English Outsider on Manchester

 

I, the turcopolier, have made this comment by EO into a front page post so don't complain about the lack of paragraphing.  pl

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"Colonel, Manchester was as bitter as we have had. As bitter as 9/11 or the London bombings, perhaps more so because the targets were young people just setting out on the road to adulthood. That is a time of promise. It should not be a time of death. It is more bitter than most of us know. It is worse because we ourselves have contributed to the tragedy. On the one hand we have thousands upon thousands in our police forces and in our intelligence agencies straining every nerve to prevent such tragedies. On the other we are heaping fuel on the fire of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism with every day that passes. That is sometimes said too glibly. There are those who claim that we in the West are the root cause of Jihadi terrorism simply because we have intervened so much in the Middle East. Maybe that is so, for some Jihadis, but Muslim fundamentalism is such a strong growth that it needed no Western provocation to set it in motion. No, what we have done is more than that. We have not only removed or weakened the regimes that inhibited, more or less, that growth. What we have done is to encourage Jihad to flourish on an immensely greater scale. That increased scale increases its glamour and its pull for our English Muslims many times over. That increases greatly the chance that they will fall victim to that glamour. That increases greatly the probability of terrorist attacks. By chance I came across a video, just a short time before Manchester, that summed this murderous foolishness up. For all I know it may be a staged video - so many are - or compiled for PR purposes. But staged or contrived though it may be, the video sets out with grim clarity how we have contributed to, set the scene for indeed, the deaths of our own. https://freespeechdefense.net/2017/05/i-wonder-why-this-is-being-censored/ I refer to the section starting at nine minutes. It sets out what perhaps all on your site know but so few elsewhere. Western countries have been arming and training Muslim fighters knowing full well that those fighters were Jihadis, and were more than likely to join even more extreme Jihadi units. Knowing full well also that some of those Jihadis, but now trained in killing and invigorated by contact with other true believers, would return to their countries of origin and do what harm they could. Later on, in the copy of the video I have seen, we hear Jihadists, English and German nationals among them, making it clear they have the intention of doing that if they can. But if that were all then perhaps the danger would not be so great. Those thousands and thousands of our security forces at home do at least have a fighting chance of knowing who's been over there and who's come back. They know what they have to deal with even if that is a difficult task. What we fail to understand is the appeal of the Jihadi cause to our own disenchanted Muslim young at home, and how we ourselves have so greatly magnified that appeal. We fail to understand that what is to us atrocity upon atrocity in Syria is to them a great cause. We see ragged groups of thugs using, often inexpertly, the deadly equipment we give them or the supply of which we facilitate. They see a band of glorious martyrs. We see a mix of ethnic cleansing and rule by terror, covertly used by us to weaken regimes we don't like. They see only meritorious conquest leading to a cleaner and more just society. Can we wonder that to a number of our idealistic young, some of whom experience more than the rest of us the dysfunctionality of parts of Western society, the glamour of such a vision is irresistible? We, operating through our intelligence agencies and Special Forces, have presented them with the stage upon which that vision can be exhibited. And from his English home the loner or the psychotic or the idealist can see that great stage that we have set up and wish, somehow, to be part of it. It is not significant whether Manchester was the work of a homegrown loner or of an organised gang; the vision that inspired the commission of the atrocity is the vision we engineered. For there is now no doubt that the flood of foreign Jihadis that have wreaked such havoc in Syria and neighbouring countries was released by us or with our active complicity. It could not have happened but for Western assistance. We do not acknowledge it. We pretend that the tragedy of Manchester has no relation to our contribution to the tragedy in the Middle East. As here, from a BBC report - "Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said the city would "pull together", adding: "That's what we are. That's what we do. They won't win." As if, as the Mayor of London intimated recently, bomb attacks were phenomena that we just have to learn to live with. As if they were simply there, and no cause for them. Or no cause we have anything to do with. Just after the London bombing I met a journalist who worked for one of the broadsheets. He was proud of the fact, as well he might have been, that he and his colleagues went in to work the next day undaunted, as did, I believe, most Londoners. Looking back more than seventy years he conjured up the spirit of the Blitz. No matter what they throw at us we don't give in. We muddle on. "That's what we do." So he spoke. I held my peace. How could a journalist of all people, I did not say, fail to know that we had in large measure brought it upon ourselves? How could we be such fools? Police and intelligence in this country, all thousands of them, holding terrorism at bay. Their colleagues abroad creating the conditions in which it can grow; deliberately setting the scene for the deadly vision to flourish past any heights it could have achieved unaided, that deadly vision which now inspires so many of our disenchanted Muslims or Muslim converts here. We are fools in deadly truth, and it is our young who have paid for it in Manchester. "  EO

Comments

[Dr.Puck]

What would be a constructive set of ideas that could find traction--should these be politically supported, and come to our attention in the public square?

