In my reader’s guide to the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I point out the many parallels between the Obama family’s history and the fictional life story of an African leader in the late John Updike’s delightful 1978 novel about Africa, The Coup, in which the novelist ventured far from his Atlantic Seaboard comfort zone. It’s testimony to Updike’s powers that he could shed so much light on three people he had never heard of at the time: Barack Obama Jr. and his parents.

For example, Updike’s African scholarship student Hakim Félix Ellelloû bigamously marries a white American coed after a pregnancy scare in 1959, much as Barack Obama Sr. bigamously married a pregnant white American coed in 1961.

From my chapter on “Obama as a Man of Letters:”

Because Obama is a literary man, this is a rather literary analysis of his life and works. I’ve been intermittently comparing the Obama family saga to its eerie analog in John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup. Written at the gleeful height of Updike’s powers, The Coup consists of the verbally dazzling memoirs of a hyperliterate American-educated official in the fictitious African country of Kush. The Coup was based on Updike’s prodigious research into the lives of post-colonial African elites very much like Barack Obama Sr.

Two of Updike’s children have since married black Africans. Updike’s 1989 essay “A Letter to My Grandsons” is addressed to his daughter’s half-African children. In it, Updike explains to them that there’s “a floating sexual curiosity and potential love between the races that in your parents has come to earth and borne fruit and that the blended shade of your dear brown skins will ever advertise.” (I’m not sure that Updike’s children and grandchildren truly wanted to read that, but if Updike is to churn out a book a year, in his voracious search for material he must occasionally mortify his progeny.)

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I moved to Chicago in 1982, not too long before Barack Obama did, but, unlike him, I can’t recall that I ever once thought of getting involved in Chicago politics. To me, wanting to be a Chicago politician would be like me wanting to be an Albanian politician, or me dreaming of opening a shop that buys and sells pre-owned hubcaps.

This is not at all to say that the spider’s web of Chicago political relationships is boring for the disinterested spectator.

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From New York magazine (via NRO):

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I blogged here on April 2:

So, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he’s going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he’s going to do about it.

He’ll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won’t take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn’t you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright’s memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Update: Now, Rev. Dr. Wright’s daughter says that isn’t true. She asserts her father is in an electronically inaccessible region of Ghana and will issue a statement when emerges from “email hell.”

I must say, the news Rev. Wright is currently hanging out with Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Kurtz makes Obama look much more Presidential than did the endless Obama-Wright psychodrama of last spring. As I blogged on April 29:

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In Slate:

Are We Getting Two for One? Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco?

By Christopher Hitchens

I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama’s part for Wright’s views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to “Minister” Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette.

Why? Obama wrote thousands of sympathetic words about Wright’s views and style in 1995. If he has changed his mind since then (and in 2004 he said he hadn’t), it’s his responsibility to prove it to us.

And Obama wrote a couple of pages that were fairly sympathetic to Farrakhan, rejecting his black nationalism on practical, not moral grounds.

On p. 200 of his autobiography, Obama writes:

“If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”

If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq [a Black Muslim ally].

After a discussion of the failure of the Nation of Islam’s attempts to sell black-only toothpaste and other consumer products, Obama rejects Farrakhanism as being unable to “create a strong and effective insularity.”

Hitchens goes on:

All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, “Keep my wife out of it,” or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse’s influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University…

A friend asked an old Chicago acquaintance of Obama about Wright a few months ago, and he blamed it on Michelle, but didn’t cite any persuasive evidence.

I spent a few hours last week looking for evidence to support this not implausible presumption, but couldn’t find anything in particular on Google. We know that Obama met Jeremiah Wright before he met Michelle Robinson. I’ve never heard that she was a member of Wright’s church when she met Obama in 1989.

The idea that Michelle would knowingly risk becoming First Lady out of personal, ideological, or racial loyalty to Rev. Wright seems implausible. My guess would be that Michelle would strangle baby pandas to get to the White House. She has a need for social dominance, which was unfulfilled in her educational career at intellectually elite schools that she got into because of affirmative action. In contrast, nobody cares if the First Lady isn’t all that smart — she’s the First Lady!

On the other hand, I haven’t seen any evidence that Michelle gave her husband any good advice on his Rev. Wright problem either. There is so much we don’t understand about them.

As I’ve been saying for a long time, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is an attentionaholic far leftist whose career interests do not necessarily coincide with Barack Obama’s. Indeed, Wright may well wish to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008 who proved what Wright’s been saying his whole life, that a black man can’t a fair break in America. And I’ve said for a long, long time that Obama would have to do a Sister Souljah on Wright and do it as early as possible.

