From Fascism to Jihadism
by Yehuda Mirsky
A vital region aflame and on the march. Unresolved disputes over old imperial boundaries breeding terrible violence. A fanatical belief system stitched together from religious traditions, romantic cults of violence, and modern ideologies, then fanned by fire-breathing, charismatic leaders and propped up by timid plutocrats terrified of the masses. Genuinely well-intentioned progressives finding themselves the unwitting supporters of murderous fanatics. America and the Jews savagely attacked as the hated representatives of all that is wrong with the modern world.
No doubt about it, Europe was a frightening place in 1930s and '40s. Fascism and communism squeezed out the democrats and then turned on each other; America and Britain, after early hesitations and defeats, successfully stamped out the greater conflagration, whose ashes hardened into the cold war. And while communism survived a few decades longer, it too collapsed when internal contradictions and the containment of the West became too much to bear. To be sure, history has never really ended in Europe--just ask the Bosnians or Chechens. But its world-threatening systems of conflict were ended and the ideologies that sustained them discredited.
Comparing now and then, uncanny similarities abound. And this, as the Marxists used to say, is no accident. The new ideology of "jihadism" consists, partly, of the detritus of the worst European ideologies. Jihadism, like fascism and communism, has itself arisen in response to powerful currents--of modernization then, and globalization now.
When I say "jihadism," I do not mean to denigrate the "jihad of the spirit," which is a profound concept in Islamic law and theology. And I'm not calling, God forbid, for civilizational war. Rather, I mean to give a name to a specific configuration of old beliefs and new ideologies arising in today's Middle East--a configuration that is not without precedent. Indeed, by glancing backward at the historical antecedents to our present predicament, we can focus on our long-term policy objectives and devise the best ways to achieve them.
Here, then, are some of the striking similarities:
Legitimate grievances left unanswered and protests deflected by cynical elites. John Maynard Keynes rightly predicted the disasters of the punitive peace of Versailles. The Russians and Slavs groaned first under the czars and then the commissars--and, boy, were they angry. Since the end of the Ottoman Empire, the people of the Middle East have largely been ruled by a succession of autocrats who have delivered neither freedom nor prosperity (the Gulf petrocracy aside) and have worked mightily to deflect their peoples' understandable rage elsewhere. The Palestinians and their interests have been cynically neglected by the Arab states, steadily sold out by their leaders, and treated unjustly by Israel.
The growing pains of massive change. To put it mildly, modernization in Europe involved unsettling economic, political, and social changes that, scarcely contained by liberal institutions, engendered a fantastic backlash. Today we see changes in the direction of economic, political, and social integration on a global scale. They, too, are disturbing to many. And they spur a return to older, familiar identities that have vanished, if indeed, in their pristine forms, they ever even existed at all. The sharia society, whose return political Islam demands, is as much a historical fiction as were the primal forest of German Volkism and Marx's happily unalienated medieval craftsmen. All are romantic answers to very concrete problems, and all have proven deadly when taken seriously.
Blame it on America. And not without reason, as from its founding, America has been both the engine and exemplar of modernity. In Weimar, the late historian Detlev Peukert showed, the euphemism for "modernity" was "Americanism." The more things change....
And on You Know Who. There has been an astounding and historically unprecedented adoption of Nazi-like anti-Semitism not only by Arab masses, but also Arab governments, including our ostensible ally, Egypt. This results not only from the fact that the material is out there, and not only because "the enemy (Hitler) of my enemy (Jews) is my friend," but also because, then and now, Jews both exemplify and champion the Western political and socio-economic order that has given them enormous freedoms and opportunities--all while clinging to a particular and demanding ethnic identity. The dynamic tension that poises them on the cusp of local and global, old and new, is in no small part what makes Jews interesting and, for people whose own sense of identity is deeply threatened, maddening to watch. Moreover, while Israel is not a colonialist state, its founders made whatever use they could of the configurations of colonial power. Today, it stands as a reminder of the European map-drawing that created nearly every Middle Eastern border. Worst of all, it's an achievement by the people who used to be pathetic outcasts. (As one Yale-educated Saudi put it to me: "The State of Israel is the living embodiment of the castration of Islam and that is why it must be destroyed. To be defeated by America is one thing, but by Jews?")
