Thought for the Day: Addressing the Islamic State
Keith Rankin, 24 February 2015
The brutal and publicity-seeking behaviour of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL) in the places we westerners call
'Middle-East' and 'Iraq' and 'Syria' is certainly a challenge to western liberal democracies.
Brutalism is nothing new. There have always been instances of government and non-government forces engaging in violence
on a scale that doesn't compute to most of us in our relatively sheltered lives. And not always perpetrated by the bad
guys.
I was watching a BBC documentary about the British Empire the other day. The oppression imposed by British rule in Kenya
in the 1950s, for example, was sufficient to create a rebel force called the Mau Mau. These rebels did some extremely
brutal things, especially to other Africans who they saw as taking the British side. British retaliation to Mau Mau
atrocities was to execute even bigger atrocities. In a few years, however, the best known Mau Mau leader was President
of an independent Kenya. In hindsight, the British opposition served no purpose. The British were on the wrong side of
an unstoppable movement for change.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the dying years of the South African apartheid regime, a significant number of
people were 'necklaced' – burned alive – by rebels who we by-and-large supported. We looked the other way, and hoped
that the forces for change would be quick, allowing that phase of South Africa's history to quickly end. Nobody
advocated military support for the regime that the people doing the necklacing were fighting.
In Cambodia in the early 1980s we continued to recognise the vanquished Pol Pot regime, guilty in the 1970s of one of
the worst genocides ever. We recognised the killing fields killers because they were overthrown by the Vietnamese at a
time when the west was still smarting over its inglorious Vietnam debacle. These western military ventures almost always
fail.
What we in the west are fighting for today is the 'Wilsonian' system of autonomous sovereign secular nation states. This
system was the main legacy of World War 1, when nations such as Iraq were created from the pens of the victorious powers
– especially the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.
The system has never actually been realised. What is the status of, for example, Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland (whose
rugby players play for a foreign power), or Niue for that matter? Or Greece?
The Islamic World does have a dream – and always has had such dreams – for political structures that we perceive to be
incompatible with the Wilsonian system of nation states. IS represents an extremely vocal and brutal representation of
this aspiration.
The last substantial polity that took the form of a 'caliphate' was the Ottoman Empire, which New Zealand invaded on 25
April 1915. Indeed World War 1 can probably be best understood as a fight between established and emerging western
powers for influence over the Ottoman territories in the 'Middle-East'; carving those lands one way or another into
western client nation states.
One could argue that the Roman Catholic world today is a Christian caliphate, with the Pope as its Caliph. Looked at
this way, we can see that alternative geopolitical (and indeed geo-theocratic) structures can coexist and overlay.
Usually much blood is spilled before we realise this. The religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries –
essentially protestants versus 'papists' – were amongst the most brutal episodes in world history.
IS presents a big geopolitical conundrum. The west's natural inclination is to respond to this challenge with violence.
You cannot resist this kind of change, however, by pretending it's a local scrap where some particularly naughty boys
given a good caning will say 'sorry'.
The big question for us in the west is, really, to question what it is about our western societies that is turning off
young Muslims in particular, and young people more generally. It's partly about economics; unemployment and all that.
It's partly about political structures that so many of the young cannot and do not engage with. But it's also that young
people may need causes and purposes that give meaning to their lives. Life in the west for too many young has become
precarious, frustrating and purposeless.
ENDS