I saw the new Batman movie over the weekend–went on two long and was too dark for my tastes. However, Heath Ledger’s demented performance as Joker as worth the price of admission. As I drove back from the theater, I started thinking about the interesting parallels between the movie and the subject matter of the asymmetric warfare discussions we’ve been having in the last couple of years.

Gotham, for example, is a dystopia of primary loyalties and endemic corruption. Indeed, Batman’s goal in the film is to give the government legitimacy, without which it cannot defeat crime. Commissioner Gordon struggles to build up the police force with a stable of honest and professional cops. Most interestingly, the Joker is cast as a kind of global guerrilla/super-empowered individual. He targets the moral and political focal points of the city and takes an atavistic glee in the systems disruptions he causes. He terrorizes with the simplest of tools–a knife, an assault rifle, and improvised explosive devices. The Joker also carries out a complex series of manipulations in order to pit the city’s factions against each other.

The closest thing to a coherent belief system that the Joker holds is a theory that every human being is just as savage as he is. That, and a visceral distaste for organization of any sort. The Joker may be a fantasy character, but his love of raw chaos and destruction for its own sake is sadly all too real. We can see in contemporary criminal gangs, militias, and insurgencies a certain core of sadists who will maim and kill for pleasure. They are more Jeffrey Dahmer than Mao Zedong.

In Liberia’s vicious mid-90’s civil war, drugged-out children holding oversized guns battled it out throughout the streets of Monrovia at the behest of commander who went by bizarre non-de-guerres as “General No-Mother-No-Father” and “General Butt Naked.” They marked their territory with severed heads and fetishes. In 1980s Lebanon, war correspondent Coskun Aral recounts meeting a French mercenary sniper who would shoot people crossing the demarcation line and then play Mozart on a nearby piano. And then there’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony, who commands a cult of brainwashed, limb-chopping children.

This is an uncomfortable realization, especially for left-leaning policy elites who believe all terror and violence can be resolved by paying attention to “root causes.” To them, insurgents are uniformly idealistic individuals fighting for justice and honor. Often times, as Paul Collier notes, research shows that third-world insurgent motivations are often far more base–control of diamond mines rather than socialist utopia.

The “strategic corporals” of ethnic militias are often warrior kings like Serbia’s Arkan, men who excel at pillage, rapine, and mass slaughter. These sadistic warriors aren’t anything new–they’ve been around for as long as humans have killed one another. But they are an integral part of today’s world of non-state conflict, where terrorism against civilians is a common tactic. Global guerrilla theory provides a great outlet for Joker types–alienated, intelligent, and ruthless men wanting to bend the world to their personal whims. Systems disruption as a military doctrine seems to be tailor-made for such characters.