Candles and Kalshnikovs.

Please help us not to understand.

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Crossing the river Seine in Paris, you are quite likely to traverse the Ile de la Cité, the oldest part of the city, with Notre Dame on one side and the Sainte Chapelle on the other. Next to the Sainte Chapelle, and not nearly as interesting to tourists, is the Palais de Justice, used for particularly important and sensitive trials. But for the best part of a year in 2021/22 the focus was on the Palais, where the trial was underway of twenty people (some in their absence) involved in various ways in the massacres in Paris on Friday 13 November 2015, which saw 130 people dead and hundreds more injured, many gravely.

In French, Friday is vendredi, so the incident soon became known as V13, the title of a book by Emmanuel Carrère, which has just been published in an English translation. Carrère attended practically every day of the trial, chronicling the almost unbearable testimony of  survivors and their families, but also the testimony of the accused. He wrote a weekly summary for the Nouvel Obs magazine, on which the book is based. This isn’t a review of the book, although I would recommend you read it, but, given that it is now available in English, I thought it might be useful to take it and the incident it describes, as a point of departure for a wider discussion of the Liberal understanding of political violence and its limitations and consequences.

This was the worst episode of mass violence in France since the Second World War, and only the incompetence of the assailants prevented a much higher casualty toll. They were armed with Kalashnikov automatic weapons, which are for war-fighting, and whose 7,62 millimetre rounds can cause terrible wounds even if they do not kill. There were three targets. One was the Stade de France where a football match was taking place between France and Germany. Three attackers wearing explosive belts tried to enter the stadium but arrived too late, and were turned away. Two blew themselves up outside and the third fled. There were 80,000 people in the stadium at the time and the suicide bombers could have caused unthinkable casualties. The other two groups targeted the Bataclan theatre where a rock concert was in progress, and the terraces of several cafés. There were about 1500 people in the Bataclan and the attackers were methodically massacring them when two extremely brave policemen armed only with pistols arrived and killed one of the attackers, forcing the others to go to ground, to be killed later in exchanges of fire with the police. One of those who attacked the cafés blew himself up, but the vest failed to explode properly and he was the only fatal casualty. The others fled, and eventually died when one of them also blew himself up during a police assault on the apartment where they were hiding. (The aftermath of the explosions and the enquiry are recounted in the 2022 film Novembre, well worth seeing.)

Even years later, and beyond grief and pain, the main reaction of the survivors and the families at the trial was one of complete amazement and disbelief: why us? why them?. These were not random killings; they were carefully planned. As well as the killers, a team of perhaps twenty people were involved in the logistics, planning and transportation. The operation itself was organised directly from Syria by the Islamic State, which had already existed in various forms for nearly a decade, but whose existence had just begun to penetrate the public consciousness. The targets were not chosen at random but had been reconnoitered in advance, and the attacks timed to cause the maximum number of casualties. The Islamic State’s propaganda apparatus, through celebratory videos, press statements and articles in its online magazine, exulted over the success of the attacks and the punishment inflicted on France. The killings were described as “a blessed attack, helped by Allah” by “soldiers of the Caliphate,” against Paris, that “capital of abominations and perversions which carries the banner of the Cross in Europe.” The rock concert was described as “a festival of perversity.” Other motives cited included French participation (with the US and UK) in air attacks on the Islamic State in Syria, and the traditional references to French participation in the Crusades, which of course tried to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslim colonists.

Seen in this light, the killings begin to make a kind of twisted sense, a point it is necessary to insist upon. Nearly all the killings took place in the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris, in the East of the city around the Bastille. Originally a working-class area, it was being colonised at the time by the dreaded Bobos, the “bourgeois bohemians,” usually well-off younger professionals who voted for parties of the Notional Left and had highly progressive social views. Most of the victims were in their twenties and thirties, working in “modern” jobs like IT and public relations, quite a few running start-up businesses. With their fiercely secular views and very progressive social values, drinking alcohol, mixing freely irrespective of sex and listening to “satanic” music, they were the absolute epitome of everything the IS detested. (Ironically, most of them would happily have gone on a demonstration against “ Islamophobia.”) Those who died therefore deserved to perish, not as representatives, let alone collateral damage, but because they were evil, degenerate people, and their deaths would be pleasing to Allah. At a more strategic level, the attacks were both to punish France for its actions against the IS in Syria, and to provoke a backlash which in turn would radicalise French Muslims and persuade them to rally to the IS. The intention was (and remains) thereby to destroy the (secular) French state, an abomination in itself, and to incorporate at least parts of the country into the Caliphate.

