Important, Difficult, and Unpleasant Duties

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There’s a camp, more an open-air prison, called Al-Hol, tucked away in the far east of Syria that houses thousands of people who are mix of Islamic State diehards, their victims, and those simply caught in the crossfire. There’s no long-term solution in mind, and so Al-Hol festers, mostly forgotten by the Western world.

Not that there’s an information blackout, this long piece in the New Yorker is a haunting read. But the enemies of Western civilization have nothing to gain by starting a social media blitz about Al-Hol.

Getting to this point has been neither quick, clean, nor painless. The battle of Mosul, the last major defeat of the Islamic State, left an estimated 40,000 civilians dead. Amnesty International dutifully condemned both sides.

Even the most dim-witted Westerners basically supported the destruction of the Islamic State, largely because they were repeating the Assad talking points that any and all anti-Assad Syrians were really just Islamic State.

This sort of difficult, complex, yet ultimately necessary military operation was allowed to go on because Raqqa and Mosul are meaningless names to most. What happened during the battles stayed inside an information black hole. Western troops were largely uninvolved in direct fighting.

It would be hard to argue that the world would be a better place if much of Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria were under the control of the Islamic State. And yet the collective West seems incapable of doing anything similar.

Reminiscent of Ivan Karmazov, many of us struggle to accept that Evil is very real, and that there is diabolical Evil on our very doorstep. The god of secular humanism and progress allows for no Evil, no dragons to be slain. If there’s no real Evil in the world, then there’s also no point in doing anything difficult to confront it.

And that’s how we’ve ended up where we are today, seeing Hamas and Pride flags flying together, people who are obsessed with every minor mistake Ukraine has ever made, yet unable to name the obvious Evil standing before us.

Thus we trudge on as a society, drunk and numbed with social media, an increasingly large panoply of drugs, and using what little energy we have left to fight battles over the tyranny of small differences.