Why do Western governments seem to do everything that they can to encourage more Islamic terrorism?

You can come up with all kinds of convoluted theories that try to explain why:

• The leadership has a ‘white guilt’ complex.
• They’re paid off by Arab governments.
• They have a death wish.
• The elites are demons, possessed by demons, or are working for demons.
• Terrorism is a useful and cynical excuse for the extension of state power over entire sectors of the economy and private life (think the TSA).
• Terrorism is useful to provoke wars on behalf of foreign powers.
• None of the terrorist attacks are real: the events are put on by paid actors putting on a slick show for TV producers, much like the moon landing or Harambe’s death.

Many of those bullet points are accurate to varying degrees. But the overwhelming sense within the government is that the state is doing everything that it can to suppress and discourage terrorism within the moral limits set on the behavior of legitimate states that were widely agreed upon (but not always adhered to) after the end of World War II.

Tolerance is the law

States are also obligated by treaty and domestic law to treat all citizens equally regardless of race, natural origin, sexuality, and whether or not they identify as a half-dragon of indeterminate gender.

That makes actual reform tricky because it would involve violating countless international agreements and public commitments to inclusivity. Violating those international agreements often has negative consequences both politically and economically.

The main thing that democratic states attempt to provide their citizens is a sense of safety. There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that everyone — even criminals apart from the most heinous and violent, and even then — deserve safety and essential respect.

Terrorism and committed terrorists then pose a dilemma to the way that the system is supposed to work. When the individuals in the system don’t behave like the utililitarian minimaxers that the political models say that they should behave like, it throws the entire bureaucratic system into confusion.

Supposedly, Muslims should be happy collecting welfare or learning how to write Javascript trackers instead of driving trucks down the boardwalk to crush dozens of men, women, and children. The model said that they would respond primarily to economic incentives; to policies (in bureucratese). That something other than mere incentive could motivate men to act in dramatic and violent ways is somehow difficult to discuss.

Further, because toleration of speech — even speech intended to provoke the worst sorts of violence against the most valuable classes of human tax cattle — is seen as sacrosanct, it’s difficult for the Western governments to take a hard line on suppressing the free flow of information that’s useful to provoke more spectacular attacks against civilians.

Suicide bombers are the real job creators

Terrorism is fundamentally good for the business of the Western states, which is to extract value from the productive citizens and to provide a sense of safety and security for everyone in equal measure.

Terrorist attacks kill an expendable part of the population in a flashy and even entertaining way. It gives even people unaccustomed to a sense of victimhood the chance to participate in candlelight vigils, to get outside for a good cry, and to buy memorial floral arrangements.

This is good for public morale, because the modern value system places the victim above everyone else. The funny Justin Trudeau quote “If you kill your enemies, they win” has substantial truth value to it when viewed from the progressive point of view.

By celebrating victims instead of warriors — which has been widely portrayed as a moral advance from the real barbarism of World War II — we welcome this as a sign of our moral progress.

‘Winning’ in the sense of post-1945 humanist morality is not the same as that of a military victory in which the other side is vanquished and needs to surrender territory. ‘Winning’ is seen in the spiritual sense of being the most put-upon victim, the weakest and most helpless one, in need of protection.

In this way of seeing things, the more bombings that happen, the greater the moral elevation of both the martyrs and the population which mourns those martyrs.

The worst thing in this view would be to accomplish a lasting victory over the state sponsors of terrorism; which is of course difficult because the primary state sponsors of terrorism are the Western nations that funnel so much money, arms, and training to allies like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.

It’s no longer even a conspiracy theory to point out that Saudi Arabian high officials were directly connected to the 9/11/2001 attacks in New York City: it’s common knowledge reported from declassified papers in even that newspaper that everyone gets at the doorstop of their room at the Holiday Inn.

Jack Bauer the social worker

Terrorism creates endless opportunities for the state to create counter-terror make-work. By importing aggressive foreigners from a religion with a millennia-long record of successful conquest through well-understood means, new jobs are created.

There are new jobs for social workers, interpreters, spies (both domestic and foreign), arms manufacturers, spy software developers, translators, security people, the rest of the military-industrial complex, and more. Police can be provided with ample overtime pay to ‘keep the country safe’ even if their primary job is just to clean up the viscera after a particularly messy concert or nightclub event.

