RUTHFULLY YOURS

The #CyberAvengers are:
Paul Ferrillo
Chuck Brooks
Kenneth Holley
George Platsis
George Thomas
Shawn Tuma
Christophe Veltsos

Cybersecurity, as many organizations practice it today, is broken. Everybody is feeling the pressure as competitors and partners alike dread a breach. Leadership can’t be left in the dark due to technobabble, a lack of resources, or excuses as to why cyber risk cannot be measured.

FireEye is proud to support the new eBook, The #CyberAvengers Playbook: Doing the Little Things (and Some of the Big Things) Well (2017 Edition). This short guide is designed to give you actionable items that could help any organization improve its cybersecurity posture.

Download the eBook and pick up the following tips from the #CyberAvengers:

Oversight duties: Learn to view risk from an enterprise perspective in an era where accountability and fallout costs are surely going to grow.
Cyber risk: Why it matters and how to wisely spend your limited resources.
Communication gaps: Cybersecurity is not an IT-only issue, so do not be afraid to speak your mind. We show you which questions to ask.
Response and continuity: Even the best-tested plans can go out the window during a time of crisis. Learn to minimize the fallout.
What’s happening in 2017 and what to expect in 2018: From the ransomware scare to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect, business is becoming more expensive. We try to help you save wherever you can.

It could be that I’m from the Soviet Union, or it could be that I love dystopian literature, but I was always under the impression that a “ban” was a prohibition. When a book was banned, its publication, possession, consumption, and often mere mention were criminal offenses. A book ban, from my understanding of the term, was a top-down, government-led censorship that attempted to stop certain ideas from finding their way into the consciousness of the people. Certainly, most regimes and governments that ban books tend to use those metrics.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/30/quick-read-this-article-before-its-banned/

But here we are and another year’s “Banned Book Week” in America is winding down.

Judging by the press for the event, the modern history of the United States is replete with book bannings. Almost every book you love was probably banned at some point. And what’s more, they were banned recently.

Banning books, according to the narrative, isn’t something that only happens in repressive regimes, dystopian novels, or in our dark past. No. Upon entering any library or book retailer this week (the latter being places that, as it happens, have loads of “banned books” to sell you) you will learn that the banning of books is a real and present danger in the United States. It is happening at this very moment and we must be vigilant to prevent more book banning from occurring. The very earnest librarian or bookstore employee will tell you so.

What Kind of ‘Ban’ is This?
Leading the list of “banned books” are most often Harry Potter and Captain Underpants—which apparently were banned so much in the United States that they outsold almost all the other books during the years of their initial publication and hardest banning. If this isn’t shocking enough, we see classics such as Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby occupy places of distinction among the banned. Reading one of the “banned books” is presented as a kind of revolutionary act of defiance. Curl up with a copy of Harry Potter, and suddenly you’re a part of The Resistance.

Trouble is, none of these books were ever actually banned in the United States. At least not in the sense that any rational person understands the term. These books have all enjoyed full and relatively uninterrupted publishing runs, and are readily available for purchase (and nowhere more readily than at the stores celebrating “Banned Book Week”). Reading them hasn’t landed anyone in jail and there is a surfeit of real-world and online discussion groups and book clubs dedicated to their content.

So how is it that so many books can be on a “banned” list (with more being added every year) if these books weren’t ever banned?

The answer is in the power of purposely misusing language to mislead. They’re lying.

Well, to be fair, as Whoopie Goldberg would say, it’s not lying-lying. It’s just a redefinition here and a conflation there. You might call it “marketing.”

Congratulations! You’ve Been Banned*
What the American Library Association (ALA) has done in fostering “Banned Book Week” is to broadly repurpose the culturally and emotionally charged word “banned” and then to conflate their already watered down redefinition with other language in service of selling a narrative . . . and books.

