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Historical Parallels of Terrorism
Pankaj Mishra.
What if we are looking at the phenomenon of terrorism through the wrong lens? The vast majority of terrorism in the world today is coming from Muslims, that much is clear. But this observation must be tempered with its corollary that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Is it right, then, to look at modern terrorism strictly through the lens of Islam? Or are there perhaps prior historical patterns and precedents that hold up a warped mirror to our own predicament? Does modern terrorism stem directly from Islam, or is modern terrorism just an Islamic spin on another expression of deeper problem of modernity, a problem whose prior manifestations we might recognize? This is just a short post as I don’t have time for a more in-depth one and would need to read this book to have a fuller response.
I ask because of an interview I recently listened to through BBC History Magazine’s podcast, History Extra. The interview was with Pankaj Mishra, who has authored a book entitled The Roots Of Modern Rage. From the book’s description at Amazon (emphasis my own):
[Pankaj] shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises―of freedom, stability, and prosperity―were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world―or were left, or pushed, behind―reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose―angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally.
Pankaj sees in modern Islamism patterns very similar to Nazi Germany, revolutionary Russia, and many other groups besides. I do not have an interview transcript to quote directly, but in the interview he declares that the Islamism that guides terrorists of Isis and Al-Qaeda is a mish-mash of 19th and 20th century socialist philosophy with Islam thrown in, and thus itself of the same family as horrible philosophical responses to modernity that drove the Nazis and the Soviets. Far from actually reaching back to historical Islam for purity, it is far more akin to the Nazi obsession with old German pantheism, inventing a philosophical and religious past that never was and steering itself towards a purity that never could have existed.
I think he’s got a point here. Germany, after centuries of division as the battleground of the European powers, united, modernized, and industrialized extraordinarily quickly, and in feelings its oats while having a massive chip on its shoulder it sparked two massive wars, the second of which was sustained by an insane pagan racial ideology. Russia, being forced to modernize in a very short order, without having the educational or cultural foundation to sustain it, devolved through revolution into a brutal industrial dictatorship that threatened the rest of the world for many decades.
I’ve not had the chance to read his book in full, though, and as I recall from the interview he doesn’t necessarily have any good solutions for the problem, save that the West must have and express more faith in itself over its successes, the Islamic world must reconcile itself to modernity, and that the rest of the world and the West must together find a new a fusion of thought that respects the past while also facing up to the fact that it’s never coming back. Near the end of the interview, the author, himself an Asian, responds rather humorously to the query of whether Eurocentrism in philosophy should be set aside by saying that not only should it not be discarded, but that it should be embraced for its strengths.
For myself it has had me wondering if perhaps we ought to be taking the longer view too that Islamism will eventually burn itself out like the Soviets if we keep a firm resolve against it, or if it will by necessity be crushed like we had to do to the Nazis. Both solutions, though, have little to say on immigration itself and a lot to say in favor of having strength in our own history and culture as being paramount. Either way, If Pankaj is correct in his diagnosis, when Islamic nations and cultures do reconcile themselves with the modern world (and they’ll have to, though the process is proving extremely painful from within and without), the phenomenon of Islamism, with its terrorism, will eventually burn out or be crushed — either way it will not sustain itself.
I have no conclusions on this myself, but it does bear pondering and questioning.
Published in History
I wrote about this phenomenon under the heading “That Sucked, You Suck, and I Suck – the unique components of American Exceptionalism” – which Ricochet has conveniently lost.
But the absence of human agency is absolutely a root problem. Too bad there exists cultural imperatives in the rest of the world that demand it be ignored.
That’s a description of jihad in the west; the conquest of India was protracted and very bloody. Aurangzeb’s conquests killed several million in the 17th century, and in both west and east iconoclasm and the attempts, often successful, to extirpate pre-Muslim culture were almost universal.
Overall, estimates of the death toll of jihad over the centuries are as high as 270,000,000.
You skipped the Albigensian Crusade.
Of course like any broad generalization made with honesty and knowledge the thesis contains truth, but the world is really complex, indeed chaotic and always will be. For instance, when oil prices skyrocketed in the 70’s, oil rich M.E. all of a sudden had a printing press of foreign exchange. What can any country do with foreign exchange? Spend it abroad on imports. They can import pieces of paper. i.e buy financial assets, which is what Saudi Arabia did with a lot of it, or they can import stuff. The Pasha tried to develop Iran by spending it domestically, but that’s just another way of importing. The dollars drove up the value of their currency which made imports cheap. This wave of imported things, food stuff, services, workers destroyed artisan producers with their guilds, family associations which is where life took place, where young men found wives etc. Traditional culture and traditional production were destroyed. In various combinations these were the two strategies used to spend oil wealth. When a traditional economy unravels it must reravel into something modern and functional or remain dysfunctional and fragmented. Islam has never been able to modernize. So they have two choices if oil prices regress to historical means. Return to traditional artisan economies or modernize. Can systems without property rights, capital markets, individual freedom, man made laws and the concept of individual responsibility modernize? Oil wealth flows to the government so economic opportunity will remain a function of political influence and connections, and since they get most of their revenues without having to tax citizens they are hardly likely to held accountable by their citizens, even if there were some mechanism for doing so. We’re going to be living with these dysfunctional places for another several centuries as long as they are Islamic. We cannot fix them and so far they cannot fix themselves. We can try to have normal relations but we must quarantine them. We can choose who immigrates to our country and should. Muslims, even the best most gentle hardest working should be at the bottom of the list of who we extend visas to. Those who would immigrate are also the sorts who might change these cultures if they are forced to remain.
