Thought for the Day: Addressing the Islamic State

Thursday, 26 February 2015, 10:43 am
Column: Keith Rankin

The brutal and publicity-seeking behaviour of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL) in the places we westerners call 'Middle-East' and 'Iraq' and 'Syria' is certainly a challenge to western liberal democracies.

Brutalism is nothing new. There have always been instances of government and non-government forces engaging in violence on a scale that doesn't compute to most of us in our relatively sheltered lives. And not always perpetrated by the bad guys.

I was watching a BBC documentary about the British Empire the other day. The oppression imposed by British rule in Kenya in the 1950s, for example, was sufficient to create a rebel force called the Mau Mau. These rebels did some extremely brutal things, especially to other Africans who they saw as taking the British side. British retaliation to Mau Mau atrocities was to execute even bigger atrocities. In a few years, however, the best known Mau Mau leader was President of an independent Kenya. In hindsight, the British opposition served no purpose. The British were on the wrong side of an unstoppable movement for change.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the dying years of the South African apartheid regime, a significant number of people were 'necklaced' – burned alive – by rebels who we by-and-large supported. We looked the other way, and hoped that the forces for change would be quick, allowing that phase of South Africa's history to quickly end. Nobody advocated military support for the regime that the people doing the necklacing were fighting.

In Cambodia in the early 1980s we continued to recognise the vanquished Pol Pot regime, guilty in the 1970s of one of the worst genocides ever. We recognised the killing fields killers because they were overthrown by the Vietnamese at a time when the west was still smarting over its inglorious Vietnam debacle. These western military ventures almost always fail.

What we in the west are fighting for today is the 'Wilsonian' system of autonomous sovereign secular nation states. This system was the main legacy of World War 1, when nations such as Iraq were created from the pens of the victorious powers – especially the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.

The system has never actually been realised. What is the status of, for example, Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland (whose rugby players play for a foreign power), or Niue for that matter? Or Greece?

The Islamic World does have a dream – and always has had such dreams – for political structures that we perceive to be incompatible with the Wilsonian system of nation states. IS represents an extremely vocal and brutal representation of this aspiration.

The last substantial polity that took the form of a 'caliphate' was the Ottoman Empire, which New Zealand invaded on 25 April 1915. Indeed World War 1 can probably be best understood as a fight between established and emerging western powers for influence over the Ottoman territories in the 'Middle-East'; carving those lands one way or another into western client nation states.

One could argue that the Roman Catholic world today is a Christian caliphate, with the Pope as its Caliph. Looked at this way, we can see that alternative geopolitical (and indeed geo-theocratic) structures can coexist and overlay. Usually much blood is spilled before we realise this. The religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries – essentially protestants versus 'papists' – were amongst the most brutal episodes in world history.

IS presents a big geopolitical conundrum. The west's natural inclination is to respond to this challenge with violence. You cannot resist this kind of change, however, by pretending it's a local scrap where some particularly naughty boys given a good caning will say 'sorry'.

The big question for us in the west is, really, to question what it is about our western societies that is turning off young Muslims in particular, and young people more generally. It's partly about economics; unemployment and all that. It's partly about political structures that so many of the young cannot and do not engage with. But it's also that young people may need causes and purposes that give meaning to their lives. Life in the west for too many young has become precarious, frustrating and purposeless.

ENDS

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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