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jazzy_davePaul Berman "Terror And Liberalism" (W.W. Norton and Co.)
This is one of the most idiosyncratic, short, but compelling studies of the topic available. This is an original contribution to an overlooked connection between violence and fanaticism, along with an insightful study of terrorists amongst the Islamists. Berman postulates that a war against liberalism, the classical bulwark against barbarism is a century-old battle waged in the world. The Islamists and contemporary liberals are engaged in an ideological conflict against 19th Liberalism.
Berman writes:
[Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. It was submission to the kind of authority that liberal civilization had slowly undermined, and which the new movements wished to reestablish on a novel basis. It was the ideal of the one, instead of the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total doctrine, the total movement. "Totalitarian" was Mussolini's word; and Mussolini spoke for all.
The death cult infected the French Revolution and found its resurgence with the Western totalitarian death movements of the early 20th Century such as Nazism.
Moreover, Berman notes that the death cult migrated to the Arab Middle East as well. Berman sees Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer executed in 1966, as one of the most important influences on the modern Islamic world.
These suicide bombers are part of a profound pathology within the Arab world, a chiliastic movement, where death is glory.
Also, Berman does not fail to criticise American foreign policy when it's needed (he understands the current administration foreign policy strategy better than most other people); and it does not fail to criticise the failure of liberalism when they happen ("the totalitarian movements arise because of failures in the liberal civilisation"). These people were protesting the very existence of liberalism. These people were fanatics.
A thought provoking book.
This is one of the most idiosyncratic, short, but compelling studies of the topic available. This is an original contribution to an overlooked connection between violence and fanaticism, along with an insightful study of terrorists amongst the Islamists. Berman postulates that a war against liberalism, the classical bulwark against barbarism is a century-old battle waged in the world. The Islamists and contemporary liberals are engaged in an ideological conflict against 19th Liberalism.
Berman writes:
[Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. It was submission to the kind of authority that liberal civilization had slowly undermined, and which the new movements wished to reestablish on a novel basis. It was the ideal of the one, instead of the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total doctrine, the total movement. "Totalitarian" was Mussolini's word; and Mussolini spoke for all.
The death cult infected the French Revolution and found its resurgence with the Western totalitarian death movements of the early 20th Century such as Nazism.
Moreover, Berman notes that the death cult migrated to the Arab Middle East as well. Berman sees Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer executed in 1966, as one of the most important influences on the modern Islamic world.
These suicide bombers are part of a profound pathology within the Arab world, a chiliastic movement, where death is glory.
Also, Berman does not fail to criticise American foreign policy when it's needed (he understands the current administration foreign policy strategy better than most other people); and it does not fail to criticise the failure of liberalism when they happen ("the totalitarian movements arise because of failures in the liberal civilisation"). These people were protesting the very existence of liberalism. These people were fanatics.
A thought provoking book.
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