Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman's *Terror and Liberalism* might very well be the first "great" book of the 21st Century, since it's probably the first book that really captures what the 20th Century was about, and what we have carried over into the 21st as unfinished business. But the book may not get the attention it deserves, because it isn't a very scholarly work. It manages to discuss totalitarianism without referencing Hannah Arendt even once, and it doesn't have so much as a minimal Index. What it has, instead, is a coherent thesis. Consider the following passage:"He [Albert Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. (p. 46)"This is an enormous insight, and to be frank it does not appear with such clarity in Arendt's work. Her explanation, that loneliness has become an "everyday experience," seems grossly inadequate. Surely the notion that it's all a matter of loneliness appeals to a sense of profound irony, but couldn't we all just get a puppy? This was the payoff for all that scholarly zeal and industry?Moreover, Arendt never makes the connection between terror as an organizing principle for a 20th Century form of government, and terrorism as a strategy of totalitarian movements that are out of power. And so she did, in fact, miss something important.And of course even if Arendt had not completely missed the seeding of the Middle East with the totalitarian ideas of the Nazis and the Stalinist,s she never would have guessed that Islam itself could become the excuse for such a movement. She, herself, had been a product of the German Counter-enlightenment. Her mentor, Martin Heidegger, made a vain bid to become the philosopher of National Socialism, and would have succeeded had not the Nazis been too clever. So she has no excuse for missing the role that the Counter-enlightenment plays the writings of the Ba'ath founder, Michael Aflaq, and the Islamist founder, Sayyid Qutb.So if Berman lacks some background, he does manage to get to the heart of a matter that deflected more scholarly minds. And he stands as the first to make this leap. Even today people don't appear to see the connection between Jurgen Habermas' "Lifeworld vs. System World" typology, inherited from Husserl and Heidegger, and the philosophy of Qutb, which simply maps the same concepts into the religious framework of Islam. The insight that man had become alienated from his own nature, whether through the "false consciousness" of Marx or by our "deluded faith in the power of reason," makes virtually the same diagnosis as Qutb. So it's not really that surprising for Arendt to identify loneliness (alienation) as the culprit. Of course, it had to be. There is not such a great distance, p

Paul Berman's "Terror and Liberalism" is an excellent attempt at finding common ground between America's political Left and Right, at least when it comes to the current "War on Terror." Berman painstakingly shows Islamic fundamentalism for what it is, a mass political movement, actually the combining of two mass political movements - pan-Arabism (ie. the Baath party) and pan-Islamacism (ie. al Qaeda and the Islamic Jihad) that are both devoted to violence and diametrically opposed to the Western Liberal tradition.Berman also argues that the Left in America has as much at stake in the "War on Terror" as do those on the Right.Paul Berman's historical research is excellent, following the path of the modern pan-Islamic movement to its roots with Sayyid Qutb (ku-tab) author of "In the Shade of the Qur'an," "Social Justice in Islam" and other works. Qutb attended the Colorado State College of Education in the late 1940's and earned a Masters Degree, but came away thoroughly disgusted with what he saw as "the barbarous West." He was especially disgusted by what the West hailed as "the emancipation of women" and "sexual liberation."At the same time that pan-Islamacism was growing, pan-Arabism was coming into political prominence behind such figures as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Though the differences between the two camps were subtle - pan-Arabists wanted a return of the old Ottoman Empire, while pan-Islamacists envisioned a world under shariah (the legal code of Islam) - they were also volatile. Berman describes the differences between the two groups as akin to the differences between the Italian fascists under Mussolini who sought to rebuild the Roman Empire and the German Nazis who sought a return to the Roman Empire in a Germanic form. Indeed the Arab world sided with the Axis powers during World War II, which led to England and the U.S. setting up the state of Israel in what was then the Palestine territories.In 1966 shortly after Colonel Nasser took power in Egypt, several attempts were made on his life. He blamed them on his alienating Qutb's group, the Islamic Brotherhood and had Sayyid Qutb hung in retribution. Still, despite their differences, the two factions have been bound by a hatred of Israel and the West that ignites their common passions.After delving into the history of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, Berman takes on what he sees as a misguided view among many Western Leftists like Noam Chomsky, who've rationalized terrorism as the only possible response to Western oppression by less technologically advanced nations. People like Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky have defined Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as an appropriate response by a smaller opponent to a bully, while Berman sees it as a cataclysmic struggle between two conflicting ideologies, one rooted in individual liberty, the separation of Church and State, a love of technology and women's suffrage and the other one diametrically opposed to all of these things on virtually every leve

"Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses." So said an Algerian religious-political figure quoted by Paul Berman, whose effort here is to get people who believe in liberalism and liberal society to throw off the blinders of multicultural sensitivity and see and hear the real deeds and words and intentions of Islamic extremists as they call for our death and destruction. This small but powerfully reasoned book draws two inescapable conclusions: 1) That "Islamic fascism" is not just a metaphor drawn from European culture (as one might speak in reverse of a French jihad against American fast food), but the actual importation of mid-20th century European fascism, with all the same characteristics as Nazism, Stalinism, Franco's Spain and other such movements: intolerance of any other way of life within its borders, an obsession with purity (which requires ever more total enforcement), the notion of a Gotterdammerung-style clash between the pure and the infidels, and last but not least, a virulent anti-Semitism which in some cases, such as that of a Nazi racial theorist who wound up on Nasser's payroll, is quite literally imported from Europe. The implication, clearly, is that Islamic fascism has to be broken just like European fascisms were.2) A willful blindness on the part of liberal society to recognize that our enemies really do say and think what they're saying and thinking. Both sides in politics still try to see rational motivations for what is in fact an irrational mass movement in love with death. The right, thanks to its business ties with the Saudis, is only slowly acknowledging how the terror really stems from those supposed friends and allies, since why would good business partners do such a thing? The left refuses to entertain the idea that events like 9-11 could have a maniacal religious motivation, since any blow against the US must, by definition, be part of the struggle of the oppressed against global capitalism, and therefore must be ultimately rational (and regrettable yet understandable, if not indeed downright admirable). (For a perfect example of how resistant the left is to criticism of the view that it's All About The U.S., read The Nation's review of this book, which spends most of its energy angrily attacking a couple of pages that skewer Noam Chomsky as the perfect exemplar of the Grand Unified Evil-America Theory of all history.)Whether it's an eye-opening (and far from unsympathetic) exegesis of the writings of the extremist author Sayyid Qutb, or a look at 1989, the year of democracy's supposed triumph, from the Islamic point of view (they saw it as their triumph over the infidel invading Soviets-- and were they entirely wrong?), Berman gives the facts underlying the news we read every day a new perspective. The good news is, liberal society did defeat fascism once, twice, multiple times. The bad news, the fight almost always started later than it should have

...Even long before the end of the Cold War, intransigent liberalism which actually stood for non-negotiable moral and political values had died. Today there are few liberal equivalents of Rush Limbaugh, a notable exception being Camille Paglia and now, in his magnificent Book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman. Berman is a no nonsense liberal who writes from a profound moral center. He cares about human dignity and clearly does not assume any less of a humanity for strangers and Others than he does for himself. He is the real leader of the revolution among a small cadre of liberals who would properly see the eradication of all thugs and criminals decked out in military fab and exploiting de facto sovereignty who claim to represent the will of the people; and further, hold our government accountable for their moral hypocrisy in supporting right wing dictatorships so long as they do not pose a threat to economic national self-interest, but castigate those on the left who are just as vicious in their human rights violations. If our government stands for democracy and freedom then we ought to demand that it behave in a morally consistent manner and adopt an ethical foundation to its foreign policy.Terror and Liberalism is a book rich in historical detail and analysis, and, indirectly, a profound work in political morality. As a liberal I found myself frustrated when the Taliban came to power in 1996 because few of my fellow liberals seemed willing to condemn those primitive trolls for the cruel form of gender apartheid they inflicted on millions of Afghan women. Why aren't liberals marching in the streets to condemn the corrupt Saudi regime and its medieval conception of women or the barbaric practice of tearing out a woman?s vulva and clitoris thereby denying her for her entire life, the ability to experience sexual pleasure...I am thoroughly delighted that Berman?s book sets the moral case for why any free and democratic country not only has a moral responsibility to export liberal democratic virtues on behalf of its fellow citizens of the world, but to invade and topple with complete rectitude any illiberal country governed by despots whose gross disregard for the basic rights of their citizens fall below an acceptable moral decency threshold. Leaders of countries who violate sovereignty--which incidentally is not an absolute but that, ever since its initial inception after the Treaty of Westphalia, has always been subjected to constraints of justice--are in essence nihilists who must be subjected to the best of moral and political paternalism that liberalism has to offer. Berman is brave enough to show that the agonistic hand ringing and "oh, let's continue talking," prevalent among spineless liberals are empty gestures which political thugs and savages take advantage of. I say three cheers for a liberal who is morally sensitive to the plight of our fellow world citizens who lack meaningful third party international coercive institutions to a

Phenomenal book!! Berman explores the failure of the left to recognize totalitarianism throughout the twentieth century and believes that the failure continues to the present day. Once again, the European left and the American left refuse to recognize the existence and threat of totalitarianism (the Arab version) in both its Islamic and Baathist forms. Berman notes that Bush has failed to articulate a case for war in Iraq (because he is fundamentally inarticulate), but insists that liberalism itself requires that we defeat totalitarian mass murderers including Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, because of our commitment to freedom and tolerance for all people, not simply for ourselves.