French President Francois Hollande called it an “act of war” but what made last week’s bloodbath in Paris so chilling was the fact that it was anything but war.
Terror was aimed at our daily way of life, wreaking havoc on a Friday night out: people were killed at a rock concert, watching a football match, having a drink in a bar or eating pizza with friends and family. The indiscriminate, insane killing resembled much more the annual US high school shoot-outs, the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway or the persecution of foreigners by Neo-Nazi thugs, than regular warfare.
Young people who exaltedly drown their own communities in blood are not soldiers. But they aren’t terrorists either: the Bolsheviks, Ireland’s IRA or even Baader-Meinhof in Germany had political intentions which the majority of us may not have shared, but could at least understand. Al-Qaeda, and now the so-called Islamic State, are neither left wing nor nationalistic. They are not even religious, even if they claim otherwise.
If it is difficult to see through the permanently shifting alliances and contradictory interests of the forces behind IS in Iraq and Syria, it is nigh impossible to make sense of the selfie-taking youths celebrating their first beheadings on You Tube, like the slaughterer Jihadi John (Mohammed Emwazi He was a “lovely young man”, said a former teacher about the university graduate from North London. It is these kids, our kids, who return from their Brownie camp in Syria to kill at home.
Politicians, police and security agencies all over the world are at a loss to explain what is going on in the heads of these youngsters, and are not sure what to suggest or how to best stem the tide. Many worthy organisations try to reverse a development that we steadfastly ignored, in the hope it will somehow go away. Woman without Borders, for instance, a think tank and activist group from Vienna, launched its SAVE initiative, or Sisters against Violent Extremism, which seeks to alert mothers to the early warning signs of their children’s radicalisation. London’s Active Change Foundation tries to combat street violence by promoting dialogue.
Others try to propagate counter narratives, to co-opt religious leaders and community heads, to boost proactive intelligence collaboration. All such measures are necessary, but not enough. “The question is not if we will suffer another attack, but when,” as one security expert puts it.
We will see new attacks on our daily life with more frequency
Conventional wisdom loves to peddle the retaliation doctrine: “because we did this, they do this back”. Thus, Russia was to blame for the death of its tourists on Sinai, because it took sides in Syria. France was to blame for the Paris disaster because of its campaign against IS. The UK should be blamed for everything since time immemorial and therefore had only itself to blame for the July 7 bombing in 2005.
Sadly, this is not true. The ‘jihadist’ attacks are only scarcely camouflaged with strategic logic and only meagerly clothed in political slogans. They will take place regardless of what countries and governments do, or don’t do, abroad. They are aimed at the weakest spots, not the most heavily armed, at the innocent, not at the perpetrators.
If our new breed of ‘jihadists’ were politically motivated, they could have focused on the plight of the Palestinians, or the decadence of Saudi Arabia’s leaders, for instance. They do not. Radical ‘Islam’, as executed in our cities, is apolitical (I am not discussing understandable grievances that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East wants to address, or the disgruntled ex-Saddam Hussein soldiers, who offer their expertise to the territorial ambitions of IS in Iraq and Syria).
If there is any truth in strategic arguments, it is this: we have carelessly destabilised the Middle East, not expecting the consequences to be so dire. With our military interventions we have created anarchy and chaos – the most fertile biotope for insanity.
The key, if not the solution, to understanding the mass appeal of movements like IS and Al-Qaeda, can be found in a book written by a US dockworker and self-taught philosopher, Eric Schlosser in the 1950s. In The True Believer, Schlosser examined the typical workings of mass movements regardless of their creed.
He saw both leaders of mass movements as well as their followers disenfranchised and alienated from the culture, traditions and values around them, environs that they perceive as hostile to their dreams and aspirations. The “bored, the worthless and the alienated” would subsume their seemingly meaningless existence into a collective of the likeminded, idealising a past that never was and glorifying a utopian future. The present, and those who populate it, would hold no value for them, including themselves.
Sixty years later, witnessing today’s disruption, his book makes chilling, yet inevitable reading.
According to Schlosser, any revolution will eventually eat its children. The pragmatists will take over once the zealots have run their course. For us, this may be taking too long for comfort.
We will see new attacks on our daily life with more frequency. But this should not stop us going to Paris, to Nairobi, to Beirut, to Ankara. We, living in great cities with unlimited choices and incredible possibilities, should embrace them. We mustn’t stay at home and bolt our doors. And we mustn’t transform our cities into high-security prisons either. We must not destroy our way of life with our own hands.
For our societies to prosper, we will have to be more inclusive, though: we must open to all strata of society – to the underprivileged, the working poor, the refugees, our minorities, the foreigners. Only if we all have realistic chances to succeed and prosper will social peace be respected. We are all in this together. More than ever before.
Andreas Weitzer is a journalist based in Malta who writes for Condé Nast and other leading publications.