Following the Vice documentary on life under the Islamic State, lots of questions are being asked regarding the propaganda being put out by the servants of Caliph Ibrahim, particularly since it is considered some of the most sophisticated promotion of radical Islamism ever seen. I want to talk about how neoreaction may be better placed to understand the recent propaganda campaigns since it is generally more aware of the divide which lies between the progressive mindset (in both its left and ostensibly right wing manifestations) and, well, pretty much everyone else in the world. Specifically, this awareness gives us clarity in understanding what failures in the American adventure have led to the collapse of stability in Iraq and the power vacuum which the Islamic State has risen to fill.
Progressives are skilled in outrage. The Islamic State is creating a society which any civilized person will find much in to be outraged about. Worse yet, they are indoctrinating children into the beliefs which spur those actions. However, we must go beyond outrage if we are to ask how exactly the Caliphate manages to attract so many people with its message. Below is the part of the Vice documentary which deals with this appeal to youth and I recommend you watch it before reading on.
Two seemingly contradictory narratives have been playing out in our media. The first is that the Islamic State is attempting to return to a barbaric, medieval way of life unfit for the 21st century. The second is that the Islamic State has harnessed social media and technology in its outreach in extremely sophisticated ways, indicating outside funding as well as experience and familiarity with the latest technology. One need only look at the numerous Islamic State affiliated accounts on twitter (which will not be linked here), not to mention the fact that the group deemed it fitting that the Caliphate be announced via hashtag (#CaliphateRestored). But the fact is, these narratives seem directly opposed to each other. How can a group so bent on barbarism also be so skilled with media technology? How can they maintain such an effective online presence? How can they be so…hip? I’d like to suggest that the modern Western mindset is incapable of comprehending Islamic State propaganda, much less effectively countering it on a cultural level, precisely because the modern Western mindset is trapped in a framework of social progress which forbids imagining any future but the one it seeks to impose on the world.
The first thing which caught me while watching the Vice documentary is the sheer strangeness of the opening scenes. Laughing children going swimming? Men with their sons and daughters? This is quite removed from the scenes of bearded, machine gun wielding fanatics which most people associate with the name of the Islamic State. If you ignore the fact that the children are bragging about killing infidels and apostates when they’re all grown up, it’s almost charming. Later in the video we see the Caliphate celebration in Raqqa, Syria. Once again, it’s striking to see how much of the audience is young. Teenagers and young adults sit while a fighter talks about how he, like many, traveled from Europe to fight for the Caliphate.
“I notice that only children say hello to us, and they send us kisses from far away. When old people look at us with a frightened look. They don’t know that we are the best people on the planet! After the prophets come the Mujaheedin!”
This striking appeal sums up the contradiction between the Islamic State’s message and the Western interpretation of it. Western media talks about the Islamic State as returning to fundamentalist barbarism. The Islamic State, however, views itself as establishing not only a new age of Islamic purity, but as waging a war for the future. As far as its fighters are convinced, losing the war means that Western hegemony will lead to the effective apostasy of traditionally Muslim lands. The youth will become increasingly irreligious and reject spiritual values. This was already seen during the 20th century when secular ideologies like Arab nationalism and socialism drove many intellectuals to abandon Islam for Social Progress.
To the progressive mindset, the idea that one could actually look at the modern, progressive world and answer “no thanks” is unthinkable. To do so doesn’t just you beyond the pale of civilization; it can only mean that you are not really part of the 21st century. The problem with that is, of course, that it is the 21st century and the Islamic State is just as real as the most progressive and post-religious subcultures of the Western metropolises. The neoreactionary, however, is better equipped to deal with this phenomenon. The vision of the Islamic State – modern technology and science informed by radical Islamic values – is essentially an archeofuturist one. It has been refocusing its propaganda to promote not just war and struggle, but also a softer message depicting daily life in the Caliphate. Those living in the Islamic State laugh and play and go swimming, just like we do. However, they also adhere to a creed which demands that its values be spread to the whole world. That’s what makes them different from us, right?
