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"His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events: he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned - whilst the pile of debris before him goes even higher. This storm is what has been called progress."The time has come to go beyond what may be read as a very apocalyptic Christian parallel between divinity and violent retribution. As Alastair Crooke detailed in his astonishingly perceptive 2010 book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, it was the need to restrain the furies of "divinely inspired" violence that led Hobbes to conceptualize Leviathan, where he called for a social contract between the individual and a necessarily strong, implacable government.
Moreover, it was the Hobbesian version of a social contract that laid the basis for John Locke to assert a dubious "natural goodness" of humanity, complete with a - very private - "pursuit of happiness" and the general welfare gleefully coalescing via the work of an invisible hand.
This fallacy/fairy tale shaped Western thought for over the next 300 years.
Now it's a completely different ball game. We have been prisoners of Hobbes and Locke for too long: such a seductive pole dancing of legitimacy around which the Western-conceived nation-states grouped to protect and legitimize themselves and their plunder of the rest of the world.
Lately, the contemporary specter of "divine violence" was marketed to everyone from Africa to Asia as armed Islamist resistance. But now this mask has also fallen. The "new" Syria shows to everyone how al-Qaeda R Us - and always was.
Comment: The 'theater' of war has many interpretations with results specific to preferred speculation.