American History

Jewish Defense League

Jewish Defense League

Jewish Defense League Although it was initially organized to protect Jews in crime-ridden neighborhoods in New York City, the Jewish Def...

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img a="" alt="The" always="" anti="" border="0" have="" jesuits="" made="" of="" part="" prominent="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAKJlhVF9sNljoCo77hZwxnqh9Z6fTCTH1zoE7Z5sNG8ow2ZoyAJ72cJp0XyHRWhe6tXmViYhC1ocePvnHf8aSE93KmMrRQxGMSaHr3sE5ZOtzw61_RFDAyh2fPKV7b-AA4l0kTUPMWRI/s1600/jesuits-logo.gif" title="Jesuits" up="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jesuits logo</td></tr> </tbody></table> The Jesuits have always made up a prominent part of anti-Catholic beliefs and conspiracy theories. It is the largest religious order of men in the Catholic Church today, with approximately 21,000 Jesuits worldwide and 4,500 in the United States. The Jesuits currently operate twenty-eight colleges and universities in the United States, including Georgetown in Washington, D.C. In addition to education and parish ministry, the order also provides opportunities for lay volunteers to assist the poor through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Despite these many contributions to the common good, the Jesuits are central to many anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. Why the Jesuits figure so prominently in this paranoia can be better understood by looking at the history and special character of this religious order. The founder of the Jesuits, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>St. Ignatius of Loyola</a> (1495–1556), was born in the Basque region of Spain. As a young man, he dreamed of a military life by which he would win glory for himself and acclaim from the ladies. This worldly dream was cut short when Ignatius was crippled by a cannonball during the siege of Pamplona. <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067165716X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=067165716X&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=PMNM5OAKX3FTU35Y"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=067165716X&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="The" always="" anti="" border="0" have="" height="1" jesuits="" made="" of="" part="" prominent="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=067165716X" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" up="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1495916359/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1495916359&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=XVKEYECEBZV6KHRM"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1495916359&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="The" always="" anti="" border="0" have="" height="1" jesuits="" made="" of="" part="" prominent="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1495916359" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" up="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> While recuperating, Ignatius experienced a profound conversion and decided to take the same discipline he experienced as a soldier and apply it to a new religious order, which he hoped would be a new army for the Church. This was the Society of Jesus, which was founded in 1540. Through combining discipline and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>learning</a>, the Jesuits became a powerful new force in Roman Catholicism. Of great significance for the Americas was the interest the Jesuits took in foreign missions. The first Jesuits to arrive in the future United States were Fathers Andrew White (1579–1656) and John Altham (1589–1640) and Brother Thomas Gervase (1590–1637). Together, they established a mission in southern <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Maryland</a> in 1634. One of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">characteristics</a> of the Jesuit order was that, in addition to the three traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, there was added the fourth vow of special obedience to the pope. The order was founded in the midst of the <a href=" http://" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Protestant Reformation</a>, when it appeared that the religious world of Europe was in tatters. Ignatius responded to this situation by stressing obedience to church authority in these chaotic times. Certainly, to people living centuries later, the manner in which Ignatius expressed his sixteenth-century understanding of obedience could be quite unsettling. The faithful should be always ready to uphold and defend the precepts of the Church, and never criticize these in any manner; his view of obedience was strict and sounded very much like blind faith. In the constitution he wrote for the order, Ignatius stressed that a Jesuit should be completely obedient to the pope and the leaders of the order. This stress on obedience, as well as their great success in the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Counter-Reformation</a>, led the Jesuits to be especially feared by Protestants. In 1585 <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Queen Elizabeth I</a> of England issued the Act against Jesuits and Seminarianists, which banished all Jesuits from England and its territories. The perceived threat of the Jesuits led to similar such legislation in the American colonies. In 1647 the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>colony of Massachusetts Bay</a> passed the AntiPriest Law. After reviewing the violence and unrest on the European continent and claiming that these were caused by “those of the Jesuiticall order,” this law stated that no Jesuit was to come within the territory of the colony and that any currently residing in Massachusetts Bay were to be banished. Should any who were banished return to the colony, they were to be put to death. Forty-three years later Massachusetts passed an even stricter law, the Act against Jesuits and Popish Priests, on 17 June 1700. This decreed that “every Jesuit, seminary priest, missionary, or other spiritual or ecclesiastical person” was to depart the colony within three months. Any captured after that date would be imprisoned for life and subject to execution if they tried to escape. Anyone hiding or aiding in any way a member of the “Romish clergy” would be fined 200 pounds and pilloried for three days. At the time of independence the American Catholic community numbered only about 25,000, but this was to change dramatically because of immigration. Beginning with the Irish in the early nineteenth century, and followed