Wave your magic wand. Now, do the same, but don't worry about having to sell your sophisticated plan to voters.

Where are all the ideas (plans) that issue from the attitude:

here is what a rational, highly educated, situationally aware, worldly, brutally experienced, and ruthlessly adept, "problem solving engineer" would do about, for example, extremist jihadi Islam. Or, alternately, what this engineer would plan to do about poverty/climate change/plutocracy/healthcare/jobs, etc.?

Behind all the analysis should be something along the lines of: this is what I would do.

[kooshy]

Ever since the early eighties Iranians everywhere, have been physically and culturally attacked, killed, demonized, their bank accounts closed, blocked, forced to excommunicate their own born country, for ever have been on top of all terrorist lists, climbed up to the access of evil, and so on, longer and more than any Arab Sunni country or muslim group of pepole, yet they are not blowing themselves up killing innocents, eight year olds. Shame on the Arabs for not standing up to their own, governments and terrorists.

[kooshy]

IMO, the remedy to stop terror in the west is not stoping the immigration, that will not solve the terrorism , like drugs are banned for as long as we know, but still here in US we have the heroine epidemic. As long as we are not willing to address the route cause of Sunni Muslim Arabs Terrorism and remedy it, we will see more innocent blood in western cities.

[kao_hsien_chih]

The prevailing not-very-well-concealed attitude among the interventionistas seems to be that, "we have to keep intervening over there, FOR THE CAUSE! (that you plebes don't understand) Even if we have to fight them over here (as long as only you plebes get blown up)." The slogan, even if only empty catch phrase, used to be "we have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight over here." Bizarro world.

[JJackson]

EO excellent as always.
I know I am looking for logic, in a situation devoid of it, but why is it proving so hard to sell the proposition that

The people who are causing us so much trouble are Wahhabist Sunnis and are not sponsored by Shia states.
We are backing the Sunnis in Syria, including KSA who are Wahhabi to boot and actively exporting this fringe interpretation of Islam, while we will not work with the Shias who are also fighting the Wahhabists.

This seems an easy sell and yet no takers, strange.

[sid_finster]

Sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment, but they do learn.

[Jim Buck]

Lemur said...
I think its critical to note these 'home grown' Muslim bombers in the West often become explosive in reaction to the liberal mores they encounter.

That is debatable. There is good evidence that muslim bombers in the west became explosive in reaction to the apologia for such brutality that was devised by this man:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Myatt

[Robert C]

I predict, with dismay, that within two weeks, some congressperson, likely an R, maybe a D, or a member of the Trump administration will site the Manchester tragedy as a clear reason to expedite regime change in Syria and Iran. Sadly, this will be met with numerous nods of yes-yes. Watch this Sunday's newsies if you can stomach it.

[Fred]

Fellow,

Everyone has had 15 years to review GWB's propaganda campaign, the MSM complicity and all the rest aided an abetted that decision. 19 guys didn't do that on their own and their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam didn't come out of the nowhere.

[Kunuri]

"Unfortunately there will be many more Manchesters and San Bernardinos. And with each new atrocity & intelligence failure, the governments ask for and get even more power and grow even bigger their national security and surveillance apparatus."

Maybe that's the whole point, not the oil or the pissing contest between the major powers.

[Fred]

Ghostship,

The mother and father of that 23 year old did not go to England to become either English or Western. You would think that the followers of the secular Utopian vision of the political left would recognize the pattern of behavior that has repeated itself over and over again. That would entail a road to Damascus revelation. Perhaps a road to Nice, Paris, San Bernandino, Chattanooga, London, Manchester moment will occur. If not, well, in the not to distant future some other poor flyover country families will get to bury their children for the sake of some Western politicians "true believer" vision of human homogenization. Facebook will put out some special emojis and the Mayor of Paris turn off the Eiffel Tower for a few hours; and the usual PC suspects will enforce the usual PC mandates.

