ON ISIS, PACIFISM AND REMAINING HUMAN
In 1937 when he was fighting on the Aragon front for the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War George Orwell had a Nationalist soldier in
his sights. However the man had just visited the latrine and was in the process
of hitching up his pants, this small detail made a difference to Orwell and he
did not pull the trigger. Was Orwell right? For the man who survived as a
result of Orwell’s decision may have been a hardened fascist responsible for
some atrocity against Republican prisoners, he may have gone on to kill some of
Orwell’s own comrades. Yet I suspect that many will sympathise with Orwell’s
decision. What it provides is a cameo, a little glimpse of humanity amidst the
hideous barbarism of war.
Later during the Second World War Orwell was cheered by the
news of the sinking of a German U boat, he then went on to reflect that he has
been made happy by the deaths of several dozen healthy young men. Amongst the
multitude crimes of war is the fact that it coarsens human sensibility, we grow
indifferent to the suffering or death of ‘the enemy.’
I thought of Orwell’s dilemma recently when reading the
following extract from a social media account made late on November 18 by an IS
militant known as Adam al-Almani. [Almani was/possibly still is, fighting
inside the Syrian border town of Kobane].
"Brothers and
sisters, I will try to be brief, for you this will be just a text, but for us
they are fully experienced feelings, you read this on the screen, and we are
going through this in real life, you get tired after 10 minutes of
praying...but we do not rest, you're all comfortable in a soft bed, and we are
anxious under a rain of missiles.
"You will not
understand the feeling when the sky is torn up from drones, and the earth is
bursting from what is falling on it.
"You do not
understand the feeling when you lie, hoping to sleep an hour before your next
turn guarding the front, and there are bombs falling and fragments of the
ceiling drop on you, when you do not know which of the walls will fall on you
in the next few minutes, or even worse, the roof.
"When brothers
are killed in front of you, yes, yes, we have seen all that in the movies, but
few have experienced it, when you know there is no turning back, that hell is
behind you and ahead of you are trials."[1]
When reading this it is important to remember that the
writer is fighting for just about the most evil outfit we have seen since the
demise of Pol Pot, an organisation responsible for countless crimes against
humanity, that seeks to enslave or slaughter non-Muslims and to reduce women to
the status of chattels. This fighter is equivalent to a member of the Waffen
SS. Yet momentarily in this text we see him as a human being.
 |
| ISIS Mass Murder of Prisoners. |
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that he and his like need to
be defeated absolutely and that the only way to secure this will be to kill as
many of IS as is possible, including our Jihadi friend above. The alternative
does not bear thinking about.
So this leaves me a ‘civilised’ man, sitting in a
comfortable West London apartment, cheering the deaths of young men, with the
added dimension of not having anything to do with the actual killing. This is a pretty
disgusting picture and yet to my mind there is no alternative, pacifism just
will not do. The idea that outfits like IS or the Nazi’s can be defeated by nonviolence
is risible. The kind of tactics employed by Ghandi or Martin Luther King can
only be deployed when your opponents have some scruples, the threshold of what
they are capable of may be higher, but there are some things they will not do. Thus
the Amritsar massacre was a crime against humanity and the subsequent enquiry
represented a whitewash, however there was an outcry and a fierce debate in
parliament. There would be no more Amritsar’s.[2]
It is redundant to point out that no such soul searching
will take place in IS as its Jihadi sadists behead rape and loot their way across
Iraq and Syria. What will stop them is bombs and bullets.
This is why I remain unmoved, sometimes even quietly satisfied,
by the deaths of young men, particular fellow British citizens, fighting for
Islamic State. For consider the position of the British Jihadi, he leaves a free
and open country which has educated and protected him to go and impose a
totalitarian ideology on the citizens of a country of which he knows little; to
enslave women and murder those who resist his pernicious ideas, men and women
who can but only dream of some of the opportunities gifted him. When he is
killed by a US bomb outside Kobane there is one less Jihadi to worry about. It
is also why I am so very grateful that there are so many young men and women
with the courage to do the killing and stand up against the evil of IS in
defence of civilised values.
As I say, this is not a pretty picture, it’s an ugly, even
grotesque one, providing little room for sensitivity. I am very conscious of
the coarsening effect of being an armchair propagandist and flag waver, and
sometimes feel I cross the line. After such moments I think of Orwell and his
decision, not necessarily the right one, but human in the midst of barbarity. If
we allow are enemies to rob us of this humanity we offer up to them the most
significant victory of all, we have become like them.