by the Germans, Italians, and Poles, the Catholic population reached 1.6 million in 1850 and 12 million in 1900. This created a tense situation in the United States, because although the country was predominately Protestant, its largest denomination was the Catholic Church, which alarmed many Protestants, to whom this increase looked more like an invasion than immigration. And leading this threat to the country, they were sure, were the Jesuits. A great number of anti-Catholic writings emerged in the nineteenth century. In 1882 Edwin A. Sherman published The Engineer Corps of Hell, which included the infamous Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus. This was supposed to be a kind of classified procedure manual for the top echelon of the Jesuit Order. Among its contents were chapters on how to gain influence over princes, magnates, and the wealthy. Three chapters were devoted to the methods by which rich widows were to be convinced to enter religious life and give their <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Jesuits>money</a> to the order. A very popular anti-Catholic work from the nine-teenth century that remains in print was Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. Written in 1885 by Charles Chiniquy, who claimed to be a former priest, the book warned of the threat of the Jesuits to U.S. liberty: “The American people must be very blind indeed, if they do not see that if they do nothing to prevent it, the day is very near when the Jesuits will rule their country, from the magnificent White House at Washington, to the humblest civil and military department of this vast Republic”. In the early twentieth century there appeared E. G. White’s The Great Controversy (1911). White warned his fellow Americans that the Jesuits were “the most cruel, unscrupulous, and powerful of all the champions of popery. ... There was no crime too great for them to commit, no deception too base for them to practice, no disguise too difficult for them to assume.” To those who countered that the Jesuits appeared holy, White responded that although the members of the order wore a garb of sanctity, this was only a disguise. Beneath this blameless exterior, he claimed, was a deadly intent against all that the American people stood for. A fundamental principle for the Jesuits, White said, was that the end justifies the means: “By this code, lying, theft, perjury, assassination, were not only pardonable but commendable, when they served the interests of the church. Under various disguises the Jesuits worked their way into offices of state, climbing up to be the servants of kings, and shaping the policy of nations”. In 1960 a Catholic was finally elected president of the United States. Despite all the dire predictions, the massacre of Protestants and suspension of liberties did not take place, nor were Jesuits appointed wholesale to key government posts. A good deal of anti-Catholic bigotry subsided after the election of Kennedy, but it did not all go away. Hate groups with an anti-Catholic bias and belief in a worldwide Jesuit conspiracy still remain. During the 1980s there appeared various print materials attacking the papacy and the Jesuits. Chick Publications issued a cartoon book in 1983 entitled The Poor Pope? that claimed that the Vatican “almost destroyed the United States when her Jesuits engineered the Civil War and murdered <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Abraham Lincoln</a>. Her Jesuits even set up <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War I</a> and II, which has been carefully covered up”. In 1984 the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation published and widely distributed a pamphlet entitled The Pope’s Secrets. Typical of anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, the pamphlet blames the Vatican and its Jesuit agents for all of the world’s woes. The scope and power claimed for this conspiracy is truly impressive: “Because of her age-old desire to control the world government and church, the serpent-like Vatican has infested the world and the U.S. government with so may of her zealous, highly-trained and dedicated Jesuit devotees, that she now controls the United Nations (which she created); the White House; Congress; every state, federal, civic, and social government agency including the U.S. Department of Labor, the IRS, the FBI, Supreme Court, judicial systems, the arms forces; state, federal and other police; also the international banking and federal reserve systems (called the Illumniati and Agentur), labor unions, the <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jesuits>Mafia</a> and most of the heavy-weight news media”. This worldwide conspiracy includes communism under “Jesuit-trained” <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Fidel Castro</a>, the corruption of youth with drugs by “Jesuit Vatican-trained” Timothy Leary, and control of the Israeli parliament, where some “Israelites have converted to this sect (Roman Catholicism). The Vatican wanted them to become rabbis so that they could place them in the Israeli Knesset as spies. Some of these Roman Jesuit rabbis are there today”. Finally, the pamphlet makes much of Jesuit assassins dutifully removing enemies of the pope, including Abraham Lincoln and <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jesuits>John F. Kennedy</a>. The assassination of Kennedy is an interesting twist on the old fear of a Catholic president. The claim is that Kennedy was assassinated because he wouldn’t turn the country over to the Vatican. Today the Internet has become a major outlet disseminating Jesuit conspiracy theories. One example is a web page sponsored by the Pacific Institute, a group founded in San Diego in 1977 “for the express purpose of Biblical research.” Entitled “America will soon lose its Constitution,” it warns of the great threat of the Jesuit conspiracy in the United States: “Today the pope’s Jesuits are not only entrenched at the highest levels of all branches and departments of the U.S. Government, but they are also entrenched at the highest levels of virtually all the major corporations and industries in the United States. ... Our God-given Constitution is the reason the United States has become the greatest country in the world, but it is being thoroughly undermined today by the Jesuits in the government as they work to destroy the United States”. The group blames excessive environmental regulations and gun control laws on Jesuit politicians in Congress, and they even blame Jesuits for the tragedy of <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Jesuits>September 11</a>.

