A SHREWD FRENCH PHILOSOPHER (via Arts and Letters Daily):

Bin Laden, Dostoevsky and the reality principle (Interview with André Glucksman)

Europe is trapped by complacency and an all too human desire for oblivious contentment, says a leading French philosopher. This helps ensure the success of the nihilistic terror and extremist ideology exemplified by al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Nobody wants war – but genocide is worse than war....

Glucksman: [W]hat do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common?... [T]he common characteristic is nihilism.

The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them....

Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice....

At the opening of the University of Salamanca, one General Millán Astray shouted Viva la Morte. Miguel de Unamuno, who was in charge of the occasion, was a conservative, the protégé of Franco’s wife, a philosopher of the right. He reproved the general for this impermissible, unacceptable statement, and added: "You, my general who has lost an eye in the war, are a handicapped man not because you have lost an eye but because you have shouted ‘Long live death’".

It is precisely this slogan which you hear from Islamic suicide bombers....

Interviewer: The current threat from militant Islamism is not coming from Europe, and Europeans seem to have a problem in perceiving this threat as a threat to their own interests. Is that why it seems so difficult to summon up the necessary resistance?

Glucksman: It is not only Islamism: it is nihilism, in its practical manifestation of laying waste to the civilian population. The same approach was to be found in the case of the Russian army when it flattened Grozny, a city of 400,000, and the first capital to be razed to the ground since Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw in 1944. This destructive impulse is not in the nature of Islam; this impulse is integral to the nature of civilisation and it can destroy any civilisation.

Interviewer: But these events are not perceived as being played out in central Europe, but in far away and strange locations.

Glucksman: It has happened in central Europe too – with Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing, which is also a nihilist activity.

Interviewer: Nevertheless, for a long time now, Germany and France have shied away from taking on any responsibility in such situations.... Everything which falls outside these boundaries, like Chechnya or the Middle East, really shouldn’t bother us.

Glucksman: Yes, exactly: but this is wrong. This is exactly the complacency, the crime of complacency, which once made Hitler possible. This complacency has cost us about 50 million lives. It also worked well for Stalin. ‘Better red than dead!’ Pacifism is a kind of complacency. And this complacency continues with Milosevic, with terrorism, with Saddam Hussein; people just want to sleep.

Posterity will see the welfare state as a sort of general anesthetic: it lulls people to sleep. The exertions and exactions of life are banished, and one can rest comfortably in the cradle of the state.
Posted by Paul Jaminet at April 7, 2003 10:53 AM