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In another thread I mentioned that I'd written a bit of a rambling opinion piece about what was happening in the world in the wake of the Paris attacks... I had sent this to a friend who said he'd see if he could help me get it published but it never went anywhere and I think the moment has passed to get it published in its current form... but I thought I'd share on here to spark some debate and see other people's opinions because, like everybody else, I am only a voice with no solution to any of this... apologies for the length!! You all know I'm very wordy...

It’s not a world war until we’re involved. The Paris attacks appear to have taken the majority of us completely by surprise: someone else’s problem showed up in our backyard. We are bombarded with stories about atrocities around the world committed by aggressive organisations, yet it rarely affects us. Since the turn of the century we have arguably only really had to deal with three major organised terrorist incidents in Western territory: the Paris attacks, the London bombings and 9/11.

These calamities (despite the vivid front pages) remain isolated incidents; dramatic episodes which unsettle and intrigue us but ultimately don’t fundamentally change us. Every November 11th we make a symbolic gesture to commemorate the dead and annually recommit to never allowing such atrocities to ever happen again... and, despite the smattering of humanitarian disasters in the intervening years, we have, for the most part, not let our forebears down. We live in a semblance of a united Europe and have produced generations of middle class citizens and a peaceful, slothful apathy to all matters outside of our European bubble.

I believe our selfish introspect has left us blind to the reality of where we stand in the world. We treat the recent influx of desperate refugees as something akin to a zombie horde – a terrifying problem that we’re unable to comprehend, an alien invasion. We fail to understand that the legacy of our colonial past and the reality that our arbitrary borders in the sand have created lasting problems and failed states in their wake. We fail to understand that our futile attempts to impose democracy abroad were always doomed to fail at the hands of our ineptitude, forgetting our own centuries of necessary religious intolerance, bloodshed and strife before our societies were able to usher in democracy. We have been indolent in the face of fear, frenzy and fury; our unions and political red tape haven’t prepared us for this. Our meaningless European values leave us fumbling for useless soundbites to try and explain a problem of our own making. In our largest cities we dump the unfamiliar into modern day ghettos and are bewildered when these neglected, poverty stricken urban sprawls spawn extreme ideas and an endless supply of people to believe in them.

In conventional war, propaganda seeks to dehumanise the enemy, the military seeks to exhaust the opposition and the government seeks to barter for a resolution that benefits them best. This is not a conventional war. We are not fighting a nation, we are fighting an idea: no army can stop an idea. Part of the human experience is a desire to belong to something that is greater than the individual. It’s why we join clubs, armed forces and political parties. Our self-centred society focuses on the individual, not on the collective. The result is a disillusioned, neglected youth prone to turning to drink, drugs and petty crime to alleviate their boredom, and so, we should not be so astonished when this cultural vacuum is filled by an extremist ideology that directly reaches out to them and offers an alternative. We want something to believe in, something that gives meaning to our lives when our tomorrows hold nothing to look forward to. This, more than anything, explains the magnetism of ISIS. It has used social media to exploit globalisation in order to reach out to Europe’s disenchanted youth and appeals to the desire to have a life filled with meaning and identity.

This is not new territory for the West. Communism lost out to capitalism in the great ideological war of the last century, so why are we struggling so monumentally to deal with an ideology so different from our own? We are obsessed with the concept of fighting fair without ever fighting fair ourselves. We are stunned to be attacked in our places of culture, too self-interested to take notice of the motivations of the perpetrators who yearn for an antithesis to our way of life. We don’t consider that we have been bombing the Middle East for decades, killing as indiscriminately as the individuals involved in the Paris attacks.

When anything becomes the norm, we lose interest. That’s not human nature, that’s Western nature. We forget, we always forget. Even in our remembrance, we forget. We notice but we don’t think, we hear but we don’t listen. Elsewhere in the world, people do not forget. They retain the memories of atrocities committed against generations gone by because we don’t afford them the privilege of being able to move on from past injustices, we keep dropping bombs and installing doom-destined, farcical governments to preside over the next descent into chaos.

We are at war, whether we feel like it or not. ISIS cannot be defeated by drone strikes. It is a gun toting Hydra hell bent on achieving recognition and administering retribution. We are haemorrhaging citizens to this historically tumultuous region that has shape shifted thousands of times; has seen great empires rise and fall, and seen the rise of many of mankind’s greatest religions and inventions. We shower innocent civilians with fire and shrapnel and then have the audacity to be outraged when revenge turns up in a suicide vest carrying a Kalashnikov. We have removed the cogs that kept the machines moving and now look in dismay at the many broken parts and don’t know how to fix them. The rejected transplant of democracy has been engulfed in an inferno of tribalism and in the interests of self-preservation; perhaps it might be best to swiftly exit. We are the problem. We have invaded almost every single culture and race with our foreign ideas and our foreign ways of life and imposed them on others. We swapped our empires for an organised system of democratic nation states and a Commonwealth to prop ourselves up; everything changed while nothing changed. It allowed us to forget about the collective bad we had inflicted on the rest of the world. Our comfort and safety are under attack in accordance with the principle of an eye for an eye under Sharia law.

We don’t reflect on our history as an explanation for the incomprehensible actions of people we called our own. We don’t want to understand them as much as they don’t want to understand us; but it is in these conditions which the prospect of war thrives. The concept of statehood is yet another Western import; one that can be most clearly seen in the unnatural borders of Africa and the Middle East. We have a collective responsibility to the nations we created, abandoned and destroyed.

Let the caliphate flourish and fall apart like countless empires before it. The experiments of democracy and statehood have failed: the results are abundant. Why are we opposing the breakup of countries that don’t work? Our logic that if at first we do not succeed, we should try and try again cannot continue to be applied here. The largely ceremonial depositions and assassinations of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden solved nothing and destroyed everything. Do we really need the removal of Bashar al-Assad to reiterate the understanding that figureheads are only as problematic as the regions they preside over and that taking them away only unleashes those problems? History should teach us not to repeat our mistakes. It’s clear that the states of Iraq and Syria can no longer exist as they once were, and whether we see new states rise from the ashes, the expansion of others or a shift to an uncertain existence of fiefdoms and tribes, only time will tell. The only reasonable solution to the war on terror is to withdraw from the region entirely. The caliphate is here to stay.