Raoul Wallenberg - His Mind

In the 1940s, Raoul Wallenberg was one of the people inside Europe who worked to save Jews from the Nazis. Many courageous Germans risked their lives to help Jews to safety. But Wallenberg was different: he wasn't a German.

The Germans who formed an underground resistance movement to stop Hitler's genocide had obvious motives: they lived inside Germany and had direct access to information about secret plans for the Holocaust, and had direct opportunities to do something to stop it. Thousands of Jewish Germans and Jewish Poles were saved by men like Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Max Kolbe.

Raoul Wallenberg, however, wasn't a German, and didn't live in Germany. His decision to rescue Jews, a decision which cost him his life, is therefore significant. His "special mission" to Budapest saved thousands of Jewish Hungarians. The President of the United States remarked about Wallenberg:

He came from a prominent family, but he chose to help the most vulnerable. He was a Lutheran, and yet he risked his life to save Jews. “I will never be able to go back to Stockholm,” he said, “without knowing inside myself I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that

It is important to recall not just the Holocaust's horrors, but also its heroes: bearers of witness like Jan Karski; rescuers like Wallenberg and Schindler; writers like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel; and resistors like the Danes and the righteous of many nations who hid and saved many thousands of their Jewish neighbors.

Who was this Swedish Lutheran, who studied in United States, and wound up in Hungary? His development included spending time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He traveled extensively in Africa. He also traveled in Israel, and after a stay near the Sea of Galilee, he described his experiences in a letter:

The next morning we went swimming in the lake, which is situated a couple of hundred feet below sea level and is the one on which Jesus walked.

Elsewhere in Israel, he wrote about how he spent his reflective time:

Sundays, I usually take a walk up Mount Carmel (where the Carmelite fathers originated) and admire the view.

These travel experiences gave him a global perspective, and his later activities in saving the lives of others takes on a special significance in light of his time spent in Israel.

The details of Wallenberg's efforts, which saved thousands of Jews, have been recorded in detail; great mystery, however, surrounds his final disappearance and death, presumably at the hands of Soviet intelligence officers. What is clear, however, is that his character was a spiritual and powerful one, motivating and enabling him to undertake his special mission to Budapest.

Hitler's Economics

To understand the economic program of the Nazi Party, one must remember the meaning of the word "Nazi" - it was an abbreviation for the long official name of the party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, translated as the National-Socialist German Workers Party, and also abbreviated NSDAP. The words "socialist" and "worker" in the party's name give hints as to its economic policies.

The Nazi Party generally embraced the notions of regulation, taxation, and income redistribution. Further, it "nationalized" various businesses, meaning that it made some companies the property of the government, allowing ordinary people no influence over such businesses. Thus Nazi economic policy intersected with its mission to have total control over society.

Historian Marshall Dill notes that the Nazis proceeded in two ways. Indirectly, by ensuring that government officials and party leaders were appointed to the boards of directors of major companies, they took control of companies. Directly, the Nazis instructed the government to confiscate and simply assume ownership of some businesses. Marshall Dill writes:

It is instructive to note the infiltration of boards of directors by deserving Nazis: government officials, Gauleiter, etc. The network of interlocking directorates was impressive. On the other hand, the government by no means refused to establish direct ownership and control of industry.

The Nazis, then, were socialists in the sense that they believed that the government should intervene in the marketplace and should own the means of production. The Nazis were clearly opposed to a free market. Marshall Dill continues:

The principle example of direct government participation in industry was the huge Hermann Goering combine, which by the end of its career managed operations ranging from steel mills to the control of canal-boat shipping.

Not only in terms of industrial production, but also in terms of employment, the Nazis wanted the government, and not the decisions of free individuals, to control the economy. Historian William Duiker writes:

Most dramatic were the mass demonstrations and spectacles employed to integrate the German nation into a collective fellowship and to mobilize it as an instrument for Hitler's policies. In the economic sphere, the Nazis pursued the use of public works projects and "pump-priming" grants.

Thus an ever-increasing percentage of Germans became employees of the state, thereby reducing the ability of the free individual to impact the economy. Looking at the rise of Hitler's government and how it took power, and looking at that process from an economic perspective, Friedrich Hayek writes:

The support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.

