John Robert Gallagher, a Canadian who was reportedly killed last week while fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) alongside the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia, wrote an essay on the war against jihadism and other forms of religious extremism that motivated him to risk his life, which was posthumously published by The National Post.
After observing that, given the threat posed by ISIS, agreeing to fight against the group may seem “objectively insane,” Gallagher identified two reasons that spurred him to take up arms.
The first reason Gallagher cited was the “cause of a free and independent Kurdistan.” The Kurds, Gallagher wrote, are the world’s largest stateless ethnicity, and their rejection of “religious fanaticism and suicide murder” in the face of adversity was reason enough for the West to support their bid for nationhood.
The second reason Gallagher identified was the war against the theocratic politics that characterize ISIS.
This war may have started in 1979, or earlier; 2001 increased the intensity of the conflict; the withdrawal from Iraq kicked off the latest phase. Like the American Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War, this war is about ideas as much as it is about armies. Slavery, fascism, and communism were all bad ideas which required costly sacrifice before they were finally destroyed. In our time, we have a new bad idea: Theocracy. …
We are all on the front lines of this conflict, whether we know it or not. We can measure the causalities not only in the body counts of deadly terror attacks, ‘mass demonstrations,’ embassy assaults and assassinated artists; we can also measure it in the terror produced among cartoonists, satirists, publishers and booksellers, news media and educators who are being prevented from doing their necessary work of maintaining the machinery of the enlightenment. Not only have we all been threatened; in many ways we are all already casualties of this war.
Gallagher wrote that western civilization and the unprecedented freedom it has given humanity is too often unappreciated by those who would excuse extremism, rather than identify the threat it poses to their values.
Our war is not just about theocracy; it is between those who still believe in the enlightenment, that self-determination is the most basic and most crucial of all human rights, that the first duty of every man in society is to defend the mechanisms by which we make ourselves free; and those who ultimately lack the capacity to believe in anything. …
Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated, and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence.
Gallagher noted that he was brought up in a religious environment, and that western society still allowed him to dissent from what he was taught and think for himself. “The mechanisms of society,” he wrote, “gave me the tools by which I could make myself free. They saved my life.”
Like theocracy today, fascism used to be an international movement, with fascist parties in every western country. Then World War II happened. Nazi Germany became the standard-bearer of fascism, and when it was crushed, the movement wasn’t just destroyed, it was discredited for all time. Ironically, the rise of ISIS gives us the same chance now. We have the ability to eradicate jihadism in our lifetime. The terrorists’ own playbook sees the taking and holding of territory as a necessary step to discredit Western democracy and prove that the Caliphate is a real political possibility in the 21st century. We have to prove that it is not. And like we did with Nazi Germany, we must crush it with overwhelming, unrelenting force. We have to take it while the mass graves are still fresh, while there are still survivors to give testimony to the atrocities they’ve witnessed, while the murderers are still around to be put on trial. Only by destroying ISIS without mercy can we discredit the idea, and force the would-be jihadis and fellow-travelers to give up their insane dreams of a new Mecca and join the modern world.
I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization. A free Kurdistan would be good enough cause for any internationalist, but we are fortunate enough to be able to risk our necks for something more important and more righteous than anything we’ve faced in generations. With some fortitude and guts, we can purge the sickness that’s poisoning our society, and come together to defeat this ultimate evil. I’ve been fighting this battle in one way or another for my entire life. I hope for success. The rest is in the hands of the gods.
Last Wednesday, Gallagher’s mother announced his death in a statement on his Facebook page, which read in part:
I have heard from representatives from the YPG in Syria and in London and it seems that John Robert was killed by a suicide bomber earlier today. I don’t have many details at this time.
I hope that some of will take the time to read the essay John Robert wrote before he went away. He thought this was such an important fight and he has always been a man of principle, who believed very strongly in human rights and justice. I am very, very proud of him and his sisters and I love him very much.
That same day, the United States Defense Department announced that it would no longer send military aid to the YPG.
Randy Hillier, a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, offered brief remarks in Gallagher’s memory on Friday.
Last month, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote that the ongoing wave of Palestinian terror bears “more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide jihad” inspired by ISIS than to a unique “intifada.”
Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around this story of daggers: The weapon of the poor? Really? The weapon one uses because it is within reach and one has no other? When I see those blades, I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of the beheadings of Hervé Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines; I think that the Islamic State’s videos have clearly gained a following, and that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods exported everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
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