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Terror and Liberalism

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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, philosophically, between Qutb's "hideous schizophrenia" of modern life, and the nostalgic longing for the "Lebenswelt" that drives much of modern European philosophy.

Liberalism did not evolve as a cure for the condition of man. It evolved as a cure for the tendency of mankind to become dogmatic. Hence it looks nothing like a cure for mankind's inherent ills. It doesn't regard mankind as "alienated" from himself. One side sees the human condition as tragically fragmented, and seeks a remedy in unity. The other sees the longing for a remedy as the problem, a compulsion to worry the patient to death.

Berman reflects this insight in his critique of Noam Chomsky, whom he views as "the last of the 19th Century rationalists." But this analysis, though informative, doesn't quite capture the slipperiness of Chomsky, whose philosophy is ultimately counter-rational. While Chomsky does, in fact, tend to see the world in the simplistic terms of a "greed vs. freedom" dialectic, his main problem is that he really has no program for calamity. Berman is probably more clear about totalitarianism than liberalism, which may be why his great book ultimately reaches a sort of impasse.

Why is it the Americans who recognize the necessity? Why is the American faith that the sovereignty of others means security for themselves so exceptional? Why are the Americans so uniquely disinterested in perfecting mankind? Perhaps we need to be as canny as those Germans were, about communicating the antidote to their philosophies of "revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism?"

Ultimately Berman gets it. The problem lies in the habit of wishful thinking that afflicts most of America's historical allies, and some of its own deluded clan. Without any capacity to confront calamity the natural tendency is to deny it. Pretend it doesn't exist, or is an exaggeration and you need not change your worldview, or your mind. (But you may be obligated to hate the bearer of bad news.) Thus Chomsky's obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore, and by Derrida and Habermas recently. And it's only this resistance to the horns of the dilemma that represents the impasse. How could there be any problem that can't be resolved by a trick of the tongue or the eye? Oh, I mean by revealing the tricks, of course. It was all just a trick of the eye that day in early September. Don't be alarmed.

But thanks to Berman's eloquence we are able to see such pretense for what it is. We are at last able to perceive clearly the continuity of the beast that replaced chattel slavery as the world's consummate evil, and is destined to one day join it on the ash heap. It is alarming. But not beyond us.

...

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 level.

"Terror and Liberalism" is an excellent book that not only gives the reader a broader understanding of the roots of fundamentalist Islam, but an insight into why so many on the American Left reflexively support any movement willing to take on the bully they see as America's "Military-Industrial Complex," and why that view is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous as well.

"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, and long after someone like Berman had made it clear that a Mein Kampf-- and a Hitler-- really meant what he said.

This is a wake-up call for liberals who would like to pretend that radical Islam does not present a serious threat to the West. There are many good things in this wonderfully well-written book. Berman's explication of the ur-myth of totalitarianism (left or right) is very good. His summary of Sayyid Qutb's thought is the best description of the fundamental ideas of Islam that I have ever read; the theological basis of Islamic antipathy to the idea of separation of religion and the state is very nicely conveyed. Berman's account of the failure of the French Socialists in the 1930s is merciless, and he dismantles Noam Chomsky's simple-minded worldview in three pages. That latter is worth the price of the book by itself.

On the negative side, Berman's orientation is a bit too literary for my tastes. For example, I think he forces his theme of irrationality where it really doesn't fit. The totalitarian programs he talks about seem to have two major characteristics, (1) an enormously ambitious goal (remaking society, conquering the world, etc.), and (2) utter amorality in selecting the means of achieving that goal (no compunctions about massive slaughter). However destructive such programs are, there is nothing necessarily irrational about them. The one movement he talks about that does seem to be truly irrational is the Palestinian suicide bombing murder spree, in which those actions have no apparent connection to any specific political goals. Berman can also be careless in selecting examples to buttress his argument. Athens and the Roman Republic were not fragile little republics surviving only in benign circumstances, until "popped like bubbles by marauding armies from afar". Athens became a predatory and expansionist power, its eventual decline traceable to a failed imperial war to conquer Syracuse. The Roman Republic was never conquered, but underwent a transition to imperial government due to the pressures of maintaining far-flung provinces and armies; it became the Roman Empire, hardly a bubble pop. And Pancho Villa launched an invasion of New Mexico, not Texas.