Although the Nazis came to power in 1933, the social and economic forces which gave them control over the Germans began much earlier. Hayek writes that

The doctrines which had guided the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were not opposed to the socialism in Marxism.

The Nazis opposed Marxism because of "its internationalism" which, the Nazis saw, proved an obstacle to the concrete implementation of certain aspects of socialism. Internationalism reduced the ability of the Nazi government to regulate, to tax, and to eventually own businesses - all of which reduced the power of any free individual to act independently in the economy. The Nazis rejected these elements of Marxism: its internationalism and its democracy. The Nazis saw that these elements were inconsistent with socialism. In this way, the Nazis were developing a form of socialism which was more consistent than Marxism, as Hayek writes, "and as it became increasingly clear that it was just these elements which formed obstacles to the realization of socialism, the socialists" became willing to abandon the program of democracy and internationalism. "It was the union of anticapitalist forces," the socialists and others who opposed free markets and who opposed democracy, "which drove out from Germany everything that was" oriented toward liberty.

In short, the Nazis discovered that a free market and the right to own private property were analogues to political freedom and to free speech. In order to completely control society, which was Naziism's goal as a totalitarian movement, the government had to intervene in the economy, limit the individual's decision-making ability, tax, regulate, and otherwise reduce the freedom and influence of the individual, culminating in government-owned or government-operated industries. Hayek continues:

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism - Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle - are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism.

While the Marxist version of socialism was theoretically internationalist, in the concrete development of socialism, especially after 1914, nationalism was wedded to socialism. In this way, Hitler and the Nazis understood how to make a more effect form of socialism, which would allow them to control spheres of public and private life, and enslave the Germans.

Hitler's economic policies were part of his larger plan to bind millions of Germans who, having lost their freedom to the Nazi government, would be forced to carry out his visions of war, conquest, and genocide.

Ancient Weather, Modern Concerns

The earth's climate is always changing. A few decades with warmer-than-normal temperatures follow a few decades with cooler-than-normal temperatures. Indeed, the change is so constant that it becomes a statistical challenge to determine what ‘normal’ might mean in this context.

Should we take the average temperature of the last 500 years as normal? Or of the 500 years prior to that? How does the 500 years between 1450 and 1950 compare to the 500 years between 1200 and 1700? And which of them might be “normal”? The lack of direct temperature measurements complicates the question further. Prior to a century or two ago, few direct observations of climate were recorded. Even in the last century, large parts of the earth's surface were unmeasured in terms of daily temperatures.

This is true of rainfall as well: it is constantly changing on a micro and a macro scale, over decades and centuries, and observational data are scarce for most regions prior to the last few years.

A wealth of questions and dearth of data: one political question looms over all - could any of this climate change be caused by human activity? There are indeed quite a few policymakers who believe that climatic instability is anthropogenic. How can this claim be verified?

Those who assert that the planet's climate is being disrupted usually assert that this is the result of industrialization. Large-scale use of fossil fuels, and the production of other alleged agents of climate change, began around 1750. The earliest working steam engines date to the late 1600's, and people had burned wood, coal, peat, and charcoal for centuries before that. But the mid-1700's saw an acceleration of industrialization, and if human activity can influence the climate, then this would be the starting date.

One may formulate the question this way: do we see changes in the earth's climate after 1750 which are unlike changes and patterns which occurred prior to that date? If so, then it is at least possible that some climate change is anthropogenic. Jack Goldstone, commenting on research published by Geoffrey Parker, notes that scholarship uses

the geological, biological, and recorded data on regional and global temperatures to show that the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century was not a mere figure of speech or anachronistic exaggeration; it was in fact an age of dramatically lower temperatures and the advance of ice and glaciers across the world: at one point even the Bosporus froze solid, creating a land bridge from Europe to the Middle East that had not existed for millennia.

Thus documented is a temperature swing, in this case a cooling, greater in magnitude and duration than anything observed after 1750. The early 1600's were the center of this "Little Ice Age," which spanned, according to scholar J.R. McNeill, the years from 1250 to 1850. Nobody is likely to assert that a climate change starting in 1250 was caused by human activity.

