Seeding The Whirlwind
A million people and several heads of state, including those
from Germany, Britain, Israel and Palestine, remembered the Charlie Hebdo
martyrs, gathering in Paris. It was an impressive show of solidarity under the
TV borne gaze of the world.
A million placards reiterated ideals of freedom of expression, the freedom
to satirise, and the determination not to be cowed down by terrorists. This
even as a German publication that dared to republish the blasphemous Charlie
Hebdo cartoons as a tribute, was swiftly fire-bombed. And Al Qaeda proudly
claimed responsibility for the Paris killings, while issuing a warning against
repetitions of similar blasphemy. At the same time, the Internet was served
with a convenient way to bomb commercial flights.
What can such violent and repeated provocation that throws
away the rule book of civilised behaviour, hope to produce in the end? Will it
yield what the terrorists desire, a dividing of the waves, a great
polarisation, a hating, faith-addled crusade afresh? Will we descend, as in
centuries past, into multiple wars of religions and ethnic peoples contending?
Will the saddening thesis of Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations, that speaks of an unbridgeable divide
between races and cultures, come
about in reality, prodded into life by these continuous atrocities? Is the era
of conventional history in the Hegelian sense, where nations seize the
initiative from each other in the march of time, going to be replaced by a
hundred bush-fires burning simultaneously?
Is the narrative of massive injury and injustice that the
terrorists routinely use for justification acceptable? Or is the world making
up its mind to coalesce against a rash
of scourges? Terrorists represent nobody else, but are still hydra-headed, growing
virally amoeba fashion, motivated, well-trained and funded; and getting away
with it.
The concerted retributive backlash must inevitably come, but
to be effective, it needs precision targeting and a great global consensus without
exception. But it is surely better if the next attack ends before it begins.
Extremist instigation and terrorist strikes today are a form
of perpetual war, the nuclear age version of a constantly lit fuse that will
kill a few of the ‘enemy’ and a random number of non-combatants. There is no
distinction between one kind of hostile
and another, between criticism and injury, no preference for soldiers in
‘uniform’, between victims who belong to one faith or another, or are just faithless
atheists.
When we read of epic wars in history and legend, which
consumed generations of protagonists, in the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
Mahabharata, The 100 Years War; we think surely the time-scales are
exaggerated, euphemistic, not meant to be taken literally. But perhaps not any
more.
Because we are caught in the middle of multiple
international guerrilla wars of
increasing sophistication, an informal battle for supremacy between different
sects, tribes, races, religions. These are age-old struggles resurfacing, in
rejection of technology, modernity, appeals to universality.
Our choices, in the face of such amoral savagery, are
extremely limited. We cannot seem to do much against people who think it
appropriate to kill children, old men, girls, women, young men in bloody
attrition, or just in order to reduce their numbers and potentiality,uncaring
of collateral damage, willing to kill people coincidentally passing by. But
they do say, we are only answering in kind, doing what has been done repeatedly
to us!
Statism apart, the civilised narrative seems to believe that
we cannot descend to the Pit in retaliatory bloodshed. Not effectively anyway,
though this has been tried, and continues to be policy in some places. A
garland of heads for every eye gouged out, decimation for a murder, has met
with some limited success, but alas, only till the regrouping. And we cannot win the hearts and minds
involved, no matter how hard we try. Fanaticism has its own unquenchable
thirsts and deep fires.
Nor can we seem to persuade or prevent rich countries
funding such mayhem with one hand, while shaking hands with the world with the
other. We need to impress on such nations and Governments that the Frankenstein
monsters they have nurtured are turning on them just as much as on others.
But at the same time, and even as the battle rages, the
intellectuals who analyse these things, work the levers on every side of the
fence. There are justifications, debates and denouncements. Deep causes are
mined, and the bloodshed is seen by some as the surface consequence of
something utterly logical.
The situation of the lit-fuse, like the slow burning rope
that help smokers without matches, goes on; unaddressed, unfettered,
unmolested, because no effective and coordinated global challenge to it has yet
been devised. Great Powers see terrorists as good and bad depending on how it
suits their purposes.
The terrorists themselves do not feel remorse, because they
do not admit to any moral lapse. The fingers of accusation of a satanic
morality, are pointed the other way. Who are the real terrorists they ask? Their
accusations are jabbed into our eyes through uploaded You Tube broadcasts. These are punctuated, between rants of hate,
by beheadings, summary shootings, pathetic condemned men, shorn of dignity,
confessing to their ‘crimes’ in misled hope of reprieve. They no longer need middle-men to get their
message out, though terrorists are often assisted anyway by formal media, via
the quest for ‘breaking news’.
Can the rich throw money at the ‘wronged’ to set things
right? It may be too late. The terrorist has found his own sources; through
Janus-faced Governments, drug-trafficking, extortion, prostitution, gambling,
forgery, the exploitation of real estate, commodities, the use of unofficial
channels, front establishments; and through the vested interest funding of
‘regime change’ provocateurs.
Terrorists lack for nothing; not guns, not training, not
sophistication, and certainly not motivation. They are not afraid to die any
more than they are afraid to kill. They live at no fixed address. Their
supporters have plausible deniability; protected by the freedoms of liberal societies
and structures around the globe.
Guerrilla warfare is now the ghost- who-walks, the effective
combatants are not so much timely and good ‘intelligence’ but spies and
commandos trained in covert action and preventive offensives.
This, while the armed forces and Governments of the world,
like so many behemoths, lumber about, flailing
and slapping at pestilential locust-beings, that clog up their innards
and block up their exits.
The dreaded and offensive secret service organisations
throughout recent history, trained in
subversion, unsavoury as they are, may be the only saviours. It is this
kind of fight-fire-with-fire force, woven into a tight international network of
cooperation, that can bring terrorism low. There must be disruption, weakening and
psychological warfare. A deliberate and
clever creation of mistrust and paranoia, misinformation, sabotage, betrayal,
use of poisons and deadly germs, conflict engineered between leaders and
lieutenants, followers and mentors, as in any regular war.
But let it be clearly understood. This cannot turn into a
pogrom against the innocent no matter how much the terrorists may desire it to
perpetuate their cause. Any demonising of entire peoples running into billions
of humans, is a travesty of justice. Terrorists are not part of anybody’s piety, no matter what they claim. Maoists,
religious and ethnic warriors are not sanctioned by anyone.
There is madness in wilful martyrdom to be sure, but sadly,
there is also intoxication. It is enough for the world to respect this for the needless
loss of life it entails, even as it moves to resist it.
(1,240 words)
January 12th,
2015
Gautam Mukherjee
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