The radical loser
by Hans Magnus
Enzensberger
Hans Magnus
Enzensberger looks at the kind of ideological trigger required to ignite
the radical loser - whether amok killer, murderer or terrorist - and
make him explode
I. The isolated individual
It is difficult to talk about
the loser, and it is stupid not to. Stupid because there can be no
definitive winner and because each of us, from the megalomaniac
Bonaparte to the last beggar on the streets of Calcutta, will meet the
same fate. Difficult because to content oneself with this metaphysical
banality is to take an easy way out, as it ignores the truly explosive
dimension of the problem, the political dimension.
Instead of
actually looking into the thousand faces of the loser, sociologists keep
to their statistics: median value, standard deviation, normal
distribution. It rarely occurs to them that they themselves might be
among the losers. Their definitions are like scratching a wound: as
Samuel Butler
says, the itching and the pain only get worse. One thing is certain:
the way humanity has organized itself – "capitalism", "competition",
"empire", "globalization" – not only does the number of losers increase
every day, but as in any large group, fragmentation soon sets in. In a
chaotic, unfathomable process, the cohorts of the inferior, the
defeated, the victims separate out. The loser may accept his fate and
resign himself; the victim may demand satisfaction; the defeated may
begin preparing for the next round. But the radical loser isolates
himself, becomes invisible, guards his delusion, saves his energy, and
waits for his hour to come.
Those who content themselves with the
objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the
devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the
true drama of the radical loser. What others think of him – be they
rivals or brothers, experts or neighbours, schoolmates, bosses, friends
or foes – is not sufficient motivation. The radical loser himself must
take an active part, he must tell himself: I am a loser and nothing but a
loser. As long as he is not convinced of this, life may treat him
badly, he may be poor and powerless, he may know misery and defeat, but
he will not become a radical loser until he adopts the judgement of
those who consider themselves winners as his own.
Since before
the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists
and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern.
Neither poverty nor the experience of political repression alone seem to
provide a satisfactory explanation for why young people actively seek
out death in a grand bloody finale and aim to take as many people with
them as possible. Is there a phenotype that displays the same
characteristics down the ages and across all classes and cultures?
No
one pays any mind to the radical loser if they do not have to. And the
feeling is mutual. As long as he is alone – and he is very much alone –
he does not strike out. He appears unobtrusive, silent: a sleeper. But
when he does draw attention to himself and enter the statistics, then he
sparks consternation bordering on shock. For his very existence reminds
the others of how little it would take to put them in his position. One
might even assist the loser if only he would just give up. But he has
no intention of doing so, and it does not look as if he would be partial
to any assistance.
Many professions take the loser as the object
of their studies and as the basis for their existence. Social
psychologists, social workers, social policy experts, criminologists,
therapists and others who do not count themselves among the losers would
be out of work without him. But with the best will in the world, the
client remains obscure to them: their empathy knows clearly-defined
professional bounds. One thing they do know is that the radical loser is
hard to get through to and, ultimately, unpredictable. Identifying the
one person among the hundreds passing through their offices and
surgeries who is prepared to go all the way is more than they are
capable of. Maybe they sense that this is not just a social issue that
can be repaired by bureaucratic means. For the loser keeps his ideas to
himself. That is the trouble. He keeps quiet and waits. He lets nothing
show, which is precisely why he is feared. In historical terms, this
fear is very old, but today it is more justified than ever. Anyone with
the smallest scrap of power within society will at times feel something
of the huge destructive energy that lies within the radical loser and
which no intervention can neutralize, however well-meaning or serious it
might be.
He can explode at any moment. This is the only
solution to his problem that he can imagine: a worsening of the evil
conditions under which he suffers. The newspapers run stories on him
every week: the father of two who killed his wife, his small children
and finally himself. Unthinkable! A headline in the local section: A
Family Tragedy. Or the man who suddenly barricades himself in his
apartment, taking the landlord, who wanted money from him, as his
hostage. When the police finally gets to the scene, he starts shooting.
He is then said to have "run amok", a word borrowed from the Malayan. He
kills an officer before collapsing in the shower of bullets. What
triggered this explosion remains unclear. His wife's nagging perhaps,
noisy neighbours, an argument at the pub, or the bank cancelling his
loan. A disparaging remark from a superior is enough to make the man
climb a tower and start firing at anything that moves outside the
supermarket, not in spite of but precisely because of the fact that this
massacre will accelerate his own end. Where on earth did he get that
machine pistol from?
