Where the Black Flags Fly
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Media conveys immediacy, but it doesn't convey
culture. Its famous flattening effect makes shoppers
at a Staples in D.C. or a Whole Foods in Berkeley
feel like they're right among the toppled buildings
of Aleppo or Gaza, without actually giving them any
insight into the motivations of the players.
They're watching foreign movies in a language
that they don't understand and attributing their own
motivations to the main characters. They assume that
the differences are incidental, but if the
differences really were incidental, America would
look a lot more like Iraq.
It's been a while since Westerners lived in a
society in which human life was truly worthless, in
which no one trusted anyone else and it was easier
to kill than not to kill.
Outside of a few urban centers in the Middle East
where the elites start the revolutions that end up
stringing them from the gallows, life is cheap and
worthless. Men kill their wives and daughters over
petty suspicions. Clans murder each other in vicious
brawls. Wedding celebrations begin with firing guns
into the air and end with bodies on the ground.
Everything is worth more than people. A camel has
value. A pickup truck has value. A smartphone has
value. All these things are hard to make.
People are easy to make.
The birth rates are high. Everywhere there are too
many people. Too many sons to inherit. Too many
daughters to marry off.
The UN and a whole bunch of international
organizations slop in enough aid to keep hunger and
disease away, but not enough to make life livable or
worthwhile. The wealthy have satellite dishes on
which they watch American reality shows and Turkish
soaps. The poor kidnap them and hold them for
ransom. It's not just life in the Middle East. It's
the whole Third World experience.
About the only reliable source of wealth comes out
of the ground and the countries that have it are
usually too lazy to get it themselves. That's what
the armies of Western engineers are for. They don't
build their own skyscrapers with the oil money.
That's what the disposable Asian workers are for.
Killing is the easiest solution to most problems.
Men kill over honor. Women kill themselves out of
desperation. Children grow up torturing animals.
Clerics settle religious questions with murder. It's
just easier that way.
Theological debates are complicated and impossible
to settle, but fly the black flags, seize a village,
kill the men and force the women to convert to the
true faith of the machine gun and the sword and the
debate is over.
ISIS is how Islam has been settling questions of
theology since the 7th century. Why stop now just
because you can order takeout from your smartphone?
Westerners are innately fascinated by new
technology. For the Middle East, technology is a
tool for settling medieval disputes. Twitter is just
a way of showing off your latest crop of severed
heads. The pickup truck substitutes for a camel.
Politicians settle political debates with more
murders. Elections are complicated. Democracy is
messy. It's easier for a colonel to take everyone
out back and shoot them. And then spend the next
twenty years building palaces with his people's
wealth. And the people mostly like it that way too.
The question isn't why should they kill, it's why
should they stop? The peace proposals never get
anywhere. If you reward violence with concessions,
there's no reason for it to ever stop. And if you
don't, what else is there to do?
When life is worthless, everyone has a gun and a
grudge, it's easier to kill than not to kill. You
can see that phenomenon as readily in Chicago as in
Iraq. Why not shoot the guy next door because he
owes you money, because your daughter looked at him
twice, because he's on your turf or because he's a
Kurd.
Or because it's Thursday.
Under crowded conditions, life is cheap but honor is
expensive. Fights start over the pettiest things and
escalate into relentless violence. You can see it in
Yemen or in Ferguson. Everyone is just waiting for
an excuse to be angry about something and to take it
out on someone else.
The Western Urbanites who helicopter parent their
2.5 children into a Prozac prescription and lament
their disposable society don't understand what a
truly disposable society looks like even though they
probably live less than a mile away from one of
those.
In a disposable society, people have no value.
Children have no value. Human labor has no value. If
you want something done, you force someone to do it.
If you can't have your own slaves, you can control
an extended family. You don't think in terms of what
it costs to make something. The only cost that
matters is the cost of imports. Everything else is
inhumanely cheap.
Emotional reactions always trump rational ones.
Everyone feels put upon and slighted from the
biggest prince to the lowliest laborer. Everyone is
filled with resentments that they channel through
the Koran and the mad preachings of Islamic clerics
promising holy wars and blaming everything on the
CIA, the Freemasons and the Jews.
When it gets hot enough, the killings begin and they
usually don't stop until the weather cools down. The
black flags fly. The yellow flags fly. The green
flags fly. And you can either play the game or get
beheaded on the evening news.
Maybe both.
There's no morality out here. The men are careful
not to look at a donkey or a woman while praying to
Allah. But they have no sense of ethics. They will
casually kill, steal, rape, break oaths and a commit
a hundred other crimes before breakfast.
If you're not a member of their family, you're fair
game. If you are, you had better know your place and
help with the stealing, kidnapping and assorted
economic empowerment projects.
Killing is easy. Self-control is hard. If there's
no accountability, no local bigshot that wants
infidel tourists and their dollars and will make the
killer's family suffer, then he has no reason not to
beat you, steal from you or drag you into a home in
some slum somewhere and wait for the fabled wealthy
infidels to pay him a king's ransom.
If not he always cut off your head to raise the
price on the next one.
His life is cheap, but yours is even cheaper.
It's best to understand that we are not dealing with
a moral code that looks anything like our own. The
nastier qualities of human nature, deceit, violence
and greed, are practically virtues. Especially if
they are directed at the right targets.
There's a reason that Islam was born here. There's a
reason that it still thrives here largely in its
unaltered form. There is no civilization where the
black flags fly.