Jesuits

Jesuits logo The Jesuits have always made up a prominent part of anti-Catholic beliefs and conspiracy theories. It is the largest religi...

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was born 13 April 1743, in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. Jefferson was a member of the Cont...

Hackers

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLLIPH7AF-g3mBo-JwLbav3a_zFDiII57uddwbcGdm4NE__9hT89ndKPgwcS47B0xFbgdT9podVmq9lCojWu91QUoPrEhKlbfhMz4uhiVHHN2UlgdOJujch1ZGKSzTpQPFQzGJdmEPYNk/s1600/hackers.jpg" /></a></div> In February 2000, Websites such as Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, and CNN were shut down by “Denial of Service” messages that crippled a corner of the Internet for a three-day period. As it had frequently done, the media focused upon the much-hyped computer hacker and professed to shed light on this dangerous underground. The popular fear is that the hacker is potentially anybody, including the neighbor’s teenage son or daughter, who, safely ensconced behind drawn shades or in basement apartments, could be busily hacking global computer systems. Such news coverage, however, is nothing new given that reports of hackers violating government, corporate, and personal databases have become common currency on the Internet and helped perpetuate a conspiracy-minded paranoia regarding the ubiquity of hackers and the vulnerability of Internet users across the globe. Yet the term “hacker” is problematic because, since its earliest incarnation in the 1950s, it has mutated in the popular media to include such divergent groups as traditional hackers, phone phreakers (people who hack into the phone system), crackers (the label for the less acceptable forms of hacking), and cypherpunks (those with a more general, but no less radical, interest in cryptography). In the seminal Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1994), Steven Levy notes that, as of 1984, there were three distinguishable generations of hackers. <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X8ROQHA/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00X8ROQHA&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=EFNMNQRMPOV2JYTD"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00X8ROQHA&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="messages" border="0" corner="" crippled="" for="" hackers="" height="1" internet="" of="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00X8ROQHA" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" three="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449388396/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1449388396&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=4WNOYCXVRKA77E55"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1449388396&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img a="" alt="messages" border="0" corner="" crippled="" for="" hackers="" height="1" internet="" of="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1449388396" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" that="" the="" three="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first generation consisted of Peter Samson, Bob Saunders, John McCarthy, Bill Gosper, Richard Greenblatt, Stewart Nelson, members of the Tech Railroad Model Club, and a host of other figures that found themselves wandering through the early computing labs of MIT. As Levy describes it, these hackers were drawn to the early computers housed in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and, driven by an overwhelming curiosity, they experimented with both hardware and software for the express purpose of pushing the computer beyond its original programming. They wanted to create something new, whether through the physical manipulation of the system or writing programming language such as FORTRAN, which helped create a freely distributable precursor of today’s video games: Spacewar. As a result, a hacker ethic stressing the free flow of ideas emerged: “Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works” (Levy, 102). Contemporary accounts of hackers continue to stress the ethics of hacking, whether Paul Taylor in Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime (1999), remarking that the true hacker demonstrates simplicity (simple but impressive skills), mastery (sophisticated technical knowledge), and illicitness (the act of hacking is against the rules) (15); or Pekka Himanen’s summary in The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (2001), that the hacker spirit consists of intrinsic interest, enthusiasm, and joy (3–4). In addition to their common interests, these early hackers were also united in that they were viewed by the general population as mages of some weird, and equally wicked, magic. As the 1950s changed into the 1960s, resistance to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, condemnation of military/educational partnerships, and the value of free love placed these early hackers in a precarious position. Public image of these hacking magi fluctuated between the “mad scientist” type and the geeky “pasty-skinned, glassyeyed automatons” that were the precursor to an Orwellian Big Brotherism just over the horizon (Levy, 130). With the advent of the 1970s, hackers eventually exited the hallowed halls of MIT and took to the streets to form computer-based clubs that fostered the hacker ethic by allowing diverse members to share hacking tips. This second wave of hackers used home-based transistor kits to explore the possibilities of creating new computer systems and social networks “where truth, openness, and democracy existed in a form purer than one could find anywhere else” (Levy, 192). Notable among this second wave were such groups as Community Memory, set up by Lee Felsenstein and Efrem Lipkin, and the popular Homebrew, founded by Gordon French and Fred Moore. In a shift of the conspiratorial target, this second wave of hackers returned the conspiratorial gaze outward to express their own mistrust of those with economic advantage, notably multinational corporations (e.g., IBM) that threatened to privatize and restrict computer systems, software, and information. Tellingly, on 3 February 1976, the Homebrew Community Club newsletter was set abuzz when a hacker, in a written letter entitled “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” expressed dismay, frustration, and anger that his BASIC computer software aktivitas had been hacked and freely distributed. The author of the letter? <a href=" " target="_blank">Microsoft</a> founder Bill Gates. Unfortunately, Gates’s letter was the writing on the wall; money had come to hackerdom as twenty-three separate computer companies, including