As often, the attack should not really have come as a surprise. For over a decade experts had been following the power struggle between the gravely weakened Al Qaida, with its long-term, intellectual approach to jihad, and the much more radical  groups led by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian petty criminal converted to the most radical form of Islam, which eventually combined to form the then Islamic State in Iraq in 2006, effectively independent of, and increasingly hostile to, Al Qaida. ISI had a deliberate policy of the use of extreme violence and terror, and carried out indiscriminate attacks not just against the Americans and those they accused of working with them, but against the Shia population, during the terrible civil war of 2006-7 which ended in a Shia victory. (Al Zarqawi himself was killed by the Americans in the early stages of the civil war.) In spite of the Sunni defeat, ISI survived, and indeed expanded, as disaffected Sunnis and former Baathist Iraqi Army officers swelled their ranks, looking for revenge on the Americans and the Shia. The uprising in Syria in 2011, begun by Sunni defectors from the Syrian Army, was their opportunity.

In the years that followed, tens of thousands of foreigners came to fight in Syria for the newly-proclaimed Islamic State. Many wanted to take the jihad back to their own countries, and the leadership of the IS was entirely happy with the idea. It also wanted revenge on the countries—notably France, Britain and the US—who had been attacking them. The US could not be attacked directly, but France and Britain could. Experts and journalists who followed jihadism had been attempting to warn of possible attacks for some time, but were ignored or dismissed as “Islamophobes.” One of them, the Franco-American journalist David Thomson, was literally shouted down during a French TV programme the year before the attacks for suggesting that something similar might happen.

And indeed, there had been series of attacks in Europe and elsewhere already, including the massacre of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in early 2015. But the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) in France and elsewhere refused to take an interest in such things. The shock of V13 was therefore all the greater, as was the utter incomprehension of the French establishment, which had steadfastly refused to engage with the jihadist threat, or even try to understand it.

But subsequent attacks in France, and others such as the bloody assault on Brussels airport a few days later which killed 35 people and wounded 350, occupied the front pages only for a short while before disappearing. And indeed, V13 actually left remarkably few traces, and the trials themselves were only sketchily covered by most of the media. With a sigh of relief, the PMC allowed the horror to slip out of sight. Their main fear had always been that the attacks would be “instrumentalised” by the ”extreme Right” and that Muslims would be “stigmatised” as a result. (This of course was precisely what the attackers wanted.) But the French people behaved with remarkable maturity, and to the relief (and perhaps secret disappointment) of the PMC and its media, there were no acts of revenge at all. The French people, and the Muslim community, realised that they were dealing with a fringe tendency which was extremely dangerous but did not represent Muslims as a whole. Indeed, few of the attackers seemed to have much of an idea of Islam at all, or to have read the Koran. And many Muslim leaders and countries condemned the attacks.

As the years went on, as the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa was dismantled by western-led military action, as the chief of the Islamic State since 2010 and self-annointed Caliph since 2014, Abu Bakir al-Baghdadi, was killed by the Americans in 2019, and as large-scale terrorist attacks ceased, to be replaced by opportunistic small-scale actions, the problem seemed to be going away. Even the horrific killing and beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in 2020 did not occupy the media for very long, and the ongoing trial of his assassin’s associates has hardly raised any interest in the PMC media. The problem, it is thought, is over, and we can get back to the really important business of trying to oppose the “extreme Right.” We don’t want to understand, and please don’t make us.

To see why this voluntary ignorance is so, we need to make a small detour into the way that the PMC, with its Liberal heritage, sees organised violence of any kind. Liberalism has always conceived human beings as fundamentally rational utility-maximising animals. Small-scale violence of any kind is usually traced to the famous “underlying causes” of poverty, marginalisation etc. and is susceptible to social engineering. Liberals have historically been anti-military, less for moral reasons than because conflict is wasteful of resources and bad for business. Liberals opposed western colonies on the grounds that everything needed could be obtained by trade and that colonies raised the possibility of war, even if they nonetheless approved of “civilising” primitive peoples. Liberals did not go into the military and regarded it with scorn and condescension. The military was the preserve of their class enemies and rivals for political power, the old landowning aristocracy. (The recent conversion of Liberals into hopeless warmongers is a separate issue; and I’ll come back to it the end.)

