The precipitous
fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991
occasioned no victory march and no festivals or parades
in the Western street. Calculated cautiously by the
G. H. W. Bush administration and reported lethargically
by the mainstream Western media, this low-key approach
to the demise of the superpower adversary was prudent;
for it prevented offending the pride of the Russian
people and hence prevented slowing or reversing this
extremely favorable, rapid chain of events for the
trans-Atlantic alliance. However inconspicuous it
was to the general public, some low-circulated professional
journals and conservative think-tanks began to use
terms like "American hegemony," "uncontestable superiority," "absolute
supremacy," and "the new world order" to describe
this sudden rise of the incredible fortune for the
United States to be able single-handedly to determine
the destiny of the earth. In less than a year, the
global village woke up and realized that a total
collapse of the international balance of power had
indeed occurred, and that this phenomenon had left
the planet with a single superpower.(1)
Then, suddenly, many newspaper
columnists, radio and television commentators,
political scientists and historians rushed to the
conclusion that this historic event was indicative
of the final victory of democracy over tyranny.
Interestingly, these euphoric announcements came
two to three years after some writers had already
had anticipated this victory and gone even farther
by heralding the end of history.(2) About a decade
later the survivors of the terrorist attacks on
New York and the Pentagon reported also that they
saw the end of history, but to them it was Armageddon!
Millions of others who watched the surreal collapse
of the World Trade Center buildings on live television
probably had similar impressions. The organization
that committed these acts and was becoming known
to the world as al-Qaeda (ﻩﺪﻋﺎﻗﻟﺁ al-Qhaedeh),
had been originated from an Islamist resistance
movement at the end of the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan in 1988 and, interestingly enough,
was now replacing the Soviet Union in challenging,
head-to-head, the United States.(3) This rapid
adversarial succession conformed to the classical
theory of "the
balance of power," according to which any
major power-vacuum in international relations is
to be filled by a new power of different origin.
Strange, though, was the nature of this new power
in that it appeared very different from the one
it had succeeded, and was in fact infinitely different
from any kind of global power that ever existed.
For this new contender had no defined territory
and was not representative of any nation-state;
its membership and operational range were transnational;
it had no jurisdiction and no sovereignty as a
political unit; it abided by no international rules
whatsoever and relied on no traditional economic,
political, and military means. Perhaps the most
disturbing element of all of this was to learn
that it took only nineteen of its paramilitary
suicidal operatives with box-cutters to hijack
four civilian airliners to function as cruise missiles
and thereby to kill about three-thousand people,
to terrorize millions more, to damage billions
of dollars and to bring the nation's volatile economy
virtually to a standstill. By all counts, this
was the most destructive and humiliating attack
ever to take place on American soil.
It is now evident that the
success of this spectacular assault and the failure
of the G. W. Bush administration to root out al-Qaeda
from Afghanistan and quickly to capture or kill
its leader, Osama ben Laden (ﻦﺪﺎﻟ ﻦﺒ ﻪﻤﺎﺴﺍ), and
the decision to wage, instead, a distractive and
miscalculated war in Iraq with numerous casualties
and fatalities, have all but exposed the illusion
of U. S. military invincibility and have
helped considerably the recruiting of a new generation
of terrorists in the Moslem world. Now, even if
ben Laden is captured or killed, the genie is out
of the bottle as hundreds of young megalomaniacs
are prepared to take his place and numerous new
terrorist cells are springing up all over the world.
Given the strong desire of al-Qaeda and its growing
terrorist allies to acquire and to use the weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) on the United States,
it is no longer inconceivable that a group of suicide
bombers should enter this country through, say,
the Mexican borders and simultaneously should detonate
tactical nuclear weapons in New York, Boston, Chicago,
Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In case
of a coordinated attack of such magnitude, it is
questionable what would be left of the United States
as a nation-state. For example, would the then
stronger southern states return to their old secessionist
policy and this time easily achieve independence;
or would they try to simply dominate the northern
territories, expel people of African and Latin
descent and establish, say, an authoritarian Baptist
republic? In the face of these difficult questions,
it is doubly hard to predict what the rest of the
world would look like after such a catastrophic
attack. Could Russia and the former Soviet Republics
be the next victims? Would the People's Republic
of China (PRC) become the world's dominant power
decades sooner than expected? A more troubling
question is, could al Qaeda finally acquire and
unleash an incurably contagious, genetically altered
biological agent from a former Soviet Republic,
and bring to extinction the human species?
