It is with great regret and not a little fury that I follow a post about France and its ability to withstand endless punches by marking a genuine gut punch, not just to that indefatigable country but to all the liberal world. You could not dream up a more telling, more brutal, more slavishly, thuddingly dull response to the boisterousness of the open society than a massacre of cartoonists. Cultures that cannot stand laughter have never lasted long, for laughter bubbles out from human existence as irrepressibly and inevitably as air escaping a tyre, and those creeds that would deny it will spend their time in an endless chase of covering up this or that puncture to the point of exhaustion. That such a culture as Salafist Islam could last as long as it has is only a function of it being on the margins, forever spurned by a majority or using force to keep itself in place, forever broiling in resentment and forever doomed to stay there.
I have little else to say on the matter except that I have never felt as French or at least as European as today. Solidarity often means so little, but here I feel strangely as close to the front line as those who were murdered. They were killed for expressing opinions, and they let me live only because I was not visibly expressing those opinions, which hardly seems a decent reason to outlive them. Part of me wants to run onto that Paris street neck bared like Cicero shouting to empty space "kill me too", since I am equally as guilty in the eyes of these killers for denying that Muhammed is the prophet of God. These cartoonists merely made that more apparent than me. Solidarity, it seems, is linked extremely closely to survivors' guilt.
One other thing. I say "front line" very carefully here. I know very little about the thinking of the Salafists or Qutbists or whatever these people can be called, but the more I learn about Islamic history the more I realise just how grand is the narrative these little shits think they're playing in. This is a grand battle played out in the shadow of the end-times, Ishmaelites fighting Israelites, the whole shebang. The whole Salafist ideology requires that the West is set up as a mighty enemy paradoxically always on the verge of collapse, our liberalism and institutions doomed to fail by their basis in man's and not God's law. As Simon Jenkins says today,
To them, western democracy is skin deep in its freedoms, while the simple disciplines of their form of Islam are more powerful, more courageous, more lasting.
They are engaged in a war we don't even recognise. ISIS garnered ridicule for promising to "march on Rome" from people who didn't understand that "Rome" has variously meant Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, or whatever the nearest bulwark of the West is at the time. And the shellshocked response this Paris attack has elicited is that of one side in a war that only the other side actually imagines is being fought. Deep in their hearts, and for all the impressive firepower deployed by the West over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is probably a part of the jihadis thinking "Is this it?" Is this all the massed armies of Rome have to offer? Where are the mighty hordes we fought at Yarmuk and Hattin and Mohács? We're meant to be fighting an apocalyptic total war, not a bunch of half-hearted counterinsurgencies.
For them the defence of their prophet, as they see this attack, is an attempt to have us ride forth to meet them on an appropriately impressive battlefield. It must disappoint them that we simply howl in impotent rage at them, being such spoilsports as to not understand the terribly important epochal battle we're meant to be fighting. We should remember that we are essentially engaged in battle with especially vicious LARPers eternally annoyed that we don't get what elves and orcs are or why we're supposed to care about them.
How do you fight a battle where the whole battle is not getting pulled into a battle? I don't know. But we cannot be brought to violence by all this. We must laugh at them and mock them and show them that if they want to slaughter people who mock their religion they're going to have quite a heavy workload ahead. But we must not fight. We must dance around their rage and make them feel ever more stupid, pathetic and closer to what they must on some level know themselves to be - overgrown children playing Cowboys and Indians with inappropriately deadly weaponry.
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