Because the mind-set of Liberalism is a commercial one, it was assumed that conflicts that did occur were rather like commercial competition, and could therefore be settled by the equivalent of commercial negotiations. Reasonable people, it was felt, could always reach a conclusion acceptable to all. As Liberal peacemaking initiatives spread after the end of the Cold War, a whole discourse of “reconciliation” “healing” “truth and justice” “just and lasting peace” and “inclusivity” was invented and intensively marketed. War was a result either of mistakes and confusion, or the evil machinations of “conflict entrepreneurs.” The former could be dealt with by inclusive negotiations, peace treaties, governments of national unity, elections and funding human rights NGOs, the latter needed to be sent off to prison, ideally after a trial of some kind. The actual results of this strategy were scarcely encouraging, but because the theory was right, the results were assumed not to matter.

The apogee (or nadir) I suppose, was the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement for Sudan, largely written by westerners. It proposed a system of hallucinatory complexity, in which every problem was to be dealt with by an Annex setting up a new Working Group. South Sudan was both independent and not, South Sudanese politicians were both Ministers in Khartoum and potential Ministers of a possible separate state in Juba, and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army, which had fought against Khartoum, was both the nucleus of an independent Army and part of the Sudanese military. I’m not sure even the drafters of the CPA really knew what they had done. But for anyone who visited Sudan in the aftermath of the CPA, as I did, it was evident that the Agreement had not, in fact, dealt with any of the actual problems that had caused the conflict, and that the country would soon collapse into war again, as indeed it did..

Because Liberalism imagines that humans are basically rational, utility-maximising beings, it can only imagine wars fought for rational ends, as it interprets them, almost always economic. So around the turn of the millennium there was an outburst of interest in economic agendas in civil wars. Whilst this was a welcome relief from the reductive discourse of “ethnic hatred” and “primitive savagery” it led in the end to a reductive discourse of its own, which tried to find economic agendas in everything. As a result of a great deal of research on the ground, we now have a much better understanding of the actual dynamics of conflicts in West Africa, for example, complete with all the apparent irrationality of the behaviour of the combatants. Except that, as we’ll see, the behaviour was only irrational by our standards.

All this means that Liberal PMC ideology is extremely ill-equipped to understand why people and groups actually use violence, and what they hope to gain by doing so. Either it is for some rational, often economic, purpose, in which case the issue can be settled by negotiations, or it is the doing of evil conflict entrepreneurs or evil psychopathic leaders whose motives we cannot hope to understand, and who must be destroyed or imprisoned, This rules out, of course, ever understanding the vast majority of uses of violence at all levels, which  are, in fact, quite rational by the standards of the users. Nonetheless, the type of rationality is not one that the PMC ideology can accommodate, and the objectives are often too frightening to contemplate. So please help us not to understand.

I’m not going to go grimly through all the apparently inexplicable instances of mass violence of the last hundred years, but I want to pick on a few episodes and types of violence that Western Liberal culture has spectacularly failed to understand. Starting at the micro level, a lot of organised criminal violence these days is used rationally for the control of drugs and other trafficking, including humans. This can be the case even when the substances are legal: differences in price and duty on alcohol and tobacco in different countries can make smuggling very lucrative, and gangs will fight over it. But the actual use of violence is generally to establish and enforce a monopoly, to persuade customers to stick with certain suppliers, or alternatively to change them. Nonetheless, gang warfare has increasingly become a threat to security in many European cities. Its employment, though is quite rational, and the involvement of even adolescents has nothing to do with marginalisation or lack of opportunity: drug dealing is simply much better paid than moving cartons in a supermarket. And gangs in France are now, quite rationally, using 14- and 15-year olds for killings, because the legal system treats them as juveniles, and anyway they are disposable.

