I was struck by a comment from Professor Michael Clarke, writing in The Times yesterday: “Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology – they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism.”
Symbols are important because they illustrate the cloudiness of motives and social dynamics. They show the world is not black and white, neatly predictable. Not divided into the elect and the rest. People’s motives are mixed, and they often hide them from themselves or express them to seem grander than they are.
Which is why I do wish otherwise sensible people would stop taking Islamist loonies at their own evaluation. The same were not taken in by the 1970s liberationist terrorists’ claim to be the vanguard of The Revolution. We knew we had the Soviets in the background, quietly encouraging the mayhem for imperial reasons, but no one with a brain believed the workers and students actually were going to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois state.
They are self-identified as Muslim holy warriors, fighting on behalf of the Umma, but actually they are a tiny unrepresentative group. There is no more physical threat from the average western Muslim than there was from the average 1970s trades unionist. They might in a large minority have beliefs which if taken literally would have scary results (Sharia v. state ownership of the means of production). Those need to be disputed and opposed, but
such uncontemplated dreams and their achievement are far apart.
Terrorists for an abstract cause fit a very, very specific profile: spoiled middle-class kids of more education than brain, and petty-criminals made good who find their psychopathy is accepted and admired by the former when applied to the cause. He is not an evil genius; he’s a very naughty boy. The wittering left always looks for moral justification in ‘rage’. It seeks oppression and struggle – violence as a response to poverty – bad for bad. And the terrorist will often take up that chant: he is doing this on behalf of some group of people that is suffering, so the suffering he causes is legitimate, praiseworthy. But it is not his underlying motive any more than the broader ideological picture he fits himself into. It is about being important, making a difference to the world, and the violent purpose shared with other young males adds a testosterone buzz. If they did not have intellectual pretensions, and a bigger concept of what it means to be somebody, they would join a street gang and get some bling.
There are evidently cultural factors. Given the fuel you also need the fire of contact with others who will give meaning to a tantrum. A sense of separation helps, but also a sense of connection to a radically different life. For the revolutionary left this was provided by the new academic lifestyle contrasted with a straitened post-war home-life and the teachings of internationalist Marxism about communist countries. I suggest that explains the British Pakistani experience: communities are large enough for the would-be alienated to avoid mixing with their neighbours and have strong links to bits of Pakistan which have come under Deobandi influence.
My prediction in comments to Perry’s discrimination piece…
The young men arrested today are overwhelmingly likely to be of Pakistani heritage or black English converts like previous actual terrorists. Perhaps that’s prejudice by me, perhaps the facts if they bear me out would represent prejudice by the police, and artifact of arrest, but there are more factors acting than merely religion. Young and men for a start.
… appears to have been borne out.
And the liberal papers are expressing puzzlement about the young men’s privileged backgrounds. Déjà vue. And the rest offer politico-military reasoning. Ditto.
It was the humiliating failure of the Revolution to appear, and the sclerosis of Soviet power in the face of the roaring technology and communications of the West, that disarmed and marginalised The Movement. We win not by exhibiting fearfulness, and giving the spoiled kids the attention they crave, but symbolising our contempt for their dim pseudo-philosophy. Terrorism is gesture politics. Dismissive not submissive gestures are what we require to cut it down to size.
Increasing not decreasing our freedom to travel and freedom of speech would be a start.
This is one of the (very) few posts here that I completely agree with.
Just one more thing I’d add to the terrorist profile: Misapplied group identification. Humans are a social species and always live in groups of varying sizes and natures (family, ethnic group, religion, language, professional or ideological etc).
Very often, terrorists under-identify with groups they belong to (Muslims in Britain) over-identify with groups that they don’t belong to (Palestinians, anyone?) or long for the creation of some sort of impossible uber-group (such as the Umma).
My favorite example was a member of the Bader-Meinhof gang who began tortured by her country’s past (alienated from German society) and vowed to never let anything like that happen again. She then over-identified with the Palestinians and took part in a hijacking and was killed at Entebbe airport.
As a sensitive teenager, she agonized over the fate of Jews in WWII. At the end of her life she was terrorizing Jews with a rifle and screaming threats at them. Irony surrenders.
That’s a very interesting piece Guy. I broadly agree with you that a good strategy is just to get on with life and show’em that what we can achieve with technology and commerce knocks what they can achieve with furious politico/religous rhetoric into a cocked hat.
