| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front |
| Brink Lindsey on Islamism... |
| 2001-09-28 |
| At first glance, shadowy Islamist terrorists look very different from any enemy we have ever faced. And indeed, the tactics they employ are novel, as are the tactics that must be used to defeat them. But the fundamental nature of our present adversaries, once seen plainly, is all too familiar. The evil we confront today is the evil of totalitarianism: Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their coconspirators are the modern-day successors of Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. The misbegotten secular religions of totalitarianism won their devoted and ruthless followings by offering an escape from the stresses of modernity — specifically, from the agoraphobic panic that liberal open-endedness roused. They aspired to "re-enchant" the world with grand dreams of class or racial destiny — dreams that integrated their adherents into communities of true believers, and elevated them from lost souls to agents of great and inexorable forces. With their insidiously appealing lies, the false faiths of communism and fascism launched their mad rebellion against the liberal rigors of questioning and self-doubt — and so against tolerance and pluralism and peaceable persuasion. They inflicted upon a century their awful, evil perversion of modernity: the instrumentalities of mass production and mass prosperity twisted into engines of mass destruction and mass murder. Despite the trappings of religious fervor, Islamist totalitarianism is strikingly similar to its defunct, secular cousins. It is an expression, not of spirituality, but of anomie: in particular, a seething resentment of Western prosperity and strength. Consider the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 to resist the British presence in Egypt, the Brotherhood was the original radical Islamist terror network. As detailed in David Pryce-Jones' powerful The Closed Circle, the official account of its formation records this statement at the group's initial meeting: "We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and serve the welfare of Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. Lo, we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and dignity." And — just like its Communist and fascist predecessors — Islamist totalitarianism seeks redemption through politics. It is animated by the pursuit of temporal power: the destruction of the "decadent" (i.e., liberal) West and creation of a pan-Islamic utopian state featuring unrestrained centralization of authority. Whether the utopian blueprint calls for mullahs, commissars, or Gauleiters to wield absolute power is of secondary importance: It is the utopian idea itself — the millennial fantasy of a totalitarian state — that unites all the radical movements of the Industrial Counterrevolution. Today, the sectaries of radical Islamism continue to uphold various collectivist strains of "Islamic economics" — trumpeted as righteous alternatives to the secular and individualist corruption of "Eurocentric" globalization. But this much is clear: The United States is now at war with the totalitarians of radical Islamism. And in prior conflicts with the totalitarian impulse of the Industrial Counterrevolution, the United States has been undefeated. Americans triumphed first over fascism, then over Communism — movements with ideologies of potentially global appeal, and with political bases in militarily formidable great powers. Americans will rise again to this latest challenge. Unlike its predecessors, radical Islamism speaks only to the disaffected minority of a particular region, and none of the governments of that region holds any hope of prevailing against the resolute exercise of U.S. power. However long the present war must last, and however costly it must be, the final outcome cannot be doubted: interment of Islamist totalitarianism in what President Bush so stirringly referred to as "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |