• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 935 0

a latterday Cold War. During the Cold War, the West went to great lengths to advertise the superiority of its freedoms over totalitarian Marxist-Leninism, and this included covert CIA support for the work of Jackson Pollock. The Australian lawyer Peter Coleman wrote an outstanding book on these operations. Not much of this talk seems to translate into concrete policy suggestions as to how cultural warfare might actually be waged. Would it be primarily designed to subvert the jihadists’ ideology, or to solidify the West’s own morale? The old Atlanticist model does not seem particularly relevant if the victims of terrorism are also in Bali or Kenya while US conservatives heap scorn on ‘Euroids’. There are additional problems in reviving this tactic since we live in a less serious age, and one which has progressively marginalised high intellectual endeavour. Within my lifetime, academics studied such subjects as the comparative history of parliaments or war finance; they are now more likely to be experts on gay and lesbian body art, serial killers or the persecution of witches, rivalling television in their populist pursuit of the lurid or trivial. A glance through any catalogue of academic books—that is, those written in incomprehensible jargon and with pages of footnotes to prove earnestness—shows how unserious academics have become as a group. How can politicians defend Western values if their conception of them is to demonstrate familiarity with the Arctic Monkeys, while being almost embarrassed about going to the opera? All societies should do more to educate all their citizens in the history of the individuals and institutions that make living in them a relative privilege. This should include discussion of the historic separation of Church and state in the West, with religion confined to matters of public and private morality, and the advantages that accrue from local permutations of that broad arrangement. This has never prevented the religious from playing to their advantages in dealing with the depressed, elderly, suicidal and so forth.116

Ultimately the battle with jihadism will only be won by Muslims themselves, albeit with our discreet encouragement and involvement, because despatching huge armed forces is manifestly unsatisfactory, whether in creating more jihadists or exposing the West’s internal divisions and indisposition to suffer extensive casualties in what is, for the time being, still the age of pre-robotised warfare. It is salutary to recall that more British soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland in a single year than have so far perished in the entire campaign in Afghanistan. Since the suffering of the vast virtual ummah—which is not the suffering of Africa or Tibet—seems to be at the heart of contemporary problems with jihadism, anything that contributes to a sense of nation or statehood may reverse that tendency, as will anything that encourages the considerable number of reasonable people in Muslim countries who are historically averse to being ruled by overmighty clerics and their mob-like followers. Here the West might take a much greater interest in the high culture of these societies, since very often novelists and the like are on the front line, assuming they have not been killed. In one or two places, successful pop singers have bravely propagated anti-jihadist sentiments. They speak for large constituencies whom we need on our side, and we remain indifferent to them at our peril.

All of which is to say that the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds need to exercise more curiosity about each other. We should avoid the colonial cum multicultural approach of viewing highly variegated groups of individuals through the false prism of so-called community leaders, who invariably speak for a purposive coterie. That applies to both government and the mass media. One reason we have the problem of jihadism is that various Western institutions and professions are not treated with sufficient scepticism. Their massive political bias is simply accepted as in the nature of things, as if homogeneity of opinion had