" The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism
Why everything is at stake.
by Charles Krauthammer
EUROPE'S GREAT RELIGIOUS WARS ended in 1648. Three and a half centuries
is a
long time, too long for us in the West to truly believe that people
still
slaughter others to vindicate the faith.
Thus in the face of radical Islamic terrorism that murders 6,000
innocents in
a day, we find it almost impossible to accept at face value the reason
offered by the murderers. Yet Osama bin Laden could not be clearer.
Jihad has
been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence thwart the
triumph of Islam, and whose success and example--indeed, whose very
existence--are an affront to the true faith. As a leader of Hamas
declared at
a rally three days after the World Trade Center attack, "the only
solution is
for Bush to convert to Islam."
To Americans, who are taught religious tolerance from the cradle, who
visit
each other's churches for interdenominational succor and solidarity,
this
seems simply bizarre. On September 25, bin Laden issues a warning to his
people that Bush is coming "under the banner of the cross." Two weeks
later,
in his pre-taped post-attack video, he scorns Bush as "head of the
infidels."
Can he be serious? This idea is so alien that our learned commentators,
Western and secular, have gone rummaging through their ideological
attics to
find more familiar terms to explain why we were so savagely attacked:
poverty
and destitution in the Islamic world; grievances against the West,
America,
Israel; the "wretched of the earth"--Frantz Fanon's 1960s apotheosis of
anti-colonialism--rising against their oppressors.
Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into
bin
Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is
nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are
animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the
Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive
Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried
artillery.
The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to
resort
to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in
atonement--for having taken so long to finish the job.
Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of
poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The
statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of
civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.
The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul,
who
has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and
"Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before
the
World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic
forces
that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion
has
been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to
destroy
themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure.
They
are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of
fury
and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or
political
solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds
that
your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be
extirpated."
This insight offers a needed window on the new enemy. It turns out that
the
enemy does have recognizable analogues in the Western experience. He is,
as
President Bush averred in his address to the nation, heir to the
malignant
ideologies of the 20th century. In its nihilism, its will to power, its
celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity
that
comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir,
above
all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not
only
to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant
to
obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts
represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be
destroyed.
This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike
any
since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels
would
have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of
blood
and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various
poses of
victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the
infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the
USS
Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood,
with
blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the
love
of this world is wrong. You should love the other world...die in the
right
cause and go to the other world." In his October 9 taped message, al
Qaeda
spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith gloried in the "thousands of young people
who
look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living."
Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between
those who
love life and those who love death both for themselves and their
enemies.
Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode
at the
Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from
the
Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer
of
worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will
soon
be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time
in
history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is
why the
war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our
lives, but in the life of civilization itself. "
-Gel
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