Today, the whole world finally noticed. Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post:

Wright’s Voice Could Spell Doom for Obama

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining this morning why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs: “It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Barack Obama’s pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama’s presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

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Obama-worshipper Chris Matthews briefly pressed his idol tonight on the matter of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Without 5,000 prepackaged words of patented Baroque O’Blarney nuanced thoughtfulness, Obama sounded like a Time-Life Records two-for-the-price-of-one deal on the Greatest Hits of George W. Bush and Dan Quayle:

OBAMA: I think that what has happened is we took a loop out of — and compressed the most offensive things that a pastor said over the course of 30 years, and just ran it over and over and over again. There is that other 30 years. I never heard him say those things that were in those clips.

MATTHEWS: But you did say you heard him say controversial things.

OBAMA: But I’ve heard you say controversial things.

MATTHEWS: You didn’t give me $27,000 dollars either.

OBAMA: The point is this is a church that is active in AIDS. It’s active on all kind of thing. And so this is a wonderful church. But as I said, look at the amount of time that’s been spent on this today, Chris. At a time when we haven’t talked about a whole host of issues.

The LA Times reports:

And while insisting — as he has previously — that he was not present when Wright made the pronouncements that fueled the recent furor, he steered clear of specifying the “controversial” statements he has said he did hear from the preacher.

What did the Presidential candidate know and when did he know it?

Look, that’s a stupid question, but only because the answer is clear from Obama’s own autobiography. Before Obama ever met Wright in the 1980s, he had heard from other South Side black pastors that Wright was a radical. That’s the main reason Obama was attracted to Wright rather than all the other pastors he had met as a community organizer: Wright was the optimal combination of leftism and successfulness.

Isn’t anybody else getting tired of Obama repeatedly yanking our chains about his relationship with Rev. Wright? Unlike his protege, Wright has made sure to leave a paper (and DVD) trail decades long, and it’s not thoughtfully nuanced to the verge of utter incomprehensibility, either. The Rev. says what’s on his mind, and in no uncertain terms.

C’mon, Obama, be a man. Stand up and admit to one of two logical possibilities:

- Yes, I used to be about as leftist as Rev. Wright, but I changed my mind for the following reasons …

Or

- Yes, I still am about as leftist as Rev. Wright, and here’s why …

What Obama is counting on is that white Americans don’t take blacks’ ideological views seriously. Obama is betting on everybody treating his relationship with Wright as a racial matter rather than as an ideological matter, and since all nice people shy away from thinking about racial matters, they’ll just let it drop.

In contrast, if Wright were a white minister who was an outspoken advocate of Sandinista-style “liberation theology,” a white Obama would, at a minimum, be spending a lot of time answering searching questions about his ideological evolution. But, because Obama and Wright are black, nobody takes the disagreeable Wright’s ideology seriously, and everybody assumes that the personable Obama must share their ideology.

It must be driving Wright crazy. Here he goes on Fox News a year ago and tells Sean Hannity a half dozen times that he is a follower of black liberation theologian James H. Cone, and that if you want to have an argument with him about where he stands, you should first read a stack of academic books by Cone and by Dwight Hopkins. And nobody paid any attention.

Wright doesn’t seem to consider himself a creative intellectual in the class of Cone, but he does view himself as a man who has thought hard for decades about subjects like the immorality of corporate capitalism.

And yet, Obama is getting away with going around the country on national television implying that the 66-year-old Wright is some kind of elderly uncle who has, tragically, gone crazy in his dotage. In reality, Wright holds the same political views today as he had when he first reeled in Obama two decades ago.

And the white media believe Obama’s lies about Wright because nobody takes a black man seriously as an intellectual!

So, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he’s going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he’s going to do about it.

He’ll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won’t take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn’t you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright’s memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don’t think we’ve heard the last from Rev. Wright.

In my new VDARE.com column, I offer Sen. Obama a free suggestion about how he could relieve his festering Rev. Dr. Wright problem by turning to one of his own supporters for aid. I’m not going to tell you who it is here so that you go read the whole thing.

The Wright problem didn’t get any better for Obama today when he came back from vacation with a new and even less plausible spin:

“This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down … into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country.”

Oh, come off it. This is somebody who visited Gadaffi in 1984 and gave Louis Farrakhan his “Lifetime Achievement” award in 2007. This is somebody whose first sermon Obama ever heard, according to his own memoir, included the line, “where white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” This is somebody who boasted of his church’s “black liberation theology” and its similarities to the ideology of 1970s Nicaraguan Marxists.

