The recent attacks in Paris had a certain depressing quality that comes with repetition. My own sense of expended aporia has not left me, and yet here I am writing about it because ultimately the more I work towards articulating the problem, then maybe the problem will show itself in at least an outline. Notable today was Sam Harris who had a podcast up, and perhaps unsurprisingly he was making the point that the philosophical points to be made had already been made in response to acts of terror. Indeed, as Harris points out, if people are calling this attack a wake-up call, then they've been missing a lot of things along the way.
While I am not of the atheist persuasion to bang on about the the problem of Islamism and Wahibbism that is is funding the Sunni extremists, I do relate to Sam Harris' position that the Western small-'l' liberal mindset is so effete and navel-gazing, it can't dare name an enemy when it is there; it cannot bring itself to properly brand the enemy for exactly what it is, lest it offend people. I'm not one to be so vocal about this, but if religion is what drives you to do some of this stuff, then there's a problem with your religion.
Yes, it's not exactly a popular thing to say. Neither does it mean we go around pinning the blame on any and every muslim for the events in Paris. Yet it does seem pertinent for the small 'l' liberal people to get up and take notice of the fact that the events in Paris this week, and Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, tells us there are people who would piss upon the values we hold dear, and shit upon our niceties and politesse. These cunts want to kill us all if they could, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to take philosophical note of that.
Just writing that is going to put me at odds with my friends.
A Year On From The Man Monis Thing
Back last year when I was still working with the Events Lighting company, we got this job from the City of Sydney whereby we would install colourful "disco lights" to be shone upon silver sequin fabric flags. The flags would flutter in the wind as they reflected lights like a mirror ball. It was a fabulous idea. Not content with that, there were colourful lights installed everywhere along Martin Place. Then of course on the first week it was up, the Man Monis Lindt Cafe siege happened.
If you go back and look at the news footage of the Monis siege, you can see in the background of the shots where people were running out of the cafe, the changing lights. Early on in the evening, it occurred to the City of Sydney that the disco banner lights were somewhat inappropriate to the unfolding situation. They rang up our office and asked to have it turned off. The Little Tyrant replied,
"I tell you what, if you can find a bullet proof vest, I'll tell you how to turn it off from a phone, far away."
Needless to say, the lights stayed on. The incongruity of the disco banner lights grew as the evening wore on. Eventually the siege was broken that night, but the disco banner lights were there, all night long, adding colour so to speak. Man Monis turned out to be a lone nutter more than a proper jihadist, and we all chalked that one up to the terror threat being over-stated.
Still, a year on, I can't but help think what a fiasco the whole thing was.
The Enemy Isn't Like What You Think
Here's a must read article about the kind of person who ends up in ISIL. It makes for sobering reading because it illuminates the depth of the problem.
For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”So there you have it; the perils of buying into identity politics. Not only that, we can see full well what the dividends are for America's misadventure in Iraq. In a bid to - allegedly - strike at the heart of terror by bringing down Saddam Hussein, thus ending the terror threat of things like 9/11, they turned a whole generation of men in Iraq into exactly the sort of people who become terrorists. Talk about snatching a bomb from the jaws of defeat. There's been nothing more self-defeating than American imperialism in the Middle East.
This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”
These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.
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