Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes
sums up the polarisation:
“The most important thing you can do when people you
don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of
Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take
meaningful action by demonstrating grief…
People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the
people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead
of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop
the hate’.”
Eloi turning on the Morlocks
then? But would that help or not?
And when the candles and the
flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?
There’s little serious anger
that carries through. From a position of
strength, that would be good news. From
a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness. The silence is nervous. It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to
destabilise Europe, to make normal life
unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’
will seems the safest option. Part of that
strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart
from the led. They won’t be targeted.
They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling,
incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people. Get rid of them and you only invite the more
determined to replace them.
François Hollande ramps up
the rhetoric but results will be another matter. Pending anything better, la gloire is back. France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now
at war. France was bombing Raqqa anyway,
because that was just fooling around? The
tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe. It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is
no more glorious than the swastika’s.
Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français. France’s
politicians, gathering last week at Versailles,
belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do. ‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of
those ferocious soldiers? Let's march,
let's march! Let an impure blood water
our furrows!’ Yes, they still get away
with that, but it’s not our Europe:
it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was
not the aggressor).
Hollande insists that he
will defend the Republic. Not so much France. Not so much the French. La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic
enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande
presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to
legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French. (To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated
in 1992, "If my mother tongue is
shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your
state on my land.") Republican
values are the new Falklands factor – the art
of war turned to domestic political advantage.
A false flag operation? We’ve no
evidence, but the motive is clear enough.
France likes to think it has a special relationship with
the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it,
real or imagined. Charles Martel at Tours. Roland at Roncevaux. St
Louis on Crusade.
Napoleon in Egypt. Charles X seizing Algiers.
Charles de Gaulle letting it go.
It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.
Nor is Britain’s
record. A century ago the UK made
promises to the Arabs and the Jews. It
would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to
the Arabs were not. Neither got
everything they expected. But the Arabs,
and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for. Promises of self-government if the Ottoman
yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.
In 1920 an insurgency broke
out in Iraq
against the British occupation. RAF
bombing of the area continued throughout the decade. The Air Ministry considered it useful
practice for other territories where “armed
forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British
prestige”. Not least because it was
so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.
Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids
that: "The Arab and Kurd now know
what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be
practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four
or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as
warriors, no effective means of escape."
At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore
Harris, as he then was, declared that "the
only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will
have to be applied". Ancient
history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of
keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present. The wonder is not that Europe
suffers from terrorist atrocities. It’s
that patience proved so long-lasting.
What strikes westerners as
not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that
religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms. Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper
expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which
the civilised world failed to challenge effectively. In the UK we may tend to remember the
fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In France it’s more likely to be the murder in
Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last
hope. But all such incursions into
European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western
assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the
locals think. However tempting it is to
bomb Syria
without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled
with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only
terrorism by another name). Or if
nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction. If Europeans are to defend themselves, they
must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of
others.
Europe’s defence is bound to
become more inward-looking because Europe is
forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population. (Its share is expected to halve between now
and 2050.) The ultimate triumph of
universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations
of the world may have no use for them.
They may view them with indifference, or with hostility. Either way, Europeans need to be more
watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority,
because it may be that no-one else will.
Europe is busy renouncing its
enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive. Since only those with something to hide are
offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment
but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’. But that’s not what will happen. On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow
victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’
own society against them. Nice work for
lawyers.
As terror attacks escalate,
so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles. It survives only so long as it offers
satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is. European unity has been shaken by the migrant
crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen
area – now in tatters. Counter-terrorism
demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence,
perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the
rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled. It’s not a Europe
that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one
reason why the EU is under political challenge.
Predictions of Mahometan
conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military
terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of
which active minority wields power in society has been utterly
transformed. One only has to look at
Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld. Given the London party consensus that elected mayors
are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this. But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two
wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.
Expect far Right, anti-EU
parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of
the politically correct. Expect
xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of
innocence is essential for justice, but not for security. It’s not impossible to imagine some countries
taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too
troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU. It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th
century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it
wrought. Many of Spain’s moriscos
ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took
their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex. Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the
suite of possible responses. About the
only ‘self-evident truth’ is that the less
Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the
world, the less terrorism there can be. That
calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even
of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS,
is the real tragedy. Europeans aware of
their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death
penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry. It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.
If far Right parties fill
part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all. There are equal opportunities for other
visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of
small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of
those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and
committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression
and war. It’s a strong possibility in
the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.
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