By the way, how come Hillary gets roasted alive for embellishing an old [non]war story, while Obama’s flat-out lie of a couple of weeks ago in response to the toughest question of his campaign — his lie that he wasn’t in church for controversial comments by Wright–is forgotten, dead and buried under his 5,000 words of thoughtful nuance and nuanced thoughtfulness?

Here’s some of the opening of my new column:

At VDARE.COM. we’ve never been in the business of endorsing Presidential candidates. And considering who’s left in the running in 2008, we’re certainly not going to start now.

But by publishing revelations about one candidate, aren’t we tacitly just helping the others?

For example, when Sen. Barack Obama, who has been running largely on his autobiography, makes campaign claims about his relationship with his pastor or his grandmother and I point out that his 1995 autobiography says something very different, I always receive messages denouncing me for being culpable for electing Hillary Clinton and/or John McCain. …

In this view, a presidential campaign is a zero-sum contest. Somebody has to win and everybody else has to lose. So any revelation about Candidate X is seen, not as contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, but as a dirty trick intended to elect Candidate Y or Z.

In contrast, I believe that the more that voters know about the candidates, the better. Of course, I would say that: as a nonfiction writer, that’s my professional bias.

Still, I do believe the zero-sum model is simplistic….

For example, for over a year, I’ve been pointing out that Obama isn’t the centrist post racial conciliator he plays on television. His campaign has been as disingenuous as if Ronald Reagan had run for President in 1980, not as a proud conservative, but as a bipartisan middle-of-the-roader.

In truth, Obama is a liberal somewhat to the left of the Democratic median, and with a recent radical background. And slowly, the MainStream Media [MSM] is starting to wake up to the phoniness of Obama’s marketing of himself. This week, the New York Times [Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?, By Robin Toner, March 25, 2008] and Washington Post [In Obama's New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism, By Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, March 26, 2008]have finally gotten around to admitting in major stories that Obama is well to the left of where many imagine him to be.

This slow debunking of Obama might have crucial implications for his Vice Presidential selection. The more people who understand who Obama really is, the more pressure he will be under to pick as a ticket-balancing running mate an anti-Obama, such as Sen. James Webb (D-VA).

Moreover, within a President Obama, there would always be an ongoing struggle between his cautious head and his radical heart. The more a gullible press and public persist in imagining him the equally loving son of a happy biracial home, the more leftist actions his heart will be able to get away with. But the more we are alert to the two sides of this complicated man, the more likely his intelligent prudence would triumph over the passion to prove himself “black enough” that is the remnant of his psychologically-damaging childhood.

For example, the more he is seen, correctly, as a man who chose to devote much of his adult life to pursuing political power in order to take from whites and give to blacks, the more scrutiny a President Obama would receive over seemingly minor questions such as appointments to jobs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the civil rights section of the Justice Department.

These obscure offices can be tremendously important.

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Obama had to know all along that his Rev. Wright was a potential millstone around his neck. Last fall, though, fate handed him a potential solution when Don Imus made a vulgar off-hand comment on the radio about black lady basketball players. This set off one of our routine national moral panics over race where the usual suspects rushed to call for the white guy’s head.

My vague recollection is that Obama was a little slow off the mark to demand Imus’s firing, but with Jesse Jackson taking the lead, Obama, always worried about being black enough, soon fell into line and denounced Imus. And Imus got fired. (But now he’s back on the air on a different network, because it was all pretty stupid).

What Obama should have done with the silly Imus brouhaha was to take a stand for Imus in order to pre-emptively laugh off the Wright controversy before it (inevitably) started. Obama should have said, “Imus apologized, so let’s give it a rest. Come on, lots of people say something outrageous now and then. Hey, at my church, we’d have to fire our pastor about once a month — he’s alway saying something over the top to get a reaction out of the congregation. Yeah, Rev. Wright’s kind of a shock jock of the pulpit. So, let’s not get so huffy about every little thing somebody says.”

Would this have worked?

Maybe. It certainly would have reframed Rev. Wright as a less serious figure, while letting Obama look even-handed and even-tempered.

But there would have been problems:

• It would have been out of sync with the High Pompousness of the rest of the Obama’s campaign.
• Obama was trailing Hillary among blacks at that point, and without a majority of blacks, he had no chance in the primaries, so breaking ranks with Jesse and Co. would have been dangerous.
• Wright might have gone ballistic. Keep in mind that Wright is not necessarily on Obama’s side. He just might prefer to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008. It’s not implausible that he’s been passively-aggressively sabotaging Obama for some time — his November 2007 lifetime achievement award for Farrakhan was clearly a bid for attention at Obama’s expense. Who knows what damage Wright could do to Obama if his amour propre was seriously offended? Perhaps he taped a few private conversations with Obama?

