Terror and Liberalism
© 2003, Paul Berman, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd.
ISBN 0-393-05775-5
Paul Berman is a leading liberal thinker, but in this book he
almost completely avoids politics to think deeply and philosophically
about the rise of Islamic terror and the way that the rest of the
world has responded to it.
He starts by examining the rise of both far-right (Mussolini,
Hitler) and far-left (Stalin) movements during the twentieth century.
During the whole of the nineteenth century and the
first years of the twentieth, a great many enlightened and progressive
thinkers had supposed that a main danger, perhaps the principal
danger, to modern civilization came from a single political tendency,
which was the extreme right, and mostly from a single country, which
was Germany, the sworn foe of the French Revolution. But that sort of
outlook seemed hopelessly antique by 1950. In the new era, no one
doubted that political movements on the extreme right could still make
you worry. No one felt much confidence in Germany and its political
traditions. But the midcentury writers saw all too plainly that a
danger to civilization had meanwhile cropped up in Russia and among
the hard-bitten Stalinists, and among other people
too.
In examining these various movements, he notes common a common theme,
"the rebellion that begins with
freedom and ends with
crime". Digging
deeper and turning as well to literature from
Camus,
Dostoevsky,
Baudelaire and others, he discovers the underlying
myth that drives
each: a myth taken directly from the
Book Of Revelations:
The people of God are under attack. The attack comes
from within. It is a subversive attack mounted by the city dwellers
of Babylon, who are wealthy and have access to things from around the
world, which they trade ... These city dwellers have sunk into
abominations. They have been polluted by the whore of Babylon. The
pollution is spreading to the people of God. Such is the attack from
within. There is also an attack from without - conducted from afar by
the forces of Satan, who is worshiped at the synagogue of Satan. But
these attacks, from within and without, will be violently resisted.
The war of Armageddon will take place. The subversive and polluted
city dwellers of Babylon will be exterminated, together with all their
abominations. The Satanic forces from the mystic beyond will be
fended off. The destruction will by horrifying. Yet there is nothing
to fear: the destruction will last only an hour. Afterward, when the
extermination is complete, the reign of Christ will be established and
will endure a thousand years. And the people of God will live in
purity, submissive to God.
For the
Bolsheviks and
Stalinists, the
Satanic force was capitalism;
for the
Nazi's the forces were American and Russian technology
threatening from both sides and Jews from within. The Bolsheviks and
Stalinists looked forward to the Age of the Proletariat after the
battle, while the Fascists looked for the resurrected Roman Empire,
the Spanish Phalange promised the Reign of Christ the King and
Hitler
had his
Thousand Year Reich. In all cases, the new reign would be
perfectly pure and last a thousand years. Each of the movements had
at its center a single charismatic individual who was the living
symbol of the cause; an individual so powerful as to be godlike and
above morality. All of these movements, then, used the same
underlying myth, appropriately modified for the circumstances, to sell
the revolution to the people.
Each of these promised an all-exterminating bloodbath. Stalin had
his Class War, the Fascists had their Crusade and Hitler had his race
war. Each promised to make things better, perfect even, for the
people... eventually. For the immediate present, there was going to
be slaughter.
Berman next takes a deep look at the intellectual underpinning of
the Islamist movement. Interestingly, they have western roots. Many
of the Islamic thinkers and leaders have been educated in the west,
particularly in Paris.
Baath Socialism is a branch of the larger Pan-Arab
movement, founded by Satia al-Husri in the years after the First World
War on the basis of his philosophical studies. These studies were in
Fichte and the German Romantics - the philosophers of national
destiny, of race, and of the integrity of national
churches.
... in Egypt during those years {the formative years of
the Muslim Brotherhood}, a sympathy for the European extreme right and
even for Nazism was fairly common. The militants of the Young Egypt
Society, the "Greenshirts" were openly pro-Nazi. The Muslim
Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-Banna, expressed "considerable
admiration for the Nazi Brownshirts". His organization did choose to
designate its organizational units as kata'ib or
phalanges, in the Franco style.
After these superficial similarities between what was becoming
Muslim
totalitarianism and
European movements and philosophies, Berman turns
to a single intellectual whose writings have inspired a generation of
Islamist
scholars and leaders:
Sayyid Qutb.
