I haven’t posted on here for a while. I have been intensively learning French, and it is incredible what a few weeks of unplugging from Trotskyist bullshit can do for your mental health. Given the fact that it is the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is today, I thought I may as well give my thoughts on this horrific event in history, and its relationship with the toxic politics of the far-left and their Islamist allies.
I was only two years old when 9/11 happened, so I have no memory of it. I did grow up aware of the War on Terror, but only in my adolescence did I come to have a greater understanding of 9/11 and the role it has played in world history. It took me a while to develop any sort of guiding political worldview that could help me make sense of these events, and to some degree this is still a work in progress. For most of my adolescence, I would say that I was a pretty staunch conservative. Before being brainwashed by the IMT, I was convinced that the West, for all its flaws, was in the right, and that it was defending itself from Islamofascist barbarism. My disgust with much of the left stemmed from their open sympathy and support for Islamic terrorism, and their knee-jerk defences of the Muslim religion whenever it faced the slightest criticism or scrutiny. Anyone who expressed any criticism whatsoever of Islamic extremism was fanning the flames of ‘Islamophobia’. (Let us ignore the fact that the main victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims.) Jeremy Corbyn is one of the people on the far-left who has made a career out of sympathising with Islamic terrorism. Another is the disgusting George Galloway, whom Christopher Hitchens destroyed in their famous debate back in 2005. No sooner had 9/11 happened than leftist commentators like Gore Vidal and Seumas Milne came out with the most disgusting bilge about how America somehow ‘deserved’ these attacks for daring to be a powerful, self-confident, prosperous liberal democracy, and conducting an ‘imperialist’ foreign policy. This disgraceful rhetoric was amplified by the ‘anti-war movement’ (which was actually pro-war, but on the other side).
My experience in school, where my teachers were your run-of-the-mill left-liberals who mouthed platitudes about ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’, were hardly the kind of people best placed to unequivocally defend the Western way of life from the people who wanted to destroy it. Nor did my largely apolitical and left-leaning peers seem particularly exercised about it. By the time I was in Sixth Form, I thought of myself as a neoconservative of some kind.
Of course shortly after this I was ruined by Wilde and Marx and ended up in the cult. But even after I became a Trotskyist, I still clung to some of my old views. I still believed that Western civilisation was superior, even though I had come to reject the capitalist system. I thought that socialism would revitalise the West as well as the entire world. I thought of myself as a proletarian revolutionary, but also as a proud Westerner, European and Briton. I had no patience for the pro-Islamist left, and liked the IMT’s tough line against Islamism (something distinguishing it from the SWP). I was still never entirely comfortable with the idea, pervasive on the far-left, that Islamic terrorism is largely a product of capitalism, or a response to capitalist oppression. Indeed, the IMT’s articles about Islamist terrorist attacks invariably have a few lines condemning the attack, with the rest of the article being an attack on capitalism, the bourgeois state and scaremongering about ‘Islamophobia’. The far-left is congenitally incapable of accepting that Islamist ideology has a power in and of itself. Even when it is condemned, it is condemned as a product of capitalist oppression. Supposedly, socialism would eliminate the ‘material conditions’ that drive people to religious extremism. Let us ignore the fact that Bin Laden was from a wealthy millionaire family, and that so many Muslim terrorists in the West have been educated, middle-class professionals who had so much to live for, and could hardly be described as ‘oppressed’. Of course, when I was in the cult, I suppressed these doubts.
There are still so many preposterous myths about the War on Terror that poison political discourse to this day. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job is so idiotic it does not need to be refuted. The war in Afghanistan, costly as it was, was absolutely justified and succeeded in achieving its goals – the killing of thousands of terrorist scum, stopping another attack on the same scale as 9/11, providing us with invaluable intelligence about the inner workings of global Islamism, and so much more. The Iraq War is more controversial. Whilst Bush and Blair can rightly be condemned for their dishonesty, misuse of intelligence and failure to properly plan for the governance of the country in a post-Saddam era, there was a case for removing Saddam. Whether he had nukes or not, the man was a menace to the whole region and to the civilised world. He may have gotten rid of his WMDs in the 1990s, but he had plans to restart his weapons programme once the sanctions had been lifted. Had he not been deposed, Iraq may now have WMDs. Had he died, one of his sons, more monstrous than even him, would have taken over. Far from being a force for ‘stability’, Iraq would have witnessed another Arab Spring uprising, like its neighbour Syria, and been plunged into chaos far surpassing anything we are seeing in the former. As bad as Iraq might be, it is doing much better than Syria. Far from being a bulwark against Islamism, Saddam unwittingly encouraged the growth of Islamism with his ‘Return to Faith’ campaign in the 1990s, and found it increasingly difficult to control some of the groups that emerged out of this. Granted, Saddam himself was not a sincere Islamist, but he was not above using Islamist rhetoric cynically to hold onto power, much like the ‘secular’ Assad dynasty in Syria is propped up in sectarian fashion by the Alawite minority. An added benefit of deposing Saddam was that Gaddafi of Libya was intimidated into giving up his WMDs, and Syria was forced to withdraw from Lebanon. Tyrants across the region were traumatised by the fate of Saddam.
