Sound Notion?

Benjamin Franklin Memorial

Benjamin Franklin said:

As we must account for every idle word,
so we must for every idle silence.

Hmpf! There's just no pleasing some folk! And then we go and treat them like an idol! Now that's an idle sound of silence, even if not a neon light!

Why North Koreans Don't Revolt . . .

Economist Logo
(Image from Economist)

A recent, unsigned article in the Economist, "Food and stability in North Korea: Deprive and rule" (September 17, 2011), asks a common question, "Why does North Korea's dictatorship remain so entrenched despite causing such hunger and misery?" But it gives an uncommon answer as to why the North Koreans do not revolt:

One intriguing explanation comes from Go Myong-hyun, a statistician at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, which has just held a conference in Seoul on the viability of the North Korean regime. On the basis of satellite imagery of crop areas, vegetation and human settlement, Mr Go believes that both North Korea's crops and the population that tends them are more geographically scattered than outsiders have hitherto thought. He contests UN estimates that over three-fifths of the country is urbanised. That would require every farmer to sustain nearly two city dwellers, which a shortage of fertiliser, farm machinery and fuel precludes. Mr Go reckons that urbanisation could be as low as 25%, based on data from the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project, a global population map. That would imply three farmers for each city dweller. It suggests that, even though much of the country is cut off from the food-distribution system, rural dwellers survive precariously through subsistence farming.

Moreover, communication and transportation in North Korea are so bad that an uprising is hardly conceivable, let alone likely to succeed. North Korea is thus utterly unlike the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East that have recently risen up in revolt. Those Arab states are highly urbanized, and their populations are interconnected via social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, thereby enabling large groups to maintain connections and organize resistance.

North Korea, however, is a largely rural society with as much as 75 percent of its population involved in agriculture, and it has no such social networking services. Its most urbanized part is centered on Pyongyang, "where the elites live, enjoying perks and protected by an overwhelming security apparatus." There will thus be no revolt unless the North's economic decline were to grow severe enough for the privileged in Pyongyang to see their perks slipping away or for the military and security apparatus to see their own status threatened. I think that what one can hope for, instead, as markets develop, is for corruption to undermine loyalty to the regime and the legitimacy of the state as authorities begin to obtain more money and power through bribes than through official patronage networks.

The article, by the way, also has an eye-opening slideshow of nine photos from Panos Pictures showing scenes of the North's backward agricultural society.

Ironies of this Arab Spring . . .

Amr Moussa

(Image from Wikipedia)

I read an interesting excerpt in the New York Times yesterday from a recent interview of Amr Moussa in Cairo by Raghida Dergham, diplomatic correspondent for the Al Hayat. Titled "The Goal in Libya Is Not Regime Change" (NYT, March 23, 2011), I gather from Moussa's remarks that his thoughts concerning Syria also do not include regime change:

Dergham: You haven't said much about Syria. Why so quiet so far?

Moussa: Because the situation there is still unclear.

Dergham: Do you want to wait until a lot of people die before it is clear?

Moussa: No, certainly not. We do not have the full picture as to what is going on. Is it in Deraa alone, or is there violence and crackdown in other places?

Dergham: You have seen the people asking for change, and you supported them strongly in Egypt, but you are hesitant to support them in Syria? There are demonstrations, and people are dead and people are wounded in Syria. What is your message as secretary general of the Arab League on that issue?

Moussa: I am certainly on the side of the free expression of the people, and I am certainly on the side of revolutions and the new uprising in the Arab world. No question about that.

Amr Moussa is the former (or at least 'departing') secretary general of the Arab League and has declared his candidacy for the presidency of Egypt, and while I can understand his difficult position on the issue of calling for regime change in somebody else's country, I think that Dergham has underlined the irony well. Moussa supports the "revolutions" without openly supporting "regime change," but isn't that what revolutions do? Change regimes? Didn't that happen recently in Egypt? Isn't Moussa a beneficiary of that Egyptian regime change? Isn't he running for the presidency of Egypt.

That's all I have time for today . . .

