The KKK of Kashmir, or How Rare Assassinations Keep the Majority Perpetually Silent (Sualeh Keen, 2011)
Muslim Kashmiris are often questioned about their silence on separatist terror, without understanding the all-pervading fear that still exists in the valley. Many feel that just a couple of hundred militants operating in the valley means that things have returned to normal, without understanding how terror works.
Here is an explanation of the silence of the majority and why
separatists still imbue us with fear, despite a reduction in militancy:
THE KKK OF KASHMIR, OR HOW RARE ASSASSINATIONS KEEP THE MAJORITY
PERPETUALLY SILENT
The recent assassination of Maulana Showkat Ahmed Shah of
Jamiat-i-Ahl-e-Hadees showed the lengths intolerant hard-line separatists go to
silence those who, despite being separatists as well, differ slightly with
their violent and destructive methodology. Maulana Showkat’s fault was that he
had criticised stone-pelting and has espoused a peaceful resolution of the
Kashmir conflict.
Such assassinations occur once in a blue moon in the valley, but
the impact of such rare retributions cannot be underestimated. Such exemplary
punishments to moderate separatists and mainstream leaders go a long way in
reinforcing the fear psychosis and enveloping the ordinary Kashmiri in a pall
of silence. Forget the ordinary Kashmiri, even the moderate separatist leaders
who exhort ordinary Kashmiris to sacrifice their lives at the altar of azadi
cannot muster the courage to name the ‘our own men’ behind such murders of
leaders—sometimes their fathers—even as they hint at knowledge of which
hard-line group is behind the murder.
This effectiveness of rare acts of violence in putting a permanent
gag on moderate voices of Kashmir reminded me of what I had read in the
best-selling book Freakonomics regarding the intimidation strategy adopted by
the Ku Klux Klan.
For the benefit of the members of MVJKL, I shall share relevant
excerpts here:
FREAKONOMICS
A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Chapter 2. How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate
Agents?
As institutions go, the Ku Klux Klan has had a markedly
up-and-down history. In the beginning, their activities were said to be
harmless midnight pranks—riding horses through the countryside while draped in
white sheets and pillowcase hoods. But soon the Klan evolved into a multi-state
terrorist organization designed to frighten and kill emancipated slaves.
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant spelled out for the House of
Representatives the true aims of the Ku Klux Klan: “By force and terror, to
prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to
deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free
ballot, to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to
reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.”
The early Klan did its work through pamphleteering, lynching,
shooting, burning, castrating, pistol-whipping, and a thousand forms of
intimidation. They targeted former slaves and any whites who supported the
blacks’ rights to vote, acquire land, or gain an education.
By the 1920s, a revived Klan claimed eight million members,
including President Warren G. Harding, who reportedly took his Klan oath in the
Green Room of the White House. This time around, the Klan was not confined to
the South but ranged throughout the country; this time, it concerned itself not
only with blacks but also with Catholics, Jews, communists, unionists,
immigrants, agitators, and other disrupters of the status quo. In 1933, with
Hitler ascendant in Germany, Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between
the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying
to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is
copying.”
The onset of World War II and a number of internal scandals once
again laid the Klan low. Public sentiment turned against the Klan as the unity
of a country at war trumped its message of separatism.
But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive
revival. As wartime anxiety gave way to postwar uncertainty, Klan membership
flourished. Barely two months after V-J Day, the Klan in Atlanta burned a
300-foot cross on the face of Stone Mountain, site of a storied rock carving of
Robert E. Lee. The extravagant cross burning, one Klansman later said, was
intended “just to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is
back on the market.”
Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan held great
sway with key Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters included many
policemen and sheriff’s deputies. Yes, the Klan was a secret society, reveling
in passwords and cloak-and-dagger ploys, but its real power lay in the very
public fear that it fostered—exemplified by the open secret that the Ku Klux
Klan and the law-enforcement establishment were brothers in arms.
As a Klavalier, Kennedy worried that he would someday be
expected to inflict violence. But he soon discovered a central fact of life in
the Klan—and of terrorism in general: most of the threatened violence never
goes beyond the threat stage.
Consider lynching, the Klan’s hallmark sign of violence. Here,
compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, are the decade-by-decade statistics on the
lynching of blacks in the United States:
YEARS........................LYNCHINGS OF BLACKS
1890–1899..................1,111
1900–1909..................791
1910–1919..................569
1920–1929..................281
1930–1939..................119
1940–1949..................31
1950–1959..................6
1960–1969..................3
Bear in mind that these figures represent not only lynchings
attributed to the Ku Klux Klan but the total number of reported lynchings. The
statistics reveal at least three noteworthy facts.
The first is the obvious decrease in lynchings over time.
The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and
Klan membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and
1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had
millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far fewer
lynchings than is generally thought.
Third, relative to the size of the black population, lynchings
were exceedingly rare. To be sure, one lynching is one too many. But by the
turn of the century, lynchings were hardly the everyday occurrence that they
are often remembered as. Compare the 281 victims of lynchings in the 1920s to
the number of black infants who died as a result of malnutrition, pneumonia,
diarrhea, and the like.
As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in
infancy, or roughly 20,000 children each year—compared to 28 people who were
lynched in a year.
As late as 1940, about 10,000 black infants died each year.
What larger truths do these lynching figures suggest? What does
it mean that lynchings were relatively rare and that they fell precipitously
over time, even in the face of a boom in Klan membership?
The most compelling explanation is that all those early
lynchings worked. White racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux
Klan—had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive
scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening. If a black person
violated the accepted code of behavior, whether by talking back to a trolley
driver or daring to try to vote, he knew he might well be punished, perhaps by
death.
So by the mid-1940s, the Klan didn’t really need to use as much
violence. Many blacks, having long been told to behave like second-class
citizens—or else—simply obliged. One or two lynchings went a long way toward
inducing docility among even a large group of people, for people respond
strongly to strong incentives. And there are few incentives more powerful than
the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism is so
effective.
. . .
Original post by Sualeh Keen (15 April 2011):
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