Apple and Microsoft, were eventually founded out of Homebrew’s members. Yet, as hackers began to compete with one another in a market that valued shares over sharing, they became their own conspiratorial targets. This third generation ran afoul of the first and second generations and, consequently, internal accusations of corporate espionage, theft, and an overall betrayal of the hacker spirit ensued. This internal strife among hackers-cum-corporate-officers intensified during the 1980s when the home computing market began to grow at exponential rates. Furthermore, fueled by the popularity of hackers in such venues as movies (War Games), novels (Neuromancer), and television (Max Headroom), hacking exploded in the public consciousness because the personal computer potentially allowed anyone to hack computer systems. Thus, while War Games was screened nationwide, FBI agents arrested the six teenage members of the “414 Gang,” a computer club that hacked the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a site involved in the development of nuclear weapons. Or, in 1987, Shadow Hawk (Herbert Zinn), admitting to hacking AT&T computers, became the first to be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. Finally, to help solidify the growing concern over hackers, Cornell graduate student Robert Morris unleashed the first computer worm that “unknowingly” infected computer systems worldwide and shut down the emergent Internet network. As Andrew Ross, in Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (1991), puts it, the effects of Morris’s Internet virus “helped to generate a adab panic that has all but transformed everyday ‘computer culture’” (75) while a “[v]irusconscious fear and loathing have clearly fed into the paranoid climate of privatization that increasingly defines social identities in the new post-Fordist era” (80). By the end of the 1980s, the conspiracy dialogue shifted toward a media-hyped condemnation of hacking—the distinctions among hacking, cracking, and phone phreaking completely ignored—and the potentially crippling abilities of such computerized cabals as the Legion of Doom or, in West Germany, the Chaos Computer Club. Tellingly, U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier called hacking the “crime of the future ... [and] this kind of conduct will not be tolerated” (Slatalla and Quittner). The judicial pursuit of hackers has only intensified since the 1980s and has now become an increasingly publicized enterprise. For example, in 1990, four members of the Legion of Doom were arrested for stealing information that could potentially disrupt BellSouth’s 911 emergency system. Later that year, the Secret Service, operating in the interest of national security, launched Operation Sundevil, a cooperative, multijurisdictional search and seizure operation targeting computer bulletin boards housed in fourteen cities. Bruce Sterling, in the online version of The Hacker Crackdown, writes that “Sundevil appears to have been a complete success. Boards went down all over the United States, and were shipped en masse to the computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Washington D.C., along with the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown quantities of printed material.” Yet, Sterling argues that Sundevil had little to do with hacking itself but with media relations, since it would send a “message” to the digital underground that they could not hide behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals for long. Essentially, the hacker war escalated into the public domain as businesses used the hacker threat to market security software. At the same time, law enforcement agencies publicly brought the more flamboyant hackers to trial and shifted the cultural understanding of hackers from the early days of computer exploration into the realm of computer theft and fraud. Examples of these cybercriminals include members of Masters of Deception (Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, Scorpion), who broke into such corporations as AT&T and the Bank of America, and Kevin Poulsen, who manipulated phone lines in both Los Angeles and Hawaii to ensure that he won Porsches and cash from radio giveaway contests. Conspiracy theorists, however, point to the case of Kevin Mitnick as the most public example of government/corporate manipulation of the hacking image. In trouble with the law since his hacking teenage years, Mitnick, over a two-year period, became the FBI’s most wanted hacker of the 1990s after allegedly hacking into computers, stealing corporate secrets, scrambling phone networks, and breaking into the national defense warning system. Foiled by security specialist Tsutomu Shimomura, Mitnick was arrested in 1995 after eluding authorities for several years. Mitnick spent over four years in jail prior to his trial, prompting biographer Jonathan Littman to remark that “the government made it clear that they might indict him in different jurisdictions [and] that he might have to face multiple trials. He did not get the evidence against him for a very long time. The only trial Kevin Mitnick got was in the New York Times and in the media.” Most observers argue that Mitnick, while certainly responsible for some of his deeds (he signed a plea agreement in 1995), could not have carried out all his attributed hacks and was unjustly prosecuted in favor of the positive media spin that increasingly depicted hackers in criminal/terrorist terms. Given the climate of the 1990s, Littman remarks that “there was more at stake at that time. And I think Mitnick, for the media and for some in the government, made a great scapegoat and was a great sort of boogeyman.” Even Levy, in the 1994 edition of Hackers, states that the noble stature of the early hackers has been deleted by this fourth branch of media-hyped hacker, a figure “rooted in the vernacular ... [and] synonymous with the ‘digital trespasser.’ ... In the past few years, with the emergence of computer viruses, the hacker has been literally transformed into a virulent force” (432). Unfortunately, the term has fared no better in recent years, evidenced in the “Denial of Service” attacks of 2000 or, a few years earlier, the 1998 penetration of the Pentagon’s unclassified computer networks and, in 1999, the vandalization of the U.S. Senate, White House, and U.S. Army websites. Critics contend that such hacks continue to feed into the conspiratorial paranoia that accompanies average computer users regarding the malevolent computer hacker lurking over the digital horizon, which only helps sway public opinion toward increased policing of the Internet and the ongoing development (and purchase) of security software.

