Again, the Management of Savagery

Believe me when I say that this recent attack on Israel is textbook jihad -- I've read the textbook. Well, the operational handbook. Stay tuned after the main part for some commentary on where else we see this.

I'm just going to clip a bunch of this from the open-source Wikipedia. Here's a link to a pdf of the original, which is really chewy with formatting, translation, and references to other works. I've talked about it here before. Condensed, and with light editing for Ricochet readability [all bold and italics mine -- bdb]:

Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass (also translated as Administration of Savagery), is a book by the Islamist strategist Abu Bakr Naji, published on the Internet in 2004. It aimed to provide a strategy for al-Qaeda and other extremists whereby they could create a new Islamic caliphate.

Management of Savagery discusses the need to create and manage nationalist and religious resentment and violence in order to create long-term propaganda opportunities for jihadist groups. Notably, Naji discusses the value of provoking military responses from superpowers in order to recruit and train guerrilla fighters and to create martyrs. Naji suggests that a long-lasting strategy of attrition will reveal fundamental weaknesses in the ability of superpowers to defeat committed jihadists.

Naji describes three stages of jihad.

In stage one, "vexation and empowerment," the "will of the enemy" would be broken by destruction of "vital economic and strategic targets". [...] A campaign of constant violent attacks (vexation operations) in Muslim states will eventually exhaust their ability and will to enforce their authority. [...] Salafi-jihadists will take advantage of this security vacuum, launching an all-out battle on the thinly dispersed security forces leading to the destruction of the state targeted by the jihadis. Extreme violence is emphasized:

One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening [others] and massacring—I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them.

Also part of this stage are attention-grabbing operations, publicized by "a media strategy that seeks rational and sharia justification for such operations" to attract youthful recruits to jihad. To free captured jihadis, hostages should be taken and "if the demands are not met, the hostages should be liquidated in a terrifying manner, which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy and his supporters. [...] The most abominable of the levels of savagery" are preferable to "stability under the order of unbelief". [...]

Stage two is the "administration of savagery". In the wake of the breakdown in order, the law of the jungle will prevail and survivors will "accept any organization, regardless of whether it is made up of good or evil people." Jihadists can take advantage of this savagery to win popular support, or at least acquiescence, Jihadis will be the organization—enforcing sharia and providing basic services of security, food and medicine. The areas they control will serve as bases to attack other states that have not yet been overthrown, to "plunder their money, and place them in a constant state of apprehension".

Stage three is "empowerment." The area or areas they administer become the nucleus of a new caliphate. [...] Despite the enormous suffering and loss of life caused by the forces of jihad, those forces will (according to Naji) win hearts and minds and gain legitimacy and recognition for Islamic rule by employing a mixture of persuasion and coercion.

Yeah, read the whole thing. It's over 200 pages, which is why the Wikipedia summary is quite valuable. Of course, in the 7 October Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians, we are seeing the intentional, over-the-top savagery as called for in Najian jihad. It is not a fight for territory, but a literal campaign of terror for psychological effect. It intentionally provokes. Like 9/11 or the Hell-circus proceedings of ISIS, the spectacle is the means to a further goal.

Naji is a little off-track, but basically still lighting the way; his third stage is not a final culmination under a Caliphate, but that stage is reached in scattered areas such as Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and other places where the terrorists have murdered their way into local power and are now the dispensers of bread and water as well as justice and vengeance. Perhaps he could have done with a couple more phases, but he is not a product of the U.S. Department of Defense, and is therefore not corrupted by PowerPoint thinking. His basic guide stands.

And well it should. His focus on savagery, while eye-popping, is actually a minor part of the plan. Most of Naji's work is concerned with the operational details of provoking responses, large as well as small, in reducing populations in both scope and stature, in shaping the vulnerable population, using them both as hostage and footsoldier, and levering that state of affairs into the provoking incident for the next target population.

In this, he is hardly a stone's throw from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, Gramsci, Hitler, Mao, Alinsky, and -- buckle up -- the modern US Democrat party with their armies in the streets, their political machine's "legal" protection of those armies, and their open campaign of political terror which is perverting legislatures, executives (throughout government and industry), military and border forces, elections, coroners, judges and juries, law enforcement and the law itself.

America has indeed been "fundamentally transformed". Yesss, Obama. The Reno DoJ was bad enough, when the Feds used to come in and kick your ass. Since the Holder DoJ, the Feds come in and federalize your local law enforcement, so that your own sheriff kicks your ass.

Nice city you got there -- would be a shame if Derek Chauvin and everybody standing close to him didn't do hard time for the "murder" of an overdosing thug who "couldn't breathe" even when he was sitting bolt-ass upright in an air-conditioned squad car.

These massive terror rallies in our streets in the wake of the 10/7 attacks on Israeli civilians, the media's utter refusal to acknowledge any of the Islamic jihadist savagery until forced to taste the blood, and the screeching from around the globe and across our nation for Israel -- Israel! -- to cease fire... all of these things are the result of 20-plus years of savagery in and out of the country. 9/11 has now aged beyond my personal limit (20 years) for political context, which is amazing -- it is now merely history, but the intervening decades have been filled with the United States losing a war at home, which few have even acknowledged.

I don't know how we come back from this. Oh, the tide will turn, but this water level is just plain rising, each tide higher than the last. If climate change does swamp a majority of cities with actual water and reduce the human population to a damned handful, I suspect it will be none too soon.

MEANWHILE, I am ready for war every day. That used to mean I was ready to hop off on some reservist adventure. Now, it's just life in the US. I don't know if we can win it, but I'll damned sure fight. I know what the enemy has in store for us. I've read his book.