France seems to be the easy underbelly for terrorist strikes. The abject evil, the banal brutality and the inferiority-complex-charged vitriol walked into Paris and opened fire. The carnage that is being reported is staggering in scope as well as qualia, quantity as well as quality. Whoever the perpetrators were, they meant to do maximum damage and if we're keeping score, they did a heck of a job on the French - because the French are promising a merciless retaliation.
It has only been a mere ten months since the Charlie Hebdo incident. If anything, the ferocity of this attack underscores the notion that Charlie Hebdo was just the beginning. We may opt to ridicule the terror threat, but in reality, it is a bit like the exchange in Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', where the minister says the terrorists are bad sports. It's looking like a certain amount of terror-threat paranoia is a healthy option. let's face it, we've been at war with Islamists for some time now, whether we admit it to ourselves daily or not.
Look, just today we drone-bombed Jihadi John. Remember Jihadi John? That idiot English boy who got himself wrapped up in the ISIS business of beheadings and video? Well, the US is reasonably certain they got the twerp. And that usually means, they found where he was staying and called in a drone that launched a smart-missile and the-rest-is-history-Jihadi-John. Is this good? Is this ethical? We don't know, but this seems to have turned into the frontier of our wars; and let's be honest with ourselves, this is a kind of post-colonial backlash war that's been repressed since the end of World War I, so nearly hundred years on, it's sort of on for young and for old. Foolishly, the western retreat from its own colonial aggression in the late twentieth century opened up the vacuum to be filled by some genuinely awful antagonists.
It's not some kind of mistake. The West shrunk back far enough and the islamists are trying to seize the moment. I'm not advocating the West go back in, but we have to understand that we're in some kind of war right now, and that events like in Paris aren't just blowback, they're efforts to hurt our polity. And while we strike this pose of "no compromise with the terrorists", we're locking ourselves further into this cycle of violence. Make no mistake, the asymmetry of the war is misleading, and we might fool ourselves into thinking we're not at war in the same manner that a citizen in 1939-1945 was at war.
The only reason we think that is because in light of the 9/11 attacks, the war we unleashed upon
the Taliban and Saddam was so remote, it left us the luxury to imagine we are not at war. Yet, since the fateful invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, we've had war. And as wars go, it's a pretty crappy protracted affair, with very vague victory conditions - far worse than the Hundred Years War or the Thirty Years' War, where people were waging wars wherein the context was lost and it was just more people fighting for the sake of fighting; Wars with reasons and processes that make 'Game of Thrones' look stream-lined in its plot perspicacity. Frankly, this one has the sort of metaphysical idiocy of the Crusades, once waged by the West on the Muslim world. This time the metaphysical idiocy is coming back from the Muslim world, but on the whole we have the recipe for something that could last a very long time.
Worse still, it's a war without decisive battles. There won't be land forces meeting on the field to contest terrain. There won't be battleships or aircraft carriers going toe-to-toe on the high seas. There won't even be a dogfight between fighter jets. Instead, it's going to be one side with the high tech espionage with drones and the other side with the suicide bombers. And it will drag on, tit-for-tat for decades to come.
That's just about how over a hundred people have ended up dead in Paris. It's insanity on a stick.
I don't know how to express just what I feel about all this, except to say that whatever it is that I feel, it's overwhelmingly negative, grim, and distressed. Whatever it is France intends to do, whoever it thinks is going to hold accountable and punish, so far the language says it's going to be war and more war as they re-commit to expanding the cycle of violence. John Kerry might bang on about finding the culprits and punishing them, but it just goes to show that the Secretary of the State for the United States of America hasn't got any historic perspective on this war, and he's even a veteran of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric is practically schoolyard-childish; and it just doesn't look like he's got a grip on what kind of hell kind war that's been unleashed.
You see why this is all so distressing, beyond the violence and the body count and the metaphysical idiocy.
Look, just today we drone-bombed Jihadi John. Remember Jihadi John? That idiot English boy who got himself wrapped up in the ISIS business of beheadings and video? Well, the US is reasonably certain they got the twerp. And that usually means, they found where he was staying and called in a drone that launched a smart-missile and the-rest-is-history-Jihadi-John. Is this good? Is this ethical? We don't know, but this seems to have turned into the frontier of our wars; and let's be honest with ourselves, this is a kind of post-colonial backlash war that's been repressed since the end of World War I, so nearly hundred years on, it's sort of on for young and for old. Foolishly, the western retreat from its own colonial aggression in the late twentieth century opened up the vacuum to be filled by some genuinely awful antagonists.
It's not some kind of mistake. The West shrunk back far enough and the islamists are trying to seize the moment. I'm not advocating the West go back in, but we have to understand that we're in some kind of war right now, and that events like in Paris aren't just blowback, they're efforts to hurt our polity. And while we strike this pose of "no compromise with the terrorists", we're locking ourselves further into this cycle of violence. Make no mistake, the asymmetry of the war is misleading, and we might fool ourselves into thinking we're not at war in the same manner that a citizen in 1939-1945 was at war.
The only reason we think that is because in light of the 9/11 attacks, the war we unleashed upon
the Taliban and Saddam was so remote, it left us the luxury to imagine we are not at war. Yet, since the fateful invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, we've had war. And as wars go, it's a pretty crappy protracted affair, with very vague victory conditions - far worse than the Hundred Years War or the Thirty Years' War, where people were waging wars wherein the context was lost and it was just more people fighting for the sake of fighting; Wars with reasons and processes that make 'Game of Thrones' look stream-lined in its plot perspicacity. Frankly, this one has the sort of metaphysical idiocy of the Crusades, once waged by the West on the Muslim world. This time the metaphysical idiocy is coming back from the Muslim world, but on the whole we have the recipe for something that could last a very long time.
Worse still, it's a war without decisive battles. There won't be land forces meeting on the field to contest terrain. There won't be battleships or aircraft carriers going toe-to-toe on the high seas. There won't even be a dogfight between fighter jets. Instead, it's going to be one side with the high tech espionage with drones and the other side with the suicide bombers. And it will drag on, tit-for-tat for decades to come.
That's just about how over a hundred people have ended up dead in Paris. It's insanity on a stick.
I don't know how to express just what I feel about all this, except to say that whatever it is that I feel, it's overwhelmingly negative, grim, and distressed. Whatever it is France intends to do, whoever it thinks is going to hold accountable and punish, so far the language says it's going to be war and more war as they re-commit to expanding the cycle of violence. John Kerry might bang on about finding the culprits and punishing them, but it just goes to show that the Secretary of the State for the United States of America hasn't got any historic perspective on this war, and he's even a veteran of the Vietnam War. The rhetoric is practically schoolyard-childish; and it just doesn't look like he's got a grip on what kind of hell kind war that's been unleashed.
You see why this is all so distressing, beyond the violence and the body count and the metaphysical idiocy.
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