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PONDERING ISLAMISM AS A FORM OF TOTALITARIANIAM

I have not fully collected my thoughts on this topic but a couple of posts have me mulling the relationship between radical Islamism and the great secular totalitarianisms of the 20th century. the first was from JB at riting on the wall who delved into the recent pronouncements of al Qaida’s chief ideologist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. JB is not impressed with al-Zawahiri the theorist:

“braude interprets all of this from a rationalist/western/critical perspective. but that’s missing someting. there’s nothing new here. zawahiri hasn’t made a single point here that he hasn’t been making since, at the very least, bin laden’s days in sudan. actually, i’m not sure there’s anything here unique to zawahiri. all three foundations are straight out of qutb. enjoining against the united states came out of the early days of egyptian islamic jihad. and it’s really hard to see any of this as an attempt to link himself to an-nahda:”

The second prompt for rethinking Islamism was a dialogue I had with Collounsbury on his post on Koranic duels. I ended up after the exchange stating the following hypothesis:

“Islamism has some analagous traits or borrowed tactics from previous Totalitarianisms – people like Bin Laden are not stupid, they will use what can be adapted that does not contradict their view of Islam – but I think Islamism needs to be better understood on its own merits and not its borrowings. In other words, a revision of previous attempts to retrofit Islamism into Fascist or Communist models by American intellectuals is in order. Not all of these observations are wrong but the extent has been exaggerated in an attempt to understand how Islamism ticks. Or to communicate the urgency or scope of the problem.”

I am not knocking Paul Berman whose book Terror and Liberalism argues the connection between Fascism and Islamism or even those who took the tack of analogies with Communism. I think those arguments were fairly made and are persuasive to the degree that the Islamists have been influenced by or borrowed tactics from their secular predecessors who were also in revolt against the liberal modernity represented by he West. Islamist and Arab radicals have often cribbed Anti-semitic discourse in some of its vilest manifestations directly from its European and Nazi context. Even in the instances where the relationship between Islamism and Fascism or Communism is tenuous there remains some remarkable paralells in terms of psychological/internal and transnational/organizational dynamics because all three represented a revolutionary, anti-status quo, attack on the global order.

Conceding those points I must move on to the crux of the issue. These influences and analogies may be misleading us in terms of confronting the Islamists because they are secondary and not central to Islamism as a motivating ideology. By relying too heavily on our experential familiarity with the Nazis and the Cold War we avoid looking at the heart of what drives a Muslim to become a Jihadi and are apt to miss the evolutionary trajectory that Islamist groups may be taking. By missing the trends and not understanding the psychological-ideological levers we miscue our actions in the GWOT I think also that this works both ways. Bin Laden’s pre-election videotape revealed that he did not know quite how to direct his message to a Western audience with the clarity and effect he has enjoyed with the Arab-Islamic world.

Another conundrum is the existence and relationship between radical Sunni and radical Shiite forms of Islamism. The former is in a transnationalist, revolutionary, movement phase with no overarching authority and the latter is an official state ideology already swiftly descending into bureaucratic ossification. Supreme Guide Khameini is wearing his high religious titles with as much justification as Brezhnev wore his military decorations – and probably is causing as much wincing embarrassment to his followers. I’m no expert on Iran or Islam but I find it dubious that any significant body of Shiite Muslims hail Ali Khameini as a Marja, much less as an Imam.

I’m interested in hearing what you think regarding whether we are on the right track in analyzing and countering – and hopefully crushing – radical Islamism

THE HEREDITARY COMMUNIST MONARCHY

Kim Jong-Il has allegedly decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and designate one of his sons as his official heir and successor. This move would confirm that that North Korea’s extremely harsh- and increasingly bizarre – Stalinist regime is also de facto absolute monarchy.

While all Communist nations adopted a nomenklatura system that established a permanently priviliged ” New Class” of party elite, North Korea is the only state that succeeded in establishing a family dynasty. Romania’s late Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, an admirer of North Korea’s juche police state, was believed to have wanted to establish his son Nicu as a successor when his hardline regime was overthrown in 1989 and Ceaucescu was executed.

Let us hope that history repeats itself sometime soon.

DEMOCRACY’S RIPPLE EFFECT

Following on the heels of Iraq’s historic election.The House of Saud dips its toe into democratic waters.

A lot of the quotes in the article are heartwarming. We should remember however that this was in a) a major urban center b) the reporter spoke to a lot of people with advanced degrees and most likely to hold liberal views and speak English and c) the scope of the franchise and offices was severely restricted. Nevertheless, it’s a good start and it is worthy of praise from the United States and Western countries. The al-Saud have been toying with this idea for several years but the positive outcome in Iraq certainly added an impetus by removing some of the likely objections of non-extremist Saudi conservatives.

On a personal note any further blogging today will have to wait until very late this evening. I am totally swamped with meetings and projects at work and a bombastic tantrum is probably in the offing.

HEY ! DICK MORRIS READS ZENPUNDIT !

Just kidding but I did get the drop on him by two days minimum.

ON MY READING TABLE

I cruised through Border’s recently and netted a few good catches that I have read or am starting to read. First off is BOYD – the Robert Coram biography of fighter pilot turned master military strategist, John Boyd. Skeptical of the tendency of biographers to oversell the importance of their subject, I emailed Dr. Barnett and asked him in his capacity as a professional military expert to give me an assessment of Boyd’s contribution to American military thinking. Tom sent me a one word reply:

” Substantial”.

With that endorsement, I began reading and Coram, a talented writer, draws the reader in just a few pages. It reminded me a little bit of I how I felt when I read Caro’s Master of the Senate.

Secondly I also finished Michael Scheuer’s Through Our Enemies Eyes ( I had already read Imperial Hubris ). You read Scheuer for the trees, not the forest. He’s a detail man on radical Islamist terror groups and al Qaida in particular. You learn useful things but you don’t walk away wanting to put the guy in charge of the GWOT ( reforming CIA management, yes – grand strategy, no). The book is ready for an updated edition to encompass recent events but it remains valuable to anyone intersted in al Qaida and Islamism.

My third book is a two-for-one translation of Japanese classics – The Book of Five Rings by Myamoto Musashi and The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori. I am re-reading the first, having done so once before about twenty years ago and look forward to the second which I have never read. The translator, Thomas Cleary, is noteworthy for translating works in Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Pali. Whoa ! I don’t even know what Pali is ( I’d guess an Indonesian or Indian language) and Japanese, Chinese and Arabic are all notoriously difficult and subtle languages to master. Where I come from, Cleary is what we’d call ” learned”.

Lastly but far from least is The Coming of the Third Reich by Cambridge historian, Richard J. Evans. The only reason I’ve left this one for later is that I’m fairly deeply read in the Nazi period already and I’m trying to raise my knowledge level in other subfields these days. Evans is accomplished at his craft and has a sharp, analytica,l mind. In his In Defense of History, Evans managed to make historiography interesting and relevant to the non-specialist ( a task which takes some doing, trust me) as he deconstructed the deconstructionist and pomo attack on History as a discipline.

Ah, if only there were ” Reading Fellowships ” to sit home and dive into the books. That would be something.