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Tag Archives: The Second Plane

Terror and Boredom

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

boredom, Boston Marathon bombing, Islam, Martin Amis, Osama bin Laden, religion, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, The Second Plane

Boston Marathon Bombing

“Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven’t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion… Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason…

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As [Sam] Harris puts it:

‘Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization… Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right – about anything – seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.’…

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York – and from winter to summer – with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran’s Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn’t like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack – staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, ‘Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on airplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East.’…

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism – thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren’t searching all the passengers. And I couldn’t defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric ‘pollution’ of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient program. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York…

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to ‘a tolerable level’ (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centers, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else – a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband…

Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. ‘Islam’, as he frequently reminds us, ‘isn’t like that.’ Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means ‘submission’ – the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.”

Martin Amis__________

Selections from Martin Amis’s book The Second Plane.

It has just been released that the younger Boston-Marathon-mass-murderer, Dzhokhar Tsarnev, went to the gym and then a house party with his intramural soccer buddies two days after the marathon bombing. He also tweeted this,

“I don’t argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot”

on January 15th of this year (three months to the day before the bombing). Even if that sentiment were true at the time (which is dubious), or was remotely sensible in its construction (which it’s not), it has since been disproved, self-discredited, by the acts of its author.

The liberal West needs to absorb one truth down to the soles of our feet: We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

To note: I have just spent part of the afternoon hanging out at the office of the captivating scholar of terrorism, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, and threw a slew of questions related to this topic her way. She had some fascinating thoughts on the issue of whether we can apply — or how we should apply — reason to an ideology which is so counter-intuitive, so hideously irrational. I will hopefully write some about this very pleasant and surprisingly funny hang out session later in the week.

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“Osama Is My Brother”

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Osama bin Laden, The Age of Horrorism, The Second Plane

Osama bin Laden

“It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend – a reporter and political man of letters – approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama’s lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another’s apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan’s pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires – fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

‘Why you want these? You like Osama?’

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given – reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: ‘Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.’ No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

‘You like Osama?’

‘Of course. He is my brother.’

‘He is your brother?’

‘All men are my brothers.’

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother – by definition. Osama is not my brother.”

__________

From the opening of Martin Amis’s essay “The Age of Horrorism”.

I’d encourage any of you to read the remainder of this essay, as well as the larger collection it is published in, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.

By the way, Amis has since disclosed that the friend he mentions in this story is none other than his best pal, Christopher Hitchens.

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What Has Extremism Ever Done for Anyone?

19 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on What Has Extremism Ever Done for Anyone?

Tags

9-11, extremism, Islam, Islamism, Martin Amis, Terrorism, The Second Plane

9-11

“Terror and boredom are very old friends, as onetime residents of Russia (and other countries) will uneasily recall. The other face of the coin of Islamist terror is boredom — the nullity of the non-conversation we are having with the dependent mind. It is a mind with which we share no discourse. But if September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also desperate fascination. Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits, and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical? I was once asked: ‘Are you an Islamophobe?’ And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismo-phobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you. The more general enemy, of course, is extremism. What has extremism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?”

__________

The final paragraph of Martin Amis’s Introduction to his collection of essays and stories The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom.

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