Daesh and Its Discontents
I’ve been sitting at my computer for the past hour and a half in my underwear, jumping between an endless and ever-growing stream of browser tabs. These are some of my favorite nights — when I ignore Tinder and FOMO (is this still a term that people use?), and I burrow down the web in a thousand different directions to learn things about the world that I’ve been meaning to know.
I watched the first few minutes of Stop Making Sense, read an article about why George W. Bush might be the only man who can talk sense into the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, saw a South Korean teenager transform into Adele’s doppelgänger, Googled “Obama insults Ted Cruz,” “Spectre showtimes,” and “Mediterranea,” and I’ve learned that Americans become older than the majority of our population on their 37th birthday. I’ve had a greater variety of mental experiences in the last few minutes than I probably would have in a whole day half a century ago.
In another corner of the Internet — one that many of us are probably paying a lot of attention to right now — there is a raucous debate going on. What might be the greatest humanitarian crisis of the past half-century is testing the fiber of Western civilization, and everyone has an Opinion about it. This post isn’t about whether America should or should not accept Syrian refugees (I believe very strongly that it should), but about how open society, and in particular the Internet, helped the world get here, and how it will eventually light our way out of this madness.
About ninety-nine years ago, some possibly-drunk French and British diplomats got together and scribbled some lines on a map, gleefully partitioning what they envisioned as the end of the Ottoman Empire. It was an act of terrific hubris that was unfortunately commonplace at the time. Those lines, although hypothetical and insignificant then, eventually became the borders of a country named Syria. Because of the arbitrary nature of these lines, Syria has always been a motley collection of ethnic and religious tribes — indeed, one of the stated goals of Daesh was to obliterate the Sykes-Picot borders. This artificial nation-state has been held together for the past forty-four years by the brutal hand of the Assad family. Like many unremarkable despots before them, they maintained order through brute strength. Throughout most of history, this trick has worked very well. Unfortunately for the son of Hafez al-Assad, the murder-them-until-they-stop-resisting strategy was recently and very rudely upended by the Internet and its unprecedented ability to connect the disenfranchised.
Dictators rely on a kind of reality distortion field to maintain power. If you see Assad’s face (or his flag) plastered on a building every time you leave the house, you start to believe very quickly that he’s ubiquitous, omnipotent even. In the past, it was easy for a ruler to convince people that he (at least usually he) was God — all he had to do was plaster his likeness everywhere, and make sure he had a well-incentivized army of loyalists to crush anyone smart or brave enough to dissent. It was a simple but effective strategy, played out across the millennia.
The Arab Spring was the moment that the Internet revealed all of this as bullshit. For the first time in history, a broad-based popular movement inspired by democratic ideals tried — and succeeded — to overthrow entrenched autocracies throughout the Middle East. Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saleh — these were men who had been in power for twenty, thirty, even forty years — they were all brought down by a group of people who realized the strength of their own voices, and the tremendous force multiplier that they had in platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
It is worth underscoring the importance of the Internet to this process. It is the closest manifestation to a genuine marketplace of ideas that humanity has ever seen; everyone has a voice, they’re given equal volume, distribution is decentralized, and the threat of physical violence is dampened by the promise of relative anonymity for those who seek it. It won’t be too many more years now before access to it is considered a fundamental human right. That is the depth of its transformative power on the lives it touches. It is easy to forget this while you’re in the middle of cruising down a click-hole about the Rolling Stones’ discography, or wistfully reviewing pictures of your ex on Instagram, but this is an utter waste of a precious resource compared to the change that occurs when a Syrian citizen begins to realize that it isn’t just they or their friends who despise the regime — it’s everybody. That kind of clarity shows tyrants like Assad and Mubarak for who they truly are — emperors without clothes. Even an army of strongmen willing to pull the trigger on innocents from dusk till dawn is no match for millions who have realized the odds are ever in their favor.
Of course, the old way of doing things did not surrender gracefully when the Internet helped their citizens organize. Assad has proved to be the thorniest example in all of the Middle East. He is sleek, even sophisticated — an image substantially aided by his wealthy British wife. One only need watch his skillful parrying of Charlie Rose’s questions for thirty seconds to recognize that even if he is a cold-blooded murderer, he is nonetheless a masterful politician. This, along with his more basic appeals to Alawite tribalism and Russian patronage, has allowed him to cling to power for almost five years in the face of rebellion from secular Syrians, a well funded army of radical Islamists, and general isolation from the international community.
So now the world, having generally ignored the issue for as long as possible, is faced with the terrible human consequences of Syria’s war. A quarter million have died. Many millions have left, seeking solace in foreign lands and on the open sea from the near-certain death that awaits if they remain in their country. They have overwhelmed Europe’s logistical capacity to handle refugees, and the worst fears of many came to fruition when several of the people who posed as refugees turned out to be terrorists in disguise, infiltrating the capital of Enlightenment values as a fifth column, with the intent not to seek refuge in it, but to destroy it.
This brings us to the cancer that has in many ways already replaced Assad: Daesh. Let’s begin by calling them what they are, before getting to the reasons why, like Assad, their brutal facade will inevitably crumble in the face of the less shocking but sturdier principles embodied in the motto of their most recent target, the French Republic: liberte, egalite, and fraternite.
On its surface and in its tactics, Daesh is a thoroughly medieval organization. They promise the re-establishment of the Caliphate, they murder alleged apostates, they enslave women and minorities, and the list of offenses for which punishment is meted out to their citizens is endless. We are shocked to see these things not because they are unprecedented, but because humanity took it for granted that we had outgrown them. But underneath this religious persecution, seemingly inspired by the worst offenses of the Inquisition and the Roman Empire, their lies a simpler motive for much of Daesh’s demagoguery.
