Ignoring The Islamic State

We can make the collective choice to turn our backs on what the Islamic State represents, but that decision must be a deliberate one made with full knowledge of the trade we are making.

The somewhat limp and always disappointing-to-me backlash against American involvement in a military action against theocratic fascists in Mesopotamia seems to me, looking at it in a generous light, to be solely driven by the desire to not continue sending our countrymen to die in the desert at the hands of people we probably wouldn't collectively be thinking or talking about if our soldiers weren't there. This is drawing an affirmative conclusion from a negative or unproved premise, namely that our soldiers being there is guaranteed to result in their death and that non-involvement will somehow insulate us from the developments in the region. It is inaccurately described as “war weariness” by our media, as if any civilian opining on military action from the comfort of 6,000 or more miles removed has the right to claim to be weary of combat. This is more of the same petulant and smug complaining from the comfortable set, weary of nothing but the intrusion of other people into their self-serving cocoons. Instead of choosing action based on well-reasoned and logical argument for non-involvement, it is a complacent and conciliatory trade we are engaged in with this growing horrorshow, just as a lifelong laborer trades wage for cartilage.

The ignorant and self-defeating proposition from the more fuzzy-minded among us would have you believe that groups such as the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda are somehow extremists, that their incredibly barbarous and backwards ideas and actions are a perversion or corruption of the horrific relic referred to unironically as a religion of peace instead of a fundamental command from their holy texts. The latter is obviously true, and denial of that fact in the name of tolerance is one of the more odious symptoms of the virus running unchecked through otherwise intelligent people who would like very much to allow for religious pluralism while simultaneously not being at war with those same religions. This proposition necessarily requires peaceful co-existence with groups of people who are told they have divine warrant for the wholesale slaughter of anyone from any other group. As you can see, this is an incredibly difficult endeavor to simply imagine, let alone achieve with the rapidity we require to avoid the worst outcomes imaginable.

I'm actually referring to a nuclear war, but this is still somehow horrifying.

The population of a group of true believers relative to the rest of us, especially when they are committed to getting what they want through violence, has never created an obstacle to one crackpot religion after another shaping us through force both culturally and politically. It must be unthinkable to us to forget what all religions of the world have done – the damage inflicted and civilizations lost forever – when they thought they could get away with it due to no secular resistance. Dismissals of the Islamic State as being a non-threat to America due to their geographic distance and perceived logistical shortcomings may be technically true for the immediate future, however those dismissals ignore the fact that diseased beliefs like religion spread very quickly in both a benign vacuum as well as under threat of death. The converts flocking in currently small numbers to the pretender caliphate are not only people with no futures from the region, they are people from tolerant and pluralist countries like the US, Australia, and Great Britain, where publicly speaking out against the threat Islam poses us is not yet recognized as common sense. Whether their group grows by the dozens or thousands by year's end, there is no amount of them small enough or geographic region isolated enough to be tolerable or judged to pose no threat to the rest of us. I argue that if left unchecked they will grow and expand outside Mesopotamia to pose a constant and credible threat to all nations, and they will do so waving their holy texts.

Just like these extras from "Conan" and their ghost horses.

Either the writings of the Qur’an and hadith are the divine delivery of mandate from the creator of everything through the Archangel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed or they are not. Within those writings are the mandates for the oppression of other peoples, the subjugation of women, the destruction of modernized civilizations, and the death penalty for apostates. If these instructions are the creator's divine word then these “extremists” are the only true believers getting it right, as it were, and our decision to pretend they're not Muslim is not only suicidally ignorant but incredibly disrespectful to their religious beliefs, which we claim to respect. On the other hand, if these mandates are nonsense dictated by an illiterate epileptic, which they are, what does that say about the parsing of real Muslims from false ones? And why, with the inability of influential mullahs and imams to issue a blanket fatwa against any kind of false crusade due to their religion, do we continue to pretend these actions are not recognized, promoted, and praised by the leaders of this sick and dangerous cult? I do not propose a false choice, and I do not see how any other conclusion could be reached.

Those other conclusions have an inordinate amount of 'splaining to do.

In anticipation of the immediately obvious rebuttal, that of the vast majority of people who profess the Muslim faith are peaceful and contributing members of society, perfectly wonderful human beings to all they meet, loved by puppy dogs and goldfish, let me offer this explanation. Every person I have personally met who claimed to be Muslim has been a genuinely warm and sweet individual, not including those whom I have met tangentially through debate. They do not want to kill me or anyone else, they are as furious at the actions of the Islamic State as I am with the added seasoning of shame and revulsion at what they feel is being done to their religion's reputation. Their wives and girlfriends speak openly, and I can see their face when they do so, and no one is missing any body parts. I can scarcely believe they're being honest with me about their faith. I again argue that if you are not adhering to the mandates handed down by the being you believe created you and will punish you for disobedience, on what authority can it be argued you are an adherent of that cult? If Allah told Gabriel to tell Mohammed to tell Muslims to kill apostates, and you're smarter than that, what need have you to still tie the noose of religion around your own neck? It should be cast off, as all the needs people fulfill with religion can be satisfied just as easily without it.

