13–14 November 2015

An updated comment on the terrorist attacks in Paris

Update, 14 November, 0720 MST. We now know that ISIS conducted the attack, apparently in retaliation for French air attacks on ISIS in Syria. Earlier this fall, ISIS took out a Russian airliner with a bomb, again apparently as retaliation for Russia’s air strikes in Syria. I think there’s a fairly high probability that ISIS will try to murder American civilians, either in the U.S. or, more likely, abroad. None of this should be unexpected. None of this should change our daily behavior or attitude (see Fallows, below).

Updated. The Guardian is live blogging the situation. It just published the statement of France’s President, François Hollande, which contains these paragraphs:

Faced with terror, France must be strong, it must be great and the state authorities must be firm. We will be.

We must also call on everyone to be responsible.

What the terrorists want is to scare us and fill us with dread. There is indeed reason to be afraid. There is dread, but in the face of this dread, there is a nation that knows how to defend itself, that knows how to mobilise its forces and, once again, will defeat the terrorists.

You may wish to compare Hollande’s statement with President George W. Bush’s statement on 11 September 2001, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech on 8 December 1941.

There are reports that some citizens of Paris are taking to the streets waving French flags in defiance of the terrorists. It’s good they are doing that instead of quavering in darkened homes, afraid to even peek out the window. Update, 1916 MST. France has declared a national state of emergency and ordered every to stay inside.

Accepting danger but not cowering in fear, as The Atlantic’s James Fallows observed a decade ago, is the wise approach to living with terrorism:

There will always be a threat that someone will blow up an airplane or a building or a container ship. Technology has changed the balance of power; it is easier for even a handful of people to threaten a community than it is for the community to defend itself. But while we have to live in danger, we don’t have to live in fear. Attacks are designed to frighten us even more than to kill us. So let’s refuse to magnify the damage they do. We’ll talk about the risk only when that leads to specific ways we can make ourselves safer. Otherwise we’ll just stop talking about it, as we do about the many other risks and tragedies inevitable in life. We will show that we are a free, brave people by controlling our fears. We admired Britain during the Blitz because people went about their lives rather than fretting at every minute that they might die. Let us be admirable in the same way.