They hate the West. It starts with the head of their organization, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was interned in a U.S.-run prison camp in Iraq shortly after the initial invasion. After his release, he quickly dedicated himself to the organization that eventually began calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It is this sequence of events that reveals a fundamental quality of Daesh and their discontents: they are entirely reactionary. Their existence is predicated on being oppositional to the oppression of what they consider a morally bankrupt Western civilization. They see themselves as agents of God, sent to initiate the apocalypse, and in so doing bring ruin to the decadent civilization that they feel trod upon by.
In this way, they are nihilists with religious window dressing. Without the values that the West specifically (and the rest of humanity generally) espouses, they would have no purpose— there would be no unbeliever’s throats to slit, no debased women to rape, no haram concerts to bomb, no violence to commit in glorification of their perverse conception of God. The West, whether they admit it or not, is Daesh’s raison d’être — not Allah.
They will fail. This might seem obvious, but it’s worth saying. People — and not just a few of them — are afraid. It’s the driving emotion behind the desire to see America deny Syrian refugees sanctuary. Daesh is promoting a Clash of Civilizations, and many Americans are signing up for it. They are ready to erect walls and require ID cards for certain portions of our population, either unaware or uncaring about the clear parallels to Nazi Germany this would signal. It appeals to our basest instincts, it is an approach that has been tried before, and it is exactly what these murderous fruitcakes want. But despite these setbacks, the West will — and in fact already has — won.
How can we confidently say this when some of the victims from the Bataclan have not even been laid to rest yet? Because of the hard-won values that the people at that concert symbolized — values that were born in large part in the Enlightenment-era salons of the City of Light. Although it may be tempting to surrender a piece of our open and inclusive societies for a degree of safety, Franklin was right when he said “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The truth is, our remarkably open civilization is the very thing separating us from the psychotic teetotalers and frustrated virgins firing AK-47’s at civilians. That is why they target it.
If you are skeptical about the strength of these values as an actual defense against Daesh, consider their chosen methods of attack. They pick soft targets. The number of perpetrators in each case is small. They hit unsuspecting victims. This asymmetrical warfare makes Daesh scary — but it is also very telling. Deash attacks us with suicide bombers and a few men wielding assault rifles in our most tranquil environments because that is their only option. They will never be stronger than they are right now — people are fleeing the areas they control. By one estimate, approximately 20,000 foreigners world-wide have joined Daesh’s fighting ranks since they began taking over Iraq and Syria. This seems like a compelling number until it is laid against the number of refugees who have fled both Daesh and Assad from a much smaller population sample: over four million. The simple math of this monumental tide of humanity is as great a testament as any to the attractiveness and superiority of our “decadent” civilization’s values.
At the same time, it is precisely these values which make us vulnerable. Let me repeat this. The principles we pride ourselves on — the ones that set us apart from Daesh and the barbaric civilizations of antiquity that they have so much in common with — they invite attack from people who do not share them, and they make it easier for those attacks to be carried out. What we saw in Beirut, Paris, and in the air over the Sinai peninsula, was an attempt by Daesh to take advantage of our inclusive societies to strike at their core ideas— free commerce, the unhindered enjoyment of life in an open society, and the free movement of people over the face of the earth. They struck at these values out of a desire to see us relinquish them, because they are part of what makes us morally superior. Value is directly associated with cost, and in this case, that is worth remembering — our values are hard, and in our most difficult moments maintaining them comes at a great cost. But maintain them we must.
If it is Western values that they’re attacking, they’ve shown an odd affinity for the defining iteration of those values: the Internet. However imperfectly the West has at times embodied our own ideals, in the Internet we have stumbled upon a true and uncompromised facilitator of free expression. This freedom of expression is now the literal and metaphorical target of the cutthroat band of death warriors marauding through the sands of Syria and Iraq. The great irony of all this is that Daesh is famous, and I use that word intentionally, because of the tools provided to them by these values they despise. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the Internet — these are all portals founded on respect for the importance of communication and connection between human beings. It is innate within these portals then that there will also be corners of hate, because that is part of the human experience, and open societies must by definition make an acknowledgement of the repulsive before it can be rhetorically defeated.
This is exactly what we’re seeing with Daesh, as they attempt to gain recruits from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter by bragging about their exploits. They are forced to rely, hypocritically, on tools that we have given them in order to spread their message of fear. If there was any consistency at all to their warped beliefs, they would abandon the tools of the Internet because infidels invented them and because of the values they embody — but they are too weak not to. This irony is probably not lost on them, but it shouldn’t be lost on us, either. We’ve made their relative recruiting “success,” possible. This isn’t an indictment of the systems we’ve built — but an endorsement of them. They are vibrant, they contain multitudes, and they can withstand the attack of stone age belief systems. While I often use it for frivolous nonsense, the Internet is among the most important places where absolutist ideologies of all stripes will be defeated. Our civilization’s success does not depend on violently extinguishing competing belief systems — and it should be troubling to Daesh’s faithful that theirs does.
They failed on September 11th. Why should we expect them to fail any less after November 13th? To put Daesh in the simplest terms possible: they’re haters — and they should be ridiculed as such. Not feared. While they have the ability to kill, they lost the all-important battle of ideas before they even existed, and no matter what the body count of their macabre antics ends up being, it is this battle that will determine the ultimate outcome in this underwhelming “clash of civilizations.” Remember that, the next time you see an outrageous post from their ilk on a social network created by a Jew. They have lost, and they’re throwing a tantrum. Like a child slapping its mother’s face in a fit of rage, they might have the ability to hurt us, but that doesn’t make them adults.