Jonah Goldberg:
Dear Reader (Unless you see a black and blue dress, in which case you’re more useless than a Southern California llama wrangler or a Clinton ethics adviser),
Over 20 years ago, when I was briefly living in Czechoslovakia, I visited Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed there. Even so, as Nazi concentration camps go it was pretty nice. That was by design. The Nazis used it as a Potemkin “Jewish settlement” in an effort to persuade the International Red Cross that the Nazis weren’t mistreating the Jews. To that end, they shipped out the malnourished and spruced the place up in advance of the Red Cross’s arrival.
In the grand scheme of things, this was just a small part of the Nazis’ effort to hide the fact that they were liquidating the Jews of Europe. They couldn’t hide their anti-Semitic brutality of course, but even the SS understood that openly murdering millions of innocents amounted to bad press they didn’t need.
In this desire, the Nazis weren’t alone. Stalin tried to keep a lid on the fact that he was murdering millions through starvation in Ukraine, never mind slaughtering unknown numbers of fellow Russians. The effort to keep all of it hush-hush was aided by cadres of useful idiots in the West. And not just useful idiots. Some of the unindicted co-conspirators knew and helped cover it up. Walter Duranty’s lies about the famine in Ukraine earned him a Pulitzer for the New York Times. The Pulitzer board still refuses to revoke the prize. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered up to 3 million of their fellow Cambodians. They buried the bodies and denied the crimes, they didn’t put out press releases. North Korea, right now, is the world’s largest gulag. In the last decade it has murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people through starvation or execution. But they deny this, to the great comfort of those who would have us continue to do nothing about it.
I bring all of this up to illustrate an interesting and dismaying fact about the Islamic State. Unlike every other recent genocidal movement I can think of, they don’t deny the charge. They celebrate it. They tweet it. They produce slick videos, boasting of their role as the proud butchers in the newest abattoir of humanity.
It’s said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. And in that sense we owe the Islamic State a singular compliment: They are not hypocrites. They are doing what they believe in.
THE CHALLENGE OF SINCERITY
Every now and then I run into someone. They say, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” and that’s the end of that. Other times (at a more reasonable speed), I encounter someone, invariably liberal, often in the mainstream media or working outside of politics, who asks me, “You don’t actually believe that stuff, do you?”
“That stuff” can be pretty much anything I’ve written or said of a conservative nature. The people who ask this question usually either like me, or think I’m smart, or both. And because they like me or think I’m smart, they assume that I must not actually believe what I believe. It invariably makes for an awkward conversation, particularly when it’s a relative. (It might not surprise you to know that the extended Goldberg clan is not exactly a right-wing Hebraic Tong.)
This is just a small example of a pervasive problem: the inability to believe that other people sincerely believe fundamentally different things. This is a human problem before it is an ideological problem. It afflicts people on the left and the right, perhaps not equally but close enough. Some of the sources for this confusion are actually huge advances in human civilization. The idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God is a moral triumph of the Judeo-Christian heritage. That belief often causes people to assume that we’re all fundamentally alike. And we may in fact be born that way, but we do not necessarily stay that way. It’s an understandable mistake given that the secular West is based on the deep-seated dogma of equality before the law (a dogma that rests on that Judeo-Christian heritage, FWIW).
It’s a glorious way of seeing the world in many respects, but it depends on other people seeing the world the same way for it to work. You can walk outside our world in an instant and discover that what you thought was reality was in fact a social construction. One needn’t get on a plane to the Middle East. Just put a hippie with a “Vegetable Rights & Peace” T-shirt in a maximum-security prison’s exercise yard. The last thing he’ll remember is a very large man named Tiny standing over him saying “Here endeth the lesson” as Tiny’s fist heads towards his face. By the way, this experiment works equally well with anarcho-capitalist stockbrokers, Unitarian guidance counselors, and anyone else who operates on overly rosy assumptions about the nature of man in general or Tiny’s sense of humor in particular.
This is why the “Jobs for Jihadists” thing has been so dismaying. It works on the assumption that the Islamic State doesn’t really believe what it believes — it’s just venting its frustrations with a bad job market, political corruption, and the cancellation of Firefly. As I said last week, obviously “root causes” play a role, but so does crop rotation in the 14th century. Eventually you have to take people and their movements as you find them. Now of course, maybe there’s a deeper strategy we’re all missing. Maybe Obama wants to give them all jobs so that he can move this fight into his comfort zone by declaring a global war on “workplace violence.” But I kind of doubt it.
WHAT OF JIHADI JOHN?
Western Civilization is the bee’s knees, but it’s a lot more fragile than we realize (a point I will be making more and more in this space as it is in the wheelhouse of my next book). Again, unlike the Nazis, the Communists, and countless other evil movements, the Islamic State doesn’t hide its barbarism and doesn’t deny its horror. It broadcasts them to the world as a recruiting tool. And it works!
Sure, terrifying your enemies with atrocities is a very, very old tactic. But it’s been rare in the civilized world for a while now. And, when combined with the digital revolution and social media, this is uncharted territory.
While beheading Christians and selling little girls into slavery turns off a majority of the world, including a majority of Muslims, it turns on a lot of people all the same. One such person is Mohammed Emwazi, a.k.a. Jihadi John. Now, ever since Mohammed Atta and his band of losers attacked us on 9/11, we’ve been talking about why relatively affluent and educated young men, many born and raised in the West (remember Johnny Taliban?), enlist in radical jihad. There’s lots of interesting things to be said about all that. But what interests me right now is a single, simple point. The appeal of modernity, democracy, and the liberal order isn’t nearly as powerful as we sometimes take for granted. Going by conventional reason and morality, it’s a no-brainer; even the oppressed and impoverished have a better deal in the West than they would with the Islamic State. And yet, the opportunity to slaughter innocent people, destroy priceless artifacts, rape little girls, set dudes on fire, crucify Christians, fight fellow Muslims and/or maybe die horribly in the effort speaks to something deep within them. The claim that these recruits are just criminals looking for an excuse is sand-poundingly stupid. If all they wanted was an excuse for criminality, they don’t need to fly to Syria for that. They can rob people outside their own homes. They want something more, something outside our extended order, something evil.