Intellectuals and their Romance with Political Barbarism
What alarms me regarding ISIS is that it is theologically a radical-apocalyptic Islamist movement blending insurgency, terrorism and conventional warfare that is also reviving the secular pageantry of Fascism with its grandiose mythmaking, blood rituals, compelling uniforms, Fuhrerprinzip and war-worship. It is an unholy combination that exudes a dark romanticism, a glamour of evil that rootless young Muslim men – a new generation of “armed bohemians” and “armed intellectuals” – find mesmerizing the way young Germans, Italians, Spaniards and Japanese did decades ago. Worse, while we may rightly laugh at the mummery of a dime store “Caliphate” and Islamists cribbing their P.R. style from Triumph of the Will, their success in manipulating deep cultural avatars as the key to power will inspire imitators in barbarism elsewhere that we can ill afford.
Fascism is dead – but it may not stay that way.
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Curtis Gale Weeks:
July 4th, 2015 at 10:00 am
Excellent piece, Mark.
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On Western lack of intellectual support for the likes of Saddam and Gaddafi — hasn’t this changed the slightest bit since the invasion of Iraq? While few in numbers, there have been grumblings, after-the-fact, that maybe we should have left them in place, propped them up, etc., in light of what has happened since.
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At the same time, there may be nothing preventing a counter-movement to ISIS/ISIL, or the eventual rise of a centralizing dictator, to counter ISIS in the future, in those countries. So far, we haven’t witnessed any indications of such a rise, with the possible exception of seeing Saudi Arabia (for instance) stepping up its war vs extremists.
Charles Cameron:
July 4th, 2015 at 3:29 pm
That’s a substantial response to my truly short paragraph / question, Zen, plus of course the Reason piece.
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As someone who lacks much historical awareness outside my own special interests, for myself it’s quite an education, and it will no doubt take a while for me to digest. Your penultimate paragraph, though, I can assent to whole-heartedly without further ado:
I’ll pass your post along to Paul Berman, who was at the Boston Conference, if I can find the means..
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Gratitude and congratitude.
Lynn C. Rees:
July 4th, 2015 at 3:48 pm
Some evidence suggests ISIL is a direct outgrowth of the Saddamite state rather than nutter butters flourishing in a vacuum. How much the inmates are running the asylum is a more murky issue.
Grurray:
July 4th, 2015 at 4:30 pm
I don’t doubt that we are and have been facing a strategic disaster since Saddam & Quaddafi were deposed. However, the sequence of events gets muddled by the ‘Blame the Neo-Cons, CIA, Western Civilization’ crowd.
Saddam’s oppressive regime and disastrous war with Iran killed far more people than our intervention, and Al Qaeda attacked us first.
I think Cultural Relativists who now provide ISIS with de facto apologies because the West once had religious wars have a lot to answer for.
Grurray:
July 4th, 2015 at 5:00 pm
You know what I mean:
[Paraphrasing]
‘The Muslim World is merely 400 years behind Europe. We must give the poor, jobless, noble savages time and room to evolve to our level.’
Isn’t that what Pan-Arabism was supposed to be about- how’d that work out for Kurdistan? Or Levantine Christians?
zen:
July 4th, 2015 at 7:52 pm
Hi Curtis – Much thanks. I think ISIS someday might attract some fellow travelers in the future. At least the kind who attack critics of ISIS rather than defending ISIS itself – anti-anti-Islamists mimicking the Cold war lefties who would never quite defend the Soviets per se but America could do no right and the anti-communists were always bastards etc.
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Hi Charles – Glad you liked the piece. Took a while to get it all down. Let me know if Berman has any reaction.
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Hi Lynn – Every strong horse needs a jockey to win the race. On a serious note, fascist movements are always a witches’ brew of malcontentcy, coalitions of the angry.
