the exclusion of the good alternative stuff. Most artists get into an artform in order to build upon what came before. That’s also true of alternative artists, since our influences come from other places, but in the marketplace as it exists today, we are mostly defining ourselves by not being like this crap.
This is what I call the phony “I don’t care about politics” genre. After all, it’s by a political cartoonist. Someone who lives and breathes politics. Someone who is paid by a large daily newspaper, one that won’t even pick up my stuff for $20 a week via syndication even though I’m from the state that it’s in, and pretends that all he wants do is wallow in escapist television garbage. Sorry, I’m not buying it.
This cartoon illustrates the problems with the metaphor-based form of editorial cartooning. It’s almost like you need that fancy Enigma code breaking machine from World War II to decipher the thing. And then, assuming that you’re smart enough and caffeinated enough to figure it out, you have to conclude that all that work probably wasn’t worth it.
I admit it, this one kind of freaked me out. It’s another metaphor. At first, I thought to myself that since Uncle Sam was involved, he was going to have to climb Capitol Hill and this had something to do with the failed vote on the gun background check bill. Then I realized what it really was, that terrorism would be a hard hill to climb. Again, you can really see how these metaphor cartoons are hard to pull off. I mean, if you follow the analogy, this means that Uncle Sam wants to become more of a terrorist? Or that terrorism is something that were just going to have to get over? I don’t know. Makes my head hurt. And I really don’t understand the whole enormous buried skull.
I am guessing that this was probably an attempt to be emotional, but all it looks like to me is like a 1%er banker is running to the rescue. Did this happen? How did I miss this story? Very strange. Congratulations, by the way, to the cartoonist for winning the 2013 National Headliner Award. He already previously won two Pulitzer Prizes.
No alternative cartoonist – Tom Tomorrow, Matt Bors, Jen Sorensen, Stephanie McMillan, or myself – has ever won the National Headliner Award.
Another two-time Pulitzer winner weighs in with… What? I have no idea. Yeah, I recognize the national anthem. What exactly this has to do with the Boston bombing… What? Editors will no doubt love this.
Bear in mind, I intentionally chose cartoons by people who make a lot more money than I do and have won a lot more awards than I have and are much more successful than the best cartoonists in the business. According to the prize committees and the HR departments of America’s newspapers, this is what I should be doing instead of what I am doing. This is what gets rewarded.
The Chechen Connection
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Beginning in the mid-1990s under the regime of President Boris Yeltsin and continuing into the early part of the 2000s under Vladimir Putin, Russia fought a so-called “dirty war” against Chechen separatists in a region of the world that military strategists have long considered among the most indomitable. Even in Afghanistan, where many Chechen fighters went to train in Taliban run training camps, they had a reputation for ferocity that frightened many war-hardened Afghans.
As the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is the surviving suspect in the Boston marathon bombings six days ago remained silent and in serious condition in a Boston hospital, and apparently did not issue any public statement about motives, it is impossible to say why – if indeed it was him and his brother – they did it. So what follows is speculation.
We know that older brother Tamerlan – the name of the famous 15th century Central Asian conqueror – visited relatives in Chechnya for about six months in 2012, according to his father, in order to renew his Russian passport. Authorities are currently investigating the possibility that he connected with radical separatist groups during his visit. He posted videos by radical jihadi figures to YouTube when he returned.
Why might a Chechen resent the United States? After all, Russia – not the United States – blasted the capital city of Grozny into smithereens and made countless Chechens vanish into thin air, an act of ethnic cleansing similar to Kosovo. In fact, most Chechen resistance groups focus their rage – and terror attacks – against Moscow and other Russian cities.
Some Chechens charge the United States with a conspiracy of silence with Russia, which they see as an American ally. It is a credible charge. After all, the United States has maintained a close security relationship between the CIA and the successor to the KGB, the FSB, since 1994. That’s why, for example, Tamerlan’s trip to Russia aroused a query from the Russians to their counterparts in the American government.
If you think back to the Carter administration, which made human rights a top priority (albeit inconsistently), there was a time when political dissidents might be able to expect – not in all situations, but often – the US to decry human rights violations such as those that occurred in Chechnya in the late 1990s. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, however, US policy was to refuse to comment or to issue low-profile denunciations that escaped the notice of the media. In the same way that so many governments failed to step up and help Jews escape Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, to do nothing (or very little) is to tacitly enable murderers. Silence equals consent.
Now scroll forward to 2013. The United States, which had nothing to say about Russian policy in Chechnya, is engaged in an epic clash of civilizations against Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. (Just yesterday, an American terror drone killed two people in the Obama Administration’s extrajudicial campaign of slaughter of Yemenis.) It’s not a big stretch to imagine the suspects in the Boston marathon bombings thinking that the reason that the United States doesn’t care about what happened to their homeland is that it’s all part of the same policy, that the US and Russia are on the same side, that these two countries are more friends than enemies, Western powers who are trying to destroy Islam.
So why blow up the marathon? If you’re in Boston, you go with the targets that you have. That’s where you live. Why blow up innocents? Because you can’t get at those who were truly responsible, the policymakers in Washington and Moscow. And anyway, you tell yourselves, Americans aren’t really innocent. This is a democracy. We’re responsible for our government. We vote for our leaders. We should rise up and overthrow them if we don’t like them; otherwise, we’re responsible for them. This notion of “collective guilt,” after all, is how the Allies during World War II justified targeting civilians with bombing raids. Osama bin Laden made analogous claims that Americans deserved to be targeted because of their collective guilt.