This essay seeks to explore
the present Jihadi (ﻯﺩﺎﻬﺠ Jehadi) challenge
by hypothesizing that
its marked features are "totalitarian" and "stateless."(4) To
test the first conjecture, it refers, by comparison,
to the works of two celebrated philosophers, Hannah
Arendt and Karl Jaspers, who wrote on totalitarianism.
To test the second conjecture, it bears upon the
elements of the "state" in political
theory, and should the result be warranted vis-à-vis
the concrete Jihadi movement, it furthers the investigation
into the current and foreseeable state of affairs.
Even though in the course of this study the difficulties
of throwing light into those dark caves may abound
and uncertainties about the destiny of those ghostly
nemeses linger to the end, it is to be understood
from the outset that, in view of the ever-growing
gravity of this ominous threat to international
peace and security, any attempt at unraveling this
subject-matter should not be utterly an unworthy
enterprise.(5)
To start with, by saying that
al-Qaeda and its likeminded Jihadi allies are totalitarian
is to suggest that their leadership exercises total
control over every aspect of its subjects and tolerates
no other political system or social way of life.
This means that, like National Socialism and Bolshevism,
Jihadism relies on the Leadership Principle (das
Führerprinzip) by which the shepherd,
say, ben Laden (like Hitler or Stalin), is guiding
the
flock of believers to a purportedly ideal pasture
(like an Aryan Garden of Eden or Communist Utopia
or Heaven itself).(6) Furthermore, this ideal is
promised in the Book (Mein Kampf, The
Communist Manifesto,
The Koran, etc.).(7) What it
would take, then, is a totalistic ideology with
a global
mission to
reach this goal at all cost, the ideology whose
tree is to be watered with blood and fertilized
by self-sacrifice. In this simplistic and yet grand
vision, "personhood" is an illusion.
For, as brute force and violence become necessary
in securing the actual path to the ideal goal,
the life of the individual loses its meaning and
becomes completely valueless. The suicidal loyalty
of the warriors for the cause and the effective
use of terror and brute force to intimidate and
eliminate the external and internal enemies are
necessary for tactical and strategic advantage.
In this case, the trinity of the Goal, the Book
and the Leader mesmerizes the subjects, converts
more people, and recruits more paratroopers, more
apparatchiks, more secret police, more spies, more
assassins, more explosive experts and more foot
soldiers to annihilate any foreign or domestic
opposition. And in this cosmic battle, if everyone
should die, then everyone shall die! Of course,
bravery and self-sacrifice have always been praised
in nearly every culture. Here, however, against
the overwhelming pressure of international politics
to halt its unending appetite for absolute world
domination, the Leviathan must even cannibalize
its own children for its survival and growth. Here,
the symbols rule over lives. Red flag for the blood
of global revolution. The tools: hammer & sickle.
The energy of swastika (Hakenkreuz, "hooked-cross")
for Aryan supremacy. The new moon for the latest
religion. Martyrdom, the way to go. Feast your
soul in the hall of Valhalla! Blessed are the self-immolated.
Get slain in slaying! Better yet: Explode yourself
so you may kill many! The common cause infatuated
with a morbid cult of the dead. The Totalist Rule:
Macabre! Ghostly and ghastly proving, once more,
to be indeed the same.
This is not to ignore the major
atrocities committed by the democratic states.(8)
The point, however, is that in contrast to liberal-democracy,
which at least values the lives of its own citizens,
in totalitarianism lives are valued only as long
as they are at its service and sacrificiable for
its global ambitions. The Third Reich fought to
the very end in the rubble of the Chancellary Building
over the Hitler bunker, and the Soviet Union brought
all life to the brink of total extinction over
installing some nuclear missiles thousands of miles
from its own territory, in Cuba. Today, suicide
bombing has become an equal opportunity practice
for the Jihadists, including the pregnant ones,
thus taking the lives of the mother and her unborn
by a blast up to Heaven! Or, probably, consigning
them both to nothingness!