Where I disagree with you is the idea of a “tiny minority”. Muslims with quite appalling beliefs are not a tiny minority. They are pretty much mainstream. They are a problem and unlike the commies (and fellow-travellers) they aren’t about to go away or be marginalised. The Russian revolution was 1917, Muhammed was born around 570. There is history and culture here, there is depth beyond the ersatz homo soveticus. Well beyond that. The liberal democracies have to fight a form of collectivist evil which is vastly older and more deeply entrenched than liberal democracy itself.
We’re engaged in WW IV whether we like it or not and we’re gonna have to do more than just get on with things and hope these scumbags go away.
Not quite what I said, NickM. I don’t deny that large numbers of Muslims have appalling beliefs. But just like the appalling beliefs expressed by evangelical Christians, they constitute a lesser actual threat to my way of life than the appalling beliefs expressed in the Guardian editorial pages.
The terrorists who parasitise those appalling beliefs actually to do appalling things to people outside their own communities are a tiny minority. The important thing to realise is that I am not saying the same thing as the liberal establishment here. I am saying that the greater Muslim community, and in particular the Pakistani community, is merely the habitat in which this millenarian cult happens to have cultured itself. Cozying up to “moderates” is irrelevant, because the passive community, whether its beliefs are moderate or appalling, is just a background against which the terrorists define themselves as truly devoted and dedicated – different.
I am saying that terror-cults and zealots are always with us. Perhaps they are delocalised a bit, thanks to those same magnificent 747s. But they are a fringe social phenomenon still.
I do think there is a grand-strategic picture, as well, and that the expanding power (soft power in particular) of Islamist regimes ought to be challenged as a matter of foreign policy. But I think it is an entirely different matter, mediated by different institutions: statal phenomena. Much muddle there too is caused by people confusing rhetoric with reality. And because some of the language of the cultural/propaganda struggles and official rationales is similar to that adopted by the terrorists, almost everybody is muddling up the two different things.
That is one reason (among many) why I feel the idea of a War on Terror is both absurd and dangerous. Wars happen between states. Terrorism (so far as the term has any meaning at all) is the province of informal groups. And “Terror” is just the mass emotion, corresponding to personal fear. When we confound them, we make louts into great powers.
And Hitler was just a silly man with a moustache…
“Wars happen between states.”
Since when have you started idolizing the nation-state ?
Wars happen between people (whether individuals, clans, tribes or states).
We must fight, i.e. – take all possible countermeasures – against those extremist and not so marginalized individuals, supported ideologically and materially by some states, who engage in terrorism.
We must also do our best to undermine and destroy the states that encourage them, finance them and arm them. We must strive to destroy, or regime-change the terrorist supporting states.
Sitting back and doing nothing will not do. Saying: they are just a bunch of misguided kids who will sooner or later come to their senses if we just ignore them – isn’t right.
“Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology”
Commercial aircraft are just easy, spectacular and handy targets.
Hear Hear Guy,
Its more or less what I’ve been saying, though articulated rather better.
The only way to win a ‘War on Terror’ is simply this: Don’t let them frighten us.
It seems to me that the exaggeration of the threat, and I truly believe it is exaggerated, is yet another method by which the state attempts to exert control over our lives.
The enemy in this ‘war’ has always been there, and the proportion of the total population of the planet that this enemy has killed has not increased that dramatically. The only thing that has increased out of proportion with the actual threat is our awareness of it.
“The enemy in this ‘war’ has always been there…”
So the murder of 3000 on 9/11, 200 on 3/11, and 50+ on 7/11 “has always been there” ??
I somehow must have missed it.
I’d like to know how Guy’s statement that you’ve quoted constitutes “idolizing the nation-state”.
(Christ on a banana-peel. Memo to self: attempting a blockquote here is not a good idea.)
I think you you are way off base here in one way.
A truly fundamental (good word) difference between today’s Islamist nutjob and a 70’s era revolutionary, is that the Islamist is quite correct in his discovery that his willingness to die, nay, his ardent desire to do so, is a force multiplier by a factor of ten or more, when it comes to the mayhem he can inflict.
We note that not just revolutionaries, but even US and British soldiers are willing to sacrifice their lives, if necessary. But this is enormously different than heading out, wrapped in explosives (or wrapped in a Jumbo Jet), specifically and deliberately to die.
The latter opens up a huge number of options in the murder buffet that are precluded when a stone killer decides he wants to live through the aftermath, and thus must consider escape, covering tracks, avoiding capture, etc.
But the suicide freak cares nothing about any of that. And I think THAT, more than anything, is what changed on 9/11, the simple awareness that that force multiplier was available to fascist enemies who would continue to use it for no higher purpose than to murder us in as high numbers as they could possibly inflict. Maybe that reality was true on Sept 10th… but we didn’t have to know it or confront it until the 12th.