The causes and variables in the climate are so many, and their interrelationships so complex, that mathematical and computerized models are still insufficient to reflect them. Current computational models, as complex as they may be, are still oversimplified relative to the actual climate, and do not produce accurate results.

Of the many factors in this complicated climate, Goldstone mentions solar and volcanic activity. He writes that Parker's scholarship

attributes the climate change to both a decline in solar radiation (indicated by a sustained period of low or absent sunspot activity known as the “Maunder minimum” from 1645 to 1710) and to clusters of major volcanic eruptions (in 1600-1609, 1641-1647, 1676-1679, and 1709-1710) whose sulfur and ash further reduced the solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere. This combination triggered several series of exceptionally cold years in succession, in 1600-1609, 1620-1627, 1641-1647, 1666-1680, and 1695-1699, as measured by severe low summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere.

The example above cites a significant and enduring cold period. Much of the current concerns about climate contemplate, however, the hypothesis of a warming trend. Immediately prior to the “Little Ice Age” was a period of several centuries of atypically warm weather. Here is an instance of “global warming” which occurred at a time which prevents it from being labeled as anthropogenic in any sense. Under the wordy title Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC writes:

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century.

Dramatic changes in temperature and rainfall are documented, then, at points in time prior to any possible effects of large-scale industrialization. If current climate trends have yet to reach either the magnitude or the duration of these previous naturally-occurring climate disruptions, then there is little reason to hypothesize that such trends are anthropogenic.

He Never Won an Election

A haunting question lingers on, over the years, in the minds of historians: how did Hitler and the Nazis gain control of Germany? How did a twisted leader, who was clearly mentally ill, and his band of misfit rabble-rousers, obtain power over an entire nation?

The answer lies partially in the complexities of the Weimar government. The parliamentary structure which governed Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's featured administrations built of coalitions of several political parties. Weimar-era Germany had many political parties, and it was usually impossible for any of them either to obtain a simple majority of seats in the Reichstag, which was the German parliament, or to obtain a majority of the popular vote.

At any one time during these years, there were dozens of active political parties, and voters elected representatives from a variety of them. Some of these parties were regional. Many had long and unwieldy names, and were known by abbreviations, nicknames, and colors. The word ‘Nazi’ is itself a nickname; the official name of the party was the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Its abbreviation was NSDAP. In English, the name of the party would be the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Nazi party gained national attention and its representatives were elected to the Reichstag for the first time in May 1928. Voting for the party peaked in July 1932 and declined thereafter. It never had a majority in the Reichstag, although it did have a plurality. How then did it grab power?

Hitler and the Nazis were good at exploiting the technicalities of the parliamentary system and the technicalities of Weimar's well-intentioned but unwieldy form of government. They were also good at bribery, intimidation, and general corruption. In early 1933, Hitler saw his chance. Historian Lowell Green writes:

With singleness of purpose, Hitler sought to consolidate his gains. Because he lacked a majority in key government positions, Hitler had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag, calling for new elections on March 5, 1933. Meanwhile, parliament was undermined when its building in Berlin, the Reichstagebäuse, was burned down by an unidentified arsonist on February 27. It was widely thought that the Nazis had ordered the fire to block parliamentary government, but the Nazis called the fire an attack on the government. They used the occasion to justify the suspension of civil liberties and to create the foundation for the ensuing dictatorship.

Lacking a majority, the Nazis arranged for another election, and then arranged for their chancellor, Hitler, to have "emergency powers" in hand. The Nazis corrupted the election and manipulate the results. Even with blatant electoral fraud, the Nazis were unable to gain a majority. Lowell Green continues:

The election of 1933 was not an overwhelming victory for the NSDAP. Despite all its efforts to manipulate public opinion, the Nazi Party won only 44 percent of the votes on March 5. However, Hitler was able to increase his support to a 52 percent majority in the Reichstag by means of an alliance with the German National Volk Party (Deutschnationalen Volkspartei [DNVP]) and the German Volk Party (Deutsche Volkspartei [DVP]), which was called the "Battle Front Black-White-Red."

