Not the mindless killers they employ and brainwash but the brutal masterminds themselves know exactly what they are trying to achieve. Two things. First, a backlash against all Muslims (and indeed all “others”) which will have the effect of creating a much larger reservoir of radicalised young people and especially young Muslims. Secondly, societies frightened out of their wits and therefore susceptible to more and more stringent security measures leading in turn to increasingly tense, suspicious, divided, disturbed and distracted – and therefore considerably weakened – populations in the “enemy” states.
The world is terror-stricken. The slaughter of journalists in the heart of Paris is going to ramp up paranoia exponentially around the world. Already a condition of advanced paranoia is spreading everywhere. The fastest growing business in country after country is the security business. If you travel at all frequently you get a hint of this as at proliferating checkpoints you are made to cast off belts and shoes and no doubt explosive water bottles and colognes and anything suspiciously sharp-edged while increasingly invasive machines seek to discover the contents of your luggage and examine the secrets of your person if not yet quite your soul, though no doubt that too will come. The big brothers watching us are getting bigger and much better equipped. Now they are going to be throwing their investigative muscle around much more oppressively.
Democracy used to be associated with freedom from the rigours of security checks and the insistent demands of powerful and pervasive investigative bureaucracies. No longer so. The democracies of the world are rapidly succumbing to the paranoia that once was associated with dictatorships and iron-clad authoritarian regimes. The apparatuses of pre-emptive surveillance and interdiction are