“Atheism and divorce: a formula for junior jihad.”

That’s the headline of Miranda Devine’s recent column in the Daily Telegraph, a discussion of Jake Bilardi, the Melbourne teenager who travelled to Iraq to kill himself in a suicide bombing for the Islamic State (Isis).

“Brought up atheist in Melbourne,” Devine explained, “the youngest of six children, he was a smart awkward boy who lost his father to divorce at 9 and his mother to cancer at 15.”

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Naturally, wags online got stuck into Devine, but the column raises some fascinating points. How did a bright, well-educated boy from a reasonably comfortable and distinctly non-religious background end up on the other side of the world, driving a vehicle packed with explosives into an Iraqi army position?

Only those closest to Bilardi can hope to understand exactly why he made the choices he did – and even then, suicides are notoriously difficult to fathom.

Still, it’s immediately apparent that Bilardi’s online writings (republished here) don’t resemble the stereotypical ravings of a religious fanatic. On the contrary, he comes across as intelligent and articulate, even as he reasons himself to monstrous conclusions. His radicalisation began, not from a desire to behead people, but with a revulsion at war. He writes:

Australia, a nation full of proud nationalists and people who love democracy and what they perceive to be freedom, has forever stood beside the Americans in this war, deploying troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. […] I saw the Taliban as simply a group of proud men seeking to protect their land and their people from an invading force, while I did not necessarily agree with their ideology, their actions were in my opinion completely justified. I saw the foreign troops burning villages, raping local women and girls, rounding up innocent young men as suspected terrorists and sending them overseas for torture, gunning down women, children and the elderly in the streets and indiscriminately firing missiles from their jets. Who was I to believe was the terrorist?

The passage shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, almost every time a terrorist or would-be terrorist explains their actions, the same argument gets made: a reference to “the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world”. The heads of various security agencies around the world have occasionally blurted out the same point: simply, western wars have – and will continue to – motivate violent extremists.

Obviously, that’s not a justification for terrorism or Isis, an organisation less interested in opposing foreign intervention than using chaos in Iraq and Syria as an opportunity to impose its own bloody, sectarian agenda. But it doesn’t help anyone to pretend there’s no connection between the wars abroad and the radicalisation of kids like Bilardi. Yet that’s only half of the story.

The pseudonymous Gary “War Nerd” Brecher, makes the interesting observation in Pando Daily that more foreign fighters have enlisted for Isis from Belgium (350) than from Indonesia (perhaps 70). It’s a bizarre statistic. Belgium is not only far smaller than Indonesia in terms of absolute numbers, it’s a predominantly Christian country, in which Muslims are a tiny minority. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, including a subculture of political Islamists. Yet Indonesian militants seem far less keen to die in Syria than their Belgian counterparts.

“How is it even possible?” asks Brecher. “I’ll tell you in one quick quote: ‘It’s boring in Belgium.’ Remember that line. It was spoken by a typical jihadi who left his boring Belgian life, sheltered by the pious, bland welfare state, to kill and die in Syria.”

Brecher argues that would-be jihadis in Indonesia or Yemen are constrained in part by the expense of going all the way to Iraq. It’s easier for them to join local groups and fight in their own country.

He contrasts their situation with their counterparts in Belgium. Once upon a time, young Belgians could enlist in support of their nation’s empire, finding excitement suppressing natives in the Congo. But those days are gone – and Isis fills the void by offering aimless young men the prospect of overseas’ adventures.

The foreign fighters, he says, are “a belated, kind of pathetic, echo of generations of western European male fantasies.”

There are resonances here with an argument that George Orwell made in 1940 in a famous review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It’s quite jarring to read the author of 1984 confessing that he finds Hitler “deeply appealing”.

It doesn’t help to pretend there’s no connection between the wars abroad and the radicalisation of kids like Bilardi.

Hitler, Orwell says, offers a vision of “a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder”. It’s a description not a million miles from the society Isis presides over in the enclaves of Syria and Iraq it controls.

So when Orwell asks how Hitler managed to put his “monstrous vision” across, the answers are of some contemporary interest. Hitler, he says, gained a following because he offered something other than hedonism.

“Whereas socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

Hitler’s secret lies in the recognition that people desire more than comfort and security and the avoidance of pain: “Hitler […] knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense, they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is not the new Hitler, and the dynamics of the wars in Iraq and Syria can’t be reduced to a single factor. But Orwell’s piece does contribute something significant to the debates about “radicalisation” – namely, it suggests the most common strategies to prevent kids becoming jihadis simply won’t work. Because, in a way, Devine’s right.



“[Bilardi] was taught to believe in nothing,” she says, “and ended up a fanatical believer in something very bad.”

Certainly, that’s what comes across on his blog: Bilardi’s growing disenchantment with the banality of his life and his excitement at violent jihad starts to offer him an alternative.

Conventional “deradicalisation” assumes that terrorist recruits have been brainwashed. But that wasn’t the case with Bilardi. On the contrary, he seems to have, quite soberly, examined what the world offered him – and then rejected it. The slogan that Orwell attributes to Hitler – “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” – sums up the position Bilardi appears to have arrived at.

What if Bilardi had ended up somewhere else? Andrew Bolt says Bilardi was “looking for a faith” and suggests everyone would have been safer had he found Christianity instead. This itself is an old, old neoconservative preoccupation, going all the way back to Irving Kristol’s famous book of 1978, Two Cheers for Capitalism.

Capitalism, Kristol said, should be celebrated because it delivered material well being and individual liberty. But he withheld his third cheer because of capitalism’s “unintended cultural consequences”, the uprooting of deeply held traditions and the undermining of the religious certainties that provided personal fulfilment and social stability.

Even in times of prosperity, the system produced a sort of spiritual emptiness, which left individuals’ susceptible to all kinds of radicalism. Hence the neoconservatism enthusiasm for religious revival as a necessary component of capitalist nation building. Sign Australia’s would-be jihadis up to some old-timey Christianity, the theory goes, and they’ll be immune from what Devine calls “the inevitable trajectory of the west’s cultural nihilism”.

You know who else is deeply religious and hostile to cultural nihilism? Isis. There’s not much atheism or divorce happening in territory controlled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is there.

“It’s said,” writes Grayson Clary, “that ‘Africa’ is Europe’s name for its own worst impulses; ‘Islam’ might be the name traditionalists give their own unfinished ambitions.”

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In Devine’s column you can see what he means. But what should progressives conclude from all this?

In his review, Orwell acknowledged he could feel Hitler’s attraction. Yet when Orwell travelled to Spain he found a genuine struggle for liberation, when fighting for the beleaguered Republic, and that cause inspired him more than Hitler’s demagoguery ever could.

Bilardi sought meaning and purpose and a cause for which to fight. These are all good things. So why can’t we deliver them, right here in Australia? People want something to believe in – and if we don’t provide good causes, they will, as Devine says, find bad ones elsewhere.