Qutb was born in 1906 and grew up in Egypt receiving a proper
religious education. As a young man Qutb had a passing interest in
socialism, but then took up literature, writing books that had a
"Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions." He
traveled in the United States and got a master's in education from the
University of Northern Colorado. He then returned to Egypt and joined
the Muslim Brotherhood. Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood eventually
parted ways and Nasser went on to jail Qutb as a danger to Egypt.
From jail, Qutb wrote a series of profound works that explained his
view of the world.
Berman spends a good deal of time with Qutb and it's all
fascinating. His magnum opus, In the Shade of the Qur'an, gets
the most attention, but other works are analyzed as well. Here, in a
nutshell, is Qutb's story: When Jesus came, the Jews weren't
interested in a new prophet. They had their own hierarchy and the
ones at the top wanted to defend their position. As a result, Jesus'
following was gentiles, who had their own problems with the Jews. As
time went on, the two factions fought and the real words of Jesus were
twisted in the process. The New Testament we read today is not really
Jesus' word. When Mohammed came, he was also rejected by the Jews,
which pushed them further into corruption - a corruption so bad they
need to be removed from the present day world. Islam flowered,
however, and quickly became a dominate force in the world; inventing
the scientific method and benefiting from it. Soon, however, the
Muslim world fell away from strict observance and, as a result, lost
their dominance in world affairs. Science made its way to the west,
where it was put to use against Islam. It extracted a price, however.
The principles of science were consistent with Islam, but they
conflicted with the Christian Church. As this split widened - the
Church on one side with the physical world and natural sciences on the
other - modern people of the west were locked into a kind of
schizophrenia, with religion at constant conflict with science and
reality. Not only did this drive westerners mad, but they were
spreading the contagion through their power into Islamic lands.
Ultimately, they would taint Islam itself. Thus the enemy of Islam
was the separation of church and state and, to protect itself, Islam
must fight a holy war on behalf of all peoples and bring the benefits
of Islam to all.
Qutb's writings were very influential, and when the Muslim
Brotherhood fled from Egypt, they took his writings and philosophies
with them. One of the places they fled was Saudi Arabia. Qutb's own
brother, Muhammad, helped shape Saudi Wahhabi Islam and spread it
around the world. Another figure in this spread was Sheikh Abdullah
Azzam, who had been a friend of Qutb's and had later taught in Saudi
Arabia. His Office for Services, in Peshawar, Pakistan gathered
Islamist fighters from around the world and sent them to fight in
Pakistan. His office was also the birthplace of al Qaeda. One of his
followers, Osama bin Laden, split off to found his own more radical
faction, along with Egyptian Islamists, Sheikh Rahman and
Dr. Zawahiri.
By this time the pattern should be clear. Islamism, in its
radical, militant form, is just a Muslim version of the very tried and
true formula that fuels all modern totalitarian movements. In this
case, the debilitating external threat is the schizophrenia of western
thought and the separation of church and state. Internally, there are
those Muslims who allow themselves to be seduced by western culture;
they must be rooted out (and the Jews, of course). A slaughter must
begin of the enemies of Islam that will result in a thousand years of
pure, Islamic state. At the head of the movements are various
Leaders; with total power and above morality: Osama bin Laden, Saddam
Hussein, and so on. Just another chapter in a book now full of eighty
years of slaughter:
Benhadj said, "If a faith, a belief, is not watered and
irrigated by blood, it does not grow. It does not live. Principles
are reinforced by sacrifices, suicide operations and martyrdom for
Allah. Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding
up massacres and charnel-houses. It hardly matters if the person who
had been sacrificed is no longer there. He has won." I could go on
quoting - but, enough. Surely this, you will say, cannot be Western -
surely this kind of talk, at last, is exotic! But this is how the
leaders of Germany used to speak, sixty years ago. Bolsheviks were
not afraid to speak like that. Viva la muerte! said Franco's
general. This is not exotic. This is the totalitarian cult of death.
This is the terrible thing that got underway more than eighty
years ago.
Berman next goes on to tackle the west's reaction, or lack
thereof, to this totalitarian movement. Why didn't the west see this
movement with alarm, even before 9/11? Why do many political liberals
in the west still refuse to see Islamism as a totalitarian death cult?
Because we, in our western culture have a deep belief in rationalism.
We believe every madness can be understood and explained. The same
beliefs, Berman says, kept the people of Europe from seeing Hitler in
his true light until it was too late. The beliefs kept the French
anti-war socialists in the dark so long during WW II that some of them
found themselves in the Vichy government. In the 1990's it kept much
of Europe from seeing the conflicts in Kosovo and Yugoslavia in their
true light until it was too late.