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Hi Grurray – There is the argument, and it is valid, that the instability of saddam and Gaddafi existed as external threats. While keeping the lid on at home, Gaddafi destabilized and aggravated the civil wars of all West Africa and Chad. Saddam launched two major wars etc. They were chronic makers of mischief
Ornamental Peasant:
July 4th, 2015 at 8:14 pm
Perhaps a close reading of Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” London: 1790, in addition to an awareness of Clausewitzian ‘uncertanties’ and ‘Fog of War, ought to be prescribed first to any who suggest using force to disrupt any settled social order for ‘rational’ reasons.
david ronfeldt:
July 5th, 2015 at 9:07 pm
Well done. The penultimate paragraph is particularly catching. ISIS is indeed headed toward a newly dreadful kind of fascism.
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But let’s take a further look at your final sentence about “Fascism is dead – but it may not stay that way.” Communism is dead, but fascism remains far from dead or dying. If I hark back to your 2012 post on “The Era of the Creepy-State is Here” (which briefly refers to fascist tendencies in our nation), along with several antelibrary book reviews you’ve posted, I’d say you’ve been attentive to the possibilities for fascism’s resurgence for some time. Even more attentive is Greer’s 4-post Archdruid-blog series in 2014, which I’ve been meaning to examine for quite some time.
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Moreover, as I’ve indicated a few times, TIMN has long implied, that fascism is likely to make a resurgence. As the market form spreads, arch-statist leaders will maneuver to suborn it, including by arousing people’s tribal passions — with fascism emerging as a result. IS looks to become a stark confirmation, but lots of other cases are developing around the world too.
Charles Cameron:
July 5th, 2015 at 11:51 pm
Hi David:
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I haven’t been able to keep up with the Archdruid’s voluminous writings — do you have URLs or titles for those you mention?
david ronfeldt:
July 6th, 2015 at 4:03 am
It was a 3-part series of posts in Feb 2014, starting here:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/02/fascism-and-future-part-one-up-from.html
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My folder also contains an earlier post that turns out to be from Nov 2007, here:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/11/fascism-feudalism-and-future.html
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Lots of grist for TIMN in these posts, if I ever get fully back on track.
Charles Cameron:
July 6th, 2015 at 7:10 am
I’d forgotten how long the comment trails on his posts were, and how many friends from different strata of my life I’m liable to find there!
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Thanks. Now I have me some reading to do!
zen:
July 6th, 2015 at 4:45 pm
Great convo gents!
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Ornamental Peasant – re: Burke & Clausewitz. Agreed. We have an elite that eschews strategy, reading the classics and empiricism for ideology and domestic politics uber alles.
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Hi David – Thank you! I think you have captured the dynamic. We have had many politicians and movements post WWII that have toyed with elements of Fascism but didn’t really dare embrace Fascism unapologetically. Part of the reason is the groups that did were regarded as marginalized, fringe kooks, like Alessandra Mussolini or neo-Nazi parties or they viewed the costs as being too high. Milosevic’s Bosnian Serb allies were for all intents and purposes, Fascists, but Milosevic needed international legitimacy to diplomatically and came out of the Yugoslav Communist Party where for ideological reasons, fully embracing Fascism wasn’t possible. Putin, under Dugin’s Eurasianist influence has move closer to Fascist style but again, Fascism remains a dirty word in the Russian nationalist political vocabulary because of WWII.
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ISIS is really embracing Fascism. It’s ceremonial public executions actually supercede what the Nazis and Fascists did only symbolically with blood flags and heroic cenotaphs and so on. It is reaching back to something very dark and protean, human sacrifice, as a political symbol. I think Halbertal’s book On Sacrifice, is a useful reference here on how deep this goes culturally, to the bronze age or earlier.
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http://www.amazon.com/On-Sacrifice-Moshe-Halbertal/dp/0691163308
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ISIS success may be the turn needed to “rehabilitate” Fascism as a viable political tool for ruthless ppl with a will to power
zen:
July 6th, 2015 at 4:47 pm
I’ve heard of Archdruid before from commenter Duncan Kinder – will check out the links
david ronfeldt:
July 8th, 2015 at 12:11 am
Those are excellent points to add, Mark. Your “creepy-state” post, Greer’s series, and my TIMN posts about fascism all focus mainly on structures and processes in the U.S. What are much better illuminated in your post here about ISIS are the terrible cultural and psychological traits that attend a descent into NAZI/SS-like fascism. I often read that Islam needs a Reformation; but ISIS and its ilk spell a great Deformation.