Kupchan on Democracy in the Middle East

Charles A. Kupchan

(Image from Council on Foreign Relations)

In an opinion piece for the New York Times titled "Be Careful What You Wish For" (February 24, 2011), Charles Kupchan offers a cautious reminder on euphoria concerning the revolutions sweeping the Arab world:

Western observers and policy makers had better stop operating under the illusion that the spread of democracy to the Middle East also means the spread of Western values.

Actually, a number of commenters have made this point, but the point is worth making again, and Kupchan expresses succinctly the civilizational difference and historical development that account for his caution:

In the West, modernity has meant the separation of church and state. Christianity is a religion of faith, not law; its outsized influence on European politics during the medieval era stemmed from a longstanding alliance between secular rulers and the Catholic Church. After the Protestant Reformation, politics in the West took a secular turn that only deepened with the arrival of democracy.

In contrast, Islam is a religion of faith and law, in which there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. Beginning soon after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, state and mosque became inextricably bound.

More democracy in the Gaza strip, for instance, has brought the Islamist movement Hamas to power, and democratic elections in the 1990s would have brought Islamists to power in Algeria if the military there had not intervened. Consequently:

This track record makes clear that the more democratic the Middle East becomes, the greater the role that Islam -- even if a moderate brand -- will play in its politics. This outcome is neither good nor bad; it is simply a reality in a part of the world where politics and religion are intertwined.

Neither good nor bad? I wouldn't put the point quite like that myself. The democratic outcome can be tolerable, if moderate Islam plays a moderate role, although a clear separation of mosque and state would be better, but relations with the governments that arise can be very bad if serious Islamists take power with an intent to impose shariah domestically and to offer hostility in foreign policy. Recall Iran in 1979.

Current signs are that these democratic revolutions may play themselves out differently in different countries. Tunisia might get a secular government like in the West. Egypt might get an Islamist Muslim Brotherhood hankering to be like Gaza's Hamas. Libya might get the tribal chaos reminiscent of Somalia. And I won't even try to imagine any 'mighty' eventualities elsewhere.

Not that my imagination isn't working . . .

Whither Egypt? -- Yusuf al-Qaradawi

Yusuf al-Qaradawi

(Image from Wikipedia)

The recent Arab uprisings began while I was vacationing in regions with slow internet access, so I missed out on those beginnings and have been playing catch-up ball ever since. I did express a passing opinion last January 30th when I managed to access the Marmot's Hole:

If the protests bring down the Egyptian government, the Islamists will almost certainly take control.

The government hasn't quite fallen because the military retains control, but the Islamists in Egypt are positioning themselves to take advantage even though the January 25th Revolution was largely led by secular youth. One needs to recall the events of Iran's 1979 Revolution, in which the secular revolutionaries were edged out by Islamists guided by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Do we see anything similar happening in Egypt? According to Dan Murphy, "Egypt revolution unfinished, Qaradawi tells Tahrir masses" (Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 2011):

Leading Islamic theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi returned from Qatar to rally hundreds of thousands at Tahrir Square today in his first public speech since 1981 . . . .

The devout crowd . . . was also a reminder that huge sections of Egypt take their Islamic faith seriously -- and that real and open democratic reform will almost certainly lead to a stronger role for the faith in the nation's political life.

"Qaradawi is very much in the mainstream of Egyptian society, he's in the religious mainstream, he's not offering something that's particularly distinctive or radical in the context of Egypt," says Mr. [Shadi] Hamid[, research director at the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center in Qatar]. "He's an Islamist and he's part of the Brotherhood school of thought, but his appeal goes beyond the Islamist spectrum, and in that sense he's not just an Islamist figure, he's an Egyptian figure with a national profile."

This doesn't bode particularly well, in my opinion. The Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, want Shariah (Islamic law) for Egypt, and that is what is ultimately meant by "a stronger role for the faith in the nation's political life." Hamid insists that Qaradawi is more mainstream, more moderate that other Islamists. Perhaps he is comparatively less extreme, but that doesn't make him a moderate. Magdi Abdelhadi, reporting for the BBC News, "Controversial preacher with 'star status'" (7 July, 2004), relates Qaradawi's views on suicide bombing against Israelis:

Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that "an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.

"I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God's justice . . . . Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do".

