Paris Burning

This Is Serious, François

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.

The Martin Place Siege

Wog Day Afternoon

Yes, I'm being rude because I'm incensed. I'm particularly hating on the identity politics being drawn out like one of those outlines they draw on corpses in old American movies. If this is allowed to become an identity politics issue, we'll see it feed in to the asylum seeker issue, and no good is ever going to come of it.

As the dust and gun smoke settles on the dramatic siege, we now understand that the culprit was a misfit with a gun and the wrong song in his heart. He wanted to have us frame his hostage-taking as a political act, but it seems it was the desperate final act of a cornered man.

I have to say the way things unfolded seemed very strange and disjointed, what with the media embargo and the self-censorship by the mainstream media. But at its heart was the burning question was "What kind of idiot walks into a cafe and turns it into a siege?"

The Lindt Cafe, was across the street from some major banking headquarters as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia. It was also in the vicinity of the consulate generals for the USA and Japan. It was a  target rich environment and the man opted to take hostages in the Lindt Cafe. Clearly this wasn't an act of terror, it was a cry for help -but he waved the black flag with the arabic squiggles on it and the media all went, "oh that must be ISIL."

It's only the day after that we're learning the whole thing was ad hoc; he took the wrong flag to his own hostage taking; he wasn't really all that together to begin with; and maybe perhaps should've been behind bars and not out on bail. It's not like I have any special analysis that somebody else isn't hurling around - I'm just jotting down my own outrage at the whole media circus.

It seems incredibly pathetic to me that for the better part of the day while it was unfolding that we were led to believe that it was a political act. It was only political if you take the view that the personal is ipso facto political - the way that Carol Hanisch said it, but applying identity politics to Islam instead of gender. It's kind of stupid to take a bloated subjective sense of one self and seeing in it the universal-political. In the same sense that it's hard to buy this Man Haron Monis' own views about his own political importance, it is hard to buy into the notion that a black flag with arabic writing on it is ergo Terrorism-with-a-capital-'T'. It was more terrifying because it was so gratuitous, so ridiculous in the end-analysis and so bloody stupid. This was not 9/11.

The truth is a lot more easily understood as the random violent undertaking by the unhinged - and more's the pity that two people had to die in all the unleashed chaos. The politicians are making a field day out of this, what with flags flying at half mast and praising the NSW police for their expertise, courage and dutifulness. Look, I don't mean to be the party pooper but it was one middle-aged guy with a shotgun holding hostages in a downtown cafe. It wasn't exactly the public beheading on YouTube of the American journalist somewhere in Syria. Whatever this was, it was not that.

He was just this angry, misplaced future-shocked human being who was looking for an out - an elaborate dramatic - sensationalist even - plot for an assisted suicide. His hostage taking venture was about as stupid as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and went about as well.




What Kind Of Man Reads Playboy The Koran?

Still, we must ask ourselves what kind of manner stupid we were dealing with.

Some years ago there was a dickhead writing letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers castigating them. That was this guy Man Haron Monis.

Some months ago it was reported that some sheikh was offering 'spiritual healing' but turned out he was sexually molesting his customers. That was also this guy Man Haron Monis.

Sometime last year it was reported that some religious dude had stabbed his wife to death and set the corpse on fire. That was this same guy again, Man Haron Monis.

Do you see a pattern emerging where neither the law nor media draws a line to connect these things? This guy was disturbed.

Now the same guy somehow gets bail from his 40 charges of sexual assault and being an accomplice to murder, and goes and does this shitty little thing. I think we're entitled to ask, just what the hell happened inside the system that failed us so badly? The community outrage is going to centre on this issue and the governments - both Federal and NSW - had better have some good answers. So far the indication is pretty cruddy.

Showdown In The Lindt Cafe

Turns out, ASIO knew about this guy and he wasn't on the Terror watch list.

Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday after laying flowers at a spontaneous memorial for the victims at Martin Place, Mr Abbott said Monis was well known to federal and NSW police and ASIO, but "I don't believe that he was on a terror watch list". 

"If I can be candid with you, that is the question that we were asking ourselves around the national security committee of the cabinet today," Mr Abbott said. 

"How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history, not be on the appropriate watch lists, and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?" 

He said the federal government had acted upon hearing "terrorist chatter of acts of random violence against Australian citizens", such as upgrading security at Parliament House in Canberra and raising the terror alert. 

"But … we do have to ask ourselves the question, could [the Martin Place incident] have been been prevented?"

The answer is, you can't. Unless you're like the Woody Allen joke where he fails a metaphysics exam because he looked into the soul of the student next to him.
More to the point, there's every indication this guy was mentally ill, but nobody diagnosed him.

Short of that, what could they have done? Picked him up on the street and tortured him until he confessed to plot when he himself had no idea what he was going to do until 3 days before? The unknowable is the unknowable for a reason.

A Side Note On Torturing Terrorists

Look, it's not about the Martin Place siege but more about the CIA report, which has been bugging me all week and then this siege happened. We in the wider community know what's right and what's wrong. And we know it right into the heart of democracy. Then suddenly, once in power, these politicians condone the unthinkable. It's such a weird phenomenon.

I found this on YouTube which is tangential, but has something important to say about this stuff:



You tell'em Denzel because they sure didn't listen to the real people who objected after 9/11. After a near-deacde of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think by 2011 we'd descended into this kind of fiction:



We're really not in a good spot in the moral high ground stakes here.