When these workers are too effective at their jobs, their workloads can just be increased by importing more of the problem population. When the domestic people get tired of the foreign war TV shows, they can change the scene of the programming to something which is better localized for Western tastes.

They cancelled the Iraq war TV show because the victims just weren’t all that interesting or identifiable. This changes when it’s someone who could be your neighbor. Suddenly, the show becomes relevant, emotionally engaging, and interesting. It becomes a great source of inventory for ads selling hemorrhoid cream, life insurance, and estate planning legal services.

Even better, a combination of trade agreements and environmental policy can ensure that the sources of terrorist funding in Riyadh, Mecca, Raqqa, and Islamabad can continue to support the entire cycle. This creates something like the famous Keynsian multiplier effect; rarely seen in other situations but real enough in this case.

Immigrants to Western countries who live the dream are even better contributors to this because they make for deeper pocketed donors and can help fighters to integrate into Western countries long enough to pull off attacks that make for good TV.

Every dollar sent to the Arabs in return for their primary export instead of invested in, say, breeder reactors (radiation is bad; we prefer clean power that doesn’t actually work), goes towards creating even greater levels of spending maintaining the territorial security of our Middle Eastern allies. This virtuous cycle of martyrdom is full of satisfaction for everyone involved except for all those mangled, dismembered, mutilated, tortured, and scarred civilians.

To end terrorism, choose to be terrible and terrifying

Terrorists are excellent job creators, but what the Western lands need are job destroyers: the people who are willing to sacrifice in order to destroy (in the sense that Troy was destroyed) the countries that are causing the problem. This is not something that the post-war West is going to do, in large part because they no longer believe in anything other than the sublime virtue of suffering repeated defeats.

The answer to terrorist attacks is not to double down on weeping. Nor is it to go on another adventure to teach Afghan girls how to do math. It is to engage in what would probably be a nuclear exchange between the primary sponsors of terrorism.

I know what you’re thinking.

Wow, what an irresponsible suggestion! How could you say such a thing? Millions of dead people! Nuclear winter! Genocide!

It is irresponsible because no one will really listen to this advice and I’m not even a dog catcher, much less someone with national political influence or authority. I float the idea free of anything resembling public responsibility.

However, it is the only answer that doesn’t delve into either fantasy or just escalating the problem. We live in a world in which the power of nuclear weapons defines relations between states.

The primary way that Islamic states with nuclear weapons (which includes Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) advance their interests is through covert action against their strategic ‘frenemies,’ which is everyone that’s not Islamic. That is the easy, Cliff Notes way of understanding the basic stance of Muslim states versus non-Muslim ones.

This creates some profound challenges that no one in public life has really been willing to address because to do so involves making so many unpopular statements which fly against what has become common knowledge among the bureaucrat-people who have floated up to rule the world since 1945.

Like, what do you do when your nuclear-armed rival keeps sending proxies to blow up your citizens?

What do you do when they do it occasionally?

How do you respond when they do it… once a week?

Every day?

How do you respond?

How do you respond even when the evidence of the connection reaches the public view from sources that can’t be denied?

Convert to our stupid religion and we’ll throw in a free subscription to HBO GO.

The way that Western leaders have responded is by capitulating repeatedly, despite superiority in every conceivable field except that of faith. There is a reason why evolution appears to select for fanatically religious people under conditions of extreme competition and scarcity; why the religious wound up conquering the globe, and why even the purportedly anti-religious sects tend to resemble religions in their beliefs and behaviors.

The muddled view of Westerners has been to decide to aggressively evangelize the world to adhere to the progressive faith.

We see examples of these evangelism efforts with the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls hashtag human rights campaign. The intention was to somehow effect the liberation of 276 abducted Christian Nigerian girls through some combination of fundraising and good intentions.

This fundraising did not go towards raising a company of mercenaries to kill their captors either to accomplish a hostage rescue or to dissuade similar slave raids. It instead went towards media creation, event hosting, and petition circulation. The ‘impact’ on the media was great enough to encourage countless celebrities and political figures to participate.