We’ve had Jihad for 1,400 years and counting.
Do tell.
@iwalton – one thing Sharia does have is a fairly well developed framework of private property rights, and most Muslim countries are not oil states. Certainly most Muslims don’t live in countries whose economies are dominated by oil. ???
Lots of Muslims in Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, etc., where the economy is not monocommodic with oil, oil, oil, and only oil. Indonesia has about 210 million Muslims by itself.
I can’t help but think this is entirely too optimistic, if only because our efforts against the Soviet Union were not quite as complete as those against Nazi Germany.
I mean, the Soviets are gone, but as Jay Nordlinger likes to point out, absolutely nothing was done to de-communify Russia afterwards, so the same jerks stuck around, and now we have Putin.
Also, the ideas of the Soviet Union that were problematic are still floating about our planet. Venezuela is what it is. Cuba is still an oppressive place. China isn’t actually communist in practice but still keeps the trappings of communism around. It’s not an ideology that looks like it’s going to go away anytime soon. If anything the problem we have now in America is that people who weren’t alive for the Soviet threat and don’t know anyone who experienced it think that it couldn’t be that bad. You know, we just need to have “Democratic Socialism” as the nice old man from Vermont explained it.
So, you know, if we use that model for Islamism, then we’re always going to have someone somewhere in the world who is an Islamist and it’ll take generations for it to fully go away, if it ever does. Simply crushing it has the advantage that it would create a clear and unambiguous demonstration of the ideology’s failure. And, ISIS is much weaker than the Soviets or Nazis ever were and thus are entirely crushable.
Which countries feed terrorism? Those without oil or those with it? And if they do not have oil how much support do they get from countries with oil. When did it begin? There has always been jihad, but what happened in the 20th century that set it on a new virulent path? One shouldn’t ignore the single biggest economic tsunami in the 20th century for these monocultures. Of course I was giving one example of the complexity of the subject, not offering a single explanation, on the contrary. Property rights? That’s not my understanding but I just read these things, never lived there. Governments can take what they want with minimum due process and do, do they not? People with clout and influence do as well not to mention ordinary thieves.
Under Putin, they’ve started becoming geopolitically expansionistic again, in order to distract from their domestic problems. The danger is that they could (and some would argue, already have, if you count Ukraine and Georgia) invade countries that we care about.
If one of those countries happens to be a member of NATO, that would start World War III. Or not; that would depend on whether or not the United States sticks by its Article V commitments. Which, just by having that be a question is quite dangerous itself; the alliance only works if everybody knows invading Estonia is going to guarantee war with all other NATO countries.
If one of those countries also happens to be a highly complicated military and geopolitical environment with a very tiny amount of airspace to play in (e.g. Syria), in which the US also happens to be conducting military operations, there’s also the chance that some sort of “accident” could happen that would provoke a direct conflict between the United States and Russia.
And, unlike ISIS, North Korea, or anyone else who seems to be taking up lots of attention in the news lately, Russia has nuclear weapons and the means to strike anywhere within the United States. So a war with Russia could go very bad very fast, even if their conventional forces are much weaker than they used to be.
Overwhelmingly those with unjust systems and where, not coincidentally, the people lack a meaningful franchise.
What I’m reading, here, is fascinating and a good reminder that “it’s complicated.” It’s always complicated.
One of the questions to ask (out of sheer interest, not because we have the power to do much of anything about all this) is: If you could magically remove one element from the present situation, what would it be? That is, what would do the most good?
One answer could be “Islam.” Another could be “oil.”
There was a time not so long ago when at least some of these countries—Iran, to name just one—were trying to modernize and liberalize. Yes, “modernizing” in those days meant flirting with the USSR and socialism, but it also meant a meaningful franchise—Mossadek was democratically elected in Iran, for example. Evil existed, even in the ME, without Islam. Yes, Sunni Islam was the dominant religion in Iraq, but Hussein was a bastard without being a particularly religious guy (more of a Stalinesque fascist, really).
So…it’s complicated.
It is a lot of the world – and historically that’s certainly been the case. Hence the rather frequent occurrence – frequent? At least not infrequent – of terrorism when oppressed people perceive the need for change but little realistic chance of it. Frankly it explains a lot more than religious labels do.