Coalition-building is common and necessary in parliamentary systems in which a single party rarely has a majority. Several parties form an alliance and thereby gain the majority. The Nazis were willing to lie and to intimidate the leaders of other parties. With the coalition in place, the Nazis quickly made whichever laws they pleased, included laws which made other political parties illegal.

The election of March 1933, while corrupt and fraudulent, still managed to reveal that the majority of German voters were against the Nazis. By November 1933, another election would be held, in which only Nazi candidates were allowed to be on the ballot. The official results were that 92.11% of the votes were cast for the Nazis. The November 1933 election was purely a sham, and did not represent any process of freely electing representatives.

Thus it was that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who never won a majority in any free and fair election, took power. In the last meaningful election, the majority of German voters showed themselves opposed to the Nazis. By mastering parliamentary technicalities, bureaucratic maneuvering, intimidation, fraud, bribery, and corruptions, the Nazis took power against the will of the voters.

Arab Spring, Arab Winter

In late 2010, a movement in several Arab countries raised hopes that peaceful democracies could be established in that part of the world. Known as the “Arab Spring,” it reflected the fact that Arabs, like any other human beings, generally want peace and liberty.

Yet this movement quickly disappointed both the Arabs who began it and the rest of the observing world. While succeeding in deposing a number of autocratic leaders of Arab nations, the movement was unable to install successor governments, and these nations found that they had merely exchanged one dictatorship for another.

Why did the Arab Spring turn into the “Arab Winter” as it was quickly re-named? The vast majority of Arabs, after all, are reasonable people who merely desire peace and liberty. What are the factors preventing the formation of civil governments?

Part of the problem was that the Arab Spring took down one set of governments without having a clear plan for which type of new government it would install. In this way, the Arab Spring invites comparison with the French Revolution: both removed harsh governments, and understandably so, but both failed to have prepared a new government which would be ready to take effect once the old government was gone. Ahmed Ragab writes:

The mass protests in January 2011 signaled the collapse of a particular political system that had lost all legitimacy. In other words, people believed that those structures could no longer possibly serve their interests and that they would rather jump into the unknown than continue with such structures. When Egyptians took to the streets and took down Hosni Mubarak's regime, there was no other clear alternative.

After the fall of Mubarak, who was indisputably an unsavory character, a confused scramble to develop a new form of government ensued. Wide-ranging discussions about the possible type of government and all manner of public demonstrations gave occasion to think about political science, but produced no workable practical results: the middle of a revolution is not the time to engage the public in a seminar about the theories of government. Numerous drafts of plans for governments and constitutions were presented, discussed, and revised. The citizens were called to the polls to vote a number of times.

However, these successive ballots failed to produce political institutions capable of earning people's trust, or of addressing the social, economic, and political grievances that motivated the original protest movement. The protests of June 30 signaled the failure of the entire post–January 2011 pathway to create a new stable political system that could earn sufficient popular support and trust.

Why was Egypt unable to form a new government? We may let Egypt stand as a proxy for the Arab Spring movements, because similar problems faced other countries like Tunisia and Libya. While the individual Arabs themselves are reasonable people seeking prosperity, peace, and liberty, they work under the burden of a collective society which does not seek prosperity for masses and which does not seek a politically or economically thriving middle class. While most individual Arabs have, like all other people, a natural human desire for freedom, they are living in a collective civilization which does not value political liberty. While Arabs, like citizens of all nations, prefer peace to war, they live in a collective culture which glorifies war.

The election of Mohamed Morsi in June 2012 was a failure of the Arab Spring. Morsi’s thug-like dictatorship differed little from Mubarak’s. To be sure, a nuanced difference exists between the two: Mubarak’s rule was a secular tyranny which coexisted with Islam; Morsi and his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, were not Islamic but Islamist, and the difference between those two words reveals much.

There are millions of reasonable people who adhere to a nominal form of Islam and who call themselves Muslims; peaceful people who merely want liberty and prosperity; these people may be called Islamic.

The difference between “Islamic” and “Islamist” is significant.