However, it was not enough to inspire anyone to go to battle to kill the enemy and seize his lands; not even from private companies.

If the campaign can be said to have been a success, it eventually resulted in a $195 million aid package to ‘support the victims’ of Boko Haram, the paramilitary group responsible for the abductions. This is itself an example of counter-terrorist pork. If anything, it encourages the recipient governments to encourage and abet more abductions, because it means an enormous payday in terms of both cash and valuable military equipment.

Were it conditional on the success, the program would only release funds upon the successful defeat of the organization and the scourging of the tribes that supported it. Or there would be no stupid program at all, nor any pretense to care about the victims.

Perhaps the more significant (and even darkly amusing) issue is that slave raids are now common enough in England that the government bothered to produce a report about it which claimed that the practice was pervasive throughout Northern Europe. It’s not so much that Westerners can’t be roused to action on behalf of foreigners in distant lands — they can’t even be roused to battle in defense of local girls.

To even begin to attempt to rouse people against it is to provoke the wrath of the authorities.

Certainly, westerners care much more about fictional slavers in costume drama movies than they care about actual slavers in their own countries.

Moral outrage against fictional characters is easy, safe, and doesn’t involve having to kill anyone to rectify the injustice.

Stop bombing us, but if you want to, that’s, like, whatever, man

Instead of recognizing that the world is made up of powers with irreconcilable interests and conflicting cultures, progressives (which includes the entire American political spectrum) prefer to believe that they already enjoy the sort of dominance that they have in their own territories worldwide.

If foreigners don’t realize that they really want to be progressives deep-down, if we spend enough money on foreign aid, capitulate to shakedowns from foreign powers, and show an unwillingness to use nuclear weapons, they will eventually learn to become more progressive.

One way to convert more people to the progressive cause, it’s thought, is to respond to provocations with greater and ever-more-insistent demands to be tolerant, even of groups that are not at all tolerant of the ordered liberty which distinguished the ‘West’ from the ‘Rest’ and lead to its runaway dominance after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Battle of Vienna in 1683, and after the final destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I through subversion.

Until those turning points; in part made possible by the conquest of the hemisphere that I write this from, the leadership of the West was really not secure.

These were each turning points in war that made the other advancements of Western civilization possible. Similar turning points in war could result in the loss of that leadership position. We only need to look at the sorry and disagreeable state that the rest of the world lives in to give us pause about what it means to give ground to your implacable and ancient enemies desperate for revenge.

In the meantime, terrorists are reliable job creators. And the jobs that they create are top quality, even they break some eggs on the way to making a grand halal omelette.

At the same time as the rhetoric condemning terrorism intensifies, the actions that make it easier for them to succeed intensifies.

It also helps to understand that the majority of the educated classes in the West believe that their civilization deserves to be destroyed one way or the other — that it doesn’t deserve to survive, and that even contemplating asserting that it ought to live is seen as the worst sort of evil.

There are many dumb clichés uttered about terrorism in the wake of any attack.

One of the more important ones to debunk is the notion that Islamic radicals are the people who cause problems.

The public organs often say that ‘radical clerics’ cause ‘radicalization’ or that otherwise ordinary Muslims become ‘radicalized’ after watching too many cool beheadings on Youtube and reading too many Al Qaeda PDFs.

The responsible press people want to do this to draw a distinction between peaceful, law-abiding Muslims and the types of people who detonate nail bombs next to baby carriages in airports.

This is a foolish distinction to draw.

Terrorism is a disquieting demonstration of power that synergizes well with instantaneous global communications technology. It can make people in Chicago nervous from a small explosion thousands of miles and an ocean away. The bomb isn’t just a bomb: it’s a media event.

It also generates results vastly disproportionate to the resources spent on it. A cheap bomb combined with some expendable people results in billions or even trillions of dollars of wasted expenditure on security while also serving as an effective recruiting advertisement for other political organizations.

For states, it also creates more demand for state services. It’s win-win-win all around except for the people who get blown up, the soldiers who have to fight in the wars, and to the broader society which could have used the resources in less wasteful ways.

But back to the stupidity of the distinction between the radicalized and the normal-law-abiding-tolerant types.

