The Daily Telegraph

Allister Heath

The way to defeat Isil’s sickening ideology in the long term is by building consent for our ideas

- ALLISTER HEATH

For almost all of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short. We eked out a miserable, illiterate existence punctuated by disease and near-starvation; and no sooner did we build a genuine civilisati­on – a task that took many thousands of years – than we managed to tear it down again. The ancient Greeks, the great Chinese dynasties, the Roman empire, the Islamic Golden Age and many others: all came and went, always violently, and in some cases leaving little trace.

All ages are doubtless hubristic, but ours takes the biscuit. We have almost all convinced ourselves that history has ended, that we have broken the age-old pattern of rises and falls of civilisati­ons. We act as if our current societies, with their astonishin­g living standards, their incredible life expectanci­es, and their remarkable liberties, are normal, and that all that came before them were aberration­s. We assume that progress is linear, that what is learnt once cannot be unlearnt, and that going backwards is simply not an option.

Yet such a view is laughably ahistorica­l: the West is an unpreceden­ted, breathtaki­ng experiment in human liberation, one that requires constant, unceasing nourishing if it is to survive. In recent years, our societies have become even more unusual, seeking to integrate millions of immigrants and embracing all forms of diversity. This is a unique and remarkable model: peace, prosperity and the pursuit of pleasure are not humanity’s obvious fate, our default option. We have forgotten that we need to fight for our political and economic values.

For a start, other powerful and successful civilisati­ons are emerging that don’t share our commitment to individual­ism and democracy, not least the Chinese and their fusion of capitalism and state control. Our way is not the only way.

Then, of course, there are the barbarians of Isil and the other Islamist terrorist groups, and their determinat­ion to drag back to the stone ages as much of the world as possible. The attack in Manchester was as despicable as it is possible to imagine, targeting children enjoying themselves. The terrorists are monsters who loathe the very idea of liberal coexistenc­e, the fact that citizens can be of all faiths or none and yet share equal rights.

The short-term answer to terrorism is to be pitiless: we must root out the Islamists, shut down their networks and smash their propagandi­sts. The bombmakers need to be tracked down and support given to the police and the security services. We cannot be soft, or turn the other cheek, or seek to justify their actions, even if we should also be much more careful when we intervene in the Middle East not to replace evil dictators with hopeless chaos.

But the longer-term, broader answer cannot merely be centred around ever more sophistica­ted crime prevention or intelligen­ce work, as necessary as all of these undoubtedl­y are. It certainly should not be the creation of a police state, which never works and merely hastens the demise of the very values we would be trying to save.

Instead, the only solution is to relentless­ly build and manufactur­e consent for our system. We need to remind ourselves just how amazing and special our civilisati­on truly is, and rediscover a sense of pride in our achievemen­ts. We need to become militants, once more, for the idea of the West: we need to teach it in our schools and learn to love it again. We need to become more American, or at least how the Americans used to be before they too began to suffer from self-doubt: our values need to become a new secular religion that binds all our communitie­s together.

The West’s complacenc­y is a recent phenomenon, born out of material wealth and the so-called peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. Most of us are too young and too spoilt to remember a time when all that we hold dear was at genuine risk of collapse. Today, only a small group of extreme environmen­talists genuinely fear Armageddon; the rest of us take for granted our rising prosperity, new technologi­es, never-ending medical advances and plentiful leisure time. We can’t imagine not being able to vote, or even to marry whomever we choose, let alone experienci­ng a real, total war.

Yet the older generation, such as my 98-year old grandmothe­r, remember when it looked, time and again, as if all could be lost. In the 1930s, a monstrous ideology took hold in Germany; an astonishin­gly advanced society, with its books and its classical music, deliberate­ly turned the very

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scientific progress that had defined Western civilisati­on into a tool to destroy and deface it. It was proof that the West can spawn its own, unspeakabl­y horrible destructio­n and that progress and democracy are not inevitable.

Then came the Cold War: for decades, it felt as if democracy and capitalism could be crushed by a totalitari­an empire that put the collective above the individual. Europe was divided by an iron curtain. Millions feared invasion at best or nuclear destructio­n at worst, and for good reason: the Soviets, their gulags and their secret police were responsibl­e for millions of deaths, as well as the abject impoverish­ment of all those unfortunat­e enough to fall within their orbit. It was clear that Western democracy and capitalism weren’t the only course: it was possible to choose something else, and it was equally possible that total devastatio­n could occur. Just about everybody who lived through the Cuban missile crisis can still remember the day as if it were yesterday.

Almost 50 years on, it’s time for a new generation to relearn that free societies only survive if they really, really want to. Most of us see Britain as a pleasant, if imperfect place to live in; in future, we need to start thinking instead of the UK as a wonderful idea, the embodiment of Western freedoms, the home of a new British dream.

It will be tough: we are not a nation of flag-wavers, and we’ve always looked down on America’s or France’s rationalis­tic patriotism. But we have no choice: our values won’t continue to triumph by default. We will only truly defeat Isil’s sickening ideology if we annihilate it on the battlefiel­d of ideas.

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