In all these extreme measures
of peril and death, the unaccountability of the
leadership and effectiveness of mass propaganda
are two conspicuous characteristics of totalitarianism.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
states:
The supreme task of the Leader is to
impersonate the double function characteristic of each
layer of the movement — to act as the magic defense
of the movement against the outside world; and at the same
time, to be the direct bridge by which the movement is
connected with it. The Leader claims personal responsibility
for every action, deed, or misdeed, commited by any member
or functionary in his official capacity.... The Leader
cannot tolerate criticism of his subordinates, since they
act always in his name; if he wants to correct his own
errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out; if
he wants to blame his mistakes on others, he must kill
them.(9)
In this sense, the Leader's "personal
responsibility" obviously does not mean that
he acts responsibly like a true leader; rather,
it means that he is the one who takes full credit
for every major policy regardless of the consequences
and who admits, never, to any mistakes. Since he
is the personification of the common cause, his
actions entail no personal responsibility for the
lives or deaths of others, be they his followers
or foes.(10) The latter must die while the former,
if necessary, must die as well. This generalization
of the totalitarian ruler does not exclude al-Qaeda
leader, for he has always taken full responsibility
for the deadly campaigns of his operatives. For
example, in less than five months after the August
7, 1998, coordinated truck-bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam (that killed
a total of 224 people, including 12 Americans,
and injured about 5000 African Moslems), in an
ABC News interview ben Laden said: "[W]hen
it becomes apparent that it would be impossible
to repel these Americans without assaulting them,
even if this involved the killing of Moslems, this
is permissible under Islam." He then, with
a messianic tone, added that if the act of Jihad
against the Jews and the Americans "is considered
a crime, let history be a witness that I am a criminal."(11) Likewise,
three months after the 9/11 attacks and on the
eve of the invasion of the coalition forces to
topple the Taliban regime and to capture or kill
him, on a videotape in a house-visit with a Saudi
sheik (ﺦﻴﺸ shaykh), ben Laden appeared chuckling
and admitted that he initially thought that the
planes would destroy only the floors above their
impacts and that it never occurred to him that
they would bring down the entire World Trade Center
structures. Then, he and the sheik gave thanks
to Allah. In addition, in a videotaped message
on the second anniversary of 9/11 that was televised
by the Arabic-language satellite network Al-Jazeera
(ﻩرﯾﺯﺠﻠﺍ), ben Laden in the company of his chief
lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri (ﻯﺭﻫﺍﻮﺯﻟﺍ ﻥﻣﻴﺍ),
praised the suicide-hijackers, particularly their
ringmaster, Mohammad Atta (ﺎﻃﻋ ﺪﻣﺤﻣ). Likewise,
on the eve of the 2004 United States presidential election
he addressed the American people and advised them "about
the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan...."(12)
In these as well as other appearances, he publicly
admitted leadership responsibility for the terrorist
operations that brought the loss of thousands of
lives, and showed absolutely no regret even for
the lost lives of his operatives, or for the lives
of innocent Moslems that were and are yet to be
lost in the crossfire of his previous and future
battles. Interestingly, though, like most totalitarian
leaders, ben Laden does not appear as a tyrant
insofar as he is greatly admired by his comrades
and is generally popular among the numerous members
of his religious sect throughout the world.
Liquidating once useful and
later unreliable or undesirable comrades is a symptomatic
feature of this leadership style. Arendt's examples
are the assassinations of Ernst Roehm (Röhm)
and Leon Trotsky.(13) Similarly to Roehm and Trotsky,
Ahmad Shah Massoud (ﺪﻭﻌﺴﻤ ﻩﺎﺷ ﺩﻤﺤﺍ) had once been
an ally of the Jihadists and their leader, ben
Laden, in their war effort against the Soviet occupiers
in Afghanistan. However, after the Soviet withdrawal,
Massoud, as the commander of the Northern Alliance,
had faced a new enemy in the south: the fundamentalist
Taleban (نﺎﺒﻠﺎﻂ) government of Mullah Mohammad
Omar (ﺭﻣﻋ ﺪﻣﺣﻣ ﺎﻠﻣ). Meanwhile, Omar had invited
and welcomed ben Laden back from the Sudan. At
this point, beyond Massoud's enmity to Omar, ben
Laden suspected that Massoud had been receiving
military and intelligence assistance from the Iranians
and the CIA. Ben Laden therefore decided to eliminate
Massoud. In the morning of September 9, 2001, Massoud
was preparing to fly over the northern outskirts
of Kabul to assess the Taleban lines when an aide
told him that two Arab journalists had been waiting
for days to interview him. He reluctantly returned
to his office for the interview. While seated on
a cushion to ease his chronic back pain, he noticed
that the journalist with the camera had been struggling
to place the tripod pretty close to his chest.