Hackers

In February 2000, Websites such as Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, and CNN were shut down by “Denial of Service” messages that crippled a corner of ...

Andrew Jackson

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href=" " imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img alt="and" andrew="" as="" border="0" especially="" jackson="" of="" president="" seventh="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOHdhYiKpzOnzrAAoYHFkHtvlOTXl3v3rOIdfFEAiuyfRxOKgU6RqLmf3djyDvaVCqK6iMfRenpDK6SWBSvuhPTiFGLByqvwocAEp-fQTo7qhIg4E4iza_sl4Ddqh4b3kpm7H-sUiD9uw/s1600/andrew-jackson.jpg" states="" the="" title="Andrew" united="" /></a></td></tr> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Jackson</td></tr> </tbody></table> As a general, official, candidate, and especially as seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) was and is one of the most polarizing figures on the American scene. Because of the Jacksonians’ occasionally lurid rhetoric and Manichean approach to certain policy issues, historians have long been in the habit of including Jackson and his followers in the ranks of “paranoid” or conspiracy theory–prone political <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Andrew Jackson>movements</a>. This interpretation comes most powerfully from the post–<a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">World War II</a> “consensus” historians, led by Richard Hofstadter, with their downplaying of class, economic, and ideological conflict as forces in U.S. history. <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812973461/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0812973461&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=FBJAUS24BYORSPMX"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0812973461&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="and" andrew="" as="" border="0" especially="" height="1" jackson="" of="" president="" seventh="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0812973461" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594205566/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1594205566&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=64LEJFPWQSNMQLUO"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1594205566&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="and" andrew="" as="" border="0" especially="" height="1" jackson="" of="" president="" seventh="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1594205566" states="" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" united="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> The Jacksonians constantly described American society in these terms, and practiced a politics of angry confrontation, so the consensus historians set them down as demagogues using class rhetoric to mask a capitalist agenda, or as conspiracy theorists who, as David Brion Davis puts it, saw “the growing inequality of wealth as the product of an aristocratic conspiracy against the rights of the laboring classes”. This view is inadequate. Coming to prominence in a time of sweeping change—what more recent scholars have labeled the “Market Revolution”— the Jacksonians were expressing serious concerns when they attacked their Monster Banks and hydras of corruption. This revolution saw millions of Americans become wage laborers for the first time, subject to the will of employers and forced to meet their daily needs by buying goods and services in the marketplace. Inequalities of wealth deepened as many traditional trades were decimated by industrialization. The legal and institutional order was remade in ways that maximized the power and protected the earnings of capitalist entrepreneurs over and against the rest of society. Finally, two major economic depressions punctuated the Jacksonian era, the panics of 1819 and 1837, and in those crashes millions of Americans found themselves suddenly susceptible to the fortunes and policies of unfamiliar institutions like banks and corporations, run by and for the benefit of a new class of economic power brokers. In sum, while we may find the Jacksonians’ analysis of the Market Revolution extreme and their policy responses to it crude and simplistic, the problems they perceived were no paranoid delusions. Jackson himself was probably a bit paranoid. Much of his political career was spent crusading against various enemies and evildoers, some open, some hidden, but most not especially evil by any objective analysis. Jackson tended to turn any issue into a quest for personal vindication, and while this tendency was an important flaw in Jackson’s character as a leader, it should not lead us to conclude that he was always merely paranoid. In many cases, they really were out to get him. The following is just a sampling of the occasions when Jackson detected conspirators at work against him, and vice versa. The Election of 1824 and the “Corrupt Bargain” Though Andrew Jackson’s candidacy began as a merely local, tactical maneuver, the satria of New Orleans emerged rapidly as a popular favorite, disrupting the presidential plans of House Speaker Henry Clay and <a href=" " target="_blank" title=Andrew Jackson>Monroe</a> administration cabinet members John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun. Jackson’s sudden rise was one of the seminal events in U.S. political history, potentially placing the power of presidential selection into the hands of popular majorities for the first time. Unfortunately, the U.S. political system was unprepared for this development. The established means of nominating presidential candidates, the congressional caucus, fell apart when only one quarter of the members attended. Crawford was nominated but the supporters of Jackson, Adams, and Clay ignored the caucus decision, setting up a four-way presidential race that was guaranteed to be difficult to resolve. Jackson finished first in the popular and Electoral College voting, but fell short of the required majority in the College. This meant the tamat decision would have to be made in the House of Representatives. The Jacksonians expected the House to simply ratify the people’s choice, but that was not a constitutional requirement. Though some feared riots if Jackson was not elected, the House voting on 9 February 1825 had the look of a deal between the Adams and Clay forces. The states that had given their Electoral College votes to Clay went to Adams, along with several Jackson states, making Adams president. Rumors of a conspiracy to thwart the people’s will circulated heavily, and one week later they seemed to come true, when Adams announced Clay as his choice for secretary of state. Adams and Clay both denied that there had been any arrangement, but the circumstantial evidence for a perhaps unstated understanding between them is strong. The Jacksonians exploded in anger, denouncing the election as a “corrupt bargain” against the people and Adams as a morally and democratically illegitimate president. Jackson’s own reaction was typically violent: “So you see, the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Andrew Jackson>silver</a>. [H]is end will be the same”. His supporters used the battle cry of “bargain and sale” to undermine the Adams administration’s every move, finding sinister motives behind even the most high-minded initiatives and the least significant decisions. Adams and Clay were dubbed “the coalition,” a pejorative term in those days, used to denote an alliance based purely on self-interest and lust for power. Missouri senator and ardent Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton led a congressional investigation of corruption in the administration. The committee issued a report comparing Adams and Clay to the kings and prime ministers of England before the American Revolution. The coalition was supposedly out to seize absolute power by using the government’s revenue to buy up supporters, specifically by appointing partisans to office and subsidizing friendly newspapers. Later a Committee on Retrenchment was formed during the campaign year of 1828 to look further into Adams’s alleged excesses. Of course, this so-called spoils system of partisan appointments expanded dramatically once the Jacksonians were in power, despite their cries for “reform” while Adams was president. Ironically, all these attacks were directed at what was probably one of the least partisan administrations in U.S. history. Most of the charges were exaggerated or fictitious, but all were made plausible by the circumstances of Adams’s election. Whether corrupt, a bargain, or not, the Adams-Clay coalition was based on assumptions about the role of