Is this really so different in principle from Al-Qaeda's view that suicide bombings against the West are legitimate because Westerners are not innocent victims? Qaradawi distances himself from Al-Qaeda, but he seems to me to be of the same cloth.

And worrisome if true is this Agence France-Presse report in the Hindustan Times: "Egypt protest hero Wael Ghonim barred from stage" (February 18, 2011):

Google executive Wael Ghonim, who emerged as a leading voice in Egypt's uprising, was barred from the stage in Tahrir Square on Friday by security guards, an AFP photographer said. Ghonim tried to take the stage in Tahrir, the epicentre of anti-regime protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, but men who appeared to be guarding influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi barred him from doing so.

I've not been able to confirm this through any independent reports on other news sites, but if this should be an authentic report, it also does not bode well for the secular leaders of the January 25th Revolution.

Whatever the case on that report, let's hope that the youthful secular leaders of Egypt's January 25th Revolution prove tougher, cannier, and better organized than Iran's were back in 1979.

Dostoyevsky: "to set up heaven on earth"

Hanging Gardens of Babylon

with

Tower of Babel in Background

'a little heaven on earth'

Marten Jacobszoon Heemskerk van Veen

(Image from Wikipedia)

Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, also called Alyosha, is the 'hero' of Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. At the age of 19, he opts for the life of a monk, an existential choice that Dostoyevski describes in a very intriguing manner:

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch -- that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise." In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect." (Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (New York: Random House, 1950), pages 25-26)

Had Alyosha turned atheist, he would have been a very dangerous man, for that turn would have turned him from a revolutionary of the soul to a social revolutionary and turned his spiritual energies from seeking perfection of his own soul to seeking perfection of all society. Socialism of the late 19th century was often a violent doctrine, looking back for inspiration to the French Revolution, and though Dostoyevsky does not make explicit in this passage that Alyosha would have turned to violence in pursuit of a socialist society, such might be implicit given that Alyosha is described as the sort of passionate young man "seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, [even] life itself," for his aim of perfection.

Dostoyevsky's insight into the religious impulse behind revolutionary socialism has since become nearly a sociological cliché -- the secularization of eschatology -- but it remains an interesting inquiry. My own thoughts on this matter, partly impelled by Dostoyevsky's depiction of Alyosha, turn from the moment of a revolutionary grab for power to the process of constructing utopia, the Tower of Babel being built "to set up heaven on earth." Such utopian visions always turn to dystopian realities because the search for perfection, when no longer directed toward one's individual soul, where it would have better experienced the bitter, personal truth of human imperfectibility, directs itself instead toward a perfection of mankind believed attainable through constructing a society so totally regulated that it exerts ideological force upon the innermost being of each individual. This never works, of course, for no social mechanisms can perfectly construct, or reconstruct, the soul. Human evil is ineradicable by merely human means, so the mechanisms must be applied with ever-greater pressure toward bending human nature to the revolutionary will, a repression that never totally succeeds and must therefore become ever more repressive . . . except that the revolutionaries, being merely human themselves, come to apply the machinery not for the explicit aim of human perfection but in the implicit interest of personal power. They grow cynical and accept bribes but must constantly extol the revolution and revolutionary purity -- and thereby only succeed in constructing a totally dishonest society. Thus does the misdirected quest for perfection result in deeper corruption.

Gary Saul Morson also has some thoughts on this theme in Dostoyevsky's writings.

Islamism: Bernard Lewis and Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer and Bernard Lewis

(Image from Kramer's Gallery)

I spent over an hour yesterday trying unsuccessfully to open a cyberclassroom for my course on Islamism at Yonsei's Underwood International College.

I'll get help today from someone with The Knowledge. Maybe a London cabbie...

Meanwhile, I will post here what I would have posted there, albeit with a bit more commentary, as befits blogging. I've previously mentioned that the aim of my Islamism course is to understand this awkwardly named phenomenon, the rise of political Islam. This week, we're reading materials independently and trying to define precisely what Islamism means. With that aim in mind, I have read one article by Bernard Lewis and another by Martin Kramer, so I will share selected paragraphs for interested readers.

