You are a combatant in a global insurgency

We are all inexorably drawn into the theatre of war. The shells and bullets are our opinions and beliefs, the cannons and the rifle barrels are TikTok and Twitter

9/11 ushered in an age of cinematically sophisticated barbarism, and the October 7 attacks on Israeli soft targets elevated that tactic to a new grotesque height. 

Debate has been raging online in the last week or so over the purported split among non-woke, right-aligned commentators over the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s response. The Democrats have also seen division in their ranks: two weeks ago, pro-Palestinian activists targeted the White House and called the Democratic president “genocide Joe.” This week far-left Jewish pro-Palestinian activists attacked the Democratic National Committee headquarters. In videos widely shared on social media, high-pitched screaming could be heard from protesters as they were dragged away by police from the doors of the DNC headquarters, which they were trying to pull from their hinges. Similar videos can be seen showing hysterical protestors elsewhere across the United States. 

A few days ago a debate at University College Dublin on the Israel-Palestine question had to be stopped because it had devolved into a pushing-and shoving shouting match. London has been rocked by mass protest after mass protest in support of Palestinians, and last weekend there were clashes with supporters of British veterans who were objecting to pro-Islamic crowds marching through London on Armistice Day.

Screen shot taken from https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/protestors-in-new-york-cry-globalize-the-intifada-at-demonstration-675520#google_vignette

In other words, most of the western world has been tearing itself apart because of what’s happening in a tiny nation, thousands of miles away.  Young Americans, Irish, and British people feel strongly enough about this fight, which for all practical purposes has nothing to do with them, that they scream at and kick and tear at any structure that they associate with Israel.

Then this week, seemingly out of nowhere (but actually from a very specific somewhere), Osama bin Laden made a comeback. Bin Laden’s screed, Letter to America, went viral on TikTok, with thousands of people sharing how the Saudi terrorist had changed their perspective on America forever. Immediately, the handwringing began from the normies who are still tethered to some sense of morality and reality — ‘how could these kids be siding with this man?’ comes the anguished cry. ‘What is happening to our youth?’

I will tell you what is happening, and its not just happening to our youth. We are all unwitting combatants in a global insurgency that hinges upon some form or other of identity politics. The ultimate aim of this global insurgency remains unclear, at least to me —is it neo-Maoism? Is it transhumanism? Is it an unholy alliance of state capitalism and authoritarianism? Is it American imperialism on steroids? Is it Satan himself? I have yet to be convinced who the villain is, but the fact that there is one, and is driving a global insurgency, could not be clearer.

Insurgency is a very specific military concept that most of you will be familiar with. Basically, it’s a political-military strategy in which, traditionally, the weaker party uses the strength of its adversary against that adversary and to its own advantage. It capitalises on an underdog status to win the hearts and minds of non-combatants and the unaffiliated, and to bring them into the fight. It rejects conventional tactics of war. It gives primacy to the political over the military — but at the same time makes precise use of violence, even when that violence might seem indiscriminate or barbaric. It exploits local grievances and ties them to bigger or far-away causes and ideologies. Think Mao and his uphill but ultimately successful campaign to take over the vast and unruly nation of China. As John Mackinlay wrote in “The Insurgent Archipelago, “[Mao’s] strength and his major asset was no longer the possession of territory, but the possession of the population.” 

What Mao began in the 1920’s became the playbook for the major crises that would follow. The Viet Cong successfully used it to send the mighty American military — still righteous from its triumph in World War II, home in disgrace and demoralisation. Today, Hamas is leveraging the political underdog trope to bring the ostensibly more powerful Israeli side into disrepute as it tries to fight a conventional war against a spectre hiding behind women and children. 

Meanwhile, thanks to a toxic combination of widespread existential meaninglessness in wealthy Western populations and the breakdown of traditional communities and ways of life, combined with the mesmerising and amplifying effects of social media, we have all been inexorably drawn into the theatre of war. The shells and bullets are our opinions and beliefs, the cannons and the rifle barrels are TikTok and Twitter. 