At last, this radical loser – he may be
just fifteen and having a hard time with his spots – at last, he is
master over life and death. Then, in the newsreader's words, he "dies at
his own hands" and the investigators get down to work. They find a few
videos, a few confused journal entries. The parents, neighbours,
teachers noticed nothing unusual. A few bad grades, for sure, a certain
reticence – the boy didn't talk much. But that is no reason to shoot
dead a dozen of his schoolmates. The experts deliver their verdicts.
Cultural critics bring forth their arguments. Inevitably, they speak of a
"debate on values". The search for reasons comes to nothing.
Politicians express their dismay. The conclusion is reached that it was
an isolated case.
This is correct, since the culprits are always
isolated individuals who have found no access to a collective. And it is
incorrect, since isolated cases of this kind are becoming more and more
frequent. This increase leads one to conclude that there are more and
more radical losers. This is due to the so-called "state of things."
This might refer equally to the world market or to an insurance company
that refuses to pay.
But anyone wishing to understand the radical
loser would be well advised to go a little further back. Progress has
not put an end to human suffering, but it has changed it in no small
way. Over the past two centuries, the more successful societies have
fought for and established new rights, new expectations and new demands.
They have done away with the notion of an inevitable fate. They have
put concepts like human dignity and human rights on the agenda. The have
democratized the struggle for recognition and awakened expectations of
equality which they are unable to fulfil. And at the same time, they
have made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the
planet's inhabitants round the clock on every television channel. As a
result, with every stage of progress, people's capacity for
disappointment has increased accordingly.
"Where cultural
progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is
seldom received with enthusiasm," remarks the philosopher Odo Marquard (
book):
"Instead, they are taken for granted and attention focuses on those
ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of
increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality,
the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely
because of this decrease in numbers."
This is an understatement.
For what we are dealing with here is not annoyance, but murderous rage.
What the loser is obsessed with is a comparison that never works in his
favour. Since the desire for recognition knows no limits, the pain
threshold inevitably sinks and the affronts become more and more
unbearable. The irritability of the loser increases with every
improvement that he notices in the lot of others. The yardstick is never
those who are worse off than himself. In his eyes, it is not they who
are constantly being insulted, humbled and humiliated, but only ever
him, the radical loser.
The question as to why this should be so
only adds to his torment. Because it certainly cannot be his own fault.
That is inconceivable. Which is why he must find the guilty ones who are
responsible for his plight.
But who are these omnipotent,
nameless aggressors? Thrown back entirely on his own resources, the
answer to this nagging question is beyond the isolated individual. If no
ideological program comes to his aid, then his search is unlikely to
extend to the wider societal context, looking instead to his immediate
surroundings and finding: the unjust superior, the unruly wife, the bad
neighbour, the conniving co-worker, the inflexible public official, the
doctor who refuses to give him a medical certificate.
But might
he not also be facing the machinations of some invisible, anonymous
enemy? Then the loser would not need to rely on his own experience: he
could fall back on things he heard somewhere. Few people have the gift
of inventing a delusion for themselves that fits their needs.
Consequently, the loser will most often stick to material that floats
freely within society. The threatening powers that are out to get him
are not hard to locate. The usual suspects are foreigners, secret
services, Communists, Americans, big corporations, politicians,
unbelievers. And, almost always, the Jews.
For a while, this kind
of delusion may bring the loser relief, but it will not be able to
actually pacify him. In the long term, it is hard to assert oneself in
the face of a hostile world, and he can never entirely rid himself of
the suspicion that there might be a simpler explanation, namely that he
is responsible, that his humiliation is his own fault, that he does not
merit the esteem he craves, and that his own life is worthless.
Psychologists call this affliction "identifying with the aggressor". But
what is that supposed to mean? It certainly has no meaning for the
loser. But if his own life is worthless, why should he care about the
lives of others?
"It's my fault." – "The others are responsible."
These two claims are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they
reinforce each other. The radical loser is unable to think his way out
of this vicious circle, and it constitutes the source of his terrible
power.
The only way out of the dilemma is to fuse destruction and
self-destruction, aggression and auto-aggression. On the one hand, at
the moment of his explosion, the loser for once experiences a feeling of
true power. His act allows him to triumph over others by annihilating
them. And on the other, he does justice to the reverse of this feeling
of power, the suspicion that his own existence might be worthless, by
putting an end to it.
As an additional bonus, from the moment he
resorts to armed force, the outside world, which has never wanted to
know anything about him, takes notice of him. The media make sure he is
granted an enormous degree of publicity – even if it is for just 24
hours. Television spreads propaganda for his act, thus encouraging
potential imitators. For minors, as shown by events in the United States
in particular, the temptation this represents is hard to resist.