...

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 womans vulva and clitoris thereby denying her for her entire life, the ability to experience sexual pleasure...I am thoroughly delighted that Bermans 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 assume the default duty of protecting their rights when their leaders have failed to uphold them.
Berman is correct. We must continue exporting democratic liberal values, values that treat people as ends in themselves and that affirm the dignity of reason in all, values that give people some share in the making of laws that govern their destiny.
A real Moral Imperialism based on indispensable political values found in liberalism is the way to go. Those who don't want the same political luxuries for others that that they enjoy are bigots and mere social ballasts. Many of the backward so called nation/states of the world, politically speaking, exist in a state of savage adolescence. Berman's fine book demonstrates that the best of liberalism is a way of re-socializing those who have never had their moral and political sensibilities forged in its civilizing crucibles.Jason D. Hill

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.

This book is a thoughtful, thorough and insightful study of totalitarian thought. Berman writes convincingly of his opinions and thoughts on totalitarian and how it is related to the Islamist movement that is raging through the Middle East. He writes about how the current Islamist movement came to being and why. He tells of the reasons why bin Laden is fighting the war against us ~~ not because we're greedy corporate Americans but because we are a threat to his and his people's vision of utopia. He also delves into the Israel and Palestine's problems. He also explains the history behind communism, facism, and socialism. Berman also talks about Western Europe and their ideas on democracy as well as United Nation's ineptness in dealing with different problems.

This is perhaps one of the most rewarding reading I've done lately. I don't know much about Islam and what causes Muslims to declare a jihad against Westerners. Then again, I don't know much about the history of the last fifty years or so. And this book has whetted my appetite to know more and how liberalism is related to the current events going on today, even with the Bush's administration. It is also a great way to learn more about the Islamist movement that is going on in the Middle Eastern countries as well as Arabic countries. It is an eye-opener for me and it does help me understand current events better.

This is one book that I will definitely pass onto my friends and family. I think everyone who is curious about world affairs and likes essay-type writing, will enjoy this book. It will provoke thought and conversation among your friends and family. It will help you see the world in a different light, even if you don't agree with the author's perspective. But he makes his arguments in a convincing way ~~ and the book is easy to read, very well-written and with thoughtful, concise reasoning behind every word.

7-15-04

Paul Berman is what one could fairly describe as a thinking man's pundit, unafraid of alienating either his more sympathetic supporters from the left, and sometimes drawing praise and agreement from the conservative right. The author of many provocative and thought-inspiring essays, Berman found himself surprised and befuddled by the turn of events on 911, which he watched with dismay from his perch on his apartment house roof in Manhattan. Quite quickly he became much more aware of the radical threats pulsing through the city as, for example, a Yemeni cleric was indicted and subsequently convicted of laundering and forwarded tens of millions of dollars to Al Quaida.

In "Terror And Liberalism " he turns his penetrating wit and intellectual powers to a consideration of the nature of, and threats emanating from, what he has come to describe as "Islamic Totalitarianism" Far from flying with the angels of either the right or the left, Berman indicates understanding the rise of such radical organizations requires abandoning these kinds of simple dichotomous paradigms, and in examining the ways in which the terrorism of the 21st century finds its roots in the violent and reactionary movements of the 20th century. Berman shows how the recent episodes of terror committed by such Islamic groups finds its origins in a continuation of the historical struggle between reactionary fascist and totalitarian groups such as the Nazis on the one hand, and the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban communists on the other against the entrenched liberal cultures of the Western democracies.