An Islamist seeks the establishment of an Islamofascist state, a government which will enforce Sharia law. Islamism takes seriously the Qur’an’s injunctions against civil liberties, and takes literally Mohammad’s commands to wage war and kill.

Because the Arab Spring erupted without a constitutional plan ready for implementation, the power vacuum created by Mubarak’s departure was exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood. A revolution created by those who hoped for liberty, democracy, peace, and prosperity was exploited by Morsi and his Islamofascists who wanted the very opposite. Ahmed Ragab continues:

Fifty days after Morsi's election, 72 percent of Egyptians reported that they would reelect him, but ten months later, only 30 percent of Egyptians said they would reelect him. By June 2013, 78 percent of Egyptians felt that the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood was actually worse than they expected, and a recent poll revealed that about 75 percent of Egyptians don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood should be part of the future political project or process in Egypt.

Morsi’s stay in power was short. He was deposed in July 2013. A temporary government operated by Egypt’s military took over. The big question remains unchanged: can the Arabs - in this case, the Egyptians - find a way to a new government, rather than falling to yet another dictatorship? While they seek peace, their traditions make them susceptible to embracing warlike leaders. While the seek freedom, their culture makes them easy prey for tyrants.

What is true in Egypt is true of other countries swept up into the Arab Spring. Libya, long oppressed by insane dictator Muammar Gaddafi, overthrew his regime only to end up under the tyranny of an equally cruel Islamist dictatorship. Although Libya started, like Egypt, with a handful of hopeful young rebels who sought to establish a republic with freely-elected representatives, Michael Savage writes that

in Libya, the “rebels” were infiltrated by Islamist radicals, members of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood who see the conflagrations around the Middle East as prophetic. To Islamist dictators and jihadis, the current uprisings are nothing less than a sign that the coming of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, is immanent.

The people of Libya, finally freed from the oppression of Gaddafi, found themselves equally tyrannized by the Islamofascists who subverted what was originally a freedom-seeking revolution. Michael Savage continues:

Bottom line: Ghadafi was a monster. But the Muslim Brotherhood is a more dangerous monster. Before they killed Ghadafi in cold blood, Libyan “revolutionaries” had repeatedly attacked Ghadafi’s tribal homeland of Sirte. They were taking revenge on Ghadafi loyalists, terrorizing them and killing more than a thousand inhabitants of the region. One rebel fighter explained what was going on: “The Misurate brigades are taking their revenge for what soldiers originally from this village did to them. They are burning houses, stealing gold, and shooting animals.”

As the Arab Spring metamorphosed into the Arab Winter, some observers began to ask if there could ever be a free society in the region. Would every and any attempt at political liberty in the Middle East be doomed? Some alleged that a political leader outside the Arab world was

perpetuating the lie that there can actually be anything resembling “free and fair” elections in Middle Eastern countries when he knows, as the rest of us know, that a free election is an open invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups to intimidate the population and take over control of countries in turmoil. The invitation to hold “free elections” in Middle Eastern countries with no history of democracy and no democratic infrastructure or culture in place is nothing less than a naive invitation to Islamist radicals to step in. The transition from a feudal Islamic theocracy to a modern democracy must be made very gradually, if it can be made at all. People with no history of establishing and maintaining democratic institutions must be led into their formation.

If we are to have hope for the establishment, in the Middle East, of a republic with freely-elected representatives, then we must understand those cultural elements which give a foothold to Islamofascism. Certainly societal traditions are roadblocks to civil liberty. Torture and the violation of human rights is not only tolerated in the governments of that region, they are understood as the proper functions of government. The understanding of governments and political processes needs to be reformed in order for these civilizations to embrace freedom. Michael Savage writes:

Government brutality is a fact of life in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Islamist dictator like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or an old-fashioned third-world tyrant like Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Ghadafi. Middle Eastern countries since World War II generally have been held together by force.

Just as the French Revolution failed to bring lasting political liberty because it tried to change society when it needed only to change the government, so the Arab Spring failed and became the Arab Winter because it failed to change the societies and cultural traditions which are an obstacle to political freedom.

