Another day the same old fascist. The thing about these Paris attacks is that they mark out the enemy very clearly.

Despite what this generation has grown up to think, we are living in black and white times, in times of acute opposites.

Freedom and liberty on the one hand, and fascist and death cult on the other.

Orwell was entirely right. The jackboot is here again, and our enemy is not corporate homogeneity, but mass political ideology.

The corporate Coca Cola culture however, has weakened what we are, has divorced us from our history and heritage sufficiently to make the fight more difficult, and to expose us to our enemies more obviously.

It is a mistake to think that any of us has the choice to engage with this fight. You can’t turn off CNN and hope it goes away. Is it myopic to make the tragic murder of 139 people ‘all about you’? No, would that it were that easy.

This IS about you. This was an attack on you.

There was something different going on in 9/11. Although the New York attack was as much an attack on citizenship and liberty as it was an attack on the thousands that actually died that day, the Paris attacks have further reaching consequences for us all.

New York was about the economy. Paris is about the culture. New York was an attack still confined to global geopolitics. Paris is an attack on the every day, the smaller liberties of friendship, music, and the poetry of human communication.

New York, for all the sickness, tragedy and horror, was ideologically one dimensional. Paris cannot be traduced into rationalisations about globalisation, support for Israel, and western foreign policy.

The World Trade Centre was the establishment.

The attacks on Paris were designed to poison basic human love, sympathy and joy, with the paranoia of psychopathic death-lust.

Combined with the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices, the culture itself is under attack, not just the establishment or the political superstructure.

All the conspiracy theories at the time of the World Trade Centre tragedy exemplified the divide in the culture at the time. The movement against globalisation seemed to hitch itself to the Islamist agenda. There’s even a sense in which this was designed, that the battle lines of dissent were used by the Al Qaeda fascists for their own designs.

It made it easier for Bin Laden et al, if the west was at war with itself.

Now we are in the third act. These divisions and resentments have set in, and now the fascists have attacked dissenters as well as the establishment.

They think that this will make it harder for us to fight them, because they regard us as a divided culture, and think that all they need to do is exacerbate these divisions.

The enemy has revealed rather a lot about itself.

Not only has it revealed that it is philistine, nihilistic and driven not by politics but by blood-lust; it has revealed that it has very little knowledge of who it is fighting.

‘The West’ for ISIS, is still the same West as it was for Bin Laden. It’s globalisation, imperialism and corporate hegemony.

They really believe that to attack the Paris nightlife is to wound us as a culture in the same way as to attack New York’s business centre was to weaken western economic power.

This is why this week’s Charlie Hebdo’s front cover cartoon is more powerful than any satire on the Mohammad.

No matter how militarily capable an army of philistines is, they always have the same weakness. They have no concept of history, no sense of irnony, no sense of the power of words.

Hitler, Stalin? You use these, perhaps, as counter-examples to my argument here. But you’re wrong.

They had SOME concept of the power of language, and Hitler certainly was a brilliant speaker, in the way that the ISIS demagogues can only dream of.

They had SOME concept of the movement history, and it bolstered their claim to ideological power. But history, culture and language for Hitler and Stalin were really nothing more than tools for their bluster and bravado.

Churchill for his many faults, spoke to his own people through the prism of humour, irony and a genuine love of his own history and culture. No one can say that Churchill’s evoking of ancient British defiance was mere bravado.

Churchill was the weaker rhetorician when put up against the fascists. But to say that is to simply say he was less of a propagandist.

The ISIS attacks on free speech, free expression and western European liberty demonstrate that they have absolutely NO concept of irony.

They congratulate themselves as propagandists, but what they don’t understand is that our culture has been through so many of these ideologies that it is immune to propaganda, no matter how sophisticated.

An ironic culture is a culture that doesn’t divide the world through west and east. A propagandist’s does. An ironic culture is a culture that never simplifies its enemy into an ideological monolith. A propagandist’s does.

The great achievement of the western post-imperialist psyche is to have an ironic self-image. And the value of any irony, ultimately, is to give us a multi-dimensional view of our own fragility, of death.

Of all the displays of solidarity and defiance that have been shown by French citizens, and all the outrage and fighting spirit that have been displayed on social media, the Charlie Hebdo cover deals the biggest blow to ISIS in the long term.

It’s simple, silly, but it’s childishness masks a certainty and confidence that can only come from an ironic culture, a culture that sees the value of human life on a grander, more historic level than just saving ones own skin.

I have no doubt that the ISIS demagogues can’t get their head round the cartoon. They won’t be able to understand if it means they have scored and ideological victory, or whether they are missing something.

That’s why they will never win.