Their pent up anger discharged
itself in a war of unprecedented destruction against all those others who
they blamed for their own defeats. First and foremost, it was a matter of
destroying the Jews and the opponents of 1919. But they certainly had no
intention of sparing the Germans. Their actual objective was not victory,
but elimination, downfall, collective suicide, the terrible end. There is
no other explanation for the way the Germans fought on in World War II
right to the last pile of rubble in Berlin. Hitler himself confirmed this
diagnosis when he said that the German people did not deserve to survive.
At a huge cost, he achieved what he wanted – he lost. But the Jews, the
Poles, the Russians, the Germans and all the others are still around.
The radical loser has not disappeared either. He is still among us. This
is inevitable. On every continent, there are leaders who welcome him with
open arms. Except that today, they are very rarely associated with the
state. In this field too, privatization has made considerable advances.
Although it is governments which have at their disposal the greatest
potential for extermination, state crime in the conventional sense is now
on the defensive worldwide.
To date, few loser-collectives have operated on a global scale, even if
they were able to count on international flows of cash and weapon
supplies. But the world is teeming with local groupings whose leaders are
referred to as warlords or guerrilla chiefs. Their self-appointed militias
and paramilitary gangs like to adorn themselves with the title of a
liberation organization or other revolutionary attributes. In some media,
they are referred to as rebels, a euphemism that probably flatters them.
Shining Path, MLC, RCD, SPLA, ELA, LTTE, LRA, FNL, IRA, LIT, KACH, DHKP,
FSLN, UVF, JKLF, ELN, FARC, PLF, GSPC, MILF, NPA, PKK, MODEL, JI, NPA, AUC,
CPNML, UDA, GIA, RUF, LVF, SNM, ETA, NLA, PFLP, SPM, LET, ONLF, SSDF, PIJ,
JEM, SLA, ANO, SPLMA, RAF, AUM, PGA, ADF, IBDA, ULFA, PLFM, ULFBV, ISYF,
LURD, KLO, UPDS, NLFT, ATTF ...
"Left" or "Right", it makes no odds. Each of these
armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos,
self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of
responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of "the
masses". Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of
their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either;
any concern for survival is foreign to them. And this applies equally to
their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement
whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who
are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing,
shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in
the area with a bed or a scalpel – for they have trouble distinguishing
between mutilation and self-mutilation.
But none of these mobs has been able to keep up with globalization. In
cases where their ideological exploitation focuses on national and ethnic
conflicts, this is only natural. But since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, groups seeing themselves in the tradition of internationalism have
forfeited the support of a superpower in terms of propaganda and
logistics. Under the pressure of global capital, they have abandoned their
fantasies of world domination and now claim only to represent the
interests of their local clientele.
Since this cut-off point, only one violent movement has been capable of
acting globally – Islamism. It is undertaking a large-scale attempt to
siphon off the religious energy of a world faith with around 1.3 billion
believers that is not only still very much alive, but which even in purely
demographic terms is also expanding on every continent. Although this Umma
is subject to much inner fragmentation and badly affected by national and
social conflicts, the ideology of Islamism is an ideal means of mobilizing
radical losers because of the way it amalgamates religious, political and
social motives.
A further promise of success lies in the movement's organizational model.
Turning its back on the strict centralism of earlier groupings, it has
replaced the omniscient and omnipotent central committee with a flexible
network: a highly original innovation that is entirely of its time.
Besides this, however, the Islamists are perfectly happy to plunder the
arsenal of their predecessors. It is often overlooked that modern
terrorism is a European invention of the nineteenth century. Its most
important ancestors came from Czarist Russia, but it can also look back on
a long history in Western Europe. In recent times, the left-wing terrorism
of the 1970s has proved a source of inspiration, with Islamists borrowing
many of its symbols and techniques. The style of their announcements, the
use of video recordings, the emblematic significance of the Kalashnikov,
even the gestures, body language and dress, all this shows how much they
have learned from these western role models.
There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with
written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran,
references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the
international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma,
and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it
takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of
Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical
forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many
of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws,
victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and
then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.
The movement's list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America,
the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed
by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the
planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the
Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis,
Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.
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