democracy in the constitutional system that suddenly became outmoded in the 1820s. The founders may have placed the election of the president in the hands of the Electoral College and Congress, but in practice it had become the province of the people themselves. Slaying the Monster Bank Probably the best-known examples of Jacksonian “paranoia” can be found in the so-called Bank War, in which Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States first by vetoing a bill renewing its charter and then by removing the government’s deposits from the bank. Couched in some of the most radical rhetoric ever to come out of the White House, Jackson’s crusade against the bank struck the institution’s defenders and most later commentators as extreme and hyperbolic if not downright pathological. Like the attacks on the “coalition,” Jacksonian fears about the institution they sometimes called the Monster were rooted in serious concerns. Giant national institutions of any kind were virtually nonexistent in this period. The Bank of the United States (BUS) was perhaps the first national business corporation, and the only other real national institution of any kind, the federal government, had no presence in most communities besides the local post office. The BUS was not the Federal Reserve or a government treasury. Instead, it was a privately owned, profit-making commercial bank, with branches across the country, that happened to enjoy the very great privilege of holding the government’s <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Andrew Jackson>money</a> on deposit. From the inception of its first incarnation back under Hamilton and Washington, the BUS had been highly controversial, as much for its potential for political abuse as for its economic power. Especially under the direction of Nicholas Biddle, who assumed the presidency of the Second BUS in 1823, the national bank set the example followed by most major U.S. corporations since, <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=Andrew Jackson>working</a> to maximize its influence by forging close ties with politicians. Loans to lawmakers and political journalists were made freely, and several of the most prominent congressional leaders, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, were hired by the bank in their private capacity as lawyers. The influential New York Courier and Enquirer switched from opposition to support of the BUS after a loan came through. This sort of influence-buying is what the Jacksonians were thinking of when they denounced the BUS as a “hydra of corruption”. Banks themselves were unfamiliar, suspicious institutions to most Americans of the early nineteenth century. Bank-loaned paper money was felt to be, in essence, fake money (in contrast to gold and silver) that encouraged reckless, groundless speculative investments. Jackson told Biddle he had been “afraid” of banks ever since reading about the South Sea Bubble, a disastrous British investment mania of the early eigthteenth century. Jackson had also personally experienced a bank-driven financial boom and bust. The BUS was widely blamed for a banking and land speculation bubble that had burst and plunged the country into a depression beginning in 1819. Newly reestablished at the end of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">War of 1812</a>, the national bank had first failed to restrain a rapid overexpansion of credit by new state and local banks and then suddenly cracked down a few years later to save itself. An epidemic of bankruptcy, unemployment, and homelessness ensued, followed swiftly by tens of thousands of debt collection lawsuits that sent many debtors to jail. <a href=" " target="_blank">Thomas Jefferson</a> and Andrew Jackson were only two among many major figures who barely escaped total ruin in the panic of 1819, and many other similar and lesser Americans were not so lucky. Jackson’s home region and electoral base, the West, was especially hard hit. The new western cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati had been the center of the land boom, and in aggressively collecting debts after the crash, the BUS stripped hundreds of western farmers and businessmen of their property. By some reports, most of Cincinnati ended up owned by the BUS. Westerners responded with political outrage that would fuel Jacksonianism later on. New senator and future Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri reported that his trip to Washington was “one long ride amidst the crashings and explosions of banks”. In Washington, Benton helped launch the antibank crusade that Jackson would finish a decade later, giving voice to many westerners’ sense of sudden enslavement to an evil foreign entity. “All the flourishing cities of the west are mortgaged to this money power,” Benton thundered. “They are in the jaws of the monster! A lump of butter in the mouth of a dog! One gulp, one swallow, and all is gone!”. The ideas of Jacksonians like “Old Bullion” Benton, so named for his advocacy of a “hard money” currency of gold and silver coins only, can be seen as typical conspiracy theories to the extent that they blame large, disturbing changes on one villainous institution. As with many other conspiracy theories, this act of scapegoating allowed Jacksonians to avoid both acknowledging the global, systemic forces at work and admitting that any fundamental or irreversible damage had been done to U.S. society. A villain or monster could be defeated more readily than the Market Revolution or industrial capitalism. The depth of Andrew Jackson’s own antipathy to the BUS was not widely known during his first two presidential campaigns and for most of his first term as president. It came out only when his long- time political enemy Henry Clay, now a senator, decided to press for early recharter of the BUS. (The existing charter did not expire until 1836.) Clay expected a veto and hoped to use the issue against Jackson in the 1832 presidential race. Though Thomas Hart Benton led a stiff resistance and the Jacksonians had a majority in Congress, enough of them defected to allow the recharter bill to pass on 3 July 1832. The whole thing smelled of corruption to Jackson, who was sick and suffering intense pain at the time from an old bullet wound in his arm. He took the recharter drive as a personal challenge that had to beaten back: “The Bank ... is trying to kill me, but I will kill it”. The message that Jackson and his aides concocted to explain the veto remains a shocking presidential document, crackling with anger and critical of dominant elements of U.S. society in a way that would be impossible to imagine today. Hardest for his opponents to take was Jackson’s harsh class rhetoric, condemning the wealthy for conspiring against democracy and the welfare of the nation: “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the veto message argued. The document set the terms for the “Bank War” that followed, boiling down a host of fears about the social and political impact of the rise of corporate capitalism into this one battle against a monstrously large and dangerous bank. While also attacking the bank as unconstitutional and overly beholden to foreign investors, Jackson focused his greatest ire on the way government involvement with business inevitably led to the subversion of democratic institutions and values: <blockquote> Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. (Jackson, 1832 )</blockquote> Bank president Nicholas Biddle and his allies thought this was crazy talk, that the veto message would ruin Jackson: “It has all the fury of chained panther biting the bars of his cage. It is really a manifesto of anarchy”. So convinced was Biddle that the message would contribute to Jackson’s downfall that he had thousands of copies printed up and mailed at bank expense. Obviously, this was far from the case. Jackson was resoundingly reelected in 1832, an election that his opponents tried to turn into a referendum on the Bank War, with the aid of the BUS itself. As his second term opened, Jackson was determined to finish what he had started. Fearful that Biddle’s political loans and lobbying might secure another, perhaps veto-proof recharter bill sometime in the Monster’s remaining four years of life, Jackson and his advisors planned a preemptive strike. They would withdraw the government’s money from the BUS and deposit it in a number of different state banks, thereby crippling Biddle’s institution both financially and politically.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson As a general, official, candidate, and especially as seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) ...