Had Saddam’s regime been toppled as the result of an internal civil war or revolution, without a Western invasion, the sectarian violence we saw throughout the 2000s would have occurred on an even worse scale, with no American troops to minimise the carnage. Assuming Iraq succeeded in developing WMDs by then, we would have the spectre of groups like ISIS with WMDs. The idea that without an invasion, the regime would have remained in power indefinitely, is nonsense. In such a scenario, Iran would have gained even more influence in the country than it has now. Had Obama not foolishly withdrawn all the troops, the country would not have collapsed back into chaos within a couple of years, and with that the rise of ISIS. Many former Baathists and Saddam loyalists are known to have joined ISIS. Whether this is out of sincere conviction as a result of the turn towards Islamism towards the end of Saddam’s rule, or whether this is an alliance of convenience against a common enemy, is unclear. However, it is clear that something like ISIS would have emerged even had the Iraq War never happened. Saddam’s weak regime would have found it more and more difficult to suppress such groups.
It might be said that the ‘over-reaction’ to the Islamist threat has actually made it worse, and that the left are right in their criticisms of it. I disagree. Yes, it is true that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan encouraged a lot of people to join al-Qaeda and similar groups in the name of fighting the infidel. Any reaction, even a small-scale one, would probably have encouraged such sentiments. It is also true that the concentration of so many jihadist loons in Iraq gave us a wonderful opportunity to kill them in their thousands. The kind of person who would become a terrorist in response to America defending itself from terrorism was probably always going to end up a radicalised jihadist. When the Allies went to war with Nazi Germany, that galvanised many Germans and sympathetic foreign collaborators to join the German army and fight for Hitler. Should we then scold Churchill for ‘creating more Nazis’? Of course not, that is nonsense. When millions of people in the Middle East have been and are being bombarded, day in and day out, decade after decade, with anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Semitic and Islamist propaganda via television, radio and sermons and books from their religious clerics and scholars, it is a wonder there aren’t even more terrorists out there. The region is in a sorry state, and this cannot simply be blamed on the West, but on long-standing cultural issues in this part of the world. Still, I am optimistic that things can change, and that Muslim countries can build stable, functioning liberal democracies. Pessimism is not an option. We either succeed in helping the Middle East find its way, or we exist in a state of perpetual war and mistrust, waiting for the next great cataclysm, which might bring about WWIII and the possible destruction of the planet. This is simply not sustainable.
The War on Terror has made gains. Islamism remains a threat, but not like it was in 2001. We should not be complacent, and the shameful surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban by the Biden administration, in the name of appeasing domestic isolationists on the far-left and far-right, should be condemned as one of the most criminal acts ever committed by an American administration. For all that, we have inflicted crippling blows on the Islamist movement and its terrorist infrastructure. We must now gear up for the really big threat, which is not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but Islamist Iran, and its empire of evil, which sows chaos and terror throughout the Middle East. We must back Israel to the hilt. It is probably too late to intervene against Assad, but he should be denied recognition of any sort. We should strongly support Iraq in order to stave off the influence of Iran. We should continue supporting the campaign to crush the Houthis in Yemen. We must do all we can to isolate this rogue state, until the heroic Iranian people throw off the chains of theocracy and restore their country to its rightful place among civilised nations.
Why do the far-left constantly defend and apologise for Islamofascism? It seems to me that this is just another example of horseshoe theory in action. Perhaps there is the fact that they both hate Western liberal democracy, that they are both totalitarian movements that despise political pluralism and dream of creating a monolithic, homogenous community in which there is a ‘unity of interests’, and that they are both populist movements which oppose themselves to wealthy, powerful elites. For such people, Osama bin Laden can easily be made into a sort of freedom fighter, resisting Western oppression. Islamism is just the latest incarnation of ‘anti-colonialism’. Was it not Foucault who hailed the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as striking a blow against the bourgeois order he hated so much? One also sees a similar phenomenon with some right-wing isolationists – ‘paleocons’ and ‘tradcons’, who admire the Taliban for being religious extremists and wish they could institute a similar theocracy at home, with its restrictions on women’s rights, its hostility to foreigners, its militancy combined with asceticism, its fetishisation of backwardness and contempt for material progress as defined by the rest of the world. The Western far-left and far-right thus join hands in alliance with the Islamist fundamentalists in the Middle East, part of a reactionary alliance dedicated to sweeping away the hated liberal order. Suddenly, liberal democracy, for all its flaws, doesn’t seem so bad, compared to the prospect of being governed by these cranks.