As I noted in a comment below, I happened to look up as I was reading the Pape interview and see my copy of Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent‘ on the dining room bookshelf (between Larry Brown’s ‘Facing the Music‘ and Gordon Dickson’s ‘Tactics of Mistake,’ in case you care…).
And I dredged out of my memory the notion that we may just have been here before; grieving over the torn bodies of the victims of terrorists.
Part of the reason I’ve argued for so long (in the face of some heated opposition) that there are some common intellectual and historical roots between the New Left (which is really the mainstream left today) and Islamism is because – in part – the New Left has it’s roots in the decades of terror in the late 1800’s and in the philosophies that shaped them.
From Malaesta’s “Propaganda by deed” in 1876 to the Wall Street Bombing in 1920 (arguably the first car bomb), anarchist & socialist ‘true believers’ – and those who fell into their wake – killed czars and kings as well as industrialists and those unlucky enough to be standing close by.
The response within Europe was brutal, ruthless, and doubtless – by our standards – impossibly unjust.
But the movement had put down roots, and as it grew … through Fanon and Guevara, who became the icons of the praxis-oriented members of the New Left in Columbia, Port Huron, and Paris.
The levels of violence in Europe in the 1890’s were far lower than those we’re seeing in the Middle East today, and the intensity was lower as well. But we live in a faster-moving, more connected world, and the tools for big explosions don’t just come from Nobel’s factories any more.
I think it’s worth exploring this history a little bit, and seeing what it was that brought on – and most important, what brought down – the levels of public violence. I’d encourage folks to add what they know, and will post on it again in the near future.
Thank you for your most thoughtful posts. Although it should be obvious, the first step is that terrorism must be denounced, not excused. I have just posted a thought experiment, drawing on recent historical parallels, to try to imagine a situation in which the Left would be less interested in “root causes”, and more able to clearly confront evil.
Since its foundation in the last decades of the 19th century, the strategy of the Spanish Socialist Party had been to wear off the democratic system in order to facilitate a Communist revolution. Their first step towards it was taken in 1909, when a conscription process in Barcelona in answer to the killing of railway workers in Morocco, ended in a riot that lasted one week and the political dismissal of one of the few reformist government leaders.
In 1917, when the huge demand of goods related to the war from France and Britain prompted an inflationary process, the government was further destabilized in a series of savage strikes. Finally, an underequiped army was defeated in Northern Morocco in 1921 by Abd-el-Krim, a Spanish educated leader that united the Rift tribes under the word of Allah. That broke the camel’s back. In 1923 a provisional military government took office. Political parties were suspended, although a Ministry post was granted to the Socialist leader. In 1926 Spanish forces landed in Alhucemas bay and in 10 months the war was over. Peace in Morocco lasted 30 years.
The military government was dissolved from inside in 1930. In 1931 the Spanish Second Republic was proclaimed although republicans lost the local elections. First objective accomplished.
In 1932 the left lost the elections. It was the first time women voted, so they were blamed. 1934 saw two leftist insurrections against the Republic governed by right wing parties, one in Asturias and other in Catalonia. This last extinguished itself in a matter of hours. The Asturian miners were far more radicalized. The Civil Guard and the Army needed some weeks. This _repression_ was well used by the left during two years of constant propaganda, until in 1936 they won the national elections. Evidently they did not like to be in the opposition, because they decided they would not be out of power again. Calvo-Sotelo, the Monarchic Conservative leader was publicly threatened by the Communists in the Congress, and later assesinated by a government squad. Democracy was over, second objetive accomplished.
I want to point out that exactly same tactic the Spanish Left utilized between 1909 and 1923 to destabilize and wear out the incipient Spanish democracy, the war in the Rift, is used now worldwide. The same arguments, the same enemies.
Marc,
As always, you’re going into thinking persons territory here, one of the joys found with all WoC’s contributors, or, at least, almost all.
