Honestly, after a good bit of Googling I’m surprised to find just a single mention of ISIS connected to the Walking Dead Season 5 premiere.
In a ghastly early scene, Glenn, Darrell, Rick and Bob (in that order) kneel over a trough beside several extras whose throats are cut by “the bad people” at Terminus after they’re whacked in the head with a baseball bat. It is, as Vulture’s Richard Rys put it, “a disturbing echo of real-life current events that the writers surely didn’t intend, as images of ISIS beheadings still linger in the public consciousness.”
But what’s interesting about this echo isn’t just that it preceded the ISIS videos (a big can of Red Bull for cultural critics), it’s that the broader story being told about the perpetrators of the violence in this zombie show is actually more sophisticated than the public conversation around ISIS—yet another indication that the content of culture, even of the pop variety, is so important.
Part of what’s great about The Walking Dead is the persistent and frustrating question of whether we’re capable of maintaining our humanity in a post-apocalyptic setting. The moving goalposts of morality in the show aren’t just obstacles to success or a healthy self-image—they determine life or death.
As one Terminite put it, “you’re the butcher or you’re the cattle.” But as the episode unfolds we learn that these bad people weren’t so bad before the butcher or cattle question had been put to them. Point being: there was a logic to the evil they embraced.
When it comes to ISIS, and much of what we’ve accepted as terrorism in general, the story has largely been, in effect, that it’s because they’re Muslims. Arab Muslims.
Islam is “the mother lode of bad ideas,” as Sam Harris recently said, referring to Islam’s alleged intrinsic opposition to liberalism. Beyond being offensive and unsophisticated, the racial/ethnic/religion frame lacks logic. It holds little explanatory value since, as anyone who can read data can see, attitudes greatly differ according to which Muslim country or population you look at. It’s that old blurring of correlation and causation.
Another road block to an honest accounting of the causes of terrorism is the fear that understanding might just be a slippery slope to justification. In a recent post on the Forward explaining their opposition to the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of a performance depicting the murder of their father, the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer wrote:
Terrorism is irrational. It should never be explained away or justified. Nor should the death of innocent civilians be misunderstood as an acceptable means for drawing attention to perceived political grievances.
It would lack compassion to criticize the sisters for their stance; if it were my family I’d just as likely want the world to believe that the hijackers were killers without context. But one of the great (albeit still deeply flawed) advances in civilization has been the creation of standards of justice that are applied equally and determined by impartial actors. We bracket blinding rage and grief as best we can, in order to remain rational. (There’s that word again, which, like “terrorism” itself, depends largely on context and perspective.)
But it’s well established that the CIA helped to create al Qaeda when it believed it would aid the fight against the Soviet Union. Likewise, Israel played a big role in the creation of Hamas in its efforts to weaken the PLO. If terrorism were just some mass psychosis we probably wouldn’t see so much effort expended to understand it by scholars, both civilian and military; if it were simply a matter of one uniquely dangerous religion, those who single out Islam would be burdened with the need to explain why, given that both the Christian and Jewish scriptures can be read in ways that surpass the violence and savagery of the Qur’an, they believe Islam is the problem.
When our explanation for terrorism amounts to hey, they’re just bad people, we overlook both our complicity in fostering terrorism or in creating environments in which extremism can flourish. We also fail to grasp how we ourselves might act were we to find ourselves in certain contexts. All of which means we’re likely to repeat the mistakes we’ve already made in creating the conditions for groups like al Qaeda and ISIS to thrive.
Sure, when we’re confronting an immediate threat like ISIS (or the fictional cannibals of Terminus) there isn’t a lot of time for reflection on foreign policy and human nature. But the truth is, as Americans concerned with ISIS we’re fundamentally safe.
So while the insight offered by The Walking Dead may be a luxury most of us can afford only when our survival isn’t in question—one of the central tensions in the series, incidentally—the truth is, since Americans are more likely to be killed by their falling TV or furniture (or lightning or a cop or a dog or a “brain-eating zombie parasite,” in fact) it’s safe to say that this is an insight we can well afford to have.
But when we close our eyes and pretend that terrorism is irrational, or that it’s intrinsic to a religion or culture, it’s worth remembering that Susan Sontag called this mindset, ironically, “jihad language,” which she defined as “good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism.” In any case, if this past Sunday’s episode 2 is any indication of what’s in store for the fifth season of The Walking Dead, viewers will be spending a great deal of time watching Carol, Rick, Tyrese, Glenn, Carl and the rest of the group trade tense, post-apocalyptic glares and figure out how to stay human while they stay alive.