Seen in this perspective, self-described Islamic fundamentalist groups like Al Quaida and Hamas are less the exclusively pure religious rejections of the Christian West as they are a violent and ultimately secular ideology camping under the tent of a highly bastardized Islamic fundamentalism that finds its rage and purpose by rebelling against what they see as the "hideous schizophrenia" of modern society. This is all documented in a relatively obscure set of voluminous texts written by Egyptian scholar and intellectual Sayyid Qutb and entitled "In The Shade of the Qur'an", which Berman believes provides the theoretical underpinnings of the Islamic totalitarian movements now assailing the West.

So, while Berman admits the philosophical musings of Outb to be sophisticated, intellectually profound, heartfelt and deeply nuanced, he also finds reason to criticize the more radical interpretation which spokespersons for radical Muslim fundamentalism such as Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden approach the kind of crypto-fascist critique of post-modern Western societies, and indeed now constitute the same sort of grave threat to the continuation of our culture. Arguing quite persuasively, Berman posits that the radical forms of Islamism and Baathism (which is the variation of Islamic thought that ideologically propels Saddam Hussein's former ruling party) stem from the same kind of reactionary counter-revolution against the rising forces of liberalism that a century ago created the conditions for the First World War. Therefore, he argues, we must marshal our resources to combat this ideological challenge that such violent ideologies arising within the Muslim world today.

This makes great sense in trying to piece together a workable strategy for working through the issues and concerns being raised by our interventions in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and will give rise, Berman believes, to a more sophisticated and comprehensive world view than those offered in the overly simplistic liberal or conservative frames of reference in current vogue. He suggest perhaps amore enlightened liberalism will recognize, just as FDR did at the outset of World War Two, that there is great merit in rising to the international challenge and combating the tyrannical forces of radical Islamic totalitarianism. This is a terrific book, and one that will stretch and prod those old brain cells into active work. Enjoy!

Paul Berman was a major figure in the "New Left" of the 1960s. Like a few other prominent leftists, he sees Islamic terrorism not as a blow against injustice or inequality but as an attack on the liberal order. In this book he delves deeply into the life and thought of the Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb, whose writings have provided the intellectual foundation for a number of the radical Islamic movements. Berman advocates aggressive action by America and the Western nations, not based on the political "realism" favored by many on the right, but to foster a more liberal order in the Middle East. He criticizes the naivete of the left, which insists on seeing the conflict between radical Islam and the West through the prism of strong vs. weak, or oppressors vs. the oppressed

I am on the Left of the American political spectrum, an unrepentant liberal. I am also an admirer of Howard Dean, both before and after the Democratic primary, but I agree with Paul Berman that President Bush is absolutely correct about the seriousness of the terrorist threat -- and he is right to identify a key source of that threat with all fundamentalisms and fanaticisms, political or religious, wherever they arise. In recent years, the threat has come primarily from Islamic fundamentalists, but we have our share of fanatics as well.

Neither one of us is a great admirer of all aspects of the President's policies, yet we cannot claim that Mr. Bush is wrong about EVERYTHING, only some things. He may be wrong about tax cuts, perhaps, but he sure is right about the gravity of the terrorist menace.

This is a well-written and shrewd assessment of Mr. Bush and the problem of terrorism -- which should be required reading for liberals, who are too often blinded by considerations of "political correctness" and fail to admit what is staring them in the face: Terrorism in our world is evil and it is coming, primarily, from a small number of people in the world who are unwilling to compromise.

Terrorism will require drastic action from the free world to crush it; and it will not be a pleasant or fun experience waging this war upon international terror that is hurting everyone, including many good and decent Muslims who also wish for peace for their children -- a war in which intelligence services will play a crucial role and in which, right-wingers should note this, civil liberties must be protected.

Berman's recent book about the intellectual legacy of the sixties and even his introduction years ago to the collection of materials on the debate over political correctness with respect to the academic curriculum, "Debating P.C.," are excellent too.

My advice: Read everything by this guy.