Killing in the Name

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., on March 19, 2010.

One of the greatest ironies of the past decade's debates over political Islam has been that, on the whole, the most passionate and emphatic rejections of radical Islamism in this country came from President Bush and his supporters—that is, conservatives. This is peculiar because the various forms of radical Islamism represent the third major form of totalitarian ideology and politics in modern world history. While it seeks to benefit from the pathos of Third Worldist rhetoric, its ideological themes have more in common with fascism and Nazism than with Marxism-Leninism. One would think that here in Washington, its most natural and passionate opponents would be less the heirs of Ronald Reagan than of Franklin Roosevelt. Now, over a year into the Obama administration, I hope we are at a moment when this irony will be modified, and the center-left will raise a clear and strong voice in the war of ideas with radical Islamism.

Twenty-four years ago, I published a book about some aspects of German ideologies that contributed to Nazi thought. It was titled Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. The term “reactionary modernism” referred to Nazism’s simultaneous rejection of liberal political and cultural modernity combined with enthusiasm for modern technology. It described the way that the Nazis embraced the machine but remained true to what they regarded as the German soul. They, along with the Italian Fascists and the Japanese dictatorship, all demonstrated that the embrace of modern technology did not necessarily mean the embrace of ideas about democracy, individual rights, and equality of all persons. At that time, Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the most significant political and cultural reactionaries of the twentieth century, was using tape cassettes to call for the abandonment of Iranian modernity in favor of a society built on premodern religious notions. The term "reactionary modernism" was equally applicable on September 11, when Al Qaeda-trained engineering students flew jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, Khomeini's successors reject the modern world even as they race toward the possession of nuclear weapons. Yet American liberals have been slow to place the reactionary nature of these extremists at the center of their analysis about the proper response.

Though political Islamism is not identical to Nazism and Fascism, the lineages and continuities are significant. One of the most obvious continuities is hatred of the Jews and the anti-Zionism it inspires. Islamists of various ideological camps all share in the conspiracy theorizing that was at the heart of Nazi ideology. In their German-language propaganda aimed at a domestic audience, the Nazi propagandists claimed that “international Jewry” started World War II in order to exterminate the German people. They publicly assured the German audience that they would exterminate the Jews before the Jews had a chance to exterminate them. At the same time, in their Arabic-language propaganda for North Africa and the Middle East, Nazi propagandists claimed that the Jews had driven the United States into World War II in order to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, dominate the entire Middle East and destroy the religion of Islam. The echoes of these arguments come across loud and clear in the Hamas covenant of 1988, bin Laden’s declaration of war against the “Zionist-Crusader alliance,” Ahmadinejad’s calls to wipe out the state of Israel, and TV programs in Arab countries that reproduce new versions of anti-Semitic blood libels.

A second set of continuities lies in the rejection of cultural modernity, especially the extension of rights to women and homosexuals. Fascism and Nazism in Europe were, in part, a reaction against efforts to bring about both. Like the paramilitary organizations of the Fascist and Nazi street fighters, the Islamic terrorist organizations are also militant “brotherhoods” that celebrate an absurd but familiar cult of hyper-masculinity. Where fascism and Nazism sought to restore the position of women to the subordinate status they held before World War I, the Islamists view the proper position of women as something out of pre-modern times. Here again, the fundamentally reactionary nature of political Islamism is evident. It is fitting that some of the bravest and most eloquent Muslim critics of the Islamists are women.

Yet neither the left nor the right has been interested in making the deeply conservative nature of Islamist ideology and politics the leitmotif of American foreign policy. Part of Khomeini’s political genius was to combine left-wing rhetoric about anti-imperialism with the reactionary core of his vision of an Islamicized Iran. Yet while the Communists fostered a cult of martyrdom, they did not make a virtue of their own death. They wanted to make a global revolution on this earth, not to depart from it for a religiously inspired heavenly paradise. Because the Communists possessed this modicum of rationality, it was possible for the West to arrive at a nuclear stalemate and even nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence rested on the assumption that both players preferred survival to self-destruction.

The now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of episodes of suicide bombings aimed at murdering civilians are the most telling evidence that radical Islamists have a very different view of their own death than did the Communists. In view of the religious fanaticism that inspires these acts, the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of radical Islamists, including in the hands of the current Iranian regime, would not only represent an existential threat to the state of Israel. It would cross a Rubicon on world history. This is so both because Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe Israel off the map and because a nuclear Iran would be a nuclear weapons state whose religious visions of the next world could make it less likely than other atomic nations to be deterred by the prospect of nuclear retaliation, however massive. The idea that the prospect of massive retaliation will enforce rationality on this Iranian regime as it did with the Communists underestimates the depth of their ideological convictions. Nuclear weapons in the Islamic state of Pakistan are compatible with deterrence with India. Pakistan has never declared that its aim is to destroy or wipe out India. Yet the rhetoric from Tehran both about Israel and about the prospects of coming religious apocalypse is something altogether different.

Perhaps one reason for our reticence about discussing, specifically, the connection between Islamism and terrorism is the fear that doing so will offend Muslims who reject terrorism. In recent years, a reluctance to offend, and a desire to avoid the appearance of religious intolerance, sometimes called “Islamophobia,” has led the United States to substitute famous euphemisms for accurate speech about the identity of those who are waging war against us. The terms “war on terror” or, more recently, the offensive against “violent extremism” have been used in place of accurate terms that describe the enemy we are facing. The concern not to offend has made it impossible to speak truthfully about who our enemies are and what motivates them. Yet we must find a way to draw attention to the impact of religion without offending those millions of Muslims who reject the Islamists.