It’s been a week of funny looks and conversations I ought to have stayed away from. Reason is, I am not afraid of Islamic State (IS). Nor do I think it represents an imminent threat to European civilisation generally and the local paragon specifically. It seems my terror deficit comes across as stupidity or bravado or both.
On Thursday, for example, I found myself arguing that even if one assumed a sudden collective urge for winter swimming, it was unlikely IS would land at Golden Bay and mow down a few dozen people. It was also improbable that IS would blockade the harbour and paralyse shipping. As for plans by the 400-odd inhabitants of Linosa to pack their bags and leave for the mainland to avoid wholesale decapitation, it all sounded a tad premature.
I’m not making this up. These three scenarios were among the many put forward by straight-faced colleagues who I otherwise know to be sensible, well-read, and generally au courant. They also happen to be anything but warlike. Let’s just say words like ‘George’ and ‘Bush’ would normally provoke a round of choking.
Not on this occasion. There were scarcely any boots that weren’t firmly on the ground (in Libya, mostly), bombs that weren’t stacked up and primed ready for use, and fingers that didn’t twitch on triggers. I was flabbergasted.
Or maybe not, because I remember reading Bertrand Russell on the topic. He describes the hawkish spirit that gripped normal and perfectly decent people in Britain 100 years ago on the eve of the World War I.
Shops with names that sounded vaguely German were vandalised. Sausage dogs (dachshunds) were kicked to a pulp on the streets of London, often by people who wouldn’t normally hurt a fly. And a somewhat more exalted type of German name had to be changed by royal proclamation. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became the House of Windsor.
I don’t think we’re on the eve of anything remotely like World War I. Still, the kind of feelings and language I see around me tell me much about fear, hysteria, and aggression, and how they spread.
First, they appear to be highly contagious and by no means confined to poorly-educated quarters. The wildly-speculative conversation I mentioned earlier involved people with doctorates who read books and travel often. On Thursday, a number of former commanders no less told Times of Malta that the Maltese army would be a force to be reckoned with in a conflict situation.
The second thing about hysteria and eventually aggression is that they appear eminently sensible even as they thrive on irrationality
I won’t even go near the joys of social media on this one. The sky above Facebook, for example, is dark with all manner of bombs, drones, and parachutes. I’ve lost count of the number of posts on World War III, the end of days, Armageddon and such. I’ve even seen maps that were supposedly leaked by the IS war Cabinet and that had arrows in ominous red drawn on them that pointed towards Malta.
The second thing about hysteria and eventually aggression is that they appear eminently sensible even as they thrive on irrationality. It is absolutely no use to point out that possibility and probability are not one and the same.
Of course, it is hypothetically possible that an IS squad will make the crossing from Libya to Malta and gun down people on the beaches. But what are the real chances of that happening? And do we have any tangible and reliable intelligence – other than the legions of tweets and Facebook posts, that is – which points in that direction?
Nor is it terribly productive to tell the prophets of doom that we’ve been there (and in much worse places actually) before, and that much of the terror turned out to be baseless. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union it seemed quite likely that a terrorist organisation with a million to spare would adopt a homeless nuke and vaporise London or New York. Only none did.
Which is why I struggle to understand the Cassandrine looks. They make me rather suspect that many people love (possibly even need, as someone wise pointed out the other day) a good threat. So much so, they will defend the right to feel threatened unto the death of reason.
Fear and hysteria have a third characteristic. Consciously or not, they tend to tap into longer-term historical undercurrents. To put it differently, they locate themselves in large-scale geographies of fear and suspicion.
The Cold War serves up some exquisite examples of this; suffice it to say that as late as 1985 Sting saw fit to hope that Russians loved their children. (He was right, judging by the number of Russian students at the University of Malta.) But I would like to stick to Malta. The gut feeling that something sinister may yet come our way from the south is written into our very essence.
Our coast, for example, displays a chronic pathological state of the fear of invasion. It is hardly possible to walk a mile anywhere along the Maltese coast and not stumble across pill-boxes, watch-towers, ancient lines of barbed wire, redoubts, gun posts, and so on. And, when all else fails, our cliffs are easily imagined as natural bulwarks.
Add to this the caves where Torok (Turks) kept Maltese women captive, and place names like Ras il-Klieb, a headland supposedly used by Muslim raiders to load Maltese Christians (which they nastily referred to as ‘klieb’, dogs) onto their waiting ships.
That’s the physical bit. Our suspicion of the south, and the corresponding belief that the sunny horizon is the one to watch, is written into popular imagination. It takes the form of myths, stories, idioms and such.
It is easy to understand why the fantasy of Isis militants blowing up beach kiosks might seem so real. Long-term and large-scale suspicion and fear filter through into the popular spirit and become flesh at the slightest spark.
The point is not that we should shrug off the very real images of beheadings and crucifixions, or that we should sit and do nothing about them. But it is precisely these circumstances that call for a level-headed reckoning that assesses threats on their own merits.
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