“What central bank is going to accept an ISIS coin?” former U.N. and State Department adviser David L. Phillips scoffed to a New York Times reporter. Phillips, who heads a peace-building program at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, added: “It’s like blood diamonds.”
Such pragmatic tut-tuts aside, the announcement was, for all intents and purposes, a natural next step for the aspiring caliphate, which, like any self-respecting fantasy kingdom of fanatics, has already begun issuing license plates, set up courts and adroitly positioned itself as the terror set’s social media wunderkind, even publishing an online magazine, where a recent cover featured the group’s sinister black flag flapping brazenly over the hallowed symbolic space of St. Peter’s Square.
If contemporary life is define by the pursuit of alternative realities, then chalk one up for the Islamic State group. Here is a terror organization perfectly suited to the Zeitgeist, skilled in the art of delusion and technological legerdemain. And indeed, what The Daily Beast aptly dubbed the “grotesque ISIS reality show” displays no signs of abating. Last week, a fifth video of a beheaded Western hostage surfaced, this one of former Army Ranger Peter Kassig, who had been captured while delivering aide to Syrian refugees.
Up until now, there’s been something creepily cinematic about the beheadings – the stark almost technicolor desert landscapes contrasting with the orange jumpsuit-style attire of the prisoner, the scripted final words of the victim, the hooded executioner with his English accent and “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style monicker, Jihadi John. But Kassig, who converted to Islam in captivity, did not receive the group's typical performance art treatment, appearing only as a decapitated head at the feet of his tormentor. Pure gore, pure evil.
In an age where theocratic and secular fantasies collide, it is the image, more than anything, which unites them and serves as the indispensable input, the raw fodder for countless Internet memes to be circulated on social media sites, shared, downloaded, forwarded, re-tweeted and modified, in what has become an endless cyber vortex. Here, truth and fiction commingle with such alarming regularity that the fine line between the two, where it exists at all, is increasingly indecipherable. As The Daily Beast’s Christopher Dickey points out: "[T]he self-proclaimed Islamic State has shown that its media manipulation skills are far in advance of anyone else’s in the region. ... The videos of American and British hostages being beheaded are so valuable to ISIS as memes of power and fear that now it has murdered a convert to Islam.”
The unacknowledged flipside of this, however, is that the very visceral inhumanity and gruesomeness of the videos are also pure gold for proponents of the eternal "Global War on Terror" – with the Islamic State group, arguably, the enemies they’ve been waiting for ever since the campaign to rid the world of all such evil was first declared in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Here are enemies so vile and blood thirsty, so utterly without scruple, so very post-human, one might say, that there’s really no price too high that might be required in the name of stopping them. In addition to the group’s seemingly insatiable yen for lopping off people’s heads, at their hands thousands of young Yazidi girls and women have reportedly been enslaved, raped and dispatched into forced marriages. Not since reports of Germans bayoneting babies and chopping off women’s breasts during the First World War has the foe presented himself as so thoroughly (and conveniently) evil. Those stories turned out to be largely invented, while presumably the Islamic State group ones are not. But in the quasi-virtual world we all now at least partially inhabit, such distinctions have become blurred.
Perhaps, it is a testament to this confusion that these images of terror have done so little to turn off the so-called “jihadi brides,” as the female groupies who have flocked to the militants’ cause are known. If anything they seem turned on, posting selfies next to invocations to violence, comporting themselves like “fangirls” following a boy band, as Melanie Smith, a researcher at King’s College London, told the Washington Post. Only in this instance, they are mindlessly following militants, who they sometimes marry, into the very real theater of war and a life of martyrdom. Clearly, the State Department’s “Think Again, Turn Away” anti-terror social media program has some ground to make up, when it comes to winning these hearts and minds.
At times, it feels that very little about postmodernity, including its terror campaigns (both those who wage them and those who seek to counteract them) seems real anymore. Or rather everything seems real – too real – like those simulacrums the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard was always going on about, a sort of detached hyperreality that has become, in turn, its own reality.
Remember the Khorasan group? Those “seasoned al-Qaida operatives in Syria” that President Barack Obama touted as the next big threat back in September. Well, since then, the highly “mysterious” group has largely faded from the national consciousness, making only cameo appearances as the target of occasional airstrikes.
Likewise, after sending 80 troops to Chad to assist in reconnaissance missions back in May, very little has been heard of the U.S. military’s attempts to aid in the search for the hundreds of girls who were taken from their school in Nigeria last spring, although the U.S. Agency for International Development is apparently providing “psycho-social support.”
Alas, despite the “made for Twitter” campaign to #BringBackOurGirls and its enthusiastic endorsement by millions of would-be social media liberators (the most high-profile of these being none other than first lady Michelle Obama herself), about 200 of the kidnapped schoolgirls have yet to be rescued (though some have managed to escape), months after their abduction by the flamboyant Islamic terror group, Boko Haram. Incidentally, even the name Boko Haram, which loosely translates into “Western education is forbidden,” sounds like something out of the most fervid colonial satire, recalling the Brits' erstwhile, and more than a little racist use of “Bongo Bongo Land” to derogate African nations. Moreover, the indigenous solidarity marches, demanding the return of the girls, with their slick, almost too perfectly designed English-language signage, matching T-shirts and social media-ready slogans, can’t help seem just a touch incongruous.
Meanwhile, there were reports of a ceasefire between Boko Haram and the Nigerian government in October, which apparently included a pledge to return the girls, but that, too, led to precious little. Instead, the girls’ hometown of Chibok was seized by Boko Haram earlier this month. Around this same time, a suicide bomber left 46 children dead in Yobe State.
And what did officialdom do about it? Nigeria’s ostentatious leader, with his penchant for fedoras and self-promotion, took to the hustings to announce his candidacy for president in the 2015 general election.
“After seeking the face of God, in quiet reflection with my family and having listened to the call of our people nationwide to run, I, Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, have accepted to re-present myself, on the platform of The Peoples’ Democratic Party,” he said, briefly pledging to defeat terrorism and, oh yeah, bring back those girls that everybody is so very worried about. In a way, it would all be horribly funny – in a dark twisted way, of course – were real people actually not dying and being brutalized due to the whims of cartoonish terrorists and the ineptitude of an even more cartoonish president.
But hey, as the Guardian headline put it, the “Goodluck Jonathan show goes on.”
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