[English Outsider]

Tim S, two points you bring up are points that bother me too.

1. "you are bringing it on yourselves."

That in brief is what I had hoped to say. We are bringing it on ourselves. The question is, who's the "we"?

There is no accurate definition of "we" that can hold good all the time and therefore the accuracy you seek is unattainable.

We must remember that the majority of us in the UK, or at least the majority of those who voted, re-elected Mr Blair after Iraq; and there was a large number of Americans who were very keen on electing Mrs Clinton after Libya. At the very least it was clear to all of us that something had gone badly wrong in both cases, so that retrospective endorsement of two politicians involved means that we can't pin it all on just the politicians. In such cases the "we" is very large.

On the other hand we know very little of what the politicians and their advisers are doing. I remember vividly having to abandon the BBC and the broadsheets at the time of the Ukrainian coup, not merely because I didn't like the slant, but because they were simply not reporting most of it. You had to go to the internet to ferret out the details and to the academics to find out the background the details fitted in to. That to most people is a ridiculous amount of trouble to go to to find out about things you can do nothing about anyway. Easier with Syria because someone had put me on to SST for that, but most people still get their news from the TV or from their self-confirming circles on Social Media. So they really don't know what's going on at all and can't be expected to.

Unfortunately that group also includes most of the young. The young are an important element because they tend to querying and dissidence more than the rest of us and are more likely to make a stir if they think something's going wrong, so that's a big political force that's gone missing when it comes to checking the neocons' activities abroad. In addition the young are considerably more interested in domestic politics than in who's killing who and why in the ME. With the young out of action and most of the rest of us in the dark the "we" becomes fairly small.

Solzhenitsyn spends some time looking at this question in connection with the Holocaust and the Bolshevik terror. Who takes the rap for that, the top Nazis and the Commissars or the entire German and Russian nations? Who's the "we" there? He comes to the conclusion that ultimately "we" is the entire nation. Our attitudes and background culture inform the atmosphere the politicians work in and therefore it's down to all of us. With the necessary qualifications that we're seldom told much by the authorities and that democracy is going through a rough patch at the moment, Solzhenitsyn's conclusion has to be correct today. "We" is all of us.

That's what my head tells me. With my heart I'm with you entirely. The evil the politicians have committed in the ME is nothing to do with me so don't count me in with them.

2. "And after saying all of that, you refer to them as "our" idealistic young."

Afraid so. We're talking about the Muslim and Muslim convert idealistic young and they're "ours" because they live in the same country. That's just a matter of usage.

"Idealistic"? Well, apart from the fact that the precepts the Jihadis follow look to us like Deuteronomy but worse, many of them are idealistic all right. And it is necessary to accept, both in the case of the Jihadis and the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, that there's good mixed in with the bad. No one except a few psychotics deliberately says "I'm going to be really evil." It's more that they seize hold of a bad ideology and some get idealistic about following it.

That's the nightmare of living in a decaying democracy. Most people with ideals you and I might see as good aren't too bothered about it all. Those whose ideals you and I find repulsive are very set on them indeed. A contributor to the Colonel's site reminded us recently of the much quoted lines -

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

That sort of "idealism", is what I was referring to.

[Kooshy]

Was wondering why we never hear what this terrorist want, what they demand of us to stop terrorizing our cities and citizens. Maybe if we knew what they want, we could have legitimately understand if thier demands was something we could meet, or if it was out of question to deal with. For some mysterious reasons our governments, politicians and our media do not wish us to know what this terrorist demand of us to stop thier terror. From our media and elected officials we just hear they hate our way of life, yet they all wish to come and immigrate and live with us. It don't add up for me.

[VietnamVet]

EN

Thanks for the link. Except for a handful of reporters like Tucker Carlson and Patrick Cockburn, the West have been subject to a globalist information operation for the last 40 years. History is lost. Russia has had a Naval Port in Crimea for a century longer than the USA at Pearl Harbor. They have fought Turkey, France, Great Britain and Germany to keep it; the USA, Japan. Democrats repeatedly say that “Russia invaded Crimea” in 2014 but it does not make it true.