Anyway, Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times”, in the first three chapters, gives a great read on the concept and uses of political violence as it came to be practiced in the first decades of the 20th Century.
If you’ve read the book, now may a good time to re-read, if you’ve not read, now may be etc.etc.
Mike
A.L.:
Many thanks for the reference to “The Secret Agent”. It crosses my mind from time to time, too. I appreciate the history survey.
Rearch request:
There’s a particular term for the theological holding that, approximately, God will forgive anything “we” do in his name. It’s apparent kin to the “things have to get worse before they can get better” approach that is attributed to Trotsky–make it so bad that the masses MUST revolt, with the “inevitable” millenial blissful outcome as the “correct” order falls out or is imposed.
Someone notable in the Blogosphere in the last few years has used this specific term I can’t recall, in the context of the Islamicists. I cannot recall it, or him/her, for the life of me.
Does any reader of WoC have a clue for me?
I’ll probably slap my head and go “D’oh!”
And yes, it’s also a term certain people would doubtless like to apply to GWB and his fabled crypto-theocracy, if they only knew it.
Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ on the dining room bookshelf (between Larry Brown’s ‘Facing the Music’ and Gordon Dickson’s ‘Tactics of Mistake,’ in case you care…).
I do care, and you screwed it up, A.L. It should be between Heart of Darkness and The Warrior’s Soul.
I can recomend Mark Sedgwick’s “Against the Modern World” for charting the influences and connections from the Romanticism to Nitzche, Sebottendorff, Sartre, Qutb, and Dugin.
Sedgwick calls it ‘Traditionalism’. I’d call it anti-modernism. Its the enemy Popper was referring to in “The Open Society and Its Enemies”.
Another relevant book is “Occidentalism” by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, that also looks at anti-modernism.
Ursus Maritimus
Pape strikes me as an intellectual Procrustes, who trims or stretches facts until they fit his theories. I wonder what would make of “this article:”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1692606,00.html
bq. I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. “We were in a constant state of worship,” he said. “We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life.”
bq. “What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.
bq. “The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’
bq. “We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet — the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!”
Ursus: Another book is “Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393325555/
“From a review:”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/review/13ROSENT.html
bq. Islam itself, in Berman’s view, explains only part of the problem. The Middle East’s tyrants, terrorists and raving ayatollahs owe their nastiest qualities less to their own traditions, he believes, than to ours. They are, in a word, totalitarians.
bq. Though hardly alone since Sept. 11 in making this claim, Berman is one of the few commentators who haven’t used the label simply as an epithet. He wants us to see Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — not to mention such affiliated villains as the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas — in a new light, as heirs to a mode of thought handed down by the Bolsheviks, fascists and Nazis, and anticipated in the words and deeds of Saint-Just, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov and an assortment of bomb-throwing anarchists. Left or right, Berman argues, liberalism’s sworn foes have always shared the same ideal — “submission,” “the one, instead of the many,” “the total state, the total doctrine, the total movement” — and, upon encountering intransigent reality, have always brought in their wake the same bloody result: “a cult of death.”
bq. Does the totalitarian shoe fit? Berman makes a compelling case, particularly with regard to the Islamists, who have obligingly practiced the “politics of slaughter” everywhere they have appeared. From Khomeini’s “human wave” attacks in the Iran-Iraq war, to the devastation wrought by the Algerian and Sudanese civil wars, to the suicide missions of “holy martyrs” in the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere, the toll in human lives has been in the millions — mass death on a scale that would have made Hitler or Stalin proud. As for doctrine, Berman offers a long, subtle exegesis of the work of Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the chief ideologist of the Islamist movement. Qutb emerges as a thinker of sinister depths, convinced that the modern West, and those Muslim societies influenced by it, suffer from a “hideous schizophrenia,” brought on by the separation of civil and religious authority. Qutb’s solution to the anomie and alienation? Jihad by an Islamic “vanguard” to restore what should never have been sundered.