I'll begin with Lewis, who writes about Islamic revolution in light of the 'successful' Iranian one but draws more far-reaching conclusions.

A. Bernard Lewis, "Islamic Revolution," The New York Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 21 & 22 (January 21, 1988).

1. Lewis's Distinction between Quietists and Activists in Islam (paragraphs 18 through 20):

There are many different strands in the rich and varied traditional culture of Islam. There are in particular two political traditions, one of which might be called quietist, the other activist. The arguments in favor of both are based, as are most early Islamic arguments, on the Holy Book and on the actions and sayings of the Prophet.

The quietist tradition obviously rests on the Prophet as sovereign, as judge and statesman. But before the Prophet became a head of state, he was a rebel. Before he traveled from Mecca to Medina, where he became sovereign, he was an opponent of the existing order. He led an opposition against the pagan oligarchy of Mecca and at a certain point went into exile and formed what in modern language might be called a "government in exile," with which finally he was able to return in triumph to his birthplace and establish the Islamic state in Mecca. The Prophet's departure from Mecca -- the hijra -- marks the starting point of the Muslim era. The struggles in adversity that preceded his exile, like the ultimate triumph that ended his career, are all part of the Islamic tradition, of the holy life of the Prophet.

Of these two traditions, that of the Prophet as sovereign is obviously far better known and far better documented, but the tradition of the Prophet as rebel is also old and deep-rooted, and it recurs throughout the centuries of Islamic history. The activist tradition has been stronger and more explicit among the Shi'a, but it is not exclusive to them, and there has been no lack of Shi'i quietists and Sunni dissidents in Islamic history. The Prophet as rebel has provided a sort of paradigm of revolution -- opposition and rejection, withdrawal and departure, exile and return. Time and time again movements of opposition in Islamic history tried to repeat this pattern, a few of them successfully. The rebels who carried out the first great Islamic revolution in the eighth century went to Eastern Iran and from there they came to Iraq and founded the great Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Another group of religiously inspired rebels, in the tenth century, went to Yemen and then to North Africa, and from there they conquered Egypt and established the great Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. Khomeini went to Iraq, and thence to Neauphle le Château, outside Paris, and from there he returned to rule in Tehran.

2. Lewis's Distinction between Pragmatists and Ideologues in Islamist Revolutions (paragraphs 33 through 35):

A familiar feature of revolutions, such as the French and the Russian, is the tension, often conflict, between moderates and extremists -- Girondins and Jacobins in the French Revolution, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Russian, as well as numerous smaller splinter groups. Some historians have found similar differences in Islamic revolutions of the past; some observers have discerned them in the course of events in Iran. Certainly there has been no lack of such tensions and conflicts between rival groups, factions, and tendencies within the revolutionary camp. The distinction between moderates and extremists is, however, one derived from Western history, and may be somewhat misleading when applied to the Islamic revolution in Iran.

A more accurate description, for this as for other previous Islamic revolutions, would present the conflict as one between pragmatists and ideologues. The latter are those who insist, against all difficulties and obstacles, on maintaining the pure doctrine of the revolution as taught by them. The former are those who, when they have gained power and become involved in the processes of government at home and abroad, find it necessary to make compromises. Sometimes they go so far as to modify their revolutionary teachings; more often, they tacitly disregard them. This conflict, between those who reject and those who practice compromise, can be traced throughout Islamic history, from the venerated Companions of the Prophet -- those who embraced Islam and joined him during his lifetime -- to the henchmen of Khomeini. In times of revolution, it becomes particularly bitter.