Well, what exactly is the Western ideal? What constitutes Social Progress? What makes us good and them evil? To begin, the Islamic State kills people who disagree with them. We don’t do that! Well, except extremists, but they’re the bad guys, even if it does result in the occasional innocent wedding becoming a massacre. But that’s different. The Islamic State crucifies innocent people, whereas we are civilized and kill them with drones while sipping coffee somewhere far away. And there’s that funding of insurgent movements in countries we don’t like, but politics is politics. Oh yeah, and we do promote democracy in stable countries too, but shouldn’t we help freedom-seeking people become free? Unless of course they’re in Crimea, but that’s because Ukraine is modern and progressive whereas Russia is autocratic and backward and horribly traditional in its Christianity.
Oh alright, fine. So maybe we do promote our own set of values in the world and yeah, sometimes you gotta break some eggs to make a suitably 21st century omelet. But again, that’s different! The Islamic State is a theocracy! It kills people because they disagree with what they think God told them women should wear! It’s based on a religion! Our values are about freedom, democracy, and progress. That’s obviously good. And we value rational thought when we create those values, not claims that God talked to us in a cave!
What say you, Monsieur Moldbug?
Suppose you have two faiths. Both claim to be absolutely and undebatably true. Faith A tells you it is an ineluctable consequence of reason. Faith B tells you it is the literal word of God. Which is more likely to be accurate?
The answer is that you have no information at all. Perhaps faith B is the literal word of God, but you have no way to distinguish it from something that someone just made up. Perhaps faith A can be derived from pure reason, but you have no way to know if the derivation is accurate unless you work through it yourself. In which case, why do you need faith A?
In fact, of the two, faith A is almost certainly more powerful and dangerous. As anyone who’s majored in Marxist-Leninist Studies knows, it’s very easy to construct an edifice of pseudo-reason so vast and daunting that working through it is quite impractical. And this edifice is much more free to contradict common sense – in fact, it has an incentive to do so, because nonsensical results are especially subtle and hard to follow.
Whereas when the word of God contradicts common sense, the idea that it might not actually be the word of God isn’t too hard to come by. In other words, if faith A contains any fallacies, they are effectively camouflaged, whereas the “and God says” steps in faith B’s syllogisms are clearly marked and brightly colored, and faith B pays a price in skepticism if God’s opinion is obviously at variance with physical reality.
Now, don’t take more from this than is necessary. Obviously one shouldn’t prize the unthinking acceptance of claims to revelation over rational grounds for ones’ values. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the vast “rational” foundation of Western values has such a hydra of premises, some true, some false, many conflicting with and contradicting each other, that we cannot even begin to outline what our value system is. We ought to be free, equal, and ruled by justice. But is this the freedom linked to property upheld by Locke and Jefferson? Or the equality and justice instilled at the point of the State’s tax collectors, regulators, and hate-speech censors believed in by the modern progressive? The leviathan of alternative meanings attached to these three words has served to render them useless as political rhetoric. Yet despite the absence of any meaning behind these words we are confident enough to believe that we must impose them the whole world over. As the drift toward increasingly progressive norms picks up, we even see fit to damn countries like Russia for having the same opinions on marriage that we ourselves shared from millennia past up until the last couple of decades.
The neoreactionary understands the potential for blood and suffering inherent in any universalist system of values. The Islamic State tortures, crucifies, and kills innocent people, many of them fellow Sunni Muslims, many of them children, in order to implement its system of rule. It does so in a vacuum of power left by the United States, which operated under an alternative universalist ideology in which the suffering caused by war and the bodies of children who simply happened to be at the wrong wedding are justified so long as every country and people are brought under the banner of Freedom, Democracy, and Progress…whether they want it or not. The neoreactionary also suspects that war will likely always be with us, that it is sometimes justified and tragically necessary, and that in this particular situation more will die before order is restored. That said, one cannot help but feel a bitter sense of irony when it seems that the path to defeating the Islamic State may be to back the very people so many died to overthrow. War might sometimes be necessary, but a useless war born of hubris is nothing short of an abomination.