But gang warfare is about other things as well, and much of it comes from the inherited social structures of immigrant communities. Near where I live, there are sometimes organised brawls between immigrant gangs from different parts of the world. They meet by arrangement in the town centre, and proceed to kick the hell out of each other to defend their group and its honour. And a real or imagined insult to someone’s sister can provoke collective reprisals up to and including killing. Liberal ideology cannot cope with this behaviour, and beats a hasty retreat mumbling about underlying causes. But if you believe that your honour, or that of your community has been harmed, you may feel that you have no choice but to use violence, even lethal violence, to protect that honour. It may not be very utility-maximising, but it has its own twisted logic.

And before we assume comfortably that in the West we are above things, recall the work of the American psychiatrist James Gilligan, whom I’ve mentioned before, and who spent decades with some of the most violent criminals imaginable. Shockingly, perhaps, he actually asked these criminals why they were violent rather than imputing motives to them. They claimed to have had no choice, that if they hadn’t used violence in response to a threat or an insult, they would have destroyed themselves psychologically. Violence was the less-bad and inescapable alternative, even if it meant being killed in turn or being imprisoned. We are not a long way away from all those defendants at the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague who massacred people from other groups because “it was us or them” and “they started it.” Not a lot of utility-maximisation there.

Since it’s legally forbidden to discuss political violence in modern times without referencing the Nazis, let’s do so now: the more so since Liberal ideology has consistently not only failed, but actually refused, to understand why they did what they did. (The great psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim refused to read any of the literature dealing with the interrogation of former SS members, saying that certain things should just not be understood. Manuel Valls, the Socialist Prime Minister in 2015 likewise refused to hear discussion of the attackers’ motives, claiming that understanding was the first step towards excusing them) An entire intellectual framework has been erected, albeit with vicious controversies contained within it, about what the Nazis really wanted and planned, which could not be, by definition, what they themselves said. This is at least curious, because the Nazis were pretty clear about what they thought, and what they intended to do and why. Of course, there was a lot of propaganda involved in public statements, but we have, for example, the text of speeches given by Himmler to conferences of senior SS leaders, and it seems unlikely that he was deliberately misleading them.

Part of the problem is that the Nazis had few intellectuals, and almost no original ideas. (In this, as in several other things, they curiously resemble the Islamic State.) Their ideology was a mash-up of popular conspiracy theories, contemporary thinking about “race,” the fashion for Nordic mysticism, and extreme, almost clinical paranoia. But clearly that can’t be a sufficient explanation for a war that killed tens of millions and devastated Europe … can it? So historians and others, especially others, have rushed in to try to “explain” the Nazis. A minor theme, largely abandoned since the fall of the Soviet Union but still found occasionally, is of Hitler as some kind of capitalist puppet. Relatedly, some have tried to link the war to imperial competition and others to simple anti-communism (true to a degree.) A fantastic amount of time and effort has been wasted in amateur psychoanalysis of Hitler, who in truth was not a very interesting person. There are even books about books seeking to “explain” Adolph, in the hope that if we could only discover “the origins of his evil” then the whole period between 1933 and 1945 would somehow become explicable.

Or we could consider Nazi ideology as it was actually expressed, in all its derivative banality. For the Nazis were the kind of person you never want to sit next to on a plane: certain about everything, and ignorant about most of it. Or if you prefer they were the equivalent of the small-circulation blogger who writes about “geo-strategy,” confidently telling you what to think about countries they have never been to and things they do not understand, the kind of person convinced that they know how things “really work” and that you are naive if you do not agree with them.

Look, you might imagine one saying. Forget what you read in the mainstream press. Life is a struggle, OK, from small groups up to entire races. Democracy is a joke: some people are just stronger and better fitted to lead. People are not equal. The only reality is race, and humanity is divided into races just like animals and plants, and they compete against each other in the same way. Only the strongest survive, and the rest are exterminated. Darwin proved that. The Aryan race is the only one which is fully human, so everybody hates us. We have to wipe them out before they wipe us out. You may think that Russia and the West are enemies but we know better: they are both controlled by the same dark forces that want to exterminate us. And so on.

