I did not plan to write something like this right now, and I am still supposed to working on my next post about Satanism and all that, but something happened recently that hit somewhat close to home, and I have reflected on it, as well as the reaction and possible ramifications.
As I’m sure you know, there was a terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in which 22 people were killed, including children who have been subject to horrific injuries. It was a suicide attack carried out by a 22 year old man named Salman Abedi, and the possibility that he was operating as part of a wider terror plot rather than as a lone wolf is seriously being considered. I have two people who I work with who are from Manchester who have been talking about it yesterday, and I’m sure have contacted their relatives to see if everything is OK. As of today, the terror threat level in the UK has been raised to Critical, meaning that more terrorist attacks are expected to occur very soon. The country is putting itself on high alert, and there’s talk of troops being sent to patrol the streets as though this country has turned into fucking Israel!
And what did we do immediately following the Manchester attack? The usual. We cry, we mourn, we change our Facebook profiles and whatnot, pretend that they will not divide us, preach about diversity and inclusion, and then Muslims come out and pretend that they are the real victims, not the people that Islamic radicals blew to smithereens. Oh and don’t forget the Sadiq Khan message: terrorism is just like the weather now, “part and parcel of living in a big city”, just the bread and butter of the modern world. I can’t be the only one who’s had enough here.
Oh, and the Metropolitan Police have decided that any rabble-rousers who aren’t going on about peace and unity and all that bullshit and instead speak against Islam can be investigated for “Islamophobic hate speech”. Isn’t that just the cherry on top of the shit sundae?
Lots of terrorist attacks have happened in my day, not just in the UK but also the Western world, Europe in particular, and in my opinion too many. And every time it feels like the same cycle. For over 20 years, we in the West have tried dealing with this shit by either creating borderline police/surveillance states to diminish the civil liberties of their own people, we go to wars with Middle Eastern countries and then we try playing nice and needlessly shielding all Muslims and their shitty religion from criticism when most of us are mad at the terrorists rather than all Muslims, going so far as to discuss race where the issue does not belong (and both extremes seem to forget that Islam is not a race). None of this changes the problem. We strip away liberty, we cause destruction and then we bend over backwards to a force that wants us dead and our values defiled, all for nothing. And one someone comes up with a different solution, any at all. They are dismissed as xenophobic. The simple idea of controlled immigration is automatically deemed racist, because they believe that opposing immigration can only be based on hate. The idea that we should be tackling Islamist ideology is seen as “Islamophobic”, and racist, because people stupidly confuse Islam to be a racial group, rather than a religious one. The idea of promoting integration, promoting your own societal values and looking out for the interests of your own country is automatically, without context, denounced as fascistic, funny enough by people who don’t seem to know what actual fascism is.
And this whole spell that we should all just live with it is odious. Terrorism is treated like it’s a natural disaster, something that always has been and always will be with us. But that is madness! Terrorism isn’t something that occurs normally as part of civilized society. It is the product of the will to kill innocents on the part of violent individuals, in many cases an ideology that demands the radical and violent overthrow of a given social structure in favor of a typically authoritarian or totalitarian worldview and an array of societal ills that contribute to the growth of terrorism. You can’t just say this is a normal thing and an inevitable course of modern life that we can’t hope to solve. Sure, we will never be able to *completely* eliminate all terrorism from society at large, but to suggest that we shouldn’t even try and instead just live with it as though you would live with heavy rain and thunderstorms is not just defeatist, it’s also callous. We’ve tried carrying on as things were before, and I don’t think things are getting better. Not that such a thing ever happens when you decide to ignore a problem. And don’t give me any bullshit that this is some kind of blowback to the West, when terrorists kill lots of people in the Middle East just that no one notices, and right now the Philippines is in a state of martial law because of an Islamic terror group taking over a city in the country. What the hell did the Philippines do to deserve getting attacked by Islamists I wonder!
I think we need to come up with far better solutions than the kind we have offered for the problem, and we need to figure something out soon. Because the longer people keep seeing nothing change, and being told that nothing ought to change, eventually we’ll reach a point where they’ll say “we’re not gonna take it anymore”.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 