And that is why, while Mutual Assured Destruction worked with the Soviets, it is meaningless now. Our enemies have literally nothing to lose, including their own lives, which are already gone in their book.
I think to overlook the force multipier of suicide-based Jihadism (which, at least on the scale we are seeing today and given WMD seems to be unprecedented in world history) is to miss one of the most absolutely fundamental and dangerous elements of this conflict.
Whether or not it constitutes “idolizing the state,” Guy’s statement that wars only happen between states is a semantic escape-hatch that avoids the issue. The word “war” is routinely used to describe conflicts between non-states, in fact. Tribes can go to war, gangs can have wars, etc. Whether or not it is correct to call the War on Terror a “war” is ultimately beside the point. The question is whether a credible national security threat is posed by terrorists against which the military is responsible for defending us. Hezbollah is not technically a “state,” and yet Israel is at war with it. Likewise, it is possible for a handful of western countries to be at war with Al-Qaeda (and like-minded groups, and nations that support them).
As for whether the threat is credible – that’s obviously open to debate. Probably it has been overstated. Even if the terrorists get a plane or a subway here and there, it doesn’t kill all that many people in real terms, you’re still safer flying than driving, etc. etc. And yet … if it were a homegrown militia group doing these things no one would disagree that the government should disband the whole group rather than just those who participated in the operation. Further, the threat is no longer “overstated” if one of these groups manages to get its hands on a truly scary weapon. They clearly have the resovle to use such a weapon.
The security measures put in place at airports over the past couple of days are silly, sure. They go too far and in so doing stroke the terrorists’ inflated opinions of themselves. But I can’t make the leap of logic from that realization to the idea that the entire campaign against Islamic terrorism is overblown and misguided, or that the Islamic threat will just wither away the way the trade union threat did in the 1980s. There are important differences.
Well said Guy.
I think you are spot on with the analogy between old style trades unionists and the mainstream Islamic community of today.
“And that is why, while Mutually Assured Destruction might have worked with the Soviets, it is meaningless now. Our enemies have literally nothing to lose, including their own lives, which are already gone in their book.”
That may be true for the footsoldiers, but I’m not convinced their leaders, clerics, imams, etc. feel the same way. These people may be quite happy to send others to enjoy their 77 virgins, but have shown a marked reluctance to enter paradise themselves.
Steve P. –
As Bill Bennett says, “Ideas Matter”. Granted the leaders are not willing to throw their lives away on some penny-ante subway bomb or a battle with Israeli soldiers over Sticksville, Lebanon. But the suicidist philosophy is quite capable of working it’s way up the chain, and Mr. Adahmen-utjob of Iran leaves no doubt in my mind that he would be happy to make the sacrifice of himself, and a few-dozen million others of his own and other people, if he thought God was cheering him on.
And of course, as many moderate Muslims have noted, the pusillanimous Western Left goes out of its way to pander not to Muslims per se, but to the absolute worst and most fascist minded Muslims out there (i.e. cartoon rioters), thus further empowering them as well, though that’s a whole other post.
and thats the problem with the Blair administration instead of treating these people as the fools that they are he gives them credibility.
Muslim plea over foreign policy
Blair ready to listen!
Mary Ann Weaver : A Portrait of Egypt
“A number of my former professors from the American University of Cairo were Marxists 20 years ago: fairly adamant, fairly doctrinaire Marxists. They are now equally adamant, equally doctrinaire Islamists.”
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20090632-2,00.html
A lot of good points here.
One thing about the Baader Meinhof, this applies also to Italy’s Red Brigades. They were strongly supported by East Germany and by other Soviet Bloc nations. When Claire Sterling brought this up in the early 1980s, she was laughed out of court by the European left who insisted that the Communists would never, never support terrorism against Western Europe. Sterling was proven right when we got a look at some of the archieves.
The Islamist terrorists need state support today. I suspect that one of the reasons the British (Congrats BTW) were able to catch these people was that they had to do their plottiong in Pakistan rather than in Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
Sorry, Jacob, but Professor Clarke is right, commercial aircraft are symbols of not only the shrinking world that cultural conservatism has difficulty erecting bulwarks against, but it is also a symbol of western cultural superiority that is intolerable to islamism.