This is a recipe for endless war and struggle, because that is the nature of the universe. (Which is why a “peaceful solution” based on “standing up to Hitler’ would never have worked.) So ethics and morality were just a subset of the imperative for racial survival. Successful races expanded through war, weaker ones were exterminated. Racial solidarity was essential, which is why the Communist doctrine of class struggle was especially dangerous: they were the first in the camps and up against the wall. The Jews were a special problem: not only were they believed to be secretly manipulating the other nations of the world to destroy the Aryans, but having no homeland of their own they were in control everywhere. The first priority after 1933 was therefore to force them to emigrate, which the majority had done by 1939. By the end of 1941, with the war in Russia going badly, the part of Europe under Nazi control was essentially starving. (The importance of food in that War has been massively underestimated.) It was necessary to ration food so that the “deserving” had enough to eat. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army prisoners were just left to die of cold and exposure in improvised camps. Enemies of all kinds from resistance workers, prisoners of war, to Communists and of course Jews were sent to work camps, where those able to work were grudgingly fed, and the rest (including children) killed. And two million Polish Jews were taken from the ghettoes, where their deaths would create health problems, and sent to special camps to be exterminated.

In truth, as I’ve indicated, the mind-set of the Nazis, the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearful view of the world, involving frightening occult powers and vague conspiracies, isn’t that unusual. I’ve heard similar ideas, after a few drinks, in parts of the Middle East, parts of Africa and the Balkans. We’re not fools, as one General from an Arab country said to me a few years ago, we understand that western intelligence services have carefully planned everything in the Arab world since 2011. But you can find the same basic mindset in the comments section of a lot of blogs, and in the suburbs of the mainstream Internet. The difference is that the Nazis—a group of not especially bright or talented individuals with a banally terrifying view of the world—managed to take control of a major country with resources and an Army. (And of course the racial competition mindset was very common at the time, not least among educated westerners, but that’s another story.)

I’ve gone into this in a little detail because the Liberal mind is essentially incapable of understanding it, and so seeks explanations—any explanations—that conform to its prejudices. So racial hatred, evil geniuses, propaganda, traumatic events in Hitler’s childhood and any number of other explanations are put forward, to explain what WH Auden thought had “driven a culture mad” and into the arms of “a psychopathic god.” Or you can simply observe that the Nazis lived in a constant state of existential fear, surrounded, they thought, by powerful enemies that wanted to exterminate them. This fancied predicament not only justified, but actually imposed the most extreme measures for their survival. Himmler, in particular, worried incessantly in his diaries and speeches about the morality of the SS’s actions. In the end, he decided that these ghastly measures were inescapable, and it was necessary to grit one’s teeth and do what was needed, no matter how terrible. (He was violently sick at the only execution he attended.) And German commanders often found it hard to motivate troops to carry out atrocities against the local population. They claimed that in this way, the troops could strike back against the hidden forces (notably the Jews and Bolsheviks) who were behind the bombing of their cities. Curiously, this was exactly the argument used by the 13 November 2015 terrorists.

That’s enough Nazis for one week, and preferably for a while, except to say that little of the above has penetrated the public discourse, because it cannot be assimilated into the Liberal world-view. It is perhaps for that reason that I am always encountering people, in person and in print, whose view of the Nazis still comes from popular histories written immediately after the War, and who are simply unaware of the enormous amount of more recent scholarship, which often paints a very different picture.

So modern Liberalism does not understand organised political violence and can never deal with it. With its ideology of rational utility maximisation, it simply cannot understand that violence can be used as a tool by groups whose objectives seem quite rational to them even if we cannot understand why. Some cases are extreme. For example, during the long Emergency in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army attacked, at least in theory, military and state targets. The Protestant Paramilitaries on the other hand largely murdered Catholics randomly. Yet it does seem that the PPMs thought it some twisted way that if they could only kill enough Catholics, the IRA would stop its activities. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Some cases just seem weird, such as the conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s, where magicians were important, where fighters wore traditional masks and modern fancy dress, where adolescents carried guns, and where Rambo films were used as training aids. But careful work on the structure of African societies has suggested that in fact there was a great deal of realism and logic, as well as tradition, behind behaviour that most westerners found incomprehensible. If you believe that the other side’s magicians are better than yours, you might think it prudent to withdraw, even if that’s difficult to explain to an earnest foreigner from a Peacebuilding NGO.

Violence has also been used since forever to control terrain. Some of the most sickening atrocities in the war in Bosnia were designed to terrify members of the other community into leaving, since the forces involved were too small to physically control terrain. Likewise, when Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda in 1990, they were only a splinter group of exiles, mostly from the aristocratic former Tutsi elite. They could not hope to control the terrain militarily, so they used terror instead to force the Hutu peasantry to flee, and so empty the land.

