30
PARTISAN REVIEW
wake of World War I, the Islamic fundamentalist vision of the position
of women regresses well beyond that point to that of Europe's pre–
modernity. While Communism's economistic roots precluded an ade–
quate understanding of the position of women in society, its declared
support for women's equality stood in complete contrast to that of rad–
ical Islam. Indeed, from the Communist point of view, radical Islam
must be regarded as counter-revolutionary and reactionary in the
extreme .
Third, and most importantly, Islamic fundamentalism is closer to the
fascist and Nazi traditions in its celebration of values which depart from
rationality. Marxism-Leninism was a doctrine whose erroneous interpre–
tation of history, politics, and economics nevertheless contained elements
of rationality and possibilities of empirical assessment. Moreover, while
Communists certainly fostered a cult of martyrdom, they did not make
death a virtue. The elements of rationality within Marxism-Leninism
combined with the self-interest associated with possession of the huge
state of the Soviet Union. As a result the Soviet leaders believed that they
had more to lose than to gain by unleashing a nuclear war with the
United States. Because the Communists possessed this minimum of
rationality, it was possible for the West to arrive at a nuclear stalemate
with Moscow for half a century. Nuclear deterrence rested on the
assumption that both players preferred survival to self-destruction.
Given Hitler's fundamental contempt for rationality and his celebration
of the will, combined with the paranoid structure of his interpretation
of international politics, the chances that such a peaceful nuclear stale–
mate could have been sustained with Nazi Germany for half a century
would have been far less likely. A Nazi leadership would have been far
more likely to go over the brink to war, even if that meant the nuclear
devastation of Nazi Germany.
However enamored Hitler and the Nazis were of an apocalyptic end,
Nazism as an ideology celebrated the victory of the "master race," not
its death and revival in heavenly paradise.
It
was a secular totalitarian–
ism. On the other hand, terrorists inspired by Islamic fundamentalism
have an attitude towards their own death which is quite different pre–
cisely because it is inspired by a religious radicalism that envisages a
heavenly paradise in the next world. Radical Islam convinces its adher–
ents that a martyr's death is a prelude to this paradise. Their other–
worldly visions clearly inspired the murderers of September
I
nh just as
they have inspired the one hundred suicide bombers who have attacked
Israel since
1993,
thirty in the past year. They are visions with a pro–
found consequence for the future of world peace and security. Should a
