The brutality of Islamist terrorism has many precedents.
In these secular acts of iconoclasm, the goal was to abolish the past and create a new society from “year zero”—an idea that goes back to “year one” of the calendar introduced in France in 1793 to signal the new era inaugurated by the French Revolution. Systematically destroying not only pre-Islamic relics but also long-established Islamic sites, the aim of ISIS is not essentially different.
.. A more plausible view would be that Soviet crimes came chiefly from implementing a modern European tradition of using terror to remodel society, emerging with the Jacobins in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which Lenin avowedly followed.
.. the Nazi state has often been described as having taken Europe back to the Dark Ages. Certainly the Nazis exploited a medieval Christian demonology in their persecution and genocide of Jews, but Nazism also invoked a modern pseudoscience of race to legitimate these atrocities. Invoking a type of faux Darwinism, Nazi racism could have emerged only in a time shaped by science. Nazism was modern not just in its methods of killing but also in its way of thinking.
.. The increase of knowledge in recent centuries is real enough, as is the enlargement of human power through technology. These advances are cumulative and accelerating and, in any realistically likely scenario, practically irreversible. But there have been few, if any, similar advances in politics. The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality. Instead, the increase of knowledge has repeatedly interacted with human conflicts and passions to produce new kinds of barbarism.
.. Applying techniques presented in a handbook, The Management of Savagery, published online in 2004, these atrocities implement a carefully planned strategy
.. While Al Qaeda aimed to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East, ISIS is dedicated to the destruction of the entire existing world order—a goal that suggests the group is more eschatological in its view of the world than its current jihadist rivals. None of these features go any distance toward showing that ISIS is other than modern. A transnational crime cartel, rapidly expanding apocalyptic cult movement, and worldwide terror network, ISIS could have emerged only in modern conditions of globalization.
.. The state of Iraq was built by the British from provinces of the Ottoman Empire by applying a divide-and-rule strategy that meant Iraq’s governance could never be democratic.
.. A more fundamental reason was the fact that the integrity of the state rested on Sunni hegemony, which the occupation undid. Iraq was a multiethnic and multisectarian state held together principally by force. Self-government for “the Iraqi people” was impossible, since nothing of the kind had ever existed. The only realistically imaginable outcome of regime change was the violent disintegration of the state.
.. Without the American-led invasion of Iraq, ISIS would most likely not exist. The effect of regime change in Iraq was to destroy a modern secular despotism and empower a type of theocracy that is also modern.
.. Fundamentalism looks to the lost purity of an imaginary past; but in that they thrive in societies whose traditions are in disarray because of an encounter with new technologies and economic forces, fundamentalist movements are themselves essentially modern.
.. While much remains unknown, there is nothing mysterious in the rise of ISIS. It is baffling only for those who believe—despite everything that occurred in the twentieth century—that modernization and civilization are advancing hand in hand.
.. To accept that liberal societies may not be “on the right side of history” would leave their lives drained of significance
.. With mounting bewilderment and desperation, they cling to the faith that the normal course of history has somehow been temporarily derailed.
.. As in Iraq and Libya, regime change in Syria would inexorably produce the collapse of the state, with ISIS being a beneficiary of the resulting anarchy.
.. In an obsessive effort to remake the world according to an idealized image of their own societies, Western leaders have renounced a sense of reality.
.. One such fact is that toppling despots does not of itself enhance freedom.
.. Another uncomfortable fact is that tyrants are often popular. According to today’s liberals, when large numbers of people flock to support tyranny it cannot be because they do not want to be free.
.. Born liberals, human beings become anything else as a result of social conditioning. Only cultural and political repression stands in the way of liberal values becoming a universal way of life.
.. Interwar Europe demonstrates how quickly and easily civilized life can be disrupted and destroyed by the impact of war and economic crisis.
.. Civilization is not the endpoint of modern history, but a succession of interludes in recurring spasms of barbarism.
Campaign Trade Wars
Around that time, in a televised debate, Trump complained that the T.P.P. favored China. It fell to Senator Rand Paul, then still in the race, to point out that China was not a party to the agreement. Indeed, one of the T.P.P.’s main purposes, according to its American proponents, including President Obama, is to serve as a counterweight to China’s burgeoning economic power in the Pacific.
.. Trump—his trash talk, inconsistency, threats, and straight-up ignorance. In a meeting last week with the editorial board of the Times, he deplored the fact that the United States, after helping to create the Iranian nuclear agreement, was being beaten out by other countries in the scramble for new, post-sanctions business deals with Tehran. He clearly did not know that Congress, by declining to lift sanctions, is keeping the United States out of that game.
.. He even introduced legislation, in the House, to require his fellow-representatives to lower their own salaries, if they passed NAFTA, to the pay level of Mexican politicians.
.. On the day of the San Bernardino shootings, reflecting on the Paris attacks three weeks before, which left a hundred and thirty dead, he told CNN, “Whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up.”)
Why Muslims Should Never Have To Apologize for Terrorism
As a practicing Muslim, I know that my religion teaches peace. I am so certain of this fact that I will award anyone $10,000 if they can find me a verse in the Quran that says it’s ok to kill innocent people or to commit acts of terror. This is an open offer that will never expire.
Trump’s Terror Dependency
What keeps millions of people up at night is the one-trick pony that Trump could ride all the way into the White House: fear. If enough Americans cower in hysteria, Trump might be able to pull this thing off.
.. Let’s pause to behold a rare Trump acknowledgment of a bit of truthiness: The more people who are murdered by the savages from the Islamic State, the better it is for him. The Islamic State is a gift to Trump. And he is a gift to them
.. The Mexican-bashing, the call for a wall, the broad xenophobia and celebrity trash talk — it was all working. But then, “something happened called Paris,” he said, his voice lowering to a hush.
Paris — the slaughter of 130 people in November. In Trump’s telling, it was a wonderful turning point for him. “Paris happened, and Paris was a disaster,” he said. “And what happened with me is this whole run took on a whole new meaning.”
From there, he lumped Paris, the Mexican border and the Syrian refugee crisis in one big rancid stew of fear. He ran dark and spooky television ads, including some in Arizona last week, showing Islamic terrorists, a picture of the Moroccan border
.. It gets tedious reminding people that Trump’s ideas on how to stop terror have nothing to do with the problem, but let’s give it another go. The Paris killers are not — repeat, not — Syrian refugees. Nor are they from Mexico. They are Belgian and French citizens, criminals and thugs, radicalized in the festering tenements of Brussels.