The
logic of the radical loser cannot be grasped in terms of common sense.
Common sense cites the instinct of self-preservation as if it were an
unquestionable fact of nature, to be taken for granted. Whereas in fact,
it is a fragile notion, quite young in historical terms.
Self-preservation is referred to by the Greeks, by
Hobbes and
Spinoza, but it is not considered as a purely natural drive. Instead, according to
Immanuel Kant,
"the... first duty of the human individual towards himself in the
quality of his animalness is self-preservation in his animal nature."
Only in the nineteenth century did this duty become an inviolable fact
of natural science. Few deviated from this view.
Nietzsche
objected that physiologists should avoid, "fixing the instinct of
self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being." But
among those who would always rather survive, his words have always
fallen on deaf ears.
The history of ideas aside, humanity never
seems to have expected individual lives to be treated as the supreme
good. All early religions set great store by human sacrifice. Later,
martyrs were highly valued. (According to
Blaise Pascal's
fatal maxim, one should "only believe witnesses who allow themselves to
be killed.") In most cultures, heroes acquired fame and honour for
their fearlessness in the face of death. Until the mass slaughter of
World War I, secondary school pupils had to learn the notorious verse
from
Horace
according to which is sweet and honourable to die for one's fatherland.
Others claimed that shipping was necessary, but not staying alive;
during the Cold War there were those who shouted "Better dead than red!"
And what, under perfectly civilian conditions, are we to think of
tightrope walkers, extreme sports, motor racing, polar exploration and
other forms of potential suicide?
Clearly, the instinct of
self-preservation is not up to much. The remarkable fondness of the
human species for suicide, down the ages and across all cultures, is
proof enough of this. No taboo and no threat of punishment have been
able keep people from taking their own lives. This tendency cannot be
quantified. Any attempt to grasp it by means of statistics will fail due
to the huge number of unrecorded cases.
Sigmund Freud
tried to solve the problem theoretically, on an unstable empirical
basis, by developing his concept of the death drive. Freud's hypothesis
is expressed more clearly in the familiar old wisdom that situations may
arise in which humans prefer a terrible end to (real or imagined)
terror without end.
II. The collective
But what
happens when the radical loser overcomes his isolation, when he becomes
socialized, finds a loser-home, from which he can expect not only
understanding but also recognition, a collective of people like himself
who welcome him, who need him?
Then, the destructive energy that
lies within him is multiplied – his unscrupulousness, his amalgam of
death-wish and megalomania – and he is rescued from his powerlessness by
a fatal sense of omnipotence.
For this to take place, however, a
kind of ideological trigger is required to ignite the radical loser and
make him explode. As history shows us, offers of this kind have never
been in short supply. Their content is of the least importance. They may
be religious or political doctrines, nationalist, communist or racist
dogmas – any form of sectarianism, however bigoted, is capable of
mobilizing the latent energy of the radical loser.
This applies
not only to the rank and file but also to their commanders, whose
attraction is based in turn on their own self-definition as obsessive
losers. It is precisely the leader's deluded traits in which his
followers recognize themselves. He is rightly accused of being cynical
and calculating. It is only natural that he should despise his
followers. He understands them all too well. He knows they are losers
and, finally, he thus considers them worthless. And as
Elias Canetti
put it half a century ago, he therefore takes pleasure in the idea that
if possible, everyone else, including his followers, should meet their
death before he himself is hanged or consumed by fire in his bunker.
At
this point, alongside many other examples from history, one cannot help
being reminded of the National Socialist project in Germany. At the end
of the
Weimar Republic,
large sections of the population saw themselves as losers. The
objective data tell a clear story. But the economic crisis and mass
unemployment would probably not have been enough to bring Hitler to
power. For that to happen, it took propaganda aimed at the subjective
factor: the blow dealt to people's pride by the defeat of 1918 and the
Treaty of Versailles.
Most Germans sought to blame others: the victorious powers, the "global
Capitalist-Bolshevist conspiracy" and above all, of course, the eternal
scapegoat, Judaism. The tormenting feeling of being in the position of
the loser could only be compensated for by pursuing an offensive
strategy, by seeking refuge in megalomania. From the outset, the Nazis
entertained delusions of world domination. As such, their goals were
boundless and non-negotiable. In this sense, they were not only unreal,
but also non-political.
