Modern Terrorism and its Origins

Here I go, flying in the face of this week’s reading assignment… The author seemed dismissive of a western concern over the spread of communism, framing it as a fear of democracies being undermined. Not only does he decline to provide examples though one assumes he refers to the United States and perhaps West Germany and other European states on the edge of the Iron Curtain, he makes the statement in the face of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam in which neither of those states was recognizably democratic. To his credit he does recognize that communism proved far more effective in killing vast swathes of its own populations than overthrowing Cold War democracies. Insofar as McCarthy and Palmer have been remembered as extremist in their “Red Scare” tactics, post-USSR information form Soviet archives has rather moderated the accuracy of that charge. Interesting he also didn’t note that Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, was an avowed anarchist and much approved by Emma Goldman.

“In memory of the countless, men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.” – dedication of Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism

From the French Revolution to the virulent strains of Marxism and Anarchism to the current Islamist terrorism there is a unifying trait which both inspires the movement and permits it to excuse even the most violent excesses. The trait is belief that a discoverable set of laws similar to those of Newtonian Mechanics govern society and provide both a key to understanding and directing the development of society. Marx believed capitalism was merely a necessary stage in the inevitable transition to an egalitarian, socialist paradise. French idealists, promising Liberty, Equality and Fraternity drank heavily from the same utopian well of idealism, leading John Adams, a skeptic along with Burke regarding the French Revolution, to remark

" I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine."

And despite Salam Al-Marayati, notable for his 1996 comparison of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech with the ideal of Jihad in Islam, protesting to the contrary, it is the same holistic, over-arching fantasy ideology deriving from fundamentalist Islam which drives those like Bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb.

Ah you say, “But aren’t “Democracy” (as distinct from the radical “storm the Bastille” egalitarianism of the French Revolution) or “Capitalism” prone to the same faults?” To which I reply, “No, by their nature, they are inclined to what Popper describes as piecemeal engineering, meaning they are not driven by a central plan or absolute ideal deliberately guiding all aspects of social development, whereas the other ideologies I cited are indeed consumed with the idea of thoroughly and holistically re-engineering of society, be it to a restored Caliphate or Worker’s Paradise.” F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper both derided as Scientism (defined as a “slavish imitation of the language and method of science”) the attempts from the Enlightenment to the modern day, particularly of Marxism, to apply the methods of a “natural” science like physics to a “social” science like history. The radical Islamist ideology needs little more explanation than the rambling missives of Al Qaeda lamenting the lost glories of an Islamic empire which vanished inarguably in 1919 with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.