The greater threat is actually posed by the large populations of ordinary people who will change the overall character and political nature of the West.

Terrorists are just producers of political theater. The ordinary people are the ones you need to filter out, because not only do they provide a comfortable community that fighters can swim in, but they create a sustainable and growing ethnic faction that will cause greater political and cultural instability far into the future.

One bomber kills maybe 10 or 20 people and makes for exciting television. One mother produces somewhere between a few and a dozen new foreigners who will change the host culture in more profound ways over a longer period of time.

The terrorists are just dramatizing what’s going on over a longer period of time in an instant.

This is why the focus on terrorist plots as mysteries to be solved by genius detectives, spies, and other super sleuths is quite stupid. The plots are just plots of stories which are much less consequential than the larger reality of population replacement.

Figuring out which cleric radicalized whom and where the guns came from is stupid. Stopping the bombing with some last-second waterboarding but allowing the movement of millions of foreign people into your country is extra-stupid, as in stupider than an entire Special Olympiad stupid.

If anything, all the super-sleuthing and high-tech spying just makes the overall situation worse because it reduces how many embarrassing bombings there are, which adds to the sense of alarm among the general public.

Turning your otherwise nice country into Morocco, Iraq, Syria, or Pakistan is the great stupidity. Not catching a bomber or two is an understandable error. The problem is not the bomber, but the ordinary people with ordinary views from the country that he came from who now live in your formerly nice country.

Pacifistic liberals and libertarians (who are a subset of liberals) tend to decry America’s unique and novel campaign of drone bombing against Islamic terrorists. This method was explicitly chosen to play to America’s military strengths (air superiority against weak enemies) while minimizing exposure of the Pentagon to domestic criticism regarding civilian deaths in bombing campaigns.

Since the Vietnam War ended, America shifted from holding civilian death tolls as a strategic objective to making it one of the highest priorities to minimize civilian casualties. This flip happened around the same time that the New Left ascended into authority, deposing the older faction of more collectivist leftists.

Under the new way of thinking, when the United States goes to war, it doesn’t engage in total war, which considers foreign civilian populations as legitimate targets. It instead goes to war against individuals whom the state determines are ‘bad.’ The two Gulf wars were fought against Saddam Hussein and his military. When civilians were harmed, as they were through the trade embargoes, they were not harmed as the primary objective — they were harmed in the process of pushing Saddam the individual out of power.

The War on Terror was also conceived of as a fight against individuals with the religious motivations behind Islamic terror being considered non-material, at least under the official belief system as communicated by the public. Drone warfare — really radio-controlled rather than autonomous — was employed in conjunction with signals intercepts to go after the individuals perceived as responsible for terror attacks against Westerners. This was also supported by an ideological campaign to promote ‘moderate’ Islam which condemned rather than justifying terrorist attacks against infidels.

Most politically educated people see this program as incoherent and hypocritical for various reasons, but I don’t want to get into that in too much detail in this post.

The ethic of drone warfare holds that, for some mysterious reason, ‘radical’ (really mainstream) Muslims who are beyond the reach of propaganda will, out of sheer evil, attack Western interests to further their political goals. The ethical way to fight insurgencies and light infantry, in the American mind, is to continue killing individuals identified by intelligence intercepts until enough individuals freely decide that they should instead support a ‘moderate’ Islam — which is to say a politically and religiously neutered Islam which can cooperate with the global liberal order.

Thinking about it from a historical perspective, it’s entirely crazy. Killing individual fighters doesn’t break the will of a population to resist. It also doesn’t really punish a population for sheltering a resistance. Further, it misunderstands the nature of ideas and religious faith. Rather than an isolated criminal tendency of a ‘few bad apples,’ Islam is an aggressive religion which has warred with its neighbors for dominance for more than 1,000 years. Creating hundreds of martyrs is nothing for a culture with a history of being willing to sacrifice tens of millions of martyrs in the cause of the faith.

Rather than taking a Max Boot-style position that total war is really a good and admirable thing, we should instead consider some of the larger problems that have emerged in the conduct of war since the emergence of popular government.

