This year in Chicago, I learnt about the recent massacre in Paris from a text message sent to me from Texas. Last year, when in Paris, I learnt about the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff from an email from a friend in Vermont. Wherever you are, trying diligently, as I do now, to dodge news from the simmering world war, it gets ricocheted at you by another eruption of bullets. The only difference in experiencing the massacre in Chicago is the absence of the incessant police sirens that haunted Paris for weeks after the murders, and which a Belorussian friend in Paris now hears again, non-stop, from her apartment near the Bastille:

Я в порядке, спасибо большое за беспокойство! Да, что-то дикое произошло вчера. Всю ночь под окном сирены. На улицу страшно выходить.

[I’m all right. Thanks a lot for your concern. Yes, something wildly horrible happened yesterday. There are the sirens under my window all night long. Scary to go to the street.]

The frontline, with its transposition to Paris, narrows. Now, I find myself at only one remove from the tragedy: I happen to know people who know those who were affected directly. Our landlady, a journalist, had been in the office of Charlie Hebdo just a week before the shooting to commission a caricature from the doomed artists for her newspaper.

A colleague whom I’d met in Paris emailed in distress to excuse himself from our dinner party on the night of November 13 because two of his friends were at the punk rock concert inside the Bataclan, one of them shot (but not fatally) during the escape:

I’m a little overwhelmed right now given the tragedy in Paris last night.  Two of my friends were at the concert hall where the attack took place. They both survived, but one was shot during their escape (he is stable and will be fine). I have been messaging with friends in Paris all night and will probably continue to do so throughout the evening and I just don’t think I will be up for catching up tomorrow.

To say I’m overwhelmed is an understatement.  I honestly just don’t know what i feel or how to feel at the moment and I’m not sure I’ll be much better off tomorrow.

I apologize for the last minute cancellation but I have a hunch you’ll understand.

So crazy.  So sad.  

He, himself a lover of rock music, would certainly have been at the Bataclan with them, had not he made the decision to return to Chicago a month before to finish his dissertation.

Another message from a friend in Paris reads like this:

Deep breath. Profoundly disturbing and unsettling on all fronts — as a human, as a mom, as a parent, as an American, as a Jew, as someone living in France. Hard to believe we’ve explained both Charlie Hebdo and this to our son in less than a year…and on right on the heels of Kenya, Beirut, etc. Unimaginably sad for those affected directly — horrible beyond words. Scary to drop the kids off at school and crèche, to see my husband leave for work, and to head to French class shortly. “Fluctuat nec mergitur”, but how to keep living our lives with kids to consider. My perception of the present aftermath –based on the news/streets/Facebook– is sympathy and empathy, but also anger — can’t let “them” win — gotta live your life. In principal, yes, but as a parent, I cannot wrap my head around it all. A friend set out on a jog with her toddler in a stroller yesterday (determined to not let fear rule) — just down the street — when she encountered a man sprinting in her direction chased by undercover police with guns drawn. She doesn’t know what/who/why was happening, but was deeply disturbed by what could have happened in those few moments. 

Even if one is not yet him- or herself inside the mess, as if skirting a battlefield, one senses already the sound of bullets, fire and smoke. One lives in the war’s tangible potentiality.

That Charlie Hebdo was just a beginning was clear from the failed scenario of multiple attacks: a jogger, a policewoman, a kosher store in Vincennes. By now the “self-haters” have elaborated on their plan to take as many victims as possible, and with the closure of France’s national borders the war has indeed taken on.

Many international actors covet today influence in France for its strategic geopolitical location. The real social problems with unemployment, racism and xenophobia, and the ossified, uncreative educational system failing to integrate immigrants created a pool of disgruntled youth striving for a purpose. What used to turn into local gang wars, a condition vividly portrayed in Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), now found an idealistic wrapping in an appropriated version of Islam. A resentful army of social losers, fired up by the Hollywood style image of all-around-shooting masculinity, discovered their Muslim origins as a palliative for getting over the fact that they are not more than the disposable tools of somebody’s will.

The criminal invasion of Iraq in 2001 that the French reasonably and rationally opposed predictably destabilized the region and led to the uncontrollable Syrian civil war as well as ISIS. I can’t help sending curses in the direction of G. W. Bush and Co. who brought this bright future upon us. As I can’t help thinking that Islamic terrorism in France is an uncanny present that the United States sends back to France in ironic exchange for the Statue of Liberty.

Saddam Hussein and the Assads were, despite appearances, the best allies of the US in the war on Islamic extremism. Whatever was the corrupt oppressiveness of their secular regimes internally, they effectively and brutally kept under control oppressive stirrings of the religious kind. Now the bloody orgy induced by the “opium for the people” doesn’t have any serious opposition, and the battle has spread to the cultural capital of Europe – Paris, with Kalashnikovs aimed at the fans of music and sport.

But what about those Kalashnikovs? – A year ago in Paris, I was struck by an image on display at the French newsstands: On a cover of a journal one could see a disciplined and determined Russian cadet. At a desk with a textbook of the Russian language, he looked yearningly to one side, presumably contemplating a Greater Russia. The caption announced: “Russia has returned.” Working toward this expansionist goal, Putin’s government is building right now a gigantic Center of Russian Orthodox Culture on the quai Branly, to serve as the propaganda platform for Islam’s religious competitor in the aim of destroying Europe.

The closing of French borders in response to the attacks is one of those first little steps towards the re-hermetizing of national polities that the project of the European Union, dear to me, was trying to overcome. With the Russia-funded Front National and the Islamist fighters working in cahoots, ardently catering to each other’s unholy ideological needs, and Brussels, the capital of the EU, shut down under the highest threat level alert, the battle for Paris as a bastion of a free, secular, united Europe becomes real.

What should be done? Above all, the war in Syria and Iraq should end. It is not possible without a serious collective effort of occupation and control of those territories by the Western and Eastern democratic powers (the demand for such help had been voiced by the Syrian pro-democratic activists already in 2012) and a colossal economic investment into a reconstruction of those territories à la Marshall plan in the postwar Germany (that should have been conducted in Iraq since the occupation but was desperately botched up).

Undoing the wrongs is more difficult, more painful, more costly (in all senses) than avoiding the wrongs in the first place. But this time the United States, above all, owe it to themselves, to Europe, and to the whole of civilization.