Ultimately, you wage attacks in order to get attention for a cause that has been ignored. To get the issues you care about discussed and talked about. That’s the purpose of terrorism. Terrorism is the tool of the weak and oppressed against the strong and powerful. It’s asymmetric warfare.
While it will always be impossible to stop terrorism, it’s a fallacy to argue that we can’t reduce its frequency and the likelihood of American targets being attacked again, that we’ll always be targeted no matter what. It just isn’t true. Luxembourg doesn’t have a lot of terrorist bombings. Neither does Belgium – but it would if it still had its big colonial empire. If you don’t invade other countries, if you don’t engage in aggressive foreign policy, if you’re not financing and arming oppressive regimes, you tend not to piss people off.
One could argue that we shouldn’t give in to terrorists by changing our policies. But if our policies are brutal and counterproductive to begin with, it’s a discussion that we should be having.
Right now, to watch the news and watch the so-called experts talk about Boston, it’s pretty clear that they don’t get it. Skirting the issue, they talk about the psychological component, that the two brothers from Chechnya were to some extent alienated from American society. They talk about the success of law enforcement. They talk about privacy and cameras. The Republicans are even talking about this as an excuse not to legalize 11 million illegal immigrants.
But all of these issues are beside the point. The only surprise about Monday’s attack is that such horrific events are so few and far between.
My Thoughts: Boston Suspect is from Kyrgyzstan
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Note: the following relates to a rapidly developing breaking story. At this point, there is a lot of speculation and a lot of reliance on official government reports which, as we know, are not always reliable.
According to media accounts based on police reports, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings is a 19-year-old man named Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a resident of Boston who lived in the former Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan and may or may not be Chechen in origin. He identifies himself as a Muslim.
In anticipation of media queries due to his Central Asian origin, I thought I would post the following impressions and thoughts about his possible motivations.
Obviously no one knows, if in fact he is guilty, what his motivation was for helping his brother to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon on Monday. That said, a lot of people are unfamiliar with Kyrgyzstan so I thought I would set up a little bit of light on the subject since I have been there many times and have studied Central Asia, its politics and culture.
Generally speaking, Kyrgyzstan is divided between its secular Sovietized North, centered around the capital of Bishkek, and its conservative Muslim south, centered around the Fergana Valley city of Osh. Throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, the Kyrgyz Republic represented one of the great hopes for democratization in former Soviet Central Asia. It had a flawed but democratically elected president, one of the least corrupt police forces in the region, and was relatively peaceful. Largely it was free of Western influence because it did not have oil or natural gas reserves coveted by Russia or the United States. Therefore, it did not suffer from the famous oil curse.
In recent years the most important political development in Kyrgyzstan was the 2005 Tulip Revolution, which saw radical Islamist insurgents and financed by the American CIA and based around Osh topple the regime of Pres. Akayev, who fled into exile rather than order his security forces to fire upon his people. Nobody can be 100% certain why the United States decided to repeat the same mistakes that it made in Afghanistan during the 1980s, but it isn’t a huge stretch to assume that the fact that Akayev was demanding increased rent on the US air base at Manas that was established after the 9/11 attacks may have had something to do with it.
Since 2005 the political situation in the Boston suspect’s homeland has deteriorated. Some analysts consider it nearly a failed state. Certainly the central government has lost control of much of the South. For example, when I tried to cross from Tajikistan into southeastern Kyrygzstan at Sary Tash in 2008, border guards informed me that they had not heard from Bishkek in years. In fact, they no longer even had a passport stamp. It was very clear that local warlords were in charge of mining and other concerns there.
Radical Islamists, always active in the southern part of the country, have become emboldened since 2005. One insurgent group, the Islamic Movement of Turkestan, formerly known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, has attracted self radicalized Muslims from all over the world, including a substantial faction from Chechnya. Chechnya, well-informed readers will recall, was destroyed by forces under the direction of Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin. While we in the West may have forgotten this episode, Chechens are well known as ferocious fighters who never forget a grudge. Jihad is alive and well for them.
Why did Mr. Tsarnaev blowup the marathon? Assuming, of course that he did?
It may well be that his trajectory as an ethnic Chechen brought him into contact with radical Muslims in Kyrgyzstan. Although it seems like a stretch for Americans, Muslims around the world often see America and Russia acting in concert. It would then be another logical leap to attack America here – yes, including attacking innocent civilians, because after all, Russia attacks innocent civilians in Muslim countries and in places like Chechnya, and the United States does so in other places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Of course, all of this is conjecture.
Anyone interested in a broader look at the Soviet legacy in Central Asia, including countries like Kyrgyzstan, may be interested in checking out my book “Silk Road to Ruin: is Central Asia the new Middle East?”
Media may contact me via the contact form at rall.com.
As of 10:45 AM: this is an update.
So there is also a conflicting report that the brothers lived in Kazakhstan after leaving Chechnya in the early 2000s. The political situation in Kazakhstan could not be more different than in Kyrgyzstan. Although the two countries are closely related ethnically, and many many Kyrgyz live in Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan is the beneficiary of one of the biggest oil booms in the history of mankind. The economy is booming, although oil wealth has not been shared. Also, Kazakhstan is ruled by an authoritarian dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a US ally who has run the country since independence in 1991 and was a former Soviet party boss. He is ruthless – he is even accused of executing rival presidential candidates months before an election – but he hasn’t had much of an Islamic insurgency to deal with, unlike neighboring Central Asian republics. If in fact the brothers are from Kazakhstan, they probably did not have the opportunity to meet many radical Islamists.
