Echoing the “Je Suis Charlie” and “Je Suis Paris” rallying cries that followed the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo jihad attack and the November 2015 jihad massacres in Paris and Saint-Denis, tens of thousands of people spread the “JeSuisBruxelles” message with their thoughts, prayers, and memes.
And, of course, there will be flags lowered and monuments lit up all over the world this week in the national colors of Belgium to show “solidarity” with Tuesday’s victims of The Perpetrators Whose Religion Shall Not Be Named.
To borrow a useful phrase coined by British journalist James Bartholomew last year, we have reached the oversaturation point of post-terrorism “virtue signaling”– hashtags, avatars, and animated GIFs ad nauseam. These are the easy advertisements and maudlin displays of one’s resolute opposition to an unidentified something that must be stopped somehow by unspoken means.
Virtue signals are “camouflage,” Bartholomew explained. They are sincere-seeming shows of collective unity that disguise the millennial-age indulgence of publicly patting one’s own back for supposed moral courage. “No one actually has to do anything,” he opined. Virtue now “comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs.”
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