In fact, the Western Elite are attempting to destabilize Russia by supporting proxy Islamist forces to seize its resources. The resulting Holy War is the direct cause of the blowback in the West from San Bernardino to Manchester. Death will continue its spread. The only way to end the violence is to rein in the Davos Class which includes the Gulf Monarchs;
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/manchester-attack-salman-abedi-salafi-jihadism-wahhabism-isis-al-qaeda-islam-muslim-suicide-bombing-a7754301.html

[FB Ali]

I would urge you, and others, not to use italics if you don't know how to end them. You then screw up the entire thread below.

I'm trying to end it now.

[Account Deleted]

radix - yes: The inevitable words "he was radicalized", always used in the pejorative sense, belies the essentially rootless nature of 21st century secular capitalist 'culture'.

Our culture's legal codes are derived by mere mortals. Our economy revolves around a concept called 'Consumer Confidence' - where a citizen's worth to society may be quantified simply by reference the the magnitude of their consumption of material goods and services. We are held in high esteem for casting off humility and selfishly pursuing fame and fortune in this life.

Conversely, we look down on cultures whose laws are God-given and whose citizens' worthiness is measured by a concept called jihad - the struggle to be a good adherent to one's faith. We find it unfathomable that earthly pleasures may be eschewed and that the focus of life can be on the glory of one's death.

According to a school friend of Abedi:

"He used to drink, smoke weed then all of a sudden he turned religious..."

Perhaps he used to be a frivolous and unquestioning consumer - a good citizen. But he found a radix.

The act of his death is utterly abhorrent to us. But until our culture can accommodate some respect for other, 'primitive' cultures and we stop cultural proselytizing, we bring it upon ourselves. Just as we did not reach the End of History, we have not reached the End of Culture.

[JerseyJeffersonian]

Fred,

This.

I'm sorry, but I cannot but differ to a degree on the sentiment of the post that, well, WE are to blame. As appears to be the case from the coverage that I have thus far seen, the parents of this murderer had left Libya for the very reason that their Islamist fervor was out of favor with Ghaddafi, and they determined to leave. And then the poison in their minds inevitably worked its magic in setting the pace for their children; the two daughters who left to join the jihadi cause in Syria, the other son (arrested in jihadi Libya), and the murderer himself, who not only spent time in jihadi Libya, but also in jihadi Syria. The choices of the children of these "refugees" are no accident, rather the likely outcome of the beliefs and practices of their poor, poor "refugee" (read political exiles, self-chosen) parents. To my way of thinking, a major amount of assignable blame lies on the doorstep of these parents and their toxic tutelage of their spawn. To repay the hospitality of the everyday people of Britain by this crime? Unspeakable.

This bomber chose to slaughter the concert attendees, innocent children among them. He exercised his agency. He could have chosen otherwise, but then he didn't, did he?

As much as I and millions of other citizens in the West abominate the conduct and policies of our "leaders" in the Middle East, the murderous conduct of these jihadis in our midst cannot be excused, as much as the (Muslim) mayor of London may wish to pooh pooh it as just something that has to be tolerated along with the other ills of urban life.

Responsibility cuts both ways. I, and I rather suspect, the vast majority of Western citizens are not prepared to passively await the next atrocity. No more liberal handwringing, thank you very much. Take that as you will.

[Fred]

Jim,

Next time please stop the italics at the end of your comment.

[kao_hsien_chih]

I always thought the problem was that we simultaneously want to affect the matters of distant lands and still have people from distant lands come live among us. If people from distant lands want to sever ties to their homelands and live amongst us, while we ourselves have nothing to do with whence they came from, I think that's fine. If we deal with the distant lands and let people from those lands, who may have grudges against us for meddling in their homelands, not come to our shores, I think that too is fine. But if we let people from faraway places come among us, but still meddle with their homelands, we can't expect them to feel nothing about what we do and do nothing, I don't think. Either we are a nation of immigrants and keep ourselves apart from where the immigrants come from, or we are an empire, and we don't let people who might be affected by our empiring come among us. I don't think we can have a choice.

[EEngineer]

inserting missing italics off tag.