As illustrated here, in this poorly photoshopped metaphor.

On material costs. By postponing the extirpation of the Islamic State, we are actively delaying the reconstruction of a tragically and needlessly destroyed modern civilization that made irreplaceable contributions to the advancement of knowledge and humanity. This is a consequence that should cause any thinking person discomfort. We prevent the reconstruction of education and trade infrastructure, which the area is muddling through but can obviously use as much help and time as possible without ignorant savages blowing everything up. Postponing the stabilization of development of Mesopotamian oil supplies, which is approaching amounts unseen since the Hussein crime family controlled the region, strangles the financial benefits to both Iraqi and Kurdish people.

 Ignoring our pocketbooks for a moment, I want to explore what would result as the moral consequences of our decision. To begin with, we leave the peoples of the area who are powerless or ineffective at providing real resistance to the Islamic State at their mercy, which is a very grim thought if you mull it at all. The eschatology of Islam, along with all other religions, calls for the absolute end of all humanity. Total erasure of man from the face of the Earth at the time of (or to bring on) the second coming. Since these people proclaiming an Islamic State must have the primitive self-awareness necessary to understand how pitifully inept they would be at any kind of scientific or technological endeavor, they must outsource the brain power necessary to achieve their ends. Muslims educated at European and American institutions must go and help these savages with their work. The consequence of this, and no one can call it alarmist, is that every day we do not actively participate in the stabilization and reconstruction of the region we move one day closer to finding out what the religious will do with nuclear and biological weapons. This isn't news to anyone, but I bring it up to reiterate and reinforce that Islam calls for the extermination of all humanity to bring on the final judgement. 

Just in case you forgot what that will look like.

At that time, Mahdi the redeemer of Islam will come to Earth and team up with Jesus like some kind of post-modern Superfriends to do battle against the false messiah, whom they apparently have in common. Their inevitable victory will result in all of our deaths and the eradication of sin so that their ghosts may eat grapes and our ghosts may suffer eternally. As silly as all this sounds to anyone with half a reasoning mind, it barely begins to relate the sheer mindless nonsense the Muslim religion imparts to our enemies. The very real consequence of that nonsense, and our reward for trading in tolerance, is that as soon as these people get their hands on a way to carry out nuclear or biological attack on our civilization, they will.

Examining The Waters

A closer look at the triangulations of Rick Blaine suggests the pretty blond isn't always the hero's motivation. 

In its final throes of death, roughly 1992 or so, the remaining drive-in theater in Oregon made a last-ditch effort to bring some light into our tiny little lives by showing four weekends worth of film noir double features. When the last reel of the current blockbuster finished and all the teenagers had driven off into the night to resume their clumsy fumblings, the promo cards flickering forty feet high would stop with the muffled thump of an audio channel being switched, followed by three hours of un-interrupted shadows, trenchcoats, and intrigue. At the time I was very unengaged with the style, as I felt things moved along too slowly, hardly anything burst into flames, and not enough information was spoon fed to me. With Casablanca, however, I was happily surprised to see Peter Lorre slimily oozing his way through his dialogue. I was familiar with Lorre from his catalogue of monster films, and didn't need to be told that his involvement could make a passable movie momentarily great. For two decades, Casablanca has stayed in my regular rotation of comfort movies, and eventually an urge came to solve a question that had always confused me: why did Rick come for the waters?

Not to drink them, that's what vodka is for.

You, by whom I mean Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, are familiar with the film. Some may be uninitiated, however, so for them: Casablanca tells the story of Rick Blaine, an ex-patriated American who owns and operates the most popular nightclub in World War II Nazi-controlled Casablanca, who inadvertently becomes re-entangled in a love triangle he thought long dead while simultaneously working surreptitiously to aid the Nazi resistance and keep himself out of prison. It is a famous touchstone film in our time, frequently misquoted and re-enacted in homage, but when released it was just one among fifty films produced by the assembly-line studio system of Warner Brothers. 

"Might be Bogart, might be Garbo. Hard to tell…"

The waters I referred to are addressed quite early in the film. Rick (played, as I don't need to tell you, by Humphrey Bogart before he was "Bogie") has just ejected a very lovely young woman from the nightclub and is walking back inside when he is engaged in conversation by the Police Captain, Renault (played by another of my spookshow heroes, Claude Rains). The camera sits a medium distance away, framing the two men in front of the nightclub but surrounding them in fog so that they feel removed from the background action. During their talk, a plane is seen and heard flying overhead on the way to Lisbon, mentioned as the first waypoint on the trip back to America. While Rick is denying Renault's charge that he desires escape back to the States, a searchlight appears and crosses the scene several times, returning when Rick speaks of his reasoning behind relocating to Casablanca in the first place. I don't know how deeply one digs into these things to find symbolism, but an expatriate reminiscing while a searchlight peers into the fog doesn't seem terribly subtle. I can also easily imagine the more innocuous spotlight-running stagehand, an hour after lunch, forced by his bladder to stay in motion because he didn't leave enough time for a rest stop before work resumed. 

