Community safety, counterinsurgency, and copaganda

[bloodygranuaile]

The politics books club picked as its November 1 read Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life, thus forcing me to read it in October, when I’m trying to only read nice Halloweeny books. Anyway, I’m not going to write a real lengthy review for this one because I’m going to instead yell about it on Zoom on Sunday. 

 

This books is about combat profiling, mostly situational awareness and how to work through what counts as an anomalous circumstance. It would be an extremely good training on situational awareness if it were pamphlet-length. Instead it is padded out to short-book-length with absolutely eye-searing amounts of copaganda.

 

There is some very useful terminology here, allowing the reader to explicitly deconstruct and identify things that are usually noticed instinctively, if they are noticed at all: concepts like proxemics and kinesics, how to talk about baselines and anomalies in a sensible way, etc. There is also some really awful, ideologically blinkered terminology, like “good guys” and “bad guys,” where “good guys” usually means, like, U.S. forces illegally occupying sovereign nations that they illegally invaded based on lies and daddy issues, or cops. It is the Year of Our Lord 2020, the year of the George Floyd rebellions, and it is almost impossible for me to read a sentence about how police officers are good guys who will get in some sort of trouble (??) if they make terrible decisions that hurt innocent people. Like, I wish that were the case, dudes, but the notion that it isn’t openly legal for police officers to just execute civilians is so clearly not of this planet (or at least, not of this country) that it stands to undermine the credibility of the rest of the book. 

 

There are also multiple exhortations that these situational awareness skills are useful for “everybody” and that “everybody” should learn them immediately followed by language that makes it clear that the authors have not for one second considered that the person reading the book might be anything other than a straight man. Like, references to men needing these skills are all in the second person and references to women needing these skills are all in the third person (usually it’s “your wife”; the idea that a man who found this book useful and thought his wife might find it useful too might then lend the book to the wife, thus making the wife the reader, is apparently beyond Horne and Riley’s imagination). Like, come on, guys.

 

That said, if you are in any capacity involved in security, community safety, etc. type work--which I think more “ordinary” people should be, because leaving that shit to the cops is a terrible idea--it is extremely useful to learn how to pay attention to things and how to understand what you’re paying attention to! For this reason I am glad I read the whole thing even though it would probably be easier to absorb the material if the framing weren’t so yikes, and possibly if the authors spent less time trying to upsell you on the rest of their system. Like, it really would be twice as good if it were only half as long, and I highly suggest that leftists not only read it but also make little zines about only the good parts to give to other leftists, so that the maximum number of people learn the concepts but the minimum number of people have to give money to the authors to slog through a bunch of chipper copy about how counterinsurgency tactics by occupying armies are super great. (They are important to know because they will be used against you, but they are not great.) 

 

Anyway yeah the “left” here in “left of bang” refers to the earlier points on a timeline, not in any way politically left.