Liberal ideas turned to illiberal ends. Fascism turned nationalism from a nineteenth-century progressive cause into a twentieth-century anathema. Communism cannibalized social democracy and progressive politics, then made the United Nations an arena for war by other means. In the same way today, tyrannical regimes who could not care less about freedom have appropriated the legitimate criticisms of colonialism and globalism to serve their own nefarious ends. Last summer's U.N.-sponsored Durban conference on racism, with its politely understated "death to the Jews" motif, turns out to have been the canary in the mineshaft.
Communications technologies pressed into the service of hatred. Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl adroitly deployed films and other mass media to spread their agendas, flooding their worlds with images and ideas from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while suppressing the culture of free inquiry that created media technologies. Today's jihadists have seized on the Internet, which was supposed to break down boundaries and create a global community, in order to spread, well, images and ideas from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Charismatic demagogue outsiders. Hitler the Austrian, Lenin the urban intellectual, Stalin the Georgian, bin Laden the millionaire brigand chief, Saddam the Tikriti secularist, the Alawite Asad, Arafat the Egyptian engineer. These products of self-invention all embodied abstract fantasies in ways that authentic members of their societies never could, infecting their respective polities with their own alienation and bloodlust.
Egged on by flaccid, underemployed, bourgeois intellectuals. Just as fascist ("Fascism is a philosophical movement," Mussolini announced on the first page of his autobiography) and communist ideology were the products of displaced intellectuals who found themselves without a place in the emerging liberal capitalist order, so, too, have anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideologies captivated thousands of underemployed and, in the information age, regularly unemployable intellectuals who graduated from Arab universities into stagnant economies and polities.
Abetted by "useful idiots" in the West. Would, for instance, the 30 peace activists who walked past Israeli soldiers to show their solidarity with Arafat honestly want to live for a moment in the kind of police state he has created in the territories he controls? Then, as now, for so many people and for many good reasons, the humanitarian mindset, which requires and fosters a belief in human benevolence, has a hard time swallowing the reality of genuinely malevolent people. Better always to criticize one's own, if only to hold onto a sense of agency and hope.
Leading to a suicidal cult of redemptive millennial violence. An ideology of hatred that forecloses meaningful policy options, based on romantic flights from reality into fantasies of self-glorification, sends droves of young people to their deaths--at the behest of cynical leaders never asked to bear the costs of suffering themselves.
Threatening the fabric of civilization. Can anyone seriously doubt that Hitler would have used nuclear weapons if he could have? Or that bin Laden and Arafat would if they could? Or that Stalin was deterred by anything other than deterrence? Or that, as Thomas Friedman has argued, if suicide bombing proves successful in Israel, it will revisit America and spread to Europe, the subcontinent, and Lord knows where else?
So how can understanding these parallels help us forge a successful policy in the Middle East? To begin with, while it is episodes of terror that have focused our attention on jihadism, it is not an episodic phenomenon. The Arab Middle East has brought forth a movement whose full-fledged worldview seeks the destruction of Western society, beginning with its foremost representative in the Middle East. The fact that this worldview draws much of its rhetoric and symbolism from a hallowed religious tradition--and that it has numerous points of contact with legitimate concerns and grievances--is what makes it more than mere crime and gives it traction, and even suasion, in broader communities.
The grievances and discontents of the Arab Middle East are real; the poverty, autocracy, and stagnation that have made bin Laden a hero must be met, eventually, with real solutions, including political and economic reform that marry the imperatives of globalization to profound human needs for a human scale of change. Many otherwise well-meaning people around the world, we have learned since September 11, are prepared to think the worst of us. We need to come to terms with why that it is and what we ourselves may be doing to encourage them.
But first things first. Nazi Germany then, and more recently the former Soviet Union, eventually joined the family of nations--but only after they were decisively defeated. Denazification could only happen once the Nazis were gone. That victory and our victory in the cold war were made possible not only by the hard stuff of military and economic strength, but by what Joseph Nye has helpfully termed "soft power"--the attractiveness of liberal and democratic societies and the opportunities they present for human flourishing, which first effectively mobilized us against the Nazis; sustained people like Havel, Sakharov, and Sharansky behind the Iron Curtain; and, in the end, brought that curtain down. The struggle with jihadism paradoxically affords us a chance to reaffirm our own core values. Just as World War II gave birth to the human rights movement, and the cold war gave impetus to the American civil rights movement--yielding a more just society at home and a greater respect for democratic values abroad--so, too, this struggle, if waged wisely, can not only save us, but help make the globalizing community a better, if sadder and wiser, place.
Yehuda Mirsky served in the U.S. State Department's human rights bureau from 1994-97 and is currently a Javits Fellow at Harvard.
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