Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman _American Prospect_ Oct. 22, 2001 http://www.prospect.org/authors/berman-p.html The present war, if that is the correct word, may very well be, as President Bush has observed, a war of a new kind--the "first war of the twenty-first century." But in one important respect, the present war also appears to be--and this, too, the president has hinted at indirectly--a war of an old kind, perhaps even the last war of the twentieth century. The terror assault was an astonishing event, but also a familiar event. And so it is possible, by glancing at the century that has just passed, to hazard a few guesses about the torrent of events that is already pouring over us. The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror. The antiliberal movements took root in Europe and in small degree even in the United States. As the years went by, though, those same movements spread to other places and eventually to every remote spot where Western culture had also spread--that is to say, almost everywhere. The antiliberal movements flourished in several different versions, sometimes in versions that seemed utter opposites of one another. The Communist insurgency in Russia, dating from the world war itself, was merely the first. Then came Italian Fascists, German Nazis, the Spanish crusade to re-establish the Reign of Christ the King, and so forth, each country producing movements of its own based on local mythologies and customs. Antiliberal movements of the left and the right saw in one another the worst of enemies (except when they saw one another as allies and brothers, which did happen). Yet each of the movements, in their lush variety, entertained a set of ideas that pointed in the same direction. The shared ideas were these: There exists a people of good who in a just world ought to enjoy a sound and healthy society. But society's health has been undermined by a hideous infestation from within, something diabolical, which is aided by external agents from elsewhere in the world. The diabolical infestation must be rooted out. Rooting it out will require bloody internal struggles, capped by gigantic massacres. It will require an all-out war against the foreign allies of the inner infestation--an apocalyptic war, perhaps even Apocalyptic with a capital A. (The Book of the Apocalypse, as André Glucksmann has pointed out, does seem to have played a remote inspirational role in generating these twentieth-century doctrines.) But when the inner infestation has at last been rooted out and the external foe has been defeated, the people of good shall enjoy a new society purged of alien elements--a healthy society no longer subject to the vibrations of change and evolution, a society with a single, blocklike structure, solid and eternal. Each of the twentieth-century antiliberal movements expressed this idea in its own idiosyncratic way. The people of good were described as the Aryans, the proletarians, or the people of Christ. The diabolical infestation was described as the Jews, the bourgeoisie, the kulaks, or the Masons. The bloody internal battle to root out the infestation was described as the "final solution," the "final struggle," or the "Crusade." The impending new society was sometimes pictured as a return to the ancient past and sometimes as a leap into the sci-fi future. It was the Third Reich, the New Rome, communism, the Reign of Christ the King. But the blocklike characteristics of that new society were always the same. And with those ideas firmly in place, each of the antiliberal movements marched into battle. The wars that ensued, one after another in the decades after World War I, likewise shared a number of characteristics. Certain of the antiliberal movements succeeded in capturing a national state, from which they launched their wars in a more or less conventional manner: thus, the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in Russia. It was possible, as a result, to describe the twentieth-century wars in nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century terms--as wars of nation-states against one another, perhaps in alliance with other nation-states, bloc versus bloc. But the antiliberal movements were never fully synonymous with national states. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was genuinely a war between national states in the old-fashioned style. But the war between France and Germany in World War II was complicated by Nazism's ability to call on sympathizers and co-thinkers all over Europe, including in France--which is one reason why the French went down to defeat. Communism was likewise an international affair, even if simpleminded analysts on the anticommunist side found it comforting to picture communists all over the world as mere agents of a reconstituted Czarist Empire. Likewise the Warriors of Christ the King, who may have described themselves as narrow nationalists but nonetheless drew their support and even their Warriors from all over the Latin world. And the twentieth-century wars displayed one other pertinent trait. The liberal side in those wars, the side that stood for a liberal and democratic society, was never entirely sure of itself. The liberal side was internally divided. On the liberal side, there were always people, sometimes in large numbers, who suspected that the antiliberals might be correct in their view of liberalism and might even have justice on their side. And so the twentieth-century wars were ideological in a double sense. There was the struggle of liberalism against its enemies; and there was the struggle of liberalism against itself, a self-interrogation, which was liberalism's strength as well as its weakness. The present conflict seems to me to be following the twentieth-century pattern exactly, with one variation: the antiliberal side right now, instead of Communist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist. Over the last several decades, a variety of movements have arisen in the Arab and Islamic countries--a radical nationalism (Baath socialist, Marxist, pan-Arab, and so forth) and a series of Islamist movements (meaning Islamic fundamentalism in a political version). The movements have varied hugely and have even gone to war with one another--Iran's Shiite Islamists versus Iraq's Baath socialists, like Hitler and Stalin slugging it out. The Islamists give the impression of having wandered into modern life from the 13th century, and the Baathist and Marxist nationalisms have tried to seem modern and even futuristic. But all of those movements have followed, each in its fashion, the twentieth-century pattern. They are antiliberal insurgencies. They have identified a people of the good, who are the Arabs or Muslims. They believe that their own societies have been infested with a hideous inner corruption, which must be rooted out. They observe that the inner infestation is supported by powerful external forces. And they gird their swords. Their thinking is apocalyptic. They imagine that at the end they, too, will succeed in establishing a blocklike, unchanging society, freed of the inner corruption--a purified society: the victory of good. They are the heirs of the twentieth-century totalitarians. Bush said that in his address to Congress on September 20, and he was right. It is worth remarking how often an antipathy for the Jews has recurred in these various movements over the years. Nazi paranoia about the Jews was an extreme case, but it would be a mistake to suppose that Nazism was alone in this. At the end of his life, Stalin, the anti-Nazi, is thought to have been likewise planning a general massacre of the Jews, of which the "doctors' plot" was a foretaste. The Nazi paranoia, just like Stalin's, was owed strictly to ancient superstitions and especially to psychological fears--the fears that were sparked by the mere existence of a minority population that seemed incapable of blending into the seamless, blocklike perfect society of the future. The Arab radical and Islamist antipathy to the Jews naturally displays a somewhat different quality, given that, this time, the Jews do have a state of their own. And where there is power, conflicts are bound to be more than imaginary. No one can doubt that Palestinians do have grievances and that the grievances are infuriating. Israel has produced its share of thugs and even mass-murdering terrorists. It has even managed, at this of all moments, to choose as its leader Ariel Sharon, whose appreciation of Arab and Islamic sensibilities appears to be zero. In these ways, the Israelis have done their share to keep the pot boiling. Even so, how can it be that, after 120 years of Arab-Zionist conflict and more than 50 years of a Jewish state, the hostility to Israel seems to have remained more or less constant? For Israel's borders have been broad, but have also been narrow; its leaders have been hawkish and contemptuous, but have also been dovish and courteous; there have been West Bank settlements, and no West Bank settlements; proposals for common projects for mutual benefit, and no proposals. There have even been times, such as the 1980s, before the Russian immigration, when most of Israel's Jewish population consisted of people who had fled to Israel from the Arab world itself, instead of from Europe. And not even then, in a period when Israel, in its dusky-skinned authenticity, could claim to be a genuinely third-world nation, did the Israelis win any wider or warmer acceptance. Why was that, and why is it still? It is because the anti-Zionist hostility may rest partly on the hard terrain of negotiable grievances; but mostly it goes floating along on the same airy currents of myth and dread that proved so irresistible to Nazis in the past. The anti-Zionist hostility draws on a feeling that Arab and Islamic society has been polluted by an impure infestation that needs to be rooted out. The hostility draws, that is, on a lethal combination of utopian yearning and superstitious fear--the yearning for a new society cleansed of ethnic and religious difference, together with a fear of a diabolical minority population. Does that sound like an unfair or tendentious description of Middle Eastern anti-Zionism? The curses of the clerics, the earnest remarks of the presidents of Syria and Iraq and other countries, the man-in-the-street interviews that keep appearing in the press and on radio--these are not pretty to quote. Even now the newspapers in parts of the Islamic world are full of stories claiming that the World Trade Center was attacked by (of course) a Jewish conspiracy. And so, the Arab and Islamic world burns with hatred for Israel in part because of issues that are factual, but mostly because of issues that are phantasmagorical. No one should doubt that hatred for the United States likewise draws, in some degree, on real-life terrible things that America has done to the Muslim world. But to what degree? The United States is resented for supporting Israel. Then again, President Clinton did spend eight years trying to help the Palestinians negotiate a state--and hatred for the United States seems to have abated not one bit. Everyone agrees that America is loathed for its 10 years of fighting against Saddam Hussein. Yet there is reason to suppose that without military opposition from the United States the dictator who slaughtered 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq would go on with his slaughters, as he has promised to do. (And he may yet.) In any event, America was not always at war with Saddam; and in the antebellum age, anti-Americanism throve even so. America is resented for propping up autocracies such as the one in Saudi Arabia. And yet a Saudi collapse, if such a thing occurred, might well bring to power still worse despots whose government would inflict still more pain on the Arab masses. Or perhaps, as is sometimes said, America is resented because America's power, regardless of our intentions, ends up perpetuating Christendom's attacks on Islam from long ago--the medieval wars of the murderous Crusades. And this resentment is understandable; but it is understandable only in the realm of myth. In the Balkans during the 1990s, when the Serb nationalists invoked a medieval Christian zeal and set out to massacre and expel the Kosovo Muslims, the United States went to war--on the Muslim side. This seems to have done nothing to improve America's reputation in the world of the Islamists and the radical Arab nationalists. It is because America's crime, its real crime, is to be America herself. The crime is to exude the dynamism of an everchanging liberal culture. America is like Israel in that respect, only 50 times larger and infinitely richer and more powerful. America's crime is to show that liberal society can thrive and that antiliberal society cannot. This is the whip that drives the antiliberal movements to their fury. The United States ought to act prudently in the Middle East and everywhere else; but no amount of prudence will forestall that kind of hostility. And this should not be news. For the radical nationalist and Islamist movements are not, as I say, anything new. Movements of that sort are a reality of modern life. They are the echo that comes bouncing back from the noise made by liberal progress. And this should tell us truths about the struggle that has suddenly fallen upon us ... from "Terror and Liberalism" by Paul Berman Paul Berman is the author of _A Tale of Two Utopias_ (Norton) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393316750/thefriedrhayeksc and is a writer for the online magazine Slate --------------------------- Hayek related articles are a regular feature of the Hayek-L list. Hayek-L Home Page: http://www.hayekcenter.org/hayek-l/hayek-l.html Hayek Scholars Page: http://www.hayekcenter.org/friedrichhayek/hayek.html Scholars Bookstore: http://www.hayekcenter.org/bookstore/scholars_books.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 13:16:18 -0700 From: James Hess Subject: Re: article: leftist 'intellectuals' at war with our liberal civilization - Andrew Sullivan Well said. One of the things that has impressed me as I read responses to September 11 is how little original thought has gone into them. Rather, commentators on the left and the right respond with a tired cliche, "Round up all the usual suspects!" On the right, it's multiculturalism, moral relativism, anti-Americanism. On the left, its globalization or capitalism. On a list devoted to unconventional economics, I hope to seem more unconventional thought on this, too. Jim Hess Office: SSPB 4264 Program in Social Networks Phone: 949-824-4371 School of Social Science Fax: 949-824-4717 University of California, Irvine Email: ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2001 15:56:07 -0500 From: Michael Etchison Subject: Re: Isaac on Sullivan On further thought: Isaac is wrong. The evidence of malign lunacy on the left is everywhere, even if Isaac