The Iron Heel

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00847CZZO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00847CZZO&linkCode=as2&tag=mediasehat-20" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAmFDoAdlSv-ghQLVOhJmayeL3nG4CeE0giQYGT5zBV0AlnCs8v1YryWf4N4jCAPrqo1WyfZ5Gy0x5SbCMqX1i3PXiSDblMJaRp0-sd_LeWebn9Tajhxn8byA9AmsUdvzuHyYK9AxrdyA/s1600/Iron-Heel.jpg" wide="250" /></a></div> The Iron Heel is the title of Jack London’s 1908 novel about a socialist revolution in the United States. While London is best known today as a writer of adventure stories about dogs, in his own time The Iron Heel established London’s identity as a literary jagoan of the international proletariat and the most famous U.S. socialist around the world. The <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=The Iron Heel>future</a> of totalitarian dictatorship and mass working-class revolt imagined in London’s novel caused such a stir among his generation of radicals that the term “Iron Heel” came into common usage as a name for strikebreaking, police brutality, government conspiracies, and other violent forms of labor discipline and political repression. But like most dystopian novels set in the “not-too-distant future,” through the years The Iron Heel has proven to be equally prophetic and problematic. Working class by background and a committed socialist since boyhood, Jack London was inspired to write The Iron Heel by the plebeian terrorism and czarist brutality of the <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=The Iron Heel>Russian </a>Revolution of 1905 and the violent series of strikes that spread class conflict across the mining and mill towns of Colorado. In Colorado, a cabal of mine and mill owners—working in consort with the local government—used Pinkertons, the state militia, vigilante mobs, bombing conspiracies, and agents provocateurs, as well as the courts, police, and capitalist press, to crush the militant Western Federation of Miners and end their drive for the eight-hour day. <table align="center" style="width: 450px;"><tbody> <tr> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1619492288/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1619492288&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=2WNNVJVP4NRIKYQA"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=1619492288&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" heel="" height="1" iron="" is="" jack="" london="" of="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1619492288" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" title="" width="1" /></td> <td align="center" width="225"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143039717/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0143039717&linkCode=as2&tag=inamerican-20&linkId=NZ5CY54GSBZ5NC4Y"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=0143039717&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=inamerican-20" /></a><img alt="The" border="0" heel="" height="1" iron="" is="" jack="" london="" of="" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=inamerican-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143039717" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" the="" title="" width="1" /></td> </tr> </tbody></table> London extrapolated the real events from Cripple Creek, Telluride, and <a href=" " rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title=The Iron Heel>Russia</a> to produce a speculative novel in which a ruthless capitalist “Oligarchy” gives birth to the repressive “Iron Heel,” a violent counterrevolutionary army of militia, spies, and mobs who crush all political resistance to a capitalist dictatorship. The novel presents itself as the recently discovered “Everhard Manuscript.” From its imaginary vantage point in a socialist utopia some 700 years in the future, the book’s fictional editor explains that the Everhard Manuscript has been lost for centuries and represents the best firsthand account of the origins of the Iron Heel and the start of the great class war that would last nearly 300 years. The narrative was written by Avis Everhard, the bourgeois daughter of a Berkeley university professor and the lover of the novel’s true hero, Ernest Everhard. Ernest is a proletarian philosopher and political agitator who emerges from his electoral role in the Socialist Party to become the underground leader of the “First Great Uprising.” The first half of the novel is blatantly didactic, dominated by detailed discussions of socialist politics and economics. Originally skeptical of this aggressive working-class hero, the strong-willed Avis becomes converted to socialism through her own investigation of a “tacit conspiracy” by capitalist society against an injured worker who has been tossed on the scrap heap. Upon recognizing the susila superiority of socialism, Avis becomes the lover, student, and political partner of Ernest as their world gradually collapses into civil war. During a direct confrontation between Ernest and the Oligarchy (the last moment of civil “debate” before the coming war), a man of wealth and few words stands up to the intellectually and physically superior proletarian to explain bluntly: “Our reply [to the worker’s revolution] shall be couched in terms of