Massoud's friend and ambassador to India, Massoud
Khalili (ﻰﻠﯿﻠﺨ ﺪﻮﻌﺴﻣ), jokingly asked whether the
man was a cameraman or a wrestler. Steve Coll writes: "The
visiting reporter read out a list of questions
while his colleague prepared to film. About half
his questions concerned Osama bin Laden. Massoud
listened, then said he was ready. The explosion
ripped the cameraman's body apart. It smashed the
room's windows, seared the walls in flame, and
tore Massoud's chest with shrapnel."(14) Massoud
had no chance to survive the blast.
With regard to propaganda,
Arendt views it as a "fictitious explanation
of the world" to capture and brainwash its
audience.(15) As a psychological tool, propaganda
gives the followers an assurance that the worldview
that
they have come to believe is the sole truth and
that, if the outside world does not share this,
that is because of its sheer ignorance. So, in
addition to their being ensured of an intellectual
superiority, they have the feeling of having a
global mission to persuade others to convert to
their creed. This was true even for the National
Socialists insofar as they hoped that other Aryan
nations (e.g., the Celts, Nords, Anglo-Saxons)
would finally recognize their own higher station
in the global racial hierarchy, and the non-Aryan
lot, too, would accept their lower rank to the
benefit of all.(16) Hitler never understood why
the British were fighting the Germans instead of
joining
them against the supposedly inferior Latin and
Slav types. Similarly, Bolshevik propaganda was
based on a dogmatic historicism that prophesied
the final outcome of world history wherein communism
would be the last and highest stage of development.
It seems that in all such cases the "us versus
them" notion is common, where "them," i.e.,
people of the uninformed or inferior kind, will
inevitably be enlightened or eliminated. This bipolarity
combined with the dogma of historical necessity
are to be found in the writings of Gobineau and
Chamberlain, as well as of Marx and Engels.(17)
Today, the Aryan/non-Aryan and Bourgeois/Proletariat
polarities
have been replaced by the Jihadists' Moslem/Infidel
version. In this simplistic but seriously deadly
worldview the Jihadist, like his predecessors,
is convinced that there is a "global conspiracy" against
his way of life, and that the world is split into
two parts: his, which is the right one, and theirs,
which is conspiring to destroy his.
An important part of the totalitarian
propaganda is the parades, marches, uniforms and
display of striking flags, insignia, symbols, and
signs. In Mein Kampf, Hitler acknowledges
that in Munich, he learned from the Marxist parades
the psychological significance of grandiose demonstrations,
and he tells how meticulously he chose the party's
colors, insignias and flags. To him, they symbolized
the movement's "external point of view," the "outward
sign" of a "common bond."(18) Of
course, the Soviets continued their military parades
with
pomp every year in Red Square, commemorating the
Great October Revolution, and displayed their fearsome
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to
demonstrate their military and technological might.
They exploited their space exploration for propaganda,
thereby attempting to prove the superiority of
socialism over capitalism. The Islamist terrorists,
on the other hand, do not have the luxury of having
grandiose parades in broad daylight. For being
in a permanent state of war with technologically
superior enemies, they know that they can be targeted
by cruise missiles or precision bombing by satellite
guided missiles. Still, they have their own way
of attracting the domestic and of frightening the
foreign audiences, via satellite television and
websites. Their black balaclavas and bandanna headwraps
as well as solid white coveralls function for protecting
their anonymity, instilling terror in their enemies,
and fascinating and recruiting the young Arab viewers.
In Islamic tradition, black symbolizes death, while
the white coveralls shown on these "news breaks" are
the same winding-sheets for the corpse in burial.
