Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology - Part two
A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini's fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler's fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.
This theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies, for it suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the domain of those groups that history has passed by or rejected--groups that feel that they are under attack from forces that, while perhaps more powerful than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue. Such a fantasy ideology was current in the South before the Civil War and explained much of the conduct of the Confederacy. Instead of seeing themselves as an anachronism attempting to prolong the existence of a doomed institution, Southerners chose to see themselves as the bearer of true civilization. Imperial Germany had similar fantasies before and during the Great War. They are well expressed in Thomas Mann's "Notes of an Unpolitical Man": Germans possess true inwardness and culture, unlike the French and English--let alone those barbarous Americans. Indeed, Hitler's even more extravagant fantasy ideology is incomprehensible unless one puts it in the context of this pre-existing fantasy ideology.
In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.
But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us--I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief--the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as "The Power of Positive Thinking," or even "The Little Engine That Could." To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at this conclusion. Rather, what is meant by this is that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.
The allusion to William James's famous essay "The Will to Believe" is not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the two thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in particular and fantasy ideology in general--Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. All three men begin with the same assumption: If human beings are limited to acting only on those beliefs that can be logically and scientifically demonstrated, they could not survive, simply because this degree of certainty is restricted only to mathematics and the hard sciences--which, by themselves, are not remotely sufficient to guide us through the world as it exists. Hence, human beings must have a large set of beliefs that cannot be demonstrated logically and scientifically--beliefs that are therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences.
Yet the fact that such beliefs cannot be justified by science does not mean that they may not be useful or beneficial to the individual or to the society that holds them. For James, this meant primarily the religious beliefs of individuals: Did a man's religious beliefs improve the quality of his personal life? For Pareto, however, the same argument was extended to all beliefs: religious, cultural and political.
Both James and Pareto viewed nonrational belief from the perspective of an outside observer: They took up the beliefs that they found already circulating in the societies in which they lived and examined them in light of whether they were beneficial or detrimental to the individuals and the societies that entertained them. As a botanist examines the flora of a particular region--he is not interested in creating new flowers, but simply in cataloguing those that already exist--so, too, James and Pareto were exclusively interested in already existing beliefs, and certainly not in producing new ones.
But this was not enough for Sorel. Combining Nietzsche with William James, Sorel discovered the secret of Nietzsche's will to power in James's will to believe. James, like Pareto, had shown that certain spontaneously occurring beliefs enabled those who held these beliefs to thrive and to prosper, both as individuals and as societies. But if this was true of spontaneously occurring beliefs, could it not also be true of beliefs that were deliberately and consciously manufactured?
This was a radical innovation. For just as naturally existing beliefs could be judged properly only in terms of the benefits such beliefs brought about in the lives of those who believed in them, the same standard could now be applied to beliefs that were deliberately created in order to have a desired effect on those who came to believe in them. What would be important about such "artificially inseminated" beliefs--which Sorel calls myths--was the transformative effect such myths would have on those who placed their faith in them and the extent to which such ideological make-believe altered the character and conduct of those who held them--and certainly not whether they were true.
Sorel's candidate for such a myth--the general strike--never quite caught on. But his underlying insight was taken up by Mussolini and Italian fascism, and with vastly greater sensitivity to what is involved in creating such galvanizing and transformative myths in the minds of large numbers of men and women. After all, it is obvious that not just any belief will do and that, furthermore, each particular group of people will have a disposition, based on history and character, to entertain one set of beliefs more readily than another. Mussolini assembled his Sorelian myth out of elements clearly designed to catch the imagination of his time and place--a strange blend of Imperial Roman themes and futurist images.
Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations--and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy--a fantasy with which the "audience" could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus 20th-century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father's ghost.
Once again, it is a mistake to see in all of this merely a ploy--a cynical device to delude the masses. In all fantasy ideologies, there is a point at which the make-believe becomes an end in itself. This fact is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.
Any attempt to see this adventure in Clausewitzian terms is doomed to fail: There was no political or economic advantage whatsoever to be gained from the invasion of Ethiopia. Indeed, the diplomatic disadvantages to Italy in consequence of this action were tremendous, and they were in no way to be compensated for by anything that Italy could hope to gain from possessing Ethiopia as a colony.