[Keith Harbaugh]

english outsider writes (emphasis added):

[W]e are heaping fuel
on the fire of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism
with every day that passes.
That is sometimes said too glibly.
There are those who claim that we in the West are the root cause of Jihadi terrorism simply because
we have intervened so much in the Middle East.
Maybe that is so, for some Jihadis, but Muslim fundamentalism is such a strong growth that it needed no Western provocation to set it in motion.
No, what we have done is more than that.
We have not only removed or weakened the regimes that inhibited, more or less, that growth.
What we have done is
to encourage Jihad to flourish on an immensely greater scale.

Pardon me if I am overly obtuse,
but how about a clear and precise statement of what you are referring to in
"what we have done".
You claim the root cause is not simply because
"we have intervened so much in the Middle East."
If that is not the cause of the problems,
then what else is it that we have done to cause the problems?

My answer would be:
Not only that we have intervened excessively in the ME,
but that we also have admitted so many sympathizers with the victims of our interventions.

[English Outsider]

Tyler - that leads to all sorts of questions but I did not want to raise such questions in the context of the Manchester tragedy.

My sole point was that the Western covert or indirect intervention in Syria has led to a Jihadi spectacular. The numbers in themselves are just that - spectacular. A hundred thousand foreign Jihadis minimum brought in from all over the Muslim world, maybe more than two hundred thousand. Weapons fed in in great quantities and some of them sophisticated. Dramatic movements of large bodies of men and great chunks of territory changing colour on the maps. The involvement of more and more countries, again often dramatic and unexpected. It was scarcely an unobtrusive disaster; and though the Saudis et al might have paid for it it is now clear, in spite of President Obama's "Look, no hands" assertions, that we in the West orchestrated it.

I don't think it was meant to be like that. It was probably supposed to be a quick kill, like Libya. But it was like that and the Jihadi propaganda machine made the most of it. I can no longer get the Dabiq magazine or its sequel on the internet but as I recollect, the apocalyptic tone of that magazine, the talk of Crusades and of final battles, was specifically designed to catch the imagination of the young and impressionable.

Inadvertently or not that was the Jihadi spectacular we staged. If we'd hired a publicity company for the Jihadis - in fact it seems we did but that's another matter - we could not have invested the conflict with more glamour for any disaffected Muslim immigrant following it wide eyed on his computer screen. The main aspects of the conflict have been set out thoroughly on this site but the specific point I wished to make was that we in the West, inadvertently and maybe even without thinking about it much, couldn't have run a more effective recruitment operation for the Jihadis if we'd tried.

It worked. That bye product of whatever we thought we were up to in Syria worked only too well. Perhaps the only thing that did, unless one calls the deaths of tens of thousands and the uprooting of millions a success. Where there were only a few of our young Muslim immigrants inclined to fight or die for the cause there will now be many. Contacts will have been established that otherwise would not have been. Supply routes will exist that didn't exist before. A sub-culture of violent action will be the norm in places where it was not the norm previously. We will, as I stated earlier, be employing many thousands of people to suppress a threat that we ourselves have helped to intensify.

It was that aspect of the Manchester tragedy that seemed to be ignored entirely by the politicians. In the world of geo-political fantasy they inhabit I don't suppose blowback enters their minds.

[Bandit]

I fully agree with you, Bill, but as an American, watching with disgust, the destruction of the Middle East, I am deeply troubled by the lack of humanity displayed by the American and European citizens. Their DELIBERATE ignorance and addiction to the mass media is the core source of our problems.

If the governments can keep people divided and quibbling over their petty grievances while millions upon millions of people are being murdered and dislocated by their very own governments, then we, humanity, have lost the game. The voices of protest are few, and are quickly silenced by the overwhelming, mind-numbing avalanche of distortions and lies by the MSM.

[Thirdeye]

Sorry, I think that's a load of rubbish. Verbose, pretentious rubbish. "Sovietism" resulted from the imposition of modernism on Russia? Really? The Tsarists had been whipping up atavistic religio-nationalism as a bulwark against the forces of social change that could threaten their power. They played their backwards-looking, repressive game until it forced those seeking to overcome it into revolution. Germany's big step into modernity was brought about by Bismarck, not the revolution of 1918. Imperial Germany was in some ways surpassing the Anglosphere states in terms of modernity. You know what the biggest sudden plunge into modernity was in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? Immigration from southern and eastern Europe to the US. It didn't result in the immigrants latching onto wacko authoritarian ideologies. But I suppose the confirmation bias of cultural authoritarians knows no limits.

[Jim Buck]

My apologies.