Consulting a map was never going to be
enough to persuade Hitler and his followers that the struggle of one
small European country against the rest of the world was hopeless. On
the contrary. The radical loser has no notion of resolving conflicts, of
compromise that might involve him in a normal network of interests and
defuse his destructive energy. The more hopeless his project, the more
fanatically he clings to it. There are grounds to suspect that Hitler
and his followers were interested not in victory, but in radicalizing
and eternalizing their own status as losers.
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.
III. The spectacle
In one respect,
however, the Islamists are without doubt a twenty-first-century
phenomenon: where their understanding of the media is concerned, they
leave their predecessors far behind. Earlier disciples of terror also
relied on "propaganda through action", but the kind of worldwide
attention achieved today by a nebulous grouping like Al Qaida was not
granted to them. Trained by television, computer technology, the
Internet and advertising, Islamist terror now gets higher viewer ratings
than any football World Cup. The all-important massacres are staged in
Hollywood-inspired style, modelled on disaster films, splatter movies
and science fiction thrillers. This too is evidence of a dependency on
the hated West. In the media output of terrorism, the Society of the
Spectacle as described by the Situationists comes into its own.
More
momentous still, however, is the strategic use of suicide attacks, an
invincible weapon that cannot be seen by surveillance satellites and
which can be deployed practically anywhere. It is also extremely cheap.
In addition to these advantages, this form of terror also exerts an
irresistible attraction on the radical loser. It allows him to combine
destruction and self-destruction at the same time as acting out both his
megalomaniac fantasies and his self-hate. Cowardice is the last thing
he can be accused of. The courage that is his hallmark is the courage of
despair. His triumph consists in the fact that he can be neither fought
nor punished, since he takes care of that himself.
Contrary to
what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist
actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical
error, not a case of "collateral damage". In Algeria alone, Islamist
terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other
sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and
the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too,
the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among
foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only
to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims
around the world.
The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as
the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of
death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In
the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to
blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve
no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the
radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible.
As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only
be because they are the chosen few.
Experts around the world are
not the only ones wondering how the Islamist movement has been able to
recruit so many activists with its promises, far outdoing its secular
rivals. No clear answer is in sight. All that is clear is that there
must be explanations in the history of the Arab civilization that
brought forth the world religion of Islam. This civilization reached its
apogee at the time of the Caliphate. At this time, it was far superior
to Europe in military, economic and cultural terms. The Arab world views
this period with misty-eyed nostalgia; even today, 800 years later, it
plays a central role in the consciousness of the region. In the
intervening period, the power, the prestige, the cultural and economic
weight of the Arab world has been in continual decline. Such an
unparalleled demise is a puzzle and a sore point, generating an acute
sense of loss. The Indian-born Muslim poet
Hussain Hali (1837-1914) expressed this in his epic poem The Ebb and Flow of Islam:
"The historians doing research today
whose scientific methods are magnificent,
who plumb the archives of the world
and explore the surface of the earth –
the Arabs fuelled the fire in their hearts,
their rapid gait was learned from the Arabs."
Looking down from this high ground, Hali describes the decline over time, in several stanzas, the last of which reads:
"We are neither trustworthy government officials
nor proud towards courtiers,
we do not earn respect in the sciences,
nor do we excel in crafts and industry."
It
is not easy to put oneself in the position of a collective that has
experienced such a downfall extending over a period of hundreds of
years. No wonder the blame is put on a hostile outside world in the form
of the Spaniards, the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the
European colonial powers and the American empire. But other societies
such as India, China and Korea have suffered no less under the rule of
invaders and from the attacks and raids of foreign powers. But in spite
of this, they have successfully faced the challenges of modernity and
risen to become important players on a global scale. The question
therefore inevitably poses itself as to the endogenous causes of the
downfall of the Arab world. As long as this question remains unanswered,
the Arab world's enormous scientific, technical and industrial deficit
will remain unexplained and inexplicable.
The Arab world's sense
of pride is hurt not only by military inferiority to the West. Far worse
is the impact of intellectual and material dependency. In the last 400
years, not a single noteworthy invention was made by the Arabs. Rudolph
Chimelli quotes one Iraqi author as saying: "If an Arab had invented the
steam engine in the 18th century, it would not have been built." No
historian would contradict him. This means that for any Arab who cares
to think about it, the very objects on which everyday life in the
Maghreb and the Middle East depends represent an unspoken humiliation –
every fridge, every telephone, every power socket, every screwdriver,
not to mention hi-tech products. Even the parasitic oil states,
frittering away their future security, are obliged to import the
technology from abroad; without Western geologists, drilling experts and
civil engineers, fleets of tankers and refineries they would not even
be capable of exploiting their own resources. In this light, even their
wealth is a curse that constantly reminds them of their dependency. Not
including the revenue from crude oil, the economic performance of the
entire Arab world today counts for less than that of a single Finnish
telecommunications company.