So much fog, the original footage came out looking like 2D cell animation.

Rick explains to Renault that he came to Casablanca "for the waters," a poetic notion which Renault scoffs at, as they are in the Northern region of Africa where "there are no waters." "I was misinformed," Rick replies. The tale is clear: he's been used up by life, forced to rely on bad information and bouncing from place to place in an effort to find any safe harbor to live quietly and stay drunk. He'd been done wrong and left to rot, with not a friend in the world to call on for help. I still think it's masterful writing and character development, but I've since discovered that Renault was inexcusably stupid and Rick was either equally ignorant or (as I assert) deliberately lying his ass off, and I think I've discovered why.

There are only two concrete things that can be known about Rick based on the information provided in the film: he both ran firearms to the Ethiopians and fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War before arriving in Casablanca. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War would be chronologically first, and Rick's involvement in running guns there means that he was helping to supply Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia with the outmoded and obsolete firearms that directly caused their decimation in the war. They were vastly outgunned by the Nazis, and if Rick was the one to put them in that situation, he surely bears a personal responsibility in the subsequent Nazi victory. Ethiopia had fallen by 1936 and Rick had to flee, traveling north to engage on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (which, coincidentally, was the same thing George Orwell was doing at the time) and fight in the losing battle against the Francoists.

Francisco Franco, seen here at an auction bidding on a chin.

Following these back-to-back defeats, Rick fled in the opposite direction as the bulk of the refugees (who were heading en masse to 1939 France, what luck!) and made his way to the North African country of Morocco and the Vichy/Nazi-controlled Casablanca to open an expat nightclub acting as a front for the rebellion directly under the Nazi's comical noses. Now, I am not inclined to argue the logistical nightmare it must be to keep a handle on money and possessions whilst traveling across half the globe to engage in the losing end of two battle theaters, then presumably liquidate your remaining assets to purchase a nightclub. I am more interested in arguing against the popular interpretation of Rick's motives in helping his former love Ilsa and her new companion Lazlo escape Casablanca to continue the resistance, or at least refining it with a more keen instrument.

The popular position is that Rick, who originally resisted aiding Ilsa and Lazlo to escape when they first arrived in town, changes his mind when he gains a better understanding of why his relationship with Ilsa ended. Originally it seemed she jilted Rick, but she later explains her relationship with Lazlo came first, and she had only been with Rick because she thought Lazlo had been killed. This news is supposed to have softened Rick's heart, we are told, as his anger is supposed to have originated with her unannounced departure. I argue his decision was made based on a motivation to regain control over some aspect of his life, ensuring that his desired outcome was the result.

Nicely summed up here.

Rick is an anti-fascist and a man of the people, if his popularity in the community is any reliable metric. He seems to desire, generally speaking, the fostering of celebration and the potential of the celebration to cause money to change hands at his establishment. He tried to supply weapons to aid the Ethiopian resistance to fascism, which directly cause their loss. He again tried to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and was again on the losing side of the conflict. I argue his every waking moment in Casablanca was torture by dull knives, living under the constant shadow of his failures and the potential to have everything taken away by the Nazis. In ensuring Ilsa and Lazlo's escape from the fascists, Rick was undertaking the first resistance-based action for which he could personally guarantee success. Once the final airfield scene of the movie arrives, Rick personally moves the story forward at gunpoint, seeing to it that every critical step in the escape is accomplished in the narrow window of time allowed before the Nazi reinforcements arrive to keep Ilsa and Lazlo's plane from takeoff. Alone, Rick could never have accomplished supplying weapons to the entirety of the Ethiopian army or single-handedly defeated Franco's troops, but I think we have all met an individual who is easily capable of personally shouldering the failure of an endeavour they could never have prevented solitarily. I propose Rick saw enabling the escape as an act of absolution, knowing he could no longer fight personally but could instead immeasurably aid those who could still fight while giving his Nazi town leaders the finger. 

Since we've got this lying around…

"The waters," I argue, can be seen as the thirst-like need to resolve what once went wrong. The single-minded need of which one never needs reminding and the fulfillment of which is capable of overriding our primary preservation of well-being. Surely this need will be different for each of us, but writing into the script either Rick or Renault's explanation for their motivations would be pointless, as any map will show they cannot be trusted. "The waters?" Renault scoffed. "There are no waters in Casablanca." Casablanca is situated directly on the coast of Northern Africa, you see. The waters are everywhere.

It looks quite lovely, actually.