Why invade, then? The answer is quite simple. Ethiopia was a prop--a prop in the fantasy pageant of the new Italian Empire--that and nothing else. And the war waged in order to win Ethiopia as a colony was not a war in the Clausewitzian sense--that is to say, it was not an instrument of political policy designed to induce concessions from Ethiopia, or to get Ethiopia to alter its policies, or even to get Ethiopia to surrender. Ethiopia had to be conquered not because it was worth conquering, but because the fascist fantasy ideology required Italy to conquer something--and Ethiopia fit the bill. The conquest was not the means to an end, as in Clausewitzian war; it was an end in itself. Or, more correctly, its true purpose was to bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome.
To be a prop in someone else's fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you, but that was the position of Ethiopia in the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism. And it is the position Americans have been placed in by the quite different fantasy ideology of radical Islam.
The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation--in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?
As the purpose of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was to prove to the Italians themselves that they were conquerors, so the purpose of 9-11 was not to create terror in the minds of the American people but to prove to the Arabs that Islamic purity, as interpreted by radical Islam, could triumph. The terror, which to us seems the central fact, is in the eyes of al Qaeda a byproduct. Likewise, what al Qaeda and its followers see as central to the holy pageant of 9-11--namely, the heroic martyrdom of the 19 hijackers--is interpreted by us quite differently. For us the hijackings, like the Palestinian "suicide" bombings, are viewed merely as a modus operandi, a technique that is incidental to a larger strategic purpose, a makeshift device, a low-tech stopgap. In short, Clausewitzian war carried out by other means--in this case by suicide.
But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom--martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.
In short, it is a mistake to try to fit such behavior into the mold created by our own categories and expectations. Nowhere is this more tellingly illustrated than on the videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the attack. The tape makes clear that the final collapse of the World Trade Center was not part of the original terrorist scheme, which apparently assumed that the twin towers would not lose their structural integrity. But this fact gave to the event--in terms of al Qaeda's fantasy ideology--an even greater poignancy: Precisely because it had not been part of the original calculation, it was therefore to be understood as a manifestation of divine intervention. The 19 hijackers did not bring down the towers--God did.
Most of our misunderstandings of al Qaeda's goals have come about for one fundamental reason: In the first weeks after 9-11, it was impossible to determine whether or not al Qaeda had embarked on a systematic and calculated Clausewitzian strategy of terror simply because at that date we did not know, and could not know, what was coming next.
In the days and weeks following 9-11 there was a universal sense that it would happen again at any moment--something shocking and terrifying, something that would again rivet us to our TV screen. And indeed, the anthrax scare seemed at first to be designed precisely to fit this bill. It even had something that 9-11 lacked, namely the ability to frighten people who sat quietly in their living rooms in little towns across America, to make ordinary people feel alarmed undertaking ordinary daily activities, such as opening the mail. But, leaving aside the question of whether al Qaeda was in fact directly or indirectly responsible for the anthrax letters, what was most striking about this episode was that it showed dramatically that if al Qaeda had elected to launch a Clausewitzian war of terror against the United States, even acts of terror on a vastly smaller scale than 9-11 would still be assured of receiving enormous media coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Indeed, even if another agent was behind the scare, it is still hard to understand how al Qaeda could fail to profit by the lesson the scare taught--that the American media, by nature, could be trusted to amplify even the least act of terrorism into a continuing saga of national nightmare.
But leaving aside the anthrax episode, there was in fact no such act committed by al Qaeda in the months following 9-11. Nor does the possibility that one might still occur change the fact that during this critical initial period, one did not. This in itself is a remarkably telling fact.
Acts of terror, as noted earlier, can be used to pursue genuine Clausewitzian objectives in precisely the same way that normal military operations are used, as was demonstrated during the Algerian war of independence. But this requires that the acts of terror be deployed with the same kind of strategic logic that applies to normal military operations. If you attack your enemy with an act of terror--especially one on the scale of 9-11--you must be prepared to follow up on it immediately. The analogy here to time-honored military strategy is obvious:
Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
