Tuesday, January 13, 2015

"Brazil," terrorism, and our future



What made me laugh when I first saw these bombing scenes in "Brazil" was that, as Gilliam notes in his narration, people just picked themselves up and went on with their lives, not even stopping to speculate about who was responsible. They didn't know or care, and, in a practical sense, to them it didn't make any difference. One had to get on with it without the ritualized outrage we now perform after every attack: the clueless statements of our leaders, the irrelevant mobilization of heavily armored vehicles and troops, the media frenzy, the memorial services, the flowers, the stuffed animals, etc.

Christopher Hitchens told us five years ago what we had to look forward to:

What nobody in authority thinks us grown-up enough to be told is this: We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims...The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military. We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don't get the point prefer to whine about "endless war"...(emphasis added)

Jihadists praise the attacks in Paris, which, you understand, had nothing to do with Islam.

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