The Islamic State in all likelihood cannot surrender. It has spilled too much blood, it has made too many promises to too many zealots and radicals. The core of its being is a mission of holy war to extend its borders until they encompass the entire globe and the black flag flies over every city in the world. As I write this, His Holiness Pope Francis hasendorsed the use of force against the Islamic State in accordance with the doctrine of Just War. The Arab countries seem content to let the West continue to handle things, and it is doubtful that Russia and China will jump in to share in the blame for what comes next. Aside from Assad and other players already involved in the conflict, it is only Iran, directly threatened by the Islamic State, which has recently intervened. It seems that it will fall to the Western powers to once again play a defining role in the region’s future, whether by action or inaction.
After over a decade of democracy promotion following the 9/11 attacks, the idea that liberal evangelism may not be the best policy after all has hit the West square in the face. The neoreactionary understands both the religious form which these values take and their causative role in the Islamic State’s promotion of a violent path to an alternative future. To totally defeat the Islamic State means to leave it not just militarily vanquished, but robbed of support. To do this, we must recognize the simple fact that not everyone wants to be us. To offer economic and political cooperation in pursuit of peace and order in the region means accepting that we are working with a largely Sunni population which embraces traditional Islamic values. They have lived side by side with Christian, Shia, Kurdish, and Yazidi neighbours for literally centuries and most are no doubt glad to continue doing so in peace. The establishment of a Western-style democratic state in Iraq created a situation where these populations are in constant competition to capture and maintain control over the state apparatus. The neoreactionary also understands this causal relationship between liberal democracy and inter-group violence. The average liberal democrat does not.
In summary, the neoreactionary doctrine dispenses with zealous democratic fundamentalism. The numbers of dead since the American overthrow of Saddam – from war, from sectarian conflict, and now from conquest by a fundamentalist state – are far too many. How many more must die before the Western dream of a liberal, modern, progressive Iraq is finally achieved? The neoreactionary response is simple. First, dispense with democratic fundamentalism and work with other stakeholders to destroy the Islamic State, from local Sunni and tribal leaders to Assad and Iran. Second, undermine the Islamic State’s support by cooperating with Muslims rather than forcing them to choose between Westernization and fundamentalism. Third, make sure that the political institutions developed in the wake of this minimize inter-group violence. This can only be done by avoiding the use of competition for the control of centralized power as a basis for politics. The Hashemite Kingdom of old seems archaic to us, but as the New Statesman article notes, the fellow Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan still stands while Libya, Egypt, and Iraq have slipped into turmoil. Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara explicitly blames the power vacuums left by the US in the wake of removing Saddam and bin Laden as creating the perfect environment for the Islamic State to arise. The neoreactionary understanding of political institutions demands the use of resiliency to shocks and effectiveness of rule as markers of success, and it is exactly these types of institutions which Iraq (or perhaps its successor states) will have to build in order to restore peace, order, and security to the land.
If Iraq is to overcome the brutal religious fundamentalism of the Islamic State, the Western powers which, one way or another, will play a large role in determining its future must overcome their own ideological fundamentalism. Western ideas of what a free, modern, and democratic Iraq should look like are worth little when the path to their realization lies through so many rivers of blood.
You assume that IS would not have come about without Cathedral intervention and the overthrow of Saddam. This strikes me as an unfair assumption. The Saudis have been exporting Salafism to all corners of the world for decades now. Eventually the Salafists would have made a play, likely in Iraq or Syria (there’s no way Saddam’s insane sons could have held power for long). This tide was rising, and I’m glad it’s happening over there instead of in the West.