Paris, an atrocity foretold The capital of France was attacked. We are all next.By Adam Kirsch
http://www.politico.eu/article/paris-an-atrocity-foretold-attacks-911-newyork/
Now, we find out about tragedies first from our cell phones, one by one. The best way to follow the developing story was on Twitter, where eyewitnesses from Paris were being retweeted by journalists in the U.S. On Facebook, New Yorkers who had friends in Paris checked in to make sure they had survived.
There was grief, and horror, and fear — surely it is only a matter of time before the kind of coordinated terrorist attacks that have shaken Madrid and London, Mumbai and Paris, come to New York and Washington as well. What was missing — and this is a part of the horror — was any real sense of surprise.
If ever there was an atrocity foretold, it was these mass murders in Paris, following as they do on the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Hyper Cacher killings at the beginning of the year.
There was, in fact, a kind of syllogism of terror at work here: a movement that begins by targeting Jews and writers will end by targeting the West at large. Those who extenuated those earlier attacks by pointing to Israeli policies or cartoonists’ provocations may now realize that terrorism is not a form of critique, but a form of attack. Religious pluralism and free speech are the glories of liberalism, and so they are what the enemies of liberalism attack first.
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By the same token, in the terrorists’ decision to target a football stadium and a concert hall, they declare a puritanical hatred for Western pleasures — just like the terrorists who blew up the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv, in 2001, and a nightclub in Bali the next year. This dimension of the Paris attacks seems especially resonant, since for Americans the French capital has long stood for a particular kind of pleasure — the pleasures of civilization, of cosmopolitanism, of the cultivation of grace. Paris, as Oscar Wilde said, is where good Americans go when they die, and for many Americans an attack on Paris is an attack on a spiritual homeland and an ideal.
This is not mere sentimentality, but an accurate reading of the terrorists’ intentions. When terror attacks the sites of such conviviality, rather than military bases or police headquarters, the reason is partly opportunism, but it is also to send a message: it is our pleasure, not just our power, that offends them.
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It is too soon to tell which group will turn out to be behind the attacks in Paris, though early reports suggest that the killers were driven by anger over French policy in Syria. There are already suggestions that the appropriate response to the killings is for France and the West at large to refuse entry to Syrian refugees.
But this would be exactly backward: the violence that France experienced tonight is a mere fraction of what Syrians and Iraqis have been living with for years and years. Paris, we hope, can defend itself against such attacks in the future; Raqqa and Homs cannot, and the people who flee those and similar places are not our enemies but our fellow victims. The policy of Western disenagagement or minimal engagement which has allowed Iraq and Syria to fall into ever-worsening violence has costs for us, as well as for them.
Fourteen years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, France joined much of the world in declaring “We are all Americans;” if Americans now say “We are all Parisians,” that is not just gratitude or sympathy or homage, but simple acknowledgment of fact.
Nights like this are our future, too.
Adam Kirsch is a poet and critic who lives in New York City.
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