If we look past the headlines, the buzz, and the store shelf endcap advertising, we see that “book ban” for the ALA campaign does not mean government or official prohibition on the general production, consumption, or discussion of a work. The ALA has redefined “banned book” to mean that the work was removed from a library or school curriculum as a result of a challenge. The books aren’t prohibited, they’re just not offered or promoted in certain places at certain times, often to particular audiences.

This is a far cry from the popular conception of a book ban with government-sponsored book burnings, government inquisitions, and prisons. Frankly, the ALA’s use of the word “banned” is so distant from our common cultural perception of it that they should probably follow it up with an asterisk.

The ALA website states that Banned* Books Week celebrates “your freedom to read” when in fact nothing is stopping you from reading. Not. A. Thing. These days, with an ever-increasing variety of sources available for information acquisition, it’s ludicrous to argue that the exclusion of a book from a library somehow makes that book impossible to get.

If that weren’t enough, most of the banned* books listed on the ALA’s website don’t even rise to the level of their redefinition of the word “banned”! Many of the books included on the list of banned* books were never actually removed from libraries. Merely being challenged lands a book on the list. That means anyone (including someone clever enough to realize this is a good way to sell books) might land a title on the list by simply questioning a librarian or school officials about a book.

The ALA is trying to lure their audience with the romance of the oppressed while simultaneously playing fast and loose with language in ways that any current or former denizen of an oppressive state where books are really banned would warn against. There are real consequences to this kind of campaign. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education.

Librarians Versus Parents
According to the ALA’s own stats, only 2 percent of challenges come from government. Turns out, the vast majority of challenges come from parents concerned about their kids’ education and are centered around schools and school libraries. But every good narrative needs a villain. Apparently, the ALA thinks concerned parents who want to be involved in and supervise their children’s education fit that bill.

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Bruce Chadwick begins his fascinating, data-packed history of “law and disorder” in mid-nineteenth century New York City with a gripping account of the anti-abolitionist riot of 1834. A mix-up over the use of a chapel on Chatham Street for a gathering of black leaders and abolitionists led to an all-out attack by several hundred anti-abolitionists. Slavery was legal in New York State until 1827, and thousands of city residents had been sorry to see it go. The abolitionists, however, gave no ground.

For four days, rioters swept back and forth across the city, which at that time stretched from the Battery to 14th Street. Seven churches and a school for black children were burned. The Bowery Theater was heavily damaged. Businesses and houses went up in flames, and the homes of prominent abolitionist leaders were sacked and looted.

In the midst of the furious mob, vainly attempting to bring the rampage under control, was the city’s feeble company of constables. Untrained, unarmed, and unpaid, these political appointees in plainclothes worked for rewards and bonuses, and for the bribes they received from the city’s underworld; some constables even served as procurers in the city’s flesh trade. These amateur officers were good at making money and many lived in style, but they were not good at enforcing the law. Mayor Cornelius Lawrence summoned the state militia, which arrived on horseback. The militiamen warned the mob to disperse, then opened fire: several people were killed and dozens wounded, ending the riot.

For the City of New York, however, an unprecedented wave of crime and chaos had just begun. In 1835, a close mayoral election sent political gangs storming down Broadway. In 1837, a mob protesting reports of profiteering threw 500 barrels of flour into the street. Almost any rabble-rousing tale of injustice could bring hordes of irate “rogues and rascals” streaming through Manhattan. Rumors that an English actor had insulted America filled the streets with incensed New Yorkers, for whom rioting had become a patriotic duty.

In the 1820s, New York’s newspapers turned up their noses at graphic stories of crime, sin, and degradation. All that changed with the arrival of Scottish immigrant James Gordon Bennett and his penny newspaper, the New York Herald. Bennett seized on the gruesome ax murder of a prostitute to introduce a new form of crusading journalism. Instead of brief news items, Bennett published lengthy interviews with hookers and madams, scandalizing respectable New Yorkers—and tripling the Herald’s circulation. Following Bennet’s lead, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and nine other dailies joined the battle for newsstand dominance. Not unlike their modern tabloid descendants, they all claimed to be shocked by the lurid crime stories of rape and robbery that were making them rich, and they all called for a larger, better-trained police force.