The Arab world has proved similarly
unproductive where its political institutions are concerned. Imported
forms of nationalism and socialism have failed everywhere, and
democratic stirrings are routinely nipped in the bud. Of course, blanket
statements of this kind can only aim to say something about the state
of the whole. They tell us nothing about individual capabilities, that
are subject the world over to the genetic normal distribution. But in
many Arab countries, anyone who expresses independent ideas puts their
own life at risk. Which is why many of the best scientists, engineers,
writers and political thinkers live in exile, a brain drain that can
certainly be compared with the exodus of Jewish elites from Germany in
the 1930s, and which is likely to have similarly far-reaching
consequences.
Although the methods of repression that are
customary in Arab countries refer back to the traditions of oriental
despotism, in this field too, the unbelievers have proved indispensable
as teachers. From machine pistols through to poison gas, they invented
and exported all of the weapons that have been used in the Arab-Islamic
world. Arab rulers also studied and adopted the methods of the GPU and
the Gestapo. And of course, Islamist terrorism is also unable to do
without such borrowings. Its entire technical arsenal, from explosives
to satellite telephones, from aircraft to television cameras, comes from
the hated West.
That such an all-encompassing dependency should
be experienced as unbearable makes perfect sense. Especially among
displaced migrants, regardless of their economic situation, the
confrontation with Western civilisation leads to a lasting culture
shock. The apparent superabundance of products, opinions, economic and
sexual options leads to a double bind of attraction and revulsion, and
the abiding memory of the backwardness of one's own culture becomes
intolerable. The consequences for one's own sense of self-esteem are
clear, as is the urge to compensate by means of conspiracy theories and
acts of vengeance. In this situation, many people cannot resist the
temptation of the Islamists' offer to punish others for their own
failings.
Solutions to the dilemma of the Arab world are of no
interest to Islamism, which does not go beyond negation. Strictly
speaking, it is a non-political movement, since it makes no negotiable
demands. Put bluntly, it would like the majority of the planet's
inhabitants, all the unbelievers and apostates, to capitulate or be
killed.
This burning desire cannot be fulfilled. The destructive
energy of the radical losers is doubtless sufficient to kill thousands,
maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and to cause lasting
damage to the civilization on which they have declared war. One
indication of the potential impact of a few dozen human bombs is the
level of day-to-day controls that has come to be the norm.
But
this is actually the least of the losses to civilization resulting from
terrorism. It can create a general atmosphere of fear and trigger
counter-reactions based on panic. It boosts the power and influence of
the political police, of the secret services, of the arms industry and
of private security operatives; it encourages the passing of
increasingly repressive laws and leads to the loss of hard-won freedoms.
No conspiracy theories are required to understand that there are people
who welcome these consequences of terror. There is nothing better than
an external enemy with which to justify surveillance and repression.
Where this leads is shown by the example of Russian domestic policy.
The
Islamists can consider all this a success. But it makes no difference
to the actual power relations. Even the spectacular attack on the World
Trade Center was not able to shake the supremacy of the United States.
The New York Stock Exchange reopened the Monday after the attacks, and
the long-term impact on the international financial system and world
trade was minimal.
The consequences for Arab societies, on the
other hand, are fatal. For the most devastating long-term effects will
be born not by the West, but by the religion in whose name the Islamists
act. Not just refugees, asylum seekers and migrants will suffer as a
result. Beyond any sense of justice, entire peoples will have to pay a
huge price for the actions of their self-appointed representatives. The
idea that their prospects, which are bad enough as it is, could be
improved through terrorism is absurd. History offers no example of a
regressive society that stifled its own productive potential being
capable of survival in the long term.
The project of the radical
loser, as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, consists of organizing
the suicide of an entire civilisation. But the likelihood of their
succeeding in an unlimited generalization of their death cult is
negligible. Their attacks represent a permanent background risk, like
ordinary everyday deaths by accident on the streets, to which we have
become accustomed.
In a global society that constantly produces new losers, this is something we will have to live with.
*
The article originally appeared in German in Der Spiegel on November 7, 2005.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger is
one of modern Germany's most interesting and celebrated writers. Among
his books of poetry are "The Sinking of the Titanic" and "Mausoleum".
His prose works include "Europe, Europe" and "Civil Wars".
Translation: Nicholas Grindell.