cannot notice it and Sullivan did not stop to footnoting. Not that many of the malign loonies explicitly said that those in the WTC deserved it. Many said, or came close enough to saying, that America deserved it. It's not just "What did you expect, behaving like that" -- supporting causes the loony left disfavors, primarily. It's "A country which has done those things has no moral standing to complain when bad things are done to it in the name of those whom America has hurt." > Personally, I find the main message of the 9/11 attacks to be > dramatically mixed: we learn just how vulnerable it makes the US to be > one of the freest, most mobile, and most open nations on earth, but we > also learn how quickly a complex and interdependent society can heal > around a serious trauma. If there is anything meaty for Hayek > scholars to think about here, I believe it is in that last > observation. Those are indeed important. Michael ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 11:08:15 -0700 From: Hayek List Subject: WEB: terrorr as anti-liberal scourge - historical essays Welcome to History News Network: Because the Past is the Present and the Future, too. http://HistoryNewsNetwork.org =============================== Today it is Islamic madmen who resort to terrorism. At the beginning of the last century it was Bolshevik communists. They had their reasons, too, as Leon Trotsky explained in 1920 in an infamous and frighteningly frank tract, "Terrorism and Communism." Click here to read his infamous Defense of Terrorism: http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=328 Below is a list of the articles we have published in recent weeks on the history of terrorism. DAVID GREENBERG: A short history of terrorism. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=289 BERNARD WEISBERGER: When terrorists struck the US 100 years ago. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=276 BEVERLY GAGE: When Wall Street was bombed in 1920. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=271 KEITH EDGERTON: The terrorist who started World War I. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=273 NATHAN WILLIAMS: How we dealt with the terrorism of the Barbary Pirates. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=287 CHALMERS JOHNSON: Blowback. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=317 DONALD R. SHAFFER: The failed campaign to get Pancho Villa http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=301 HISTORIANS' DEBATE: John Brown and Timothy McVeigh http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=139 CHRONOLOGY OF BOMBINGS IN US HISTORY http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=244 COMPARING THE LOSSES OF 9-11 WITH OTHER ATTACKS http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=263 SPEECHES BY PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES concerning terrorism. http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=278 Rick Shenkman Editor@historynewsnetwork.org http://HistoryNewsNetwork.org Our Shortcut Address: http://H-N-N.org HNN is a 501c3 non-profit. We feature articles by historians of all political views. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 14:27:15 EDT From: Paul Varnell Subject: more on the terrorist attacks Greg, Well, if we're going to discuss the Islamic worldview as distinguished fro= m=20 other (e.g., liberal) worldviews, at least we should get some evidence from=20= =20 islamic sources. The column below attempts to do this. This was my column on the Sept. 11 attacks. Feel free to post it to the=20 Hayek list if you think it adds anything to the current discussion I see=20 going on there. The Hayek/Popper references are toward the end. It should=20 also be posted to the website of the Independent Gay Forum along with some=20 related material by others. Paul Varnell =95=95=95 Chicago Free Press Sept. 19, 2001 The New Culture War By Paul Varnell The Sept. 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in=20 Washington, D.C., constitute, and were clearly intended as, very serious=20 assaults against international capitalism and free trade, U.S. economic=20 influence, U.S. military power and the whole of America as a symbol of=20 whatever it symbolizes to the perpetrators. And what does the U.S. symbolize to the fundamentalist Muslims who are the=20 chief suspects in the attacks? Secularism, rationalism, humanism,=20 individualism, personal rights, capitalism. In short: modernity--modern=20 society in all its aspects. Capitalism? Especially capitalism. A friend sent me part of Iran's Tehran=20 Times Sept. 12 story about the attacks which begins: "Yesterday the United=20 States of America woke up to living terror when the landmarks of the=20 capitalist world were rocked by a series of huge explosions." If we want to better understand conservative Islam and the attitudes of many= =20 Arab Muslims toward the modern Western world, we cannot do better than turn=20 to the useful guidebook, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's "Young Muslim's Guide to the=20 Modern World" (Chicago, 1994). Describing the moral decay of modern Western society which young Muslims mus= t=20 resist and oppose, Nasr explains that the modern world is rooted in a "false= =20 view of man and of his society." That false view includes "individualism, humanism, rationalism, ... rebellio= n=20 against authority, ... the atomization of the family and the reduction of=20 society to simply the quantitative sum of atomized individuals"--i.e.,=20 individualism (p. 245). And Nasr denounces "Western capitalism and democracy" among the "various=20 ideologies" with which modern society has been indoctrinated (p. 212). Should anyone have doubts, Nasr regards homosexuality and all proposals for=20 legal and social equality for gay and lesbians as key aspects of this modern= ,=20 false view of society. "Moreover, the new styles of living ... demonstrate the disintegration of=20 (Western) society. ... To an even greater extent especially in big cities ..= .=20 various forms of homosexuality have become more and more prevalent during th= e=20 last generation" (p. 230-1). "Even the meaning of the family ... is under severe attack." ... "There are=20 now even those who attempt to break the traditional meaning of marriage as=20 being between the opposite sexes and try to give a new meaning to marriage a= s=20 being any bond between two human beings even of the same sex as long as they= =20 want to live together" (p. 201) These are not the words of some fanatical Taliban leader in Afghanistan. The= y=20 are by Prof. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a University Professor of Islamic Studies=20 at George Washington University. Just as the conservative Muslim worldview replicates Soviet Communism's=20 hostility to Western individualism, personal autonomy, civil liberties,=20 capitalism, economic freedom, sexual and artistic freedom, so it also finds=20= a=20 parallel in the conservative Christian opposition to secularism,=20 individualism, personal autonomy, civil liberties, gender equality, sexual=20 and artistic freedom. =20 As evidence, we need only recall Rev. Jerry Falwell's now notorious comments= =20 on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" in which he blamed the Sept. 11 attacks in par= t=20 on feminists, secularists, civil liberties advocates, and homosexuals, sayin= g=20 they helped it happen. Or, as the Christian fundamentalist Family Research Council said in its own=20 denunciation of individualism and personal autonomy following the attacks,=20 "Americans need that strength that comes from placing God first, others=20 second, and self last. Let there be an end to the idolatry of self." In short, the group is more important than the individual. And most importan= t=20 of all is making the individual subservient to religious authorities who=20 claim to speak for their gods.=20 Whatever military response the U.S. government decides to make, it will=20 necessarily be inadequate. What is needed is a new "culture war"--or if "war= "=20 is the wrong metaphor, then a new cultural advocacy effort. Modernity has powerful influence, but it does not explain itself well, does=20 not offer its own articulation and justification. We who approve of Modernit= y=20 and benefit from it--as gays and lesbians have found liberation in modern=20 individualism--must make a much more persuasive case for the value of=20 Modernity than we have so far. Modernity with its individualism, capitalism, rationality and undermining of= =20 religious dominance has more or less invaded an Arabic Muslim culture which=20 is literally in its 1400s, and no doubt feels strange, foreign, threatening,= =20 rather as if the same institutions had suddenly appeared in Europe in the=20 1400s. Muslim countries have had no Machiavelli or Hobbes or Spinoza to question=20 religion and its texts, no Locke to defend self-ownership and individual=20 rights, no Adam Smith to explain the value of economic freedom and its=20 necessity for prosperity, no John Stuart Mill to defend free speech and=20 discussion, no Karl Popper or Friedrich Hayek to explain why a free and open= =20 society has social value for everyone. This cultural advocacy necessarily includes assisting Islamic religious=20 figures who find a way to make peace with modernity, promoting greater=20 economic development so people in the Arab world benefit directly from it=20 rather than from graft or government largess, and seeking ways to generate=20 and sustain an Islamic version of the western Humanist Renaissance and=20 Enlightenment they have never yet had. =95=95=95 Paul Varnell writes for the Chicago Free Press. Some of his previous columns= =20 are posted at the Independent Gay Forum website (www.indegayforum.org. His=20 e-mail address is: Pvarnell@aol.com ------------------------------ End of HAYEK-L Digest - 5 Oct 2001 to 6 Oct 2001 (#2001-223) ************************************************************