lead. We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power .... We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain.” These words mark the birth of the Iron Heel. The battle between socialism and the Iron Heel is formally joined, and the novel, which began as a slow political romance, rapidly accelerates into a chaotic adventure story. The first signs of counterrevolution appear in the form of “patriotic” mobs known as the “Black Hundreds” who rise up and destroy union halls and radical newspapers. With time, the Oligarchy grows ever bolder: engineering an economic crisis to eliminate the middle class, plotting world wars with Germany to build up the army, and provoking a “Peasants’ Revolt” of starving farmers, which the Iron Heel destroys with characteristic gore. Yet, through this maelstrom of violence, Ernest prepares to run for Congress on the socialist ticket in the 1912 election. However, he alone is pragmatic enough to know that, given what the Oligarch said to him, voting alone is not going to overthrow the Iron Heel. So he begins to shift his organizational work away from the democratic sphere of reform and into the underground world of revolutionary conspiracy. Taking up a new identity as revolutionary leader, Ernest begins the necessary work of rooting out infiltrators, establishing a network of guerrilla “Fighting Organizations,” and planning to infiltrate the Iron Heel itself. “It was bitter bloody work,” writes Avis, “but we were fighting for life and for the Revolution, and we had to fight the enemy with his own weapons.... It was warfare dark and devious, replete with intrigue and conspiracy, plot and counterplot.” When a desperate electorate sweeps Ernest and the socialists into office, the Iron Heel plots to undermine democratic rule altogether. During a fiery speech in the congressional chamber, an agent of the Iron Heel throws a bomb at Ernest’s feet, which injures the hero, but more importantly it legitimates the arrest of all socialists as terrorists. After this blow, the Iron Heel formally abolishes democracy and asserts its dictatorial rule through “labor castes, the Mercenaries, and the great hordes of secret agents and police of various sorts.” When the First Great Uprising fails with the cataclysmic destruction of the “Chicago Commune” (in a terrifying scene reminiscent of the end of Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column), many former socialists form terrorist groups both noble and insane, taking up a desperate and undisciplined war of revenge on the Oligarchy. The manuscript cuts off in breathless anticipation of the Second Great Uprising, thoroughly planned by our heroes and set to begin when Ernest and Avis are captured and “disappeared” by the Iron Heel. As both a novel and idea, The Iron Heel played an important role in the culture of U.S. radicalism in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel was very popular with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other revolutionary socialist circles. To these groups, The Iron Heel was used as an entertaining educational tool as well as a theoretical critique of “right-wing” or party socialists who believed that electoral politics could defeat capitalism. The “Iron Heel”—much like Orwell’s “Big Brother” for the post–World War II generation—served as a potent metaphor for the conspiracies and control mechanisms of the ruling class. For example, in 1914 the radical journalist John Kenneth Turner evoked London’s novel to explain the meaning of the Ludlow Massacre: “If the picture of blood and terror so graphically painted in Jack London’s novel, ‘The Iron Heel,’ does not become a reality in the near future it will not be the fault either of the persons in control of the industries of this country or of those in possession of the reins of government.... The evidence is unmistakable of a nation-wide conspiracy to break up organizations of labor, to discipline the workers, to suppress agitators, to outlaw strikes, to nullify the tendencies that have been working toward the establishment of a better society, and to steer the ship of capitalism in the safe harbor of an industrial feudalism” (Turner). The Iron Heel seemed to predict exactly the coming of World War I and the violent hysteria that marked the red scare of 1919–1920. For the generation that followed London, The Iron Heel contains a precise prophecy of the rise of fascism in Europe. Of course, neither fascism nor a revolutionary underground of any size appeared in the United States, leading to the novel’s unceremonious obscurity in the second half of the twentieth century. However, as the hope for social revolution passed from the industrialized First World to the decolonizing Third World, The Iron Heel found a new audience in Latin America and wherever international military conspiracies, secret police, and the rich collaborated to rule with an Iron Heel.

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is the title of Jack London’s 1908 novel about a socialist revolution in the United States. While London is best known today...

Irish Republican Army

Irish Republican Army

Irish Republican Army At any one time there are believed to be over 3,000 terrorist groups active in the world. Despite recent concerns...