The 'war on terror' keeps us on the brink of chaos
And, as with all wars, truth and free speech continue to be the first casualties
While the pandemic continues to rage all over the world, a momentous event has been taking place in the Middle East, in a country wracked by wars since the beginning of history, its geography placing it at the centre of what, in the 19th century, was known as The Great Game (fought largely in imagination between the British Empire and the Russian).
The retreat of the USA, along with its junior partner, NATO, from Afghanistan, as I write, has thrown into stark and bloody relief the abject failure of these Western nations’ in their military led ‘war on terror’. That war, remember, was started by George W Bush after the attack on the USA by Al Qaeda in 2001.
The terrorists will always get through. That’s the first lesson we all have had to learn. The security forces know it, so do their political masters. At this time, the focus of the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists is in Africa, soft targets we hardly appear to notice. They are keeping their powder dry, waiting and watching us. They will be back.
A dangerous conflation derives from the extreme version of a religion that is feeling its power after centuries of dormancy: disaffected Muslim youth in western Europe, marginalised for so long; the volatility of Middle Eastern realpolitik, exploding into our individual consciousness, as well as our faces. If you didn’t know – or cared – about Middle East politics, you sure did after 2001. It’s still there, a powder keg waiting to blow. The malign influences of Iran and Israel: apparent opposites yet so very alike, each wallowing in a swamp of mutual hate.
If this is a war, we are losing it right now. Each successive tightening of our domestic security, every extra intrusion into our daily lives, whether it be searches at the entrances to buildings, or the legal right to poke into our online lives, is a small victory for men in black. They know that. We need to know it too, in order to decide how precisely we may balance the desire for security against our evaluation of freedom.
When Edmund Burke said that, in order for evil to triumph, it was sufficient for men of goodwill to do nothing, he was talking about the French Revolution. It was where state terror first reared its head, in the aptly, if to modern cynical eyes more ironically, named Committee of Public Safety. Today we say security services. To the extremists, they are simply the secret police. Both sides seem to like black as a uniform; it suits the zeitgeist, feeds the paranoia. Our ‘protectors’, like their opponents, like wearing black face masks as well in an eerie symmetry that bodes only ill.
Terror wins not just when the bombs explode, but when a civil society is policed by shadows, all in the avowed name of our security. Each feeds off each other; only we lose, either way.
Does this matter? Of course it does: everything matters. We are going to have to get used to bombs and bullets, aimed at our hearts – and minds – for a very long time before we can safely breathe the air of old freedoms again.
How do you tackle this enormous threat to everything we have taken for granted for so long, allowing pernicious evils to sprout like a forest of poison plants, in the very heart of our democracies?
For a start, we have to make sure we know and understand exactly what values we own, and why we want to defend them. There has been far too much relativism – the government’s own programme to combat extremism among young Muslims, Prevent, was, until recently, funding those who espoused a ‘holy’ war abroad. In this fight, we finally have to understand, there is no ‘abroad’.
We have to openly discuss whether it is not time to end any government funding for faith schools, of whatever persuasion. I would very strongly argue that it is. They breed prejudice; they can’t help it. The UK needs to be more radically secular, like France. (This opens the interesting question of whether the Church of England should be dis-established; again, it’s a no brainer for a 21st century multi-cultural, secular Britain.)
Education is critical, from pre-school through to post-doc university research. We should introduce the study of the importance of the growth of tolerance through the ages, with particular emphasis on the Enlightenment and its outcomes, good and bad.
We have to tackle, head on, the growing problem in higher education of radical students attempting to force restrictive changes on campuses, both a religious and a ‘woke’ censorship. Cancel culture has to be cancelled, and right quickly. These people are the anti-thesis of exponents of free speech and are as dangerous as any gun-toting bomb-thrower.
We have to prosecute vigorously anyone who attempts, in word or deed, to undermine free speech, in any of its manifestations. In that vital sense, nous sommes touts Charlie, the slogan that emerged after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in early 2015.
It has been to the surprise of many, but not to all, that a religion, long written off as the creed of losers, has taken sway once more among so many, including those of that most volatile of regions the Middle East. It offers as profound a vision of life on earth as communism once did. It is no accident that it appeals to the dispossessed and the desperately poor.
We fear it so much, at a gut level, because it provides an alternative to western materialism that cannot be matched by promises of economic growth or by our superficial values. Redemption not with a credit card and a spending spree in a shopping mall but in another life, well beyond the reach of US military power. It scares the Russians half witless (think of Chechnya, or any of the southern regions of that troubled, failed super state) and the Chinese (the Uighur) as much as the West.
History tells us you cannot defeat – or destroy – a deeply held belief; you can only accommodate it, or seek to mediate it and its impact. Right now, though, we have to stake our ground, and fight on it: to the death, yes, in some cases. This in order to defeat a twisted, ugly and ultimately evil, illogical but seductive, ideology, dressed as religion. If we can see past the often puzzling and deceptive iconography, our bewilderment will fade, our resolve will stiffen, as it must if Western liberal values of tolerance are to prevail.
If we fail, the West will decline, and the world will grow grimly darker, beyond imagination.
This week: Tim has begun to read Robert Burton’s magnum opus (his only one), The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, exactly 400 hundred years ago. Weighing in at 2,000 pages in its final edition in 1651, it is at heart an exhaustive treatise on what we now call depression, but it ranges far and wide across the human condition. Many parts are laugh out loud funny. Dr. Johnson said it was the only book he ever read that made him want to get out of bed two hours earlier.
I’ll get back to you…