Islamists can harp on about how many technologies europeans perfected started either in muslim hands or were transmitted to europe from asia by muslims, how muslims invented algebra, named the stars, etc etc ad nauseum, but the fact is that Europe, and the Anglosphere it spawned, moved on from there to perfect technologies, advance political philosophies, that changed the world, while the muslim world has eaten its own and sat in its own excrement for centuries. It is a dying culture that is responsible for its own situation, and a constitutional inability to admit its failings and move on, while at the same time their failures are rubbed in their faces every time they look up from their prayer mats praying to see Allahs paradise, and instead see jet contrails across the sky…
Since some lovely and misunderstood Muslims were just arrested by the FBI with a 1000 cellphones and who-knows-what-else which has resulted in suspicions of an attempt to blow up a bridge, I do not believe the “threats” are exxagerated. I just want to go on with my life, and for my children to be able to grow up . When one’s life is threatened, it is foolish not to take it seriously.
I hate the “inconveniences” at the airports, and am really fed up and angry about this last one! I need my “stuff” for this upcoming trip (and will be switching planes, so will it be waiting for me at the other end?)–I am going to important meetings, not camping! I want profiling which targets Muslims of every color and nationality (if we insult Mohammed to their faces, that should weed them out). My family “jokes” that I will be arrested this time around for assaulting a woman when I rip off her veil! I am sick and tired of being wanded and groped almost every time I fly, while they traipse around unmolested.
This is a war against our people and our way of life. There is no middle ground, and it will not go away.
There speaks the blinding fear that the securocrats and warmasters love and cultivate.
It is significant, I think, that a very high proportion of people who are prepared to do anything to make the threat go away, without considering whether the notional cure is worse than the notional disease, are women. Risk aversion and passivity are traditionally regarded as feminine traits: “and for my children to be able to grow up,” may hint at a biological explanation for a statistical tendency.
Here’s the truth: Life itself is risk, and risk is a sign of life. Threats never go away. There is always a middle ground.
Jacob,
For information, I originally was going to write “states or para-states,” but thought it too clumsy and over explicit. Wars happen between coherent institutional entities, if you like. They do not happen between concepts.
Matthew Parris approaches my main point from another angle here, and he’s a better writer. [I seem to be relying on the Times a lot at the moment. Maybe it has improved of late.]
Guy,
Life itself is risk, and risk is a sign of life. Threats never go away. There is always a middle ground.
I tend to think of life as a struggle against the risk. Take on the risk and eliminate it if you can. What you’re saying sounds perilously close to “the threat of being blown up by a muslim makes me feel more alive”. It makes me feel sick and tired.
Yes, there probably is an over-stating of the risk of terrorism but I’m not concerned about that now. I’m looking ahead. Truth be told, I’m about to put up a blog of my own and one of the reasons this hasn’t happened yet is that I feel in no hurry. I used to think that I’d missed an opportunity to give the world my two cents worth of cracker-barrel philosophy on this or that outrage but I don’t anymore. I don’t because I know that some Islamic outrage will happen week-in week-out. It is getting worse. The evening news is absolutely dominated by muslims killing and dying. They read out death-tolls from Iraqi bombings like lottery numbers.
What really worries me is that we could end up in a kinda Cold War situation of aquiesence to this. Essentially allowing this to become a permanent fixture of life. Just “getting on with life” is vital – no argument with you on that Guy but we also need to actually do something about it. The only solution I can see is the application of massive military force.
American Mother,
I didn’t read your entire post until just now. I’m struck by the fact that we both independtly (see my previous post) used the phrase “sick and tired”.
Something that pissed me off on UK TV this week was the continual exhortations not to go to airports unless it is “essential”. Well I usually frequent the airport of a weekend if there is nothing good on at the cinema and I don’t fancy going to the pub…
Bloody hell… I’ve only ever been to an airport for “essential” reasons such as getting on a plane. How dare they patronise us like that! Flying ain’t special, it’s just a way to get from A to B. Frequently the only realistic way. I’m not about to swim the Atlantic.
What you’re saying sounds perilously close to “the threat of being blown up by a muslim makes me feel more alive”.
No. I’m saying that if you are entirely safe, then you are already dead.
Guy, darling- In my 47 years, no one has ever called me “passive”, not even when I was a kid. You amuse me. Excuse the hell out of me for wanting my kids to live to see adulthood–but it is my job, and one would be wise not to get in the way of it.
When my Scouts are on a hike and we cross fresh bear tracks, we do not go on as if we had not seen them, we adjust. Likewise, when one camps, the food goes up in the air in a “bear bag” –or at the very least, far away from the people, because bears and humans do not mix well. Despite the wonder of spotting bears (especially Mom and/or the Cubs) wandering through, one should be alert to extremely heightened danger of the situation . For all of this, it is still the unfortunate truth that people are sometimes attacked-in their tents or on the trail…Every bear one sees will not attack, but the risk is quite real.
I am quite alive, thank you—and remain to stay that way as long as possible…So I strongly believe that we should be very wary of the bears which have left their territories and have wandered into ours.