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Perhaps it’d be apropos to recite a rare old quote from Norman Cohn warning:
“It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.”
(Source: Richard Landes’s blog at http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2015/04/06/fatal-attraction-the-shared-antichrist-of-the-global-progressive-left-and-jihad-2/ )
Charles Cameron:
July 8th, 2015 at 12:42 am
Ha, David — I quoted the same passage in my post So: how does it feel at World’s End? earlier this year, but attributed it to Landes rather than Norman Cohn. Thanks for the correction.
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It is very powerful, and sadly, has proven only too true.
david ronfeldt:
July 8th, 2015 at 8:59 pm
yes, i remember reading your insightful post then, though not that detail. here’s an oddity i notice: your post was in march, but the landes post where i saved the quote was in april?
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long as i’m quoting norman cohn, here’s part of a favorite quote from his main book about early forms of millennialism that seems apropos this thread:
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“In the Middle Ages, the people for whom it [revolutionary millenarianism] had most appeal were neither peasants firmly integrated in the life of village and manor nor artisans firmly integrated in their guilds… Revolutionary millenarianism drew its strength from a population living on the margin of society — peasants without land or with too little land even for subsistence; journeymen and unskilled workers living under the continuous threat of unemployment; beggars and vagabonds — in fact from the amorphous mass of people who were not simply poor but who could find no assured and recognized place in society at all. These people lacked the material and emotional support afforded by traditional social groups; their kinship-groups had disintegrated and they were not effectively organized in village communities or in guilds; for them there existed no regular, institutionalized methods of voicing their grievances or pressing their claims. Instead, they waited for a propheta to bind them together in a group of their own.” (Cohn, 1970, pp. 281-282)
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and of course he ends the book relating millenarianism to potentials for fascism.
Charles Cameron:
July 9th, 2015 at 12:14 am
David:
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here’s an oddity i notice: your post was in march, but the landes post where i saved the quote was in april?
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What a great eye for detail! Yup. He first posted it on March 1st, and I downloaded it then. I’m having trouble with .pdfs at the moment, so can’t compare the versions, but I imagine he updated or corrected.
zen:
July 9th, 2015 at 3:55 am
“… Instead, they waited for a propheta to bind them together in a group of their own.”
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The Taiping Rebellion that set out to replace the Q’ing with the Earthly rule of “the Heavenly King” killed more people than any war in history except WWII.
larrydunbar:
July 11th, 2015 at 6:33 pm
Considering that according to the power-law in the distribution of energy the structure of the movement is in the exponent of the equation, are you saying that the Taiping Rebellion and WWII have similar structures, i.e. the number of events in the Taiping Rebellion was similar in relationship to the number of the magnitude of events (events/magnitude of events) as they were in WWII?.
So somewhere along the line we missed a world war?
Or does the structure of the Taiping Rebellion resemble a civil war, so you are talking apples and oranges, because IS doesn’t seem to be a World War yet?
But with China in the equation, who knows?
zen:
July 13th, 2015 at 5:18 am
Hi Larry,
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In magnitude, the Taiping Rebellion is regarded as second to WWII, causing at least 20 million deaths. By contrast, the figure for the Napoleonic Wars is 3 million dead. It is generally regarded as a civil war, albeit with one side attempting to establish a messianic theocracy.
larrydunbar:
July 14th, 2015 at 5:46 pm
When plotting events over magnitude (the structure defined by the exponent in the power-law in the distribution of energy), magnitude can be considered horizontal as events are vertical. You have given us the (horizontal) base to go on, but no vertical force in the direction (perpendicular) to the base. So there is no way for me to compare structures.
In other words, as a qualt, how does the events compare in number for each historical movement?
I mean, granted, 20 million Chinese dead are the same as 20 million European dead, but how do they compare in a world environment?
At the time, did those 3 million dead, globally, represented far more events, at least potentially, according to its vertical potential, than the 20 million Chinese did at their time?
If they did, then we are talking different structures, as culture and positions become only footnotes, although very important ones, in time.