Global What? Climatic Confusion

Readers who've kept current with discussions of the weather will have noticed, over the last few years, a bewildering and shifting landscape of phrases developed to label this topic. The first was global warming, which gave way, in quick succession, to global climate change, global climatic instability, and global climate disruption. The moving vocabulary betrays a deeper conceptual ambiguity in the matter.

To say that the planet is warming is equivocal: one can compare the, e.g., the average global temperature for the month of March with the average global temperature for the month of March during the decade 1960 to 1970. Or one could compare it to the averages from the decade 1930 to 1940. Or one could compare it a monthly average for any single arbitrary year.

One can find sets of data points to support the conclusion that the planet is warming, that the planet is cooling, or that the planet is holding steady. The choice of which set of points is taken as a baseline normal is arbitrary. Extrapolations into the future can be made to trend upwards or downward, depending on how far back in time one begins the best-fit line which one extrapolates.

If the planet is cooling or warming, it must be relative to some measured point. Choosing that reference point is stacking the deck. Especially because our data are limited to recent years. Extensive measures prior to, e.g., the year 1800 are not plentiful enough to be statistically significant. Because these claims are global, worldwide data points would be needed to substantiate them. Yet large parts of the world lack any reliable observations prior to the last few decades.

It may not be possible to substantiate whether or not the planet is warming, cooling, or holding even on a long-run basis. We'd need several centuries of reliable measured temperatures from numerous scattered points on all seven continents. We do not have such data.

It is possible to argue that short-term global trends, warming or cooling, are underway; data might be available to verify such claims. But short-run trends are not able to tell us about long-run trends, because the planet constantly seesaws through various short-term temperature fluctuations.

Likewise, localized cooling and warming trends can be substantiated when data are available, but localized trends also are unable to shed light on global trends; it has been documented that one continent may experience a multi-year warming while another experiences a multi-year cooling.

Lacking precise measurements over the long-run, we do still know that long-term fluctuations occur. For example, a report titled "A 1500-year reconstruction of annual mean temperature for temperate North America on decadal-to-multidecadal time scales" was published by the Instituted of Physics in London. This report shows that the earth is warmer than it was, e.g., in the year 1800, but quite a bit cooler than it was in the year 800.

There do seem to have been eras of true global warming: several decades around the year 600 A.D., and again between the years 750 and 900. The year 1300 also seems to have been near the midpoint of several decades of global warming.

Historians have noted that a few decades of unusually warm, unusually cool, unusually wet, or unusually dry weather have been the causes for large-scale shifts in crop yields which affected the Roman Empire, or caused mass migrations by groups like the Huns, the Goths, and the Magyars. Around the year 1000 A.D., the Vikings gave up their habit of coastal raiding and settled into an agricultural lifestyle, due to a massive change in the climate.

Such significant changes in climate took place before industrialization, and so could not have been caused by human beings using fossil fuels. Steve Connor writes:

Genghis Khan owes his place in history to a sudden shift in the Asiatic climate from the cold, arid period that immediately preceded his ascent as leader of the Mongol empire, to the warmer, wetter weather that allowed his horsemen to expand out from Central Asia.

Connor, writing in the Independent newspaper, notes a multi-decade increase in rainfall:

Scientists studying ancient Siberia pine trees in central Mongolia that date back nearly 2,000 years believe that Khan’s rise to power coincided precisely with a period of unusually heavy rainfall over a couple of decades which allowed the arid grasslands of the Asian Steppe to flourish.

Both long-run and short-run warming and cooling trends are possible, in the present and in the past. It's difficult to know if we are in the midst of some long-run trend at the present; the patterns become clearer in hindsight. Short-run or localized trends shed no light on planet-wide trends.

The phrases 'climate change' and 'climatic instability' were adopted when it became clear that verifying claims of warming were difficult. The earth's climate is both changing and unstable. The nature of such change and instability is twofold: first, it has endured over centuries; second, it seems unrelated to human activity.