15% of India’s population is Muslim. India has lost two (2) Prime Ministers to assassination by terrorists. If you weren’t well informed what conclusions would you jump to from that?
Read (or listen to) any history of the Ancient World, and you’ll quickly learn that the Middle East was a hellhole long before the Arabic language had even developed, never mind the Quran being written.
The strong hatreds in the West are still present and they have a religious overlay, but it is not entirely religious as with Islam.
The Thirty Years War started because of a religious question in Bohemia. What started off as a small affair turned into a huge struggle between the French and the Spanish (the Holy Roman Empire was a branch of the Spanish royal family). Britain also benefited enormously by keeping out and trading with everybody. To say that this did not engender hatreds that lasted into the modern day is a matter of what you consider the modern day. I would contend that the World Wars had distant seeds in the Thirty Years War.
The Thirty Years War was fought on German territory and devastated the small German city states as part was civil war and part was the armies of great powers acting like locusts. Combine this with a cold, wet period and you have man-made catastrophe that was ingrained in Germans. Their weak, divided city states were no match for the strong, united, centralized national governments. (This also helps explain why Europeans and Americans are so totally different from one another — it’s different histories, circumstances and experiences.) Brandenburg was one of those weak states that had no capability of defending itself and shifted back and forth depending which invader was knocking at the door. The upshot was that Brandenburg became Prussia and united Germany under its royal family – which was opposed by the French.
To take your thesis seriously, one would have to believe that the French and the Germans did not hate one another during the course of all this. Religion was an overlay but was certainly only one. Scratch Frenchmen or Germans to this day and talk to them in either German or French and you will still get them sneering at one another.
Ne me parlez plus des Anglais, ils ont déjà brulés…
Far too optimistic. The struggles against both the Soviets and the Nazis were very close run things. The Nazis were defeated with the very considerable aid of the Soviets. The Soviets were defeated because the elites saw their vulnerability to attack (not only “Star Wars”, but a kid was able to land a Piper Cub in Red Square) and were essentially bankrupt — bankers would no longer loan them money to buy the grain needed to keep the populace quiet. You are essentially buying into Frances Fukayama’s End of History nonsense.
Again far too optimistic. Not when — if. And it depends on whether they do the defining. If they do, they won’t have to do the reconciling. We will.
Thank you for the post. I just downloaded the podcast and will listen to it this weekend.
I agree, I think the author has a point. I have read a few articles that say part of what drives people to terrorism is a feeling of not belonging and wanting to be part of something important.
I think they see realistic chance of change. That’s why they’re doing it. And there have been many cases where they have been successful.
And Indira Gandhi was certainly assassinated for religious reasons though not by Muslims.
Not going to happen absent leaders who embody the best of our culture, instead of what we usually get: leaders who represent nothing more than popular irritable mental gestures.
Britain, France, Belgium, Germany have unjust systems and people lack a meaningful franchise?
That being a Prime Minister in India is like putting a target on your back :-)
Terrorism is the tool of Islam. When they attain more power and wealth, they will continue to try to expand through conventional war. Terrorism is the tool of the underdog. The problem with how we are fighting Islam now is that we will lose our advantage of wealth and power through attrition. We spend trillions, they spend millions. This cannot continue.
The line attributed to Papal Legate Arnold Amaury did help sell a lot of T-shirts, though, so it’s all good.
True, terrorism is a political tool used by underdogs but it is also the tool of a conqueror seeking to rapidly consolidate its hold and cow the populace into submission (which includes making them afraid to engage in sabotage or other acts of resistance.) When that conqueror also adheres to a vigorously proselytizing religion, it is also the stick in coerced religious conversions, where the carrot is increased privilege, or at the least increased exemption from terror tactics.
Money, funding. That is the point where we should attack. That means a lot of uncomfortable conversations with our putative friends around the world. It also means we stop self defeating policies such as providing welfare and other public funds to immigrants who call for overthrow of our society.
As appalling as we may find early Islam, we should realize that it offered some of its early adherents not just a more successful gang but sweetness and light when compared to life in some of the surrounding pagan religions. Mohammed gained a reputation as being able to mediate quarrels over honor and loot in ways that minimized feuding and maximized fellowship.
French and German? I met a proud Münchener who sneered at Augsburgers. And it wasn’t about a sports rivalry like the
OaklandLos AngelesOaklandLas Vegas Raiders vs the 49ers which is completely logical and based on deep cultural differences of more than fifty years standing, it was about how stupid and provincial Augsburgers were. The cities are less than 45 miles apart, just one river over.Religions have modifying effects on how people respond to change, oppression, etc.
It can amplify violent protest or mute it. Which one does Islam do?
When comparing it to these other ideologies, I don’t see Islamic terrorism being a piece of modernism and technology… I just see people behaving as people always have with a religion that amplifies, condones, promotes violent reaction.
Islam does play a role here. Religion usually does.