A MERE 60-odd years on, World War II still haunts us like a livid vision out of a waking dream. Three generations after fascism annihilated itself in the manner of a suicide-bomber, Leftists and conservatives still wrestle for the laurel of true anti-fascist. Even today our bright-eyed Judeophobes know that they must transfer the shame of the Holocaust elsewhere before they can set about the unsubtle business of depicting Israelis as the modern Nazis. And our open-hearted efforts to "understand" our own era's grand-operatic reactionaries - flint-eyed jihadis such as Indonesia's Noordin Mohammed Top, or the cynical corridor-lurkers of our own suburban mosques - are dogged by the bad conscience of their distant ancestors, the Brownshirts and Blackshirts of the West's own secular-jihadist moment.
As it happens, our urge to understand this alienated "other", the better to stop them hating us, is also in large measure an accidental legacy of the Good War. If today we're all amateur shrinks at heart - with fragile selves that break asunder like porcelain vases in our dreams, and then defy our efforts to glue them back together - that has less to do with our steady diet of Hollywood talky-talk than it does with the mundane needs of the US military during World War II.
Needing to patch together its war-ravaged soldiers before their return to civvy street, the US army of the 1940s created a new kind of mass-production line, this time in group therapy. In the process they funded a vast job-creation program for shrinks, which in turn fuelled the postwar boom in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and general psychobabble. (The process is recorded in a marvellous wartime documentary by John Huston, filmed in New York's Mason Hospital.)
This mass-industrialisation of psychiatry produced a range of civilian spin-offs. Similar methods were used to analyse those hardcore or wise-guy prison inmates who'd been previously described as possessing psychopathic personalities. One of these efforts was recorded in 1944 by young prison psychiatrist Robert Mitchell Lindner in a pop-clinical study titled Rebel Without a Cause. Using an intensive course of hypnotherapy, Lindner claimed to have delved into the inner motivations of Harold, a 21-year-old recalcitrant violent offender with a criminal history dating back to his childhood. As Time magazine summarised Lindner's research: "Harold was 'a rebel without a cause, a revolutionary without a program', a grown-up infant with no self-restraint and a craving for instant satisfactions", and hence, supposedly, a classic product of the displaced, topsy-turvy family world of his day.
As it turned out, Lindner's case-study came to some paint-by-numbers Freudian conclusions. (There are uncontrollably blinking eyelashes, infant images of Harold's father as a wolf devouring Harold's mother, and all the rest.) But his central message stuck: alienated young rebels are like that because at some level we as a society have made them so. In the end their Oedipal violence and hostility towards us is retribution over the bad role models we have set them, both as individual parents and as a society.
In turn, the message of Rebel Without a Cause was borrowed by the writers of the endlessly invoked but little-watched 1955 Hollywood film starring James Dean. In the movie a young man, deprived of effective authoritative parenting, drifts into petty violence and is forced to improvise his own moral life scheme, along the way accidentally precipitating the death of a gang-leader. The story took some major detours on its way to Hollywood, of course. Dean's character isn't the brutalised son of a violent and illiterate itinerant labourer, but rather the confused middle-class offspring of indulgent but distant parents. And the rage Dean exhibits against his father is not the rebellion of the vassal against the tyrant, but rather the contempt of the adolescent would-be he-man against the office-penned, hen-pecked husband: "what do you do when you want to be a man?" The whole familiar self-indulgent repertoire of alienated middle-class youth, in short.
When it comes to jihadism, then, it often seems as if we're still channelling Dean's parents in Rebel Without a Cause. We've tried our best, goodness knows. But we know, deep down, that the whole terrorist mess must somehow be our fault, and we'd give anything to make the national family feel happy and complete again. This way of thinking about the matter gratifies us emotionally. After all, as any pop-psychologist knows, to get inside the mind of those who profess to hate us is to demonstrate superior powers of empathy, even some tincture of that moral saintliness demanded of the thoroughly modern parent.
By the same token, those who seek to empathise with Palestinian suicide-bombers (or PSBs, as it's freakily fashionable to describe them in certain corridors of academe), demonstrate, through their suppression of our mere unreflective instincts against self-immolation, their superior capacity for emotional self-discipline, another modern parenting virtue. And so when someone asks us, naively, how we're willing to sympathise with folks like this, we reply (inwardly and to ourselves) that so much rage and violence must truly be the sign of a very poor upbringing in the national family.
Yet it's not so clear how these efforts at empathy are supposed to work, in a practical sense. In the 70s, of course, western Europe and North America suffered their own domestic irruptions of nihilistic youthful extremism. But it's doubtful that well-intentioned outsiders' efforts to reason with the Oedipal Baader-Meinhoff kiddies, or the alienated Red Brigades youngsters, or the rebellious young Weathermen, ever did much good. At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games we know sympathetic West German officials attempted to reason with members of the Black September movement, much in the manner of an indulgent parent. It wasn't much of a success.
If you want to understand the perils of positive parenting towards jihadis, why not observe the travails of those many Muslim community activists who are presently fighting the good fight against jihadism. Generally they discover pretty fast that to be seen as a "moderate", or to be seeking conciliation between extremists and "moderates", is the very kiss of death, since in point of fact extremists despise moderates just as much as alienated teenagers despise do-gooders. In reality, their best bet is to keep their heads down, and struggle for supremacy in the manner of any orthodox political movement.
In the end it will be for those brave souls in the Muslim community to win or lose the fight for the hearts of their own young. For the nation as a whole, I doubt there's any remedy other than the enforcement of those crude but necessary laws that protect citizens from violence by other citizens.