The world has, through all recorded history, experienced climatic instability. Ancient records tell us of flood and droughts. Decades-long patterns of unusually harsh winters follow decades of unusually mild winters. Winds change directions, the jet stream wobbles a bit northward and then a bit southward. One year has many hurricanes, the next year few.

To say that the earth's climate is changing is again imprecise. The planet's weather is in constant flux, and has always been so. It is changing inasmuch as it is its nature to be constantly changing; but it is not changing its essential nature. Indeed, the only real change possible would be if the weather stopped changing.

The questions which attract attention to the climate are these: is it possible that human activity impacts weather patterns? If there is some shift in the earth's climate, might some of it be due to industrialization? Are fossil fuels creating 'greenhouse' gasses which are causing global warming? Does carbon-based combustion and carbon dioxide emission have the power to affect the climate? Is methane increasing and thereby disrupting the climate?

The earth's climate has demonstrated, over millennia, drastic swings and statistical 'outlier' periods, which make it unpredictable even to modern meteorologists. Understanding cause and effect within the global climate is not obvious, and is often counter-intuitive.

For example, during the early years of the Cold War, various nations conducted hundreds of nuclear bomb tests. These tests released radiation and also hurled large amounts of fine-particle dust into the atmosphere. Linked to a number of detrimental health effects, these bomb tests have not, however, been linked to any measurable climatic effects.

By contrast, a single event, the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, caused measurable weather changes around the world for several years. Why Krakatoa caused such a change, and yet the nuclear bomb tests did not, remains unclear. Our understanding of the climate is still partial, and does not allow us to confidently assert that human use of fossil fuel causes climate change.

The amount of data needed - precise measurements over many parts of the earth's surface stretching back centuries and millennia - is both staggering and lacking. Any confident statement that global warming is underway, or that human activity is changing the world's climate, is at least premature, and possibly unverifiable.

A Muslim Myth - the Twelfth Imam

It is worth pausing to consider the meaning of the word 'myth' - it does not simply mean 'falsehood' as is often supposed. In academic writings, a myth is a narrative designed to explain something. A myth may be true or false; being false does not make it a myth, and being true does not prevent it from being a myth.

As aggression has emerged in the Near East, starting with the conquest of Mecca in 630 A.D., and extending through the attacks on neighboring parts of Arabia in the following years, Mohammad himself was present as the founder of Islam, and his physical existence served a mythological function to explain the military campaigns.

In the years following Muhammad's death in 632 A.D., a growing mythology was necessary to motivate continued military conquests. This extended west across North Africa, north into Syria, east into Babylon and Persia, and finally into Europe with the invasion of Spain in 711 A.D., allowing Islam to form a vast caliphate (empire). A robust mythology was needed to fuel such an expansive military domination.

One part of this mythology was the notion of a Mahdi - or more precisely, 'the' Mahdi - an anticipated messianic figure who would lead Islam on a final campaign of attack and pillage, destroying all non-Muslim cultures, killing all 'infidels' or nonbelievers, and establishing a final and lasting caliphate.

Like most religions, Islam contains within itself a number of subdivisions: Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Wahabi, etc. Almost all varieties of Islam assert some belief in the Mahdi. Note also that technical terms within Islam, originating as they do in the Arabic language, are subject to varying spelling in English as a result of the process of transliteration: Muhammad or Mohammed, Shia or Shi'ah, etc. Scholar Timothy Furnish writes:

Although most Muslims, not just Shi'i but Sunni as well, have believed in the Mahdi as an article of Islamic doctrine, not all have. For a short time in the early Islamic movement, many believed that Jesus had been the one and only Mahdi. But perhaps under the influence of the Zoroastrian dual messianic deliverers and out of a desire to differentiate the new religion of Islam from Christianity, the major who accepted the problematic traditions about the Mahdi came to see him as a totally separate figure.

The Mahdi is one of several mythological characters who fit into an Islamic eschatological scheme - an "end times" scenario. Islam invites both comparison and contrast with other eschatological frameworks, e.g., with the Christian scenarios about the end of the world. Both Islam and Christianity offer a rich narrative about the end of time, with a number of specific individuals, some good, some evil. Islam's narrative, however, centers on the military and political establishment of a physical caliphate, while Christianity narrative focuses on the regeneration of the universe into a "new heaven and a new earth." Islam's eschatological focus is on the tangible foundation of a social order - an imposed utopia - which prompted the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to call Islam an "optimistic" religion. Christianity's eschatological focus emphasizes the spiritual revitalization of creation - which Schopenhauer called "pessimism," inasmuch as it acknowledges the imperfect nature of the present universe.