So, the Obama-Axelrod calculation that it was best to rely on media political correctness to bulldoze over their Rev. Wright problem may well still be proven correct.

Here’s the text.

As always, very eloquent.

I’m sure it will be taken as the Sister Souljah moment I’ve long urged Obama to carry out on Rev. Dr. Wright. Amidst all the high sounding phrases, however, it’s not clear whether Obama is confessing that he blatantly lied last week when he asserted:

“The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”

Nor does it appear that he’s withdrawing from Wright’s church, to which he donated $27,500 on his two most recent available tax returns.

Obama is trying to leave the impression that this is kind of a recent senile crack-up on the part of Wright (who is 66):

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

No, this is just Wright being the same Wright who went with Farrakhan to see Gadaffi when he was 42. The only difference is that it’s Wright being Wright on Youtube.

When he was told he needed a church to be politically successful, Obama searched out Wright out of all black pastors on the South Side. He got what he was looking for.

And, no, not all black pastors are like Wright. Here’s the website of the biggest black megachurch in LA, West Angeles Cathedral, with almost three times as many members as Wright’s Trinity. It’s a Christian church, not the far left politics in dashiki vestments.

In summary, unless I’m missing, Obama’s speech is a lot nice words and zero action.

We’ll see if he ever holds a press conference on this topic.

In a long article on the young Barack Obama in the Chicago Reader, December 8, 1995, as he was launching his political career, I found something I had not known before:

“Obama took time off from attending campaign coffees to attend October’s Million Man March in Washington, D.C.”

But that doesn’t mean Obama agreed with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who organized the Million Man March and gave the climactic numerology-laced two hour oration. As Obama pointed out in Dreams from my Father (p. 200), Farrakhan’s black separatist capitalism just isn’t practical:

“If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”

What Obama wants instead is multicultural collective action. He told the Reader in 1995:

“In America,” Obama says, “we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” …

“But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing ‘We shall overcome’ is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can’t find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage. …

“Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us,” Obama said.

“Any solution to our unemployment catastrophe must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent, and international economy. Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don’t also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers–whites, Latinos, and Asians.

And don’t forget, it takes a village to raise a child!

“The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.

“Now we have to take this same language–these same values that are encouraged within our families–of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other–and apply them to a larger society. Let’s talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”

Interestingly, while Obama is for the workers of the world uniting politically like in a Benetton ad, he’s not crazy about blacks deciding for themselves to live among whites:

“The right wing talks about this but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods, that’s what has always happened. Our goal must be to help people get a sense of building something larger. …

Obama’s 1995 dismissal of getting a job, getting rich, and getting out of the ghetto was a reflection of his first conversation with Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. in the 1980s, as recounted in Dreams from My Father. One of Wright’s own secretaries at Trinity tells Obama she wants to move to an integrated suburb so her son will be safe. Obama then asks Wright (pp. 283-284):

“But wasn’t there a reality to the class divisions, I wondered? I mentioned the conversation I had with his assistant, the tendency of those with means to move out of the line of fire. …

“‘I’ve given Tracy my opinion about moving out of the city, [Rev. Dr. Wright] aid quietly. ‘That boy of hers is gonna get out there and won’t have a clue about where, or who, he is.”

“‘It’s tough to take chances with your child’s safety.’

“‘Life’s not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be.’”

The economic subtext is that the jobs of both Wright as a South Side black preacher and Obama as a South Side black community organizer and proto-politician are imperiled by the right of blacks who can afford it to move out of the black slums and find a less dangerous place to raise their children. It’s less fun being a “community leader” if your putative followers keep moving to Schaumburg. So, Wright and Obama implore their followers to stay put, even at the risk that their children will join gangs and go to prison or the grave.

So these two hyper-glib men’s guilty consciences over their policy of self-interestedly persuading black parents to continue to expose their children to the dangers of gang-infested neighborhoods helps explain some of the anti-white paranoia that runs through Wright’s and Michelle Obama’s statements. For example, on 60 Minutes, Michelle explained: “… as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station …” as if KKK snipers were cruising past the South Kenwood Amoco. (South Kenwood, where the Obama’s mansion is, is only 1/3rd black, but North Kenwood’s a dicey neighborhood).

Obviously, the main danger faced by black men is being shot by other black men, but that’s too unspeakable to mention, so free rein is given to paranoid fantasies about The Man being behind black-on-black violence, as in Wright’s Trinity church “Black Value System.” Keep in mind that this quote isn’t from Farrakhan, it’s from the church that the Obama family donated $22,500 to in 2006:

Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.