Berman illustrates all of this with extensive reference to history
and literature (particularly the modern rants of uber-liberal Noam
Chomsky). It's not all on the political left, either:
But I see that, in taking note of ideological systems
of denial that have been operating in the Western countries for the
last sixty-five years or so, I have selected examples only from the
political left, from the anti-war French Socialists of the 1930's to
the days of Jose Saramago and Noam Chomsky. I don't mean to go after
the left, however. My purpose is to identify a rationalist naivete
that is shared by almost every part of modern liberal society - a
spirit of the ingenuous that blossoms everywhere along the political
spectrum, and even in the bureaucracies that are not supposed to be
ideological. For what are we to think of the FBI and CIA and their
failure, in the years before the 9/11 attack, to imagine the dangers
facing the United States?
The 9/11 attacks revealed many unexpected and
astonishing truths, but surely the most astonishing of all was that,
in Arlington, Virginia, the Pentagon had no plan to defend the
Pentagon. Everyone, unto the chiefest of Indian chiefs, turned out to
be a simpleminded rationalist, expecting the world to act in sensible
ways, without mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness. In this
country, we are all Noam Chomsky.
Berman sees our inability to cope with these new totalitarian threats
as the result of many, many different
failures in world society (but
not the ones you usually hear about with respect to terrorism):
Right now we are beset with terrorists from the Muslim
totalitarian movements, who have already killed and astounding number
of people, mostly in the Muslim countries, but not just there. What
have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed
immense failures of political courage and imagination within the
Muslim world. We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity
about those failures by people in other parts of the world... We have
needed handsome doses of wishful thinking... We have needed a
political left that, in its anti-imperialist fervers, has lost the
ability to stand up to fascism... We have needed a cynical application
of "realist" or Nixonian doctrines over the decades - the doctrines
that governed the Gulf War of 1991, the doctrines that even now lead
to friendly ties with the most reactionary of feudal systems. We have
needed and inability to cling to our own liberal and democratic
principles, an inability even to articulate those principles. We have
needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other
parts of the world. We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and
a foolish arrogance in America. We have needed so many
things!
We can now all work to fix these things. The totalitarians are on
the march again and the bloodbath has already started. Berman's work
here will be discussed for decades. It's solid scholarship, written
well.
There are some whose response to Islamic terrorism is to go on a mission to figure out "why they hate us". I think this is misguided.
This is because this attitude immediatelty gives up all moral high ground and reduces all parties to equals. We should never concede that there is any excuse for intentionally murdering innocent bystanders (and, of course, there is a huge moral difference between intentional murder and accidental death by stray gunfire or misguided bombs - if you accidentally run over someone with your car, do you turn yourself into the police as a murderer?).
Lots of people, all around the world, have legitimate grievances against other people. No grievance, however, no matter how great, can be allowed as an excuse to murder. Ghandi's people had grievances as good as any ever presented, but he didn't set out to kill English children.
Would anyone support the Jews in a terror campaign against the Germans (and the rest of Europe)? After all, the Germans killed a few million Jews and the rest of Europe then proceeded to run the survivors off the continent and back to the homeland the Romans had run them off of before. And then thousands more died adapting to the new conditions. Pretty serious grievance, eh?
But no, of course we would never support such a campaign of terror, because it is so obviously wrong. We need to draw a firm line: no terror campaign is ever justified. No matter how bad you think you've been abused, you don't have the right to take it out on other innocent people.
Once you've even allowed the possibility that suicide bombing a school bus is an excusable way of seeking to right perceived wrongs, then you have given up any possible moral argument and have basically conceded that any grievance is worth murdering over. There's a certain bit of racism here too: if you're willing to let Muslims behave in ways you would never let other "civilized" people behave, you're not exactly paying them a compliment.
I'm not saying here that we shouldn't try to understand what grievances people have against us and deal with them fairly. I'm saying that terrorism should never be allowed any excuse. Any group who uses murder to terrorize another group should be stopped and should be condemned by all good people everywhere.
The failure of this condemnation to arise amongst so many of the progressives of the world in response to Islamic-fueled terrorism is a major them of Berman's book. Why should such ostensibly good and compassionate people be unwilling to condemn the murder of innocents?
I don't know the answer and I don't find most of Berman's answers compelling. If you're one of these progressives (liberals with a small "L", that is), you'll have to ask yourself.