PEOPLE will endure and Paris will endure. People will be defended and efforts will be redoubled. We have a versatile word for this now – security.
We have another word, too, to give sense to its opposite – terrorism. It has made sophisticates of us all.
We are experts in understanding what bloody murder is for. We know we are supposed to be terrified, provoked, and drawn into war’s embrace. “That,” we say, “is what they want.”
Perhaps we should give it to them. Pure pacifism is a rare commodity for good reasons.
If you are attacked with lethal force, you defend yourself, or risk oblivion. So President Francois Hollande has answered a declaration of war with one of his own.
Sophisticated lessons remain. We do not, we say, descend to their level. That, too, is what they want.
That gives Islamic State and its kin justification for whatever they choose to do. If we become like them, if scruples are abandoned, we destroy what we defend.
Old military manuals might be more help than moral philosophy. “Choose your ground,” they say. “Don’t fight where your enemy wants you to fight. Don’t give him a choice of terrain, or of weapons.”
It will not solve every problem. It will not answer Parisians when shock turns to anger.
The questions began with the first reports. Again? So soon? Even after Hollande’s government imposed new, still-tighter surveillance laws?
One answer comes – security can never be perfect in a democratic society. So how does a democracy defend its people?
Hollande’s declaration will perhaps begin to satisfy anger. Here and in France, the demand that IS be bombed flat in Syria and Iraq will become
unstoppable.
So when do you tell people what becomes of safety and security when a country goes to war?
The blood spreads and our corner shrinks – IS offers no choice. You could refuse to fight, but could you guarantee, after Paris, that brutes dreaming of a caliphate will refuse to attack? The bodies in the
Bataclan say it is too late to pick over the West’s acts and omissions.
Tell us, then – will war make us safe? As of Thursday, some 8,125 strikes had been launched against Iraq and Syria by the United States and its allies.
They call it Operation Inherent Resolve – 8,125 strikes before the Bataclan, before Stade de France, before Le Carillon. Bombing did not ensure security.
All that Paris stood for, all that Paris is, was not defended.
IS insists on war, but the butchers cannot force you to pick their ground, or oblige you to forget the things you fight to defend. Your choices remain.
They cannot make you become them any more than they can prevent Paris from being Paris.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was promulgated in that city.
There at the Liberation, the poet Paul Eluard wrote: “In April, 1944: Paris Was Still Breathing!”
Its last lines read: “An enduring city where I have lived through our victory over death.”
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