A Window into America's Future

“I would rather die standing than live kneeling.”

— Cartoonist Stéphane Charbonnier, "Charb," who died, standing, in today's terrorists attack in Paris

"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." 

— President Barack Hussein Obama at the United Nations, 2012 

"It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf." 

 — Thomas Fuller

Let's be clear here — this morning, the Islamic terrorists won and won big. Three men — three! — with rifles and an RPG brought a major First World city to it's knees. They also unconditionally succeeded in sending a terrifying and brutal message to Western societies who cling to the quaint notion of free expression…we can get to you no matter where you live, even in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world.

The conclusion doesn't change if the French run the shooters to ground, kill them, put them on trial, whatever. They won. And they expect to die. It doesn't matter if they're "lone wolves," imported ISIS soldiers, radicalized French-born Muslims, or Major Nidal Malik Hasan on furlough. They won.

And all around the world terrorist strategists are rubbing their beards and thinking, "Hmmmmmmmm."

It is all a simple question of ROI, return on investment. For those of us who own our own businesses, for people who run any kind of enterprise, ROI is a simple formula that quite literally defines the possible. "If I spend 'X' on expanding my business, what will be the value of 'Y,' the return on the investment?" If my business is the destruction of Western culture, I've got to be aware that war isn't cheap. Secondly, wholesale slaughter is only useful if it advances my goals; for example, it works great in the Middle East, which is founded on a sort of wholesale slaughter economy. Not so great in Western democracies, where such killing tends to rally the low information voters.

But "discount slaughter," that's something else. Whether it's hacking a British soldier's head off on a busy street in London, killing a Dutch filmmaker, crashing a car into a crowd of pedestrians in Jerusalem, shattering Mumbai, or today's Paris atrocities, these type of attacks work well. In other words, the return on investment is very high...nobody has to travel to America and learn how to fly a jetliner, explosives don't have to be smuggled in, you don't have to stretch out a worldwide logistics net...all you need a good social media account, a glossy magazine and a sense that history is on your side...from Virginia Postrel, author of The Power of Glamour, on "The Glamour of Islamic State:"

Islamic State’s recruitment imagery and Internet fan posts offer a different, more contemporary and overtly violent form of glamour.Videos, magazine features and Twitter memes mirror the glamour of action movies, shooter video games and gangsta rap. They make killing look effortless, righteous and triumphant. They promise to make the jihadist feel manly and important. 

Indeed, the “intangible power” of Islamic State stems from its ability to meld common, often secular forms of martial and media glamour with a compellingly utopian version of religious faith. Conventional hometown imams often have little to offer alienated young British men longing for excitement and purpose, argued Shiraz Maher, a researcher at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, compared with “the hyper-empowering appeal of IS videos, filled with balaclava-wearing boys in smocks offering the promise of making history.”

That's ROI!

The journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo died because they satirized radical Islam. But freedom of expression, while largely absent in Islam, radical or otherwise, is one of the bedrocks of Western culture. It would be fair to say that without freedom of expression, our countries would cease to exist. The great American fantasist and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman put it best in this tweet today:

I unfortunately believe that the Paris attacks offer a window into America's future. The leader of our country has already stood before the United Nations and, with the quote beginning this post, given tacit approval to the destruction of freedom of speech (and White House shill Jay Carney told reporters in 2012, "We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this...").

Wolves don't respect weakness.

In 2002 my old friend and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette did this cartoon, for which he was sentenced to death by radical Islamists:

Hell, maybe cartoonists are the bravest of us all. Here's a link to the Mohammed cartoons.

In his post-Apoc masterpiece The Stand, Steven King wrote, “The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there...and still on your feet.”

["It's hard to be loved by idiots..."]

JE SUIS CHARLIE