Each side has certain advantages. The ideologues have the better rhetoric, the stronger appeal, the greater popular support. The pragmatists are better equipped to deal with the practical problems of government, at home and abroad. Part of their pragmatism is to try to avoid an open clash with the ideologues. When they fail, and a clash occurs, they are usually defeated, since in a time of revolutionary change the ideologues are better placed to mobilize support. It is not easy to rouse the masses for such tasks as compromising with Iraq, mending fences with the United States, or slowing the pace of revolutionary change. When pragmatists in office go too far, they are ruthlessly suppressed, and their careers end in exile, imprisonment, or death. At best, they fade out of public life and are rendered innocuous. Such have been the various fates of once prominent figures like the former foreign minister Sadeq Qotbzadah, who was executed; the former president Abolhasan Bani Sadr, who escaped to Paris; and the first prime minister of the revolutionary regime, Mehdi Bazargan, who, though alive and in Iran, has been excluded from power and reduced to insignificance. The ideologues rule, and since the practical problems remain, in time a new group of pragmatists emerges among the victorious ideologues, and the conflict is renewed, usually with the same result. The process continues until the revolutionary passion is spent, and a group of pragmatists survives, succeeds, and remains in power. Then the ways of government return to normal, and the ideologues return to the world of theory and preaching from which the revolution had enabled them, briefly, to emerge. It would seem that this stage has not yet been reached in Iran.

Taking Lewis's two points together, we can see that Islam has an inherent potential for revolution even within an Islamic system because the status of Muhammad as moral exemplar for Muslim activists legitimates rebellion against an authority perceived as insufficiently Islamic and that any Islamic system subsequently established through revolutionary means will prove unstable because ideologues will repeatedly insist upon purifying the system to make it more 'Islamic'.

Strictly speaking, if we apply this analysis too rigorously, then we would be forced to conclude that Islam could never stabilize itself, which is patently false, for there have been relatively stable Islamic systems throughout history. This stability can only come through compromise settled for against the incompetence of ideologues.

The potential for revolt, however, remains intrinsic to Islam, and the central difficulty lies in trying to determine what triggers activist Islam.

I don't know the answer to this question, but once Islamic activism is triggered, the ideologues lead the way, and Martin Kramer has some useful points to make about such Islamists.

B. Martin Kramer, "Fundamentalist Islam: The Drive for Power," Middle East Quarterly (June 1996), pp. 37-49.

1. Martin Kramer's Emphasis upon Drive for Power by Islamic Fundamentalism (Islamism) (paragraphs 5 and 6):

Fundamentalist Islam remains an enigma precisely because it has confounded all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. "Revivalist" becomes "extremist" (and vice versa) with such rapidity and frequency that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little predictive power. They will not stay put. This is because fundamentalist Muslims, for all their "diversity," orbit around one dense idea. From any outside vantage point, each orbit will have its apogee and perigee. The West thus sees movements and individuals swing within reach, only to swing out again and cycle right through every classification. Movements and individuals arise in varied social and political circumstances, and have their own distinctive orbits. But they will not defy the gravity of their idea.

The idea is simple: Islam must have power in this world. It is the true religion -- the religion of God -- and its truth is manifest in its power. When Muslims believed, they were powerful. Their power has been lost in modern times because Islam has been abandoned by many Muslims, who have reverted to the condition that preceded God's revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. But if Muslims now return to the original Islam, they can preserve and even restore their power.

2. Martin Kramer's Claim that Violence is Endemic to Islamism (paragraphs 30 and 31):

The attempts to make a second revolution demonstrated that fundamentalists of all kinds would employ revolutionary violence if they thought it would bring them to power. Frustrated by the drudgery of winning mass support, full of the heady ideas of Mawdudi and Qutb, and inspired by Khomeini's success, they lunged forward. From the wild-eyed to the wily, Sunni fundamentalists of all stripes began to conspire. A messianic sect seized the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979. A group moved by Qutb's teachings assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The Muslim Brethren declared a rebellion against the Syrian regime in 1982. Another path of violence paralleled this one -- the work of the half-dozen Shi'i movements in Arab lands that had emerged around the hub of Islamic revolution in Iran. They targeted their rage against the existing order in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon, and the smaller Gulf states. In Iraq, they answered Khomeini's appeal by seeking to raise the country's Shi'is in revolt in 1979. In Lebanon, they welcomed Iran's Revolutionary Guards in 1982, first to help drive out the Israelis, then to send suicide bombers to blow up the barracks of U.S. and French peacekeepers there in 1983. Another Shi'i bomber nearly killed the ruler of Kuwait in 1985. Some of Khomeini's adepts went to Mecca as demonstrators, to preach revolution to the assembled pilgrims. Others hijacked airliners and abducted foreigners. Khomeini put a final touch on the decade when he incited his worldwide following to an act of assassination, issuing a religious edict demanding the death of the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989.

