“World stunned by massacre at Charlie Hebdo”  “Terror Strikes at Freedom” and so many other, similar headlines. “Je Suis, Charlie” badges and in a few weeks, that will all be lost by some other atrocity somewhere else in the world.

Charlie Hebdo is already not the latest anyway, Nigeria’s Boko Harem did it again. A mass murder rampage through Northern Nigeria. Estimates suggest the body count is more than 2000, relief workers said they “gave up counting”.

Australia too seems to have its share of participation in these things. Cartoonist Larry Pickering has been assigned police protection for a while, after posting on his private blog cartoons of Mohammed. Well, at one level, good on him for doing it, at another level, Larry Pickering has passed his heyday as a cartoonist, and is somewhat irrelevant now. He has become little more than a minor irritant so why anyone would bother to pay him so much attention is beyond me. Pickering’s response is “I am standing up for free speech”.. big deal…but his next comment is more interesting: “If you don’t do that then you have already lost the board game.”

This shows just how limited the thinking is. Like the Drug War, the “War on Terrorism” is already lost. Only fools like Pickering either don’t realize it and they have no understanding of how they have already lost it. Or, they have no idea that what they think it is about is not really what it is about.

For starters, can anyone tell me who the “enemy” really is? Can anyone tell me what is their aim? Can anyone provide me with just a basic description of what we are fighting about? So far all I have is “Muslim extremists”. Their aim is to create a “Muslim world”. and we are fighting for “freedom”.

Who are these Muslim extremists? Ordinary people? I doubt it, mainly angry young men who are constantly cut out of mainstream life, I would suggest. Haters and murderers who would use religion to justify their behaviour. The martyr syndrome runs through all societies, but I suggest in Muslim society it is really strong and always has been. Mohammed’s writings suggest he knew it, and I suspect he played to it in the Koran.

In an earlier post, I found that Mary Strout suggested the number of true psychopaths could range to 4 percent of our population. In Muslim society, with nearly ¼ of the world’s population that would mean there is likely to up to 60 MILLION psychopaths. A rich field of potential killers to appeal to, isn’t it. That is just the element of Muslim society that would not be perturbed by killing anything or anyone. Those people of “good conscience” who would act in “faith”, that is a separate group altogether, and I suggest much much smaller numbers of them would volunteer.

The aims of terrorists are somewhat vague. The reason for this is there are so many terrorist groups, each with different aims. There is no one overarching group, the prominence of Al Quaida is a furfy actually. Some groups, like Boko Harem, are “freedom fighters” looking to gain local autonomy to establish a “Muslim State”. Freedom from what? Freedom for what? Freedom to do what? Make no mistake here, they are not fighting for “freedom”, they want to legitimize their power to impose their will on others. The complex reality of terrorist groups is that they would happily fight each other if they did not have different enemies or if their paths were to cross. There is no definitive enemy – just an amorphous mass of cowards hiding their faces and killing those who cannot fight back, the defenceless, the children, the elderly. Fear is the goal, they are no different than Pol Pot.

These things all add up to an inability of Western military power to be able to fight this kind of war. There is no mass movement of troops or grand strategies to win victories. There is only headlines. Every atrocity attracts more “believers”. Every killing encourages more killings. Every statement makes more people afraid. People demand that their Governments do something about this menace. Governments do the only things they can do, pass laws suppressing terrorism.

What those laws are actually doing is slowly eating away the freedoms of Western societies. In the US the so called “Homeland Securities Acts” have already undermined the First and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution, legally. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib clearly demonstrate this. Foreign citizens are not afforded the same Rights as US citizens. We can do anything we like with them, including kidnapping, torture, imprisonment without charge. Also, consider the Julian Assange case. Elected officials in the US called for the murder of an Australian citizen for publishing embarrassing documents that were republished in the New York Times without comment. In what way does that make sense? Assange’s subsequent Swedish problems is similar to the Pirate Bay issue. Sweden’s prosecutors said there was no chance of criminal charge, only to reverse their stance at the insistence of the US.

See what has happened? National sovereignty is subverted for narrow and selfish reasons. In neither case has any real validity to the charges made, but they have been made loudly and strongly and actions that have nothing to do with suppressing terrorism have been enacted under the anti-terrorism provisions of an existing law. No doubt, once in Sweden, Assange would have been extradited to the US. The Pirate Bay is similar, only “commercially based”.

Now, step back and look at these things as parts of a historical pattern. Events occur, Governments react, more events, greater reaction, even more events, even greater reactions. In each case, the reactions have been to suppress individual freedoms, bit by bit.

The terrorists are winning, the liberal democracies of the West are slowly becoming Sharia states. It might take 50 years or more, but democracy is dead. What makes matter worse, it is the same oppressive “democracy” of Socialist states, of totalitarian states, of fascist states. The media is stupidly following governments, sensationalizing the latest atrocities, demanding harsher laws, adding to the speed at which the process is occurring. We can see this happening before our very eyes, but seem to be helpless to stop it. Why?

Simply put, the liberal democracies can only fight terrorism on its own terms. It must be fought without ethics, without morals, without honour, without integrity. And this the Western Governments are so far refusing to do. What can we do?

Find the leaders of groups, who are they, where are they, where did they come from? Wipe out the villages they come from, their families, the mosques they went to school in. Kill everyone associated with them. They have to be funded, kill anyone they may have been funded by. Sooner or later they will surface, then kill them. As said, “If a prey seeks to run, give it nowhere to run to.” In short, we must become our enemy to defeat our enemy. That is why we are losing, and are doomed to lose. It is a “Catch-22” of the worst kind, no matter what choices we make, we are doomed.

The beginning of this Muslim terrorism lies a complex historical background, which has nothing to do with religion. It is the dysfunctional family dynamics of the Saudi royal family. It is the vain-glorious egotism of tribal rivalries within regional settings. Mostly though, it is the civil war of Islam. It is the traditional rivalry of the different Muslim sects, irrevocably divided by schisms dating back to the time of Mohammed. We have never understood it, never participated in it. Now we are being drawn into this conflict in ignorance reacting like we traditionally do. Doomed to failure because we do not understand.