Now, when we are all in a state of shock after the killing
spree in the Charlie Hebdo offices, it is the right moment to gather
the courage to think. We should, of course, unambiguously condemn the
killings as an attack on the very substance our freedoms, and condemn them
without any hidden caveats (in the style of "Charlie Hebdo was
nonetheless provoking and humiliating the Muslims too much"). But such
pathos of universal solidarity is not enough – we should think further.
Such thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with the cheap
relativisation of the crime (the mantra of "who are we in the West,
perpetrators of terrible massacres in the Third World, to condemn such
acts"). It has even less to do with the pathological fear of many Western
liberal Leftists to be guilty of Islamophobia. For these false Leftists, any
critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia; Salman
Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially,
at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, etc. The
result of such stance is what one can expect in such cases: the more the
Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by
Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of
Islam. This constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the
more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if
the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be . . .
This is why I also find insufficient calls for moderation
along the lines of Simon Jenkins's claim (in The Guardian on January
7) that our task is “not to overreact, not to over-publicise the aftermath. It
is to treat each event as a passing accident of horror” – the attack on Charlie
Hebdo was not a mere “passing accident of horror”. it followed a precise
religious and political agenda and was as such clearly part of a much larger
pattern. Of course we should not overreact, if by this is meant succumbing to
blind Islamophobia – but we should ruthlessly analyse this pattern.
What is much more needed than the demonisation of the
terrorists into heroic suicidal fanatics is a debunking of this demonic myth.
Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilisation was moving in
the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or
commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only
comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little
poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the
end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and
their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We
have discovered happiness,’ - say the Last Men, and they blink.”
It effectively may appear that the split between the
permissive First World and the fundamentalist reaction to it runs more and more
along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full
of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one's life to some transcendent
Cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called
"passive" and "active" nihilism? We in the West are the
Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim
radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their
self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to
render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the
current split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The
best” are no longer able fully to engage, while “the worst” engage in racist,
religious, sexist fanaticism.
However, do the terrorist fundamentalists really fit this
description? What they obviously lack is a feature that is easy to discern in
all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US:
the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the
non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe
they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by
non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western
hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s
search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists,
the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued,
fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in
fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation.
It is here that Yeats’ diagnosis falls short of the present predicament:
the passionate intensity of the terrorists bears witness to a lack of true
conviction. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened
by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper? The fundamentalist
Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their
superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity
from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with
fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they
themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our
condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority
towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The
problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity),
but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that,
secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves
by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a
dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of their own superiority.
The recent vicissitudes of Muslim fundamentalism confirm
Walter Benjamin's old insight that “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a
failed revolution”: the rise of Fascism is the Left’s failure, but
simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential,
dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize. And does the same not
hold for today’s so-called “Islamo-Fascism”? Is the rise of radical Islamism
not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim
countries? When, back in the Spring of 2009, Taliban took over the Swat valley
in Pakistan, New York Times reported that they engineered "a
class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy
landlords and their landless tenants". If, however, by “taking advantage”
of the farmers’ plight, The Taliban are “raising alarm about the risks to
Pakistan, which remains largely feudal,” what prevents liberal democrats in
Pakistan as well as the US to similarly “take advantage” of this plight and try
to help the landless farmers? The sad implication of this fact is that the
feudal forces in Pakistan are the “natural ally” of the liberal democracy…
So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom,
equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to
save them against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction –
a false, mystifying, reaction, of course - against a real flaw of liberalism,
and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself,
liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core
values is a renewed Left. In order for this key legacy to survive, liberalism
needs the brotherly help of the radical Left. THIS is the only way to defeat
fundamentalism, to sweep the ground under its feet.
To think in response to the Paris killings means to drop the
smug self-satisfaction of a permissive liberal and to accept that the conflict
between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict
– a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max
Horkheimer had said about Fascism and capitalism already back in 1930s - those
who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet
about Fascism - should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do
not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet
about religious fundamentalism.
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