This violence was not an aberration. It was a culmination. From the time of Afghani, fundamentalists had contemplated the possibility of denying power through assassination, and taking power through revolution. Because resort to political violence carried many risks, it had been employed judiciously and almost always surreptitiously, but it remained a legitimate option rooted firmly in the tradition, and it became the preferred option after Iran's revolution emboldened fundamentalists everywhere. For the first time, the ideology of Islam had been empowered, and it had happened through revolution. Power for Islam seemed within reach, if only the fundamentalists were bold enough to run the risk. Many of them were. They included not just the avowed revolutionaries of the Jihad Organization in Egypt, but the cautious and calculating leaderships of the Muslim Brethren in Syria and the Shi'i Da'wa Party in Iraq.

Kramer's central idea is a radically simplifying one: Islamists seek power. They will seek it by any means, from quietly converting to bolding intimidating to aggressively assassinating. Their aim in seeking power is the institutionalization of Islamic law, i.e., shariah.

The obvious problem for the Islamist, of course, is which Islamic shariah? Sunni or Shi'ite? And which school of law? Although the Shi'ites have one primary school of Islamic law, the Sunnis have at four major schools.

One can see how such a range of 'choices' might lead to conflict among the ideologues.

Rosenstock-Huessy doing my thinking for me...

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

(Image from Argo Books)

For the purpose of lurking intelligently at an online discussion, I'm currently reading Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and I thought that the following passage might interest some readers:

From 1880 onward a class existed in Russian society which had cut itself off from all loyalties toward the existing order. The Nihilists went on a subterranean crusade. Everywhere abroad groups of them studied. At Bern alone, in Switzerland, six hundred Russian students registered, all utterly devoid of means, but all more or less the type created by this emigration; a type which may be described as student, intellectual, conspirator and politician rolled into one, but first of all a man who says "no" to the existing order. These men did not wish to miss their calling in the history of the world. They forgot their individual conditions, wealth, family, creed, and identified themsleves with the people. Very often they acted as handman and executioner to their own material interests. Their own families, their own futures, their own intellectual treasures and needs, counted for nothing. Before murdering the Czar of the Grand Duke, they committed moral suicide and became emancipated from all earthly interests. The code radiating from people like Lenin or Savinkov was the code of those who died to themselves ten times over because they clung to their mission. More fanatical than the Spanish Inquisition, they were not interested in their own salvation. They wished -- and it seems to have been their only genuine desire -- to be ahead of the West. Once, at least, this damned West would not be the pioneer; Russians would be the leaders of future society! While Europe counted confidently on a permanence of the century of progress, they knew, once for all, the secret of her total revolution. That is why the loss of civilization was no longer a bugaboo to them. Civilization was bourgeois. Liberty was bourgeois, because civilization and liberty already existed. Conscience, Honour, Faith? Nihil! (page 59)

Rosenstock is trying to compose a portrait of those 'Nihilists' whose mindset led to the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia through their own management of savagery in the post-WWI period. He thus construes the Nihilist movement rather broadly, but so be it.

I post this passage for the purpose of focusing my thoughts on a certain revolutionary type that may also find its counterpart in today's Islamist movement. Several of the qualities that Rosenstock specifies are also evident among Islamists -- the fanaticism, the moral suicide, and the desire to outdo the West -- but I see a couple of major differences.

First, unlike with the Nihilists and their 'Nihilism', Islamism emerges from a vast population of believers whose own values are not so easily differentiated from those of the Islamists themselves. Hence the large-scale support that Islamism finds among Muslims.

Second, unlike the atheistic Nihilists, Islamists are centrally concerned about their own salvation. Hunger for paradise drives them as much as their resentment toward the West and their hatred of all things 'nonislamic'.

I don't know how useful this sort of comparison-contrast exercise might be, but worth noting is that the Bolsheviks successfully captured an empire despite being a small minority lacking in popular support.

Who's to say that Islamists couldn't pull off a similar feat, and with far more popular support...