And finally, in this catalogue of horrors, violence has been used for socio-political ends, to ensure control of a country. The classic example, even if little known in the West, is the Ikiza or “Catastrophe,” the widespread massacres carried out in Burundi in 1972 by the Tutsi aristocracy which controlled the country, against the Hutu peasantry. After a feeble attempt at a rising by the Hutu (85% of the population) the Army and Tutsi youth groups methodically executed at least 100,00 Hutu, probably at least twice that number. But though some of the killings were random, they were especially directed against Hutu schoolchildren and university students. By the end of the killings, experts think that virtually all educated Hutu who had not fled the country were dead. Which of course makes perfect sense if your strategic objective is to prevent the rise of an educated Hutu elite, since it is from such elites that popular revolutions almost always come.

Confronted with this grisly panorama, the PMC, detached for the most part from the realities of violence, has in general ignored it, or subsumed it into its Liberal ideology. It worries not about violent crime but about the “exploitation” of such crime by the “extreme Right.” It sends its agents around the world to promote peace and reconciliation after conflicts it does not know much about and whose origins it cannot understand. And until recently, that hasn’t mattered.

The most curious part of the reaction to V13 was the incomprehension of the PMC and the media, looking for boxes in which to file the episode away. The old poverty/marginalisation gambit obviously wouldn’t work: hardly any of those involved in planning and carrying out the attack were French, the majority were Belgians and there were Syrians and Iraqis as well. Behind them was a whole international jihadist network stretching across the Middle East and  Europe. People had known vaguely about the Islamic State and its horrors, and may even have read that the French, like other western nations, were attacking them. But this ….

So it’s not surprising that the official commemoration and the official memorial to V13 said nothing about who the attackers were and why they wanted to slaughter so many people. The event is presented as a “tragedy,” akin to an inexplicable natural disaster, rather than a crime. Partly this is the old, tired, fear of “stigmatising” France’s Muslim population (who had little or nothing to do with the attacks), but more than anything else it is simple incomprehension and a disinclination to understand, since understanding involves leaving normative models behind, and delving into complex ideological disputes between people with funny names who are not like us. It was even possible to impose a PMC ideological framework on the events. One of the bereaved parents wrote a book entitled You Will Not Have My Hate, which became the inspiration for a best-selling tee-shirt. Such sentiments may perhaps be noble, but they are entirely irrelevant, except insofar as they allow the PMC to feel morally superior to the assailants, and avoid having to deal with the actual issues. As the philosopher Michel Onfray remarked acidly “We have candles, they have Kalashnikovs.” But please help us not to understand.

In a sense, all of this is only part of the story. The detachment of the PMC from everyday life has protected them to a great extent from the realities of violence. (“I wish nobody any ill,”someone said to me after the V13 attacks “but if they had hit the Opéra de Paris and some expensive restaurants, the government’s response would have been very different.”) By contrast, when the assumptions and norms of the PMC are attacked, anything goes. We first saw this in Bosnia, where former pacifists foaming at the mouth demanded that western governments “do something” to “stop the violence” because the victims were white Europeans who looked like us. And the PMC transitioned rapidly to a schizophrenic policy of wishy-washy Liberalism at home, and selective violence abroad when its precious norms were threatened. So, on the one hand, Peacebuilding, diversity initiatives and human rights training in conflict zones, and on the other violent attacks on states or leaders they didn’t like. The reasons for the latter are not rational, since the PMC has no rational ideology, but essentially emotional. Please don’t force us to understand.

Which brings us, finally and inevitably, to Ukraine. Here, the PMC feels itself touched in its precious ideology, as I have suggested, and so is able to blithely support and encourage war against another state. But the war is now coming home in ways it was never supposed to, and could bring anything from regular power cuts to the possibility of a missile landing somewhere near you. And it's not as if there aren’t lower-level problems as well. The Islamic State was badly knocked about in the Levant but is increasingly active in the Sahel, much closer to Europe. And organised drug-related crime is in the process of undermining states across western Europe, facilitated by the PMC’s ideology of mass immigration and open borders. It may turn out quite soon that candles are not enough, and that our assailants will be armed with more than just Kalashnikovs. At that point, and probably too late, the PMC will have no choice but to try to understand. Whether they will succeed is another matter.