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PARTISAN REVIEW
this indeed as a "clash of civilizations," denounce Islam in general,
launch indiscriminate attacks on Arab populations, and thus generate a
massive Islamic uprising in nuclear-armed Pakistan and in oil-rich Saudi
Arabia. Then, with oil, nuclear arms, and ideological fanaticism, Islamic
radicalism could finally emerge as a major player on the world stage to
challenge and then attack the "Great Satan," the United States. Just as
World War I ushered Europe's decline and the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan preceded the implosion of the Soviet Union, so a massive and
monstrous attack on New York's symbol of world capitalism, democracy,
female emancipation, homosexuality, and the Jews would hopefully lead
the enraged United States
to
strike out wildly and indiscriminately.
In
the
short run, this expectation has met with disappointment, though clearly
the prospect of instability in the region is a long-term concern. Yet along
with this crazed "rationale" we should keep in mind that, as Dostoevsky
understood so well in
The Demons,
at the core of every terrorist move–
ment lurks the nihilistic pleasure in destruction. Bin Laden's celebratory
statements following the attacks of September
I
rth stand in a long line
of terrorist exultation over death and destruction.
Such arguments played a key role in the development of fascism and
Nazism. Both Mussolini and Hitler were able to combine respectability
with brute force on the path to power. The intellectual and cultural
atmosphere in which fascism and Nazism emerged in the first third of
the century, one shaped by Georges Sorel's
Reflections on Violence,
Friedrich Nietzsche's denunciation of a complacent European middle–
class and its rationality, Ernst junger's ecstatic celebrations of the mas–
culine male community of the trenches in World War I, as well as the
violence of the Great War itself created a critical mass of angry, middle–
and lower-middle-class men for whom the distinction between war and
politics blurred to insignificance. Like many of the terrorists in al
Qaeda, un- and underemployed "intellectuals" and youth of the profes–
sional middle-classes in post-World War I Europe were attracted to fas–
cism and Nazism, because a violent assault on liberal democracy and
bourgeois society by a new movement of hard, disciplined heroes
would, in theory, replace the decadent present with a vital future.
The Holocaust stands as the ultimate act of terror of the twentieth
century, the pristine case of the murder of innocents on a vast scale.
In
the fevered Nazi imagination, the Jews of Europe and the world were
not innocents at all. Instead, they were members of a giant, global con–
spiracy which was always referred to as a singular noun: "international
Jewry." This vast, unseen yet all-powerful group was, in their view,
responsible for all of Germany's misfortunes: the loss of World War I