In addition to the Mahdi, another character in Islamic eschatological narratives is known as the Twelfth Imam. In fact, in some versions of Islam, the Mahdi is the Twelfth Imam. The ambiguities of Islamic eschatology, and the many variations of it, present an opportunity for scholars to generate self-serving interpretations. Timothy Furnish continues:

The accounts of the future Mahdi - and, indeed, of most of the eschatological actors in Islam - are rather vague and open-ended. This fact has two ramifications: (1) many disparate interpretations of the world geopolitical, socioeconomic, religious, and military situation prior to the beginning of the end of history are possible; and (2) more important, any aspiring Mahdi can attempt to tailor these traditions into Mahdist cloak for himself, or, alternatively, alter his life and career so as to align with the traditions. Many have indeed tried to do so. And some would-be Mahdis have succeeded, at least for a season.

Among the many variations of Islamic eschatology - Timothy Furnish counts over 20 versions among the Shia alone - there are some common threads. One is the "hidden Imam" who will emerge to lead Islam on a final successful military conquest. In some versions, this Imam is the twelfth, in others he's the third or fifth, etc., and in some versions he's the Mahdi, and in other versions he's not. The general flavor of the end times scenario remains the same.

Who is this Twelfth Imam? Historically, there was a twelfth imam, a successor in the line Muhammad, who inherited leadership of Islam. His somewhat mysterious disappearance gives fuel to speculation that he hid or was hidden, waiting to reemerge at the proper time and lead the final military rampage of Islam through the world. Scholar Joel Rosenberg writes that this Twelfth Imam

was not a mythical character or fictional construct. He was a real, flesh-and-blood person who had lived in the ninth century and would someday reemerge to change the course of history. Born in Samarra, Iraq, in or around the year 868, his name was Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali. Like the eleven Shia Muslim leaders who went before him, Muhammad was a direct descendant of the founder of Islam and was thought to have been divinely chosen to be the spiritual guide and ultimate human authority of the Muslim people.

While the notion of some type of Mahdi is common to all, or most, versions of Islam, the identification of the Mahdi with the Twelfth Imam tends more to be associated with Shia than with other types of Islam.

But before he reached an age of maturity when he could teach and counsel of the Muslim world as was believed to be his destiny, the Twelfth Imam had vanished from human society. Some said he was four years old. Others said five or six. Some believed he fell into a well in Samarra, though his body was never recovered. Others believed his mother placed him in the well to prevent the evil rulers of the time from finding him, capturing him, and killing him - and that little Muhammad subsequently became supernaturally invisible. That's why some called him the "Hidden Imam," believing that Ali was not dead but simply hidden from the sight of mankind until the end of days, when Allah would once again reveal him.

Islamic eschatology plays into the hands of military aggression and terrorism. Whether at the invasion of Spain in 711 A.D. (prior to the birth of the Twelfth Imam, when the concept of the Mahdi was less distinct but still powerful within Islam), or at the final attack on Constantinople in 1453 A.D., or at New York's World Trade Center in 2001, rhetoric concerning the Mahdi has been a standard motivational tool for terrorism. Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden, regularly used vocabulary and verbal imagery designed to evoke the Mahdi. More explicitly, al Qaeda members and a large segment of the Muslims in the Arab world began to use Mahdi vocabulary in relation to Osama bin Laden in the years after the 2001 terrorist attack on New York.

To be sure, a large portion of the Muslim world did not connect Osama bin Laden with Mahdi expectations. Those who did make that connection are not deterred by his death, because his demise plays into the notion of the "hidden imam" who miraculously reappears.

In either case, the concepts of the Mahdi and of the Twelfth Imam are important for understanding the motivations behind terrorism and military aggression, both in past centuries and in the future.