As Mackinlay wrote: 

While Europe was in the thrall of the Cold War and former colonial powers grappled with the narrowly national problems of post- colonial withdrawal, another form of insurgency was being explored by populations that were uniquely dispersed. Campaigns by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) were important milestones, not because of their political, religious or ideological significance, but as an emergent technique which might have informed us of a future trend. Several aspects of the PLO and the IRA were harbingers of a future era: the dispersal of migrant communities; the management of the narratives of their own misfortunes; and the exploitation of the virtual images of news events. Their significance lay above all in the virtual dimension of the campaign, which was becoming more important than the military value of raids and attacks on terra firma. While the terrorist groups became increasingly familiar with the practicalities of exploiting the news imagery of their activities, the West failed to see its significance as a dimension of future violence.” [Emphasis mine]

“The management of the narratives of their own misfortune” — a phrase that has stayed with me since I first read this book in 2012. In my opinion, no other sequence of words has been more relevant to our current reality. We are all either captured by or purveyors of these narratives of misfortune, and that fact has been successfully leveraged to divide and control us

I must state a crucial caveat here to my use of the term insurgency, and our collective participation (unwilling though that may be) in it. I do not mean that we have been co-opted into a fight on behalf of the powerless, who are typically associated with an insurgent’s strategy. Quite the opposite, actually. The powerful have co-opted the powerless against us, the squishy, ‘normal,’ middle. Perhaps it has ever been thus. At this point, nothing would surprise me. 

Nonetheless, the concept of an insurgency remains the best way to understand our deranged new normal — because of its dependence on both political identity, public opinion and media, which are the current lynchpins holding this clusterfuck down.  And today, far too few of our dissident intellectual elites are making the explicit connection between the culture war and the cultural global insurgency.

In the last five years, the dissident elites developed in silos: some focusing on the trans issue, some on vaccine mandates and other terrible COVID-era policies, some on anti-Semitism, some on the poison of critical race theory in schools, some on open borders. Because they are not seeing the through line, at the moment there is a lot of sniping from one to another because their views do not precisely align from silo to silo. But conceptually — if not practically — they are all related, because each one of those culture war issues represents some form of old, familiar and/or traditional policies or beliefs that the global insurgency is trying to destroy.

Taken from the Twitter feed of Eli Erlick https://twitter.com/EliErlick

I’m not saying that a person who wants to see the destruction of Israel is a real and natural ally of a self-declared queer person who wants to transition children — the assault on reason and tradition is far more sophisticated than that. And that wouldn’t be the point anyway — any real, authentic solidarity between causes would be detrimental to those waging the insurgency. The point of the global insurgency is to disseminate a host of contradictory and conflicting mini-insurgencies and amplify the incoherent support of them, in order to muddy the water, break valuable allegiances among dissenters, and demoralise the general population to an extreme degree, until we can no longer see the wood from the trees. A demoralised and confused population is far, far easier to control. 

This is why young people are seemingly embracing Osama bin Laden out of nowhere, more than a decade after his ignominious death. Their views are actually very consistent with the DEI and CRT worldview that they were taught, in the United States of America, in the years following the 9/11 attacks. These viciously ideological young people are correct when they say, ‘this is what decolonisation looks like.’ Anyone professing total shock at this has not been thinking deeply enough about this issue, and is fundamentally living in the past. 

That’s why those who point out the intellectual inconsistency regarding the Queers for Palestine type activism — or the chants of ‘from the river to the sea’ at a Let Women Speak rally in Leeds today — are ignoring a crucial fact. Yes, the young Western activists shouting these slogans are muddling contradictory positions — after all, Hamas not being particularly in favour of niche sexual identities like delusional men thinking they are women. But they are adhering to a bigger ideology. And that ideology aims to destroy everything that was just a few years ago taken for granted as true and common sensical: men can’t be women, terrorism is bad, your skin colour does not define your character, forced medical treatments are immoral, Hitler was wrong. 

We must come to treat these contradictions not as a bug, but a feature of the global insurgency of which we are all a part.