The latest estimate is 180 Americans have gone off to join the ISIS State butchers in Syria and Iraq. That’s plus thousands of British, French, Australian, Canadian, German, North African, east and west Asian young people burning to kill, or preferably die, for the Prophet. Almost all got turned on by the sadistic tech-savvy, stylish ISIS web and Twitter sites developed shrewdly to appeal to youngsters and would-be guerrilla fighters whose life force comes from the internet.
From the start, when Obama contemptuously dismissed ISIS as the “J(unior) V(arsity) of Al Queda”, the White House and Pentagon have been stupid and stumped dealing with ISIS’s communication skills.
They haven’t a clue, for example, that the same holy warriors who love beheading infidels also are into writing and speaking classical-Arab poetry, and that the Arab world’s version of American Idol is a poetry contest where the winner gets more money than the Nobel Prize. (See Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel in 8-15 June, New Yorker: “ISIS, Al Queda and other Islamist movements produce a huge amount of verse…online (with) tricky syntax and unusual rhyme schemes.”)
TV pundits scratch their heads over why do some apparently normal American kids sneak off to join the killers in Syria. (A few, like Connecticut’s Keith Broomfield killed in action, hitch up with the anti-ISIS Kurds.) I wonder, too.
I can’t get inside the heads of a grownup Caliphater because I don’t know my Koran and am not a Sunni and only know fragments of Sufi poetry. But with some effort I can try to get psychologically a little closer to the American and British ISIS-bound kids, many but not all of whom are Muslim.
In World War One the great trench poet Wilfred Owen wrote his “Dulce et decorum (pro patria mori)” – how sweet and fitting to die for one’s country – in which Owen turned the hysterical pro-war slogan on its head, ending:
…”My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori”.
Western Jihad recruits don’t hear the “old lie” but only how sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, in this case their country is global without imperialist-drawn frontiers. The ISIS Caliphate, “a culture of romance (that) promises adventure”, invites young people to do something supremely heroic, a choice usually absent in normal civilian life. The real question is, why are bright kids drawn to a movement that merges the roles of victim and executioner?
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> What a softheaded boy I was back then:
When I got out of the American army after WW2 I was restless and at loose ends. The Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi criminals, which I attended, made me feel I hadn’t done enough to fight evil. For reasons, which probably had to do with a war-born sympathy for our ally the Chinese who’d battled the Japanese invader, I applied to join the Communist-led 8th Route Army in China which had guerrilla bases and operated behind enemy lines. The Cold War had not yet entirely frozen. And hopes among us “useful idiots”, fed by writers like Pearl Buck, Agnes Smedley and Han Suyin, were high that the Chinese Reds would indeed be the “agrarian reformers” they claimed to be. Soon afterwards the Communists and Chinese nationalists under Chiang-Kai Shek went back to their long running civil war. And we know what happened then.
In Detroit I found the 8th Route Army’s English-speaking liaison and proudly presented myself as eager to help the Chinese build a new society even if it meant front-line fighting to protect the revolution.
“And what skills do you bring to the New China?” the Chinese representatives asked.
I said that I was an infantry rifleman proficient in small arms like the carbine, Colt .45, two types of machine gun, rocket-propelled ‘bazooka’, mortar etc. They smiled tolerantly, and replied something like “Do you know how many people we have in China who can use a rifle? Many many millions. What we need are not ordinary soldiers like you but skilled technicians. Are you a hydraulic engineer or agronomist? No? Then stay in your own country and try to improve it!”
At that idle moment I’d been willing to lay down my life for a propagandistic ideal I’d shaped inside my own head – and which, it turned out, had little to do with the reality of Chinese life. God knows what might have happened if I’d been accepted by the Red Chinese only to find myself complicit in Mao’s deadly Great Leap Forward and his ISIS-like “cultural revolution” that killed…how many?
Or have we forgotten the young volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln in the Spanish civil war – indeed, how Muriel Spark’s romantically idealistic teacher in her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie happily sends one of her students to a heroic death fighting for the fascists?
Hitler and Leni Riefentahl got to the heart of masses of seducible Germans with propaganda films like “Triumph of the Will”. ISIS, using the headman’s blood-dripping axe and classical Arab poetry on the internet, seem equally effective. For now our only response to this international revolutionary movement is troop surges and drone strikes that are among ISIS’s best recruiting tools. Perhaps, if we’re serious about confronting ISIS, our generals and politicians should take time off to study the canonical Arab poets like al-Khansa’, Jamil, Abu Nuwas and al-Mutanabbi. Fat chance.
Hitler and Leni Riefentahl got to the heart of masses of seducible Germans with propaganda films like “Triumph of the Will”. ISIS, using the headman’s blood-dripping axe and classical Arab poetry on the internet, seem equally effective. For now our only response to this international revolutionary movement is troop surges and drone strikes that are among ISIS’s best recruiting tools. Perhaps, if we’re serious about confronting ISIS, our generals and politicians should take time off to study the canonical Arab poets like al-Khansa’, Jamil, Abu Nuwas and al-Mutanabbi. Fat chance.