Total Terror- one view on where we are and where we have been. by risa
the following was sent to me by my grampa some time ago (thanks grumps!). i don’t know who wrote it, but i’d love to hear some thoughts and arguments. there is some good in it, i think, and then some terrible sweeping statements that blur important, humanizing details. lots to think about anyway. fyi- the difficulties of writing history, and of dealing with the details that are troublesome, are demonstrated over on this controvertial talk page at the wikipedia.
Totalitarian movements have always featured the same myth: There are people of God, and they have been afflicted by pollutants from within their society as well as cosmic forces from abroad. The good people should rise up in an act of rebellion and wipe out the evil influences. Essentially, it is the story of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.
The pattern played out with Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Russia, with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Hitler in Germany. The people of God were called the proletariat if you were a Bolshevik or a Stalinist. Or they were called the Sons of the Roman Wolf if you were an Italian fascist. Or they were warriors of Christ the King for Franco, or they were the Aryan race for Hitler. As for the polluting forces, they were the bourgeoisie, kulaks, masons, Jews or so-called “inferior” races, depending on the movement.
After the apocalyptic war to purge these elements, a perfect society was predicted, be it a proletarian utopia, or a new Roman Empire, or a Reich to last a thousand years.
In each case, it was going to be a leap into the future that was also a leap into a romanticized past. Soviet communists, for instance, idealized the virtues of the ancient Russian folk who were going to be resurrected as futuristic, perfect communists.
A key feature of each of these totalitarian movements was a cult of death epitomized by the Spanish fascist slogans viva la muerte. This legitimized the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges. These movements were based on the impossible goal of creating a perfect society. The communist vision of a world purged of all capitalist elements was not achievable. But it was possible to kill a lot of Ukrainian farmers. Hitler’s vision of a heroic and pure Aryan race was also impossible. But he was able to murder millions of people who interfered with his hateful vision.
In the liberal conception, people who have human rights, who are free to think for themselves, will make rational decisions about the kind of society they want. But the whole spirit of the totalitarian movements goes against this. It stands against the liberal idea of tolerance and rationality, and instead promotes a mythology devoted to death. This aspect of fascist and communist movements was typically ignored until it was too late. Indeed, the history of totalitarianism’s growth in the 20th century largely depended on the fact that Western thinkers had difficulty comprehending the anti-liberal nature of the movements and the threats they posed.
The major totalitarian movements, communist and fascism, arose in Europe during a very short period of time between 1917 ad the late 1930s. Both quickly spread throughout the world, including the Middle East. We hear so much these days about how the Arab and Muslim worlds are alien to the West. But in regard to the spread of communism, the pattern was one we would recognize. In Iraq, in the 1950s, the single largest political party, the party with the largest ability to bring people into the streets, was the communist party. The communists enjoyed similar popularity in a variety of other Muslim nations.
The spread of fascism was harder to discern. Whereas communists all over the world prided themselves on how one communist party was exactly like all communist parties, spouting the same rhetoric from Marx and Lenin, each fascist movement claimed to be strictly a product of local roots. Yet it is possible to see the connections. In 1922, Mussolini came to power seeking to refound the Roman Empire. He organized his followers into Roman legions. In 1928, a few hundred miles away in Egypt, the Muslims Brotherhood was formed and called itself a fundamentalist Islamic Organization. But it was a political organization as well. It organized itsef into phalanges. Its goal was not the idea of refounding the Roman Empire. But it had an analogous project: refounding the great Muslim empire created by the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century.
One of the branches that emerged from the Muslim brotherhood came to power in Iran in 1979. Another branch came out of the Syrian youths who returned from their studies in Paris to found the Nazi-inspired Baath party in 1943. While Islamists sought to establish what they pictured as a theocracy, which is to say a dictatorship of mullahs or imams, Baathists primarily sought to recreate Mohammed’s empire as an imperial expression of the Arab people. Despite this difference, both movements shared with European totalitarianism one overarching theme: the cult of death. Under the Ayatollah Khomeini, the drive toward martyrdom became a kind of mass mania, epitomized in the human-wave attacks of the Iran-Iraq wars, in which young boys were sent across Saddam’s mine fields. The entire wave would typically be killed. Mothers all over Iran were hoping, praying, that their sons would be blown up in this kind of attack. Saddam encouraged his own death cult through use of poison gas. And, of course, both of these movements developed the notion of the human bomb.
The idea of suicide terrorism began to spread in the 1980s. especially in Lebanon, where Syrian Baathists were working with the Islamist Hezbollah. It became more popular in the course of the intifada of the last few years, which was subsidized on a grand scale by Iraq and carried out by Palestinian Islamist groups. By 2002, Saddam’s military parades featured units of suicide warriors, putting the death cult in full view. For many years, this phenomenon was largely ignored in the West. It somehow escaped notice that we lived in an age of genocide. Under Saddam Hussein, some 300,000 Iraqi Shiites were killed. 180,000 Kurds were killed or went missing. The insane war that Saddam and Khomeini conducted during the 1980s took hundreds of thousands of lives. The Islamist movement in Algeria has produced some 100,000 deaths. Add to that tens of thousands of deaths in Syria. In Sudan, a civil war waged by Islamists is thought to have killed up to two-million people. The scale of these killings is simply staggering. But it’s also staggering to realize how little any of this registered in the West. As in the past, the success of totalitarian movements rested on the blindness of liberal-minded people. We found reasons not to see these things. We told our selves that in the Arab and Muslims worlds, that is simply the way people are – even though much of history suggests otherwise.
The United States has taken every possible position in regard to these movements. During the Reagan years, the United States supported Afghanistan’s Islamist insurgents, as well as Saddam’s regime in Iraq. After 9/11, George Bush attacked both nations. But in his explanation for going to war, he failed to articulate an appreciation of how bloody and deeply rooted the underlying movements truly were. Or a comprehensive strategy for destroying them. Instead, he came up with a variety of rationales. In Afghanistan, it was to capture a single man. In Iraq, it was to prevent Saddam from attaining weapons of mass destruction. These were defensible goals. But Bush wasn’t able to situate them in the larger narrative of fanatical movements devoted to totalitarian ideals, a narrative that should have been recognizable from the history of the previous century. Bush’s lack of historical appreciation helps explain why the United States was not properly prepared for the aftermath of Saddam’s fall. Like those around him, the President hadn’t come to grips with the fact that millions of Iraqis were fanatical adherents of a mass totalitarian movement, and were willing to die for it. In the war of ideas unfolding in the region, the West is hobbled by the same sort of naivete that compromised the battle against totalitarianism in the 20th century.
But this blindness was by no means confined to the United States. Bush at least sought to overthrow Saddam and the Taliban. But a large part of the world persuaded itself that overthrowing Saddam’s dictatorship was a moral wrong. This followed in the tradition of the French socialist of the 1930s who failed to see the true nature of Hitler, or of Western intellectuals who praised Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1950s. And so a remarkable spectacle took place on the streets all over the world in February, 2003. The world witnessed the largest mass demonstration for peace in the history of mankind. Its purpose? To prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrants in modern history. We must be clear about what the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are about. The enemy stands for the principles of Baathism and Islamism, and expresses these principles in the form of human bombs. These are totalitarian movements stemming from the worst European tradition. And yet it has been difficult to rally the world to its side. Most nations seem eager to wash their hands of the whole situation. The United States and its allies are facing the confusion that, history shows, has traditionally plagued liberal-minded people in the face of totalitarian movements. As much as terrorism itself, this confusion remains one of the great problems of our time. And dispelling it remains one of our great challenges.
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