Limited war was more symbolic than it was about entirely annihilating civilian populations or attempting to completely alter underlying civil societies. Up until World War I — and even during the popular Napoleonic wars with introduced the mass levee — it was possible for civilians to spectate battles safely. The conflicts may have been terrible — and sometimes spilled over into civil conflict among noncombatants — but it was one still bound by laws of warfare.

Having lost this method of resolving conflicts between elites, all wars are now, in a sense, total wars. The second Iraq war’s chief objective was to profoundly change the culture and moral beliefs of the Iraqi people, as America also attempted to do in Afghanistan. This was more ambitious even than colonialists, who only sought to command the state, while leaving civil society mostly to itself, skillfully managed by administrators. Ironically, this was more successful at inducing cultural change, as the colonized naturally sought to mimic the ways of their rulers. By imposing self-rule, the Americans encouraged the natives to, in the language of American self-help, be more true to themselves.

Comparing the Predator drone to the B-17, the B-17 was designed to destroy the enemy population, with the enemy population itself defined as a strategic target. It says “the individual is irrelevant, what matters is the destruction of the mass to break the general will.”

The drone denies the existence of a culture beyond the individual — it says “there are no bad groups, there are only bad individuals.” While the B-17 had only a primitive sight for targeting and rarely was capable of precision targeting, the drone has a high resolution camera, and advanced communication makes it possible for pilots to make highly considered decisions about whom to kill and at what time.

Radio controlled drones also give non-warrior political administrators the illusion of direct control over the conduct of war. Trying to fight a war by conducting a series of assassinations is strange, but also sort of understandable for a race of bureaucrats who want to minimize danger to themselves while also failing to achieve anything resembling a strategic objective.

It would, in fact, be better to achieve the strategic objectives of the “War on Terror” while minimizing fighting, but that wouldn’t create so many lucrative jobs for so many bureaucrats who are essentially pretending hard to be protecting the West from Islamic terror.

The larger problems which tend to be ignored are the ramshackle series of alliances that the US began putting together after the collapse of the European empires, and the particular imposition of the Carter Doctrine mandating that the US intervene in defense of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies. This licensed bad behavior on the part of those monarchies, and the maintenance of that clueless alliance has also lead to the West’s absurdly accommodating immigration policies for fear of giving offense to the non-colonies that we guarantee defense to. America bears the costs of running Gulf colonies — providing them with guarantees of defense — without having the sanity to demand the traditional powers of colonizers. This included the expropriation of American assets in those countries, doubling down on the insults.

Whenever this arrangement comes to be threatened, American talking heads will tend to whinge about the ‘economic benefits’ of the enabling alliance, or appeals to vague notions of ‘regional stability.’

This enabling regime also prevents other countries from effectively defending themselves when attacked by Saudi-inspired-and-financed fanatics. They can operate with virtual impunity (at least collectively if not individually), with the only way for states or groups of people to respond are ineffectual complaints, frequently suppressed by states.

These places grew rich thanks to the American guarantee of security and technical assistance provided, besides.

This pattern is as common to the approach of popular government to foreign relations as it is to domestic policy.

The US gives these countries a guaranteed alliance, goes to war at public expense on the behalf of those states, and demands little other than the maintenance of the petrodollar system to buttress its top position on the international financial stage. This is at least the surface justification — America could also just try pursuing a sounder monetary policy than other countries rather than relying on an insane and frequently malfunctioning Rube Goldberg apparatus to prop up its financial system.

Drone warfare is sensationalized propaganda that encourages people and elites alike to focus on small, non-essential issues while ignoring the larger picture. The larger issue is the special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, and the feckless management of it by America’s itinerant political managers and permanent bureaucrats alike. When that alliance should have broken down catastrophically in 2001, it was instead reinforced multiple times over.

In all this the drone is an excellent symbol of the way the people in today’s government tend to think and what they focus on. It’s also fascinating to see how a weapon developed to flatter the sensibilities of the New Left managed to also come under severe criticism by those same people as inhumane implements used against merely misguided people who are probably really hippies on the inside. The defenders of this method of fighting also themselves minimize the larger picture of what’s going on, because it’s too complex and requires too much background knowledge to fit into a short segment on a shouting-head TV show.