But the need for cops outpaced the supply. About 70 percent of immigrants to America landed in New York. Some 30,000 a year were arriving from Ireland alone, causing a dramatic shift in religious and cultural demographics that soon raised Catholic-Protestant tensions to a boiling point. Churches were burned, and the home of Bishop John Hughes was partly destroyed by an anti-Catholic mob. Ethnic and religious firebrands egged the rioters on.

The new immigrants crowded into squalid and dangerous wards like Five Points, a notorious intersection of five streets where Columbus Park stands in Chinatown today. So infamous was this warren of alleys and passageways that, in 1842, a darkly curious Charles Dickens insisted on seeing the wicked slum for himself.

More police, better training, better weapons (such as Samuel Colt’s new revolver), and putting the cops into uniform had little effect on the crime rate. Rioters continued to rule the streets and murders went unsolved. Hotheads and agitators still found it easy to manipulate volatile crowds, and the state militia still replied in kind. When a longstanding feud between two actors brought 10,000 demonstrators to the area around the old Astor Opera House at Lafayette and East 8th Streets, the police lost control. The militia was called. Warning shots were fired. Rocks and bottles flew. A volley was then aimed directly into the crowd. At least 25 people were killed, and a hundred injured. When the anti-draft riots swept the city 14 years later, President Lincoln had to order federal troops to quell the violence.

The blurb of Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria presents the author, Nikolas Van Dam, as an experienced Dutch diplomat with a direct knowledge of the Middle East.

Having served as Holland’s Ambassador to Egypt, Turkey and Iraq, Van Dam also had a stint (in 2015-16) as his country’s Special Envoy for Syria. In that last assignment Van Dam monitored the situation from a base in neighboring Turkey.

Van Dam’s diplomatic background is clear throughout his book as he desperately tries, not always with success, to be fair to “all sides” which means taking no sides, while weaving arguments around the old cliché of “the only way out is through dialogue”.

Thus he is critical of Western democracies, which according to him, deceived the Syrian opposition by making promises to it, including military intervention, which they had no intention of delivering. He is especially critical of former US President Barack Obama who launched the mantra “Assad must go” and set “red line” which the Syrian despot ended up by crossing with impunity.

The first half of the book consists of a fast-paced narrative of Syrian history before the popular uprising started in the spring of 2011. The picture that emerges is that of a Syria in the throes of instability and frequent outburst of violence including sectarian conflict. Van Dam then juxtaposes that with Syria as it was reshaped under President Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1970, and his son and successor Bashar al-Assad.

“Under Hafez and Bashar, Syria experienced more internal security and stability than ever before since independence,” Van Dam asserts.

But isn’t Van Dam confusing terror with security and stagnation with stability?

Leaving aside the past six years that, according to Van Dam, have claimed almost half a million Syrian lives, the previous four decades of rule by the two Assads were anything but a model of security and stability. In all those years, Syria lived under Emergency Rules while thousands were imprisoned and/or tortured and executed. The absence of genuine security and stability meant that the Ba’athist regime was unable to build the durable institutions of a modern state. That’s why Syrian society at large saw its creative energies stifled, something that none of the previous dictators, from Hosni a-Zaim onwards, had managed or, perhaps, even intended to do.

In other words, contrary to Van Dam’s assertion, the two Assads destroyed chances of Syria building the political, not to mention the ethical, infrastructure of genuine security and stability.

Van Dam tries to portray Syria as a society that had always been ridden by sectarian violence, and frequently refers to “the killing of Alawites” by Arab Sunni Muslims. However, the only example he cites is that of the mass murder of Alawite military cadets in Aleppo which took place during Hafez al-Assad’s rule. The biggest “mass killing” of that epoch was the week-long carnage of unarmed civilians by Assad’s troops in Hama in 1982 which, according to Van Dam, claimed up to 25,000 lives, almost all of them Arab Sunni Muslims.