The gruesome acts of beheading the captives against
a backdrop of Koranic verses written in white on
satin drapes of solid green (the prophet's tribal
color) and black ("death") as backdrops
are intended for the maximum effect.
In this connection, "secrecy" and "rituals" play
important parts. According to Arendt,
Perhaps the most striking similarity
between the secret societies and the totalitarian movements
lies in the role of the ritual.... In the center of the
Nazi ritual was the so-called "blood banner" [Blutfahne],
and in the center of the Bolshevik ritual stands the mummified
corpse of Lenin, both of which introduce a strong element
of idolatry into the ceremony.... The "idols" are
mere organizational devices, familiar from the ritual of
secret societies, which also used to frighten their members
into secretiveness by means of frightful, awe-inspiring
symbols.(19)
Because terrorism functions mainly
by secrecy, and because in its Islamist version the
rituals are supposedly performed in accordance with
the traditions of an ancient religion, the Jihadis
need not be innovative with a new set of rituals.
Enigmatic to the outside world are their rituals,
which are normally in the Sunni manner, including
praying toward Mecca (ﻪﻛﻣ Makkah), with
folded arms, five times a day, fasting during the
Ramadan (ﻦﺎﻀﻣﺭ Ramezan), congregating for the Koranic recitals
mainly on jihad and martyrdom, washing and wrapping
corpses
in winding-sheets before burial, attending the memorials
that spare no indignity for unavailable corpses of
suicide bombers and other martyrs, participating
in brutal corporeal punishments, etc. Sociologically,
these rituals have the function of integrating and
uniting the membership. Since the Jihadists make
up a tiny minority of a billion Sunnis, the question
is why they enjoy so much support from the larger
community. While the answer may range from poverty
and the powerlessness of the populace in relation
to their financially and socially corrupt pro-Western
governments, or from their frustration from the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, to their anger over the U.S. policies in
the Middle East, it is crucial to notice the existing
walls that protect the militants from the external
world. For Arendt, "Just as the sympathizers
constitute a protective wall around the members of
the movement and represent the outside world to them,
so the ordinary membership surrounds the militant
groups and represents the normal outside world to
them."(20) For example, somewhere in the Spin
and Safed ranges of Tora Bora on the Afghan-Pakistani
border where ben Laden's inner circle and his elite
militant fighters are presumably hiding out, they
must be surrounded by ordinary al Qaeda members who
supply them with weapons, ammunition, food, heating
fuel and other necessities, and these members in
turn receive support from the sympathizers in nearby
villages and the wider communities. There are therefore
at least two protective walls separating the militant
core from the outside world, which has so far frustrated
all the U.S.-Pakistani efforts to find the hideouts
of al-Qaeda leadership. Of course, no terrorist leader
or leadership is guaranteed to remain elusive and
to survive military and assassination operations
forever. Nevertheless, locating this leadership has
been unsuccessful due to these protective barriers.
This brings the discussion to
the significance of the training schools designed
to safeguard the future of a totalitarian regime.
In a passing remark, Arendt mentions the importance
of the "Ordensbergen for the SS troops,
and the Bolshevik training centers for Comintern
agents."(21) But
one must understand that in Germany, for example,
these elite centers were actually receiving students
from the newly "reformed" nationwide system
of the Gymnasium, and the latter, from preparatory
schools with the fundamental goal of early childhood
indoctrination. Essential for the nurturing of these
schools was the larger educational environment generally
known as the youth movements, themselves considered
by the officials as a limb (Gliederung)
of the National Socialist Party. The Führer
himself set up two separate branches, one for boys
(Hitler Jugend or "the
Hitler Youth") and the other for girls (Bund
Deutscher Mädel or "the League of
German Girls").(22) The eventual goal of the
Hitler Youth was to rear a violent and brutal force
for
the SA
and, after the Blood Purge (Die Nacht der langen
Messer or "Night of the Long Knives")
of 1934, for the SS and Wehrmacht. The subsequent
conjoining
of the military and police cultures occurred by the
promotion of Heinrich Himmler (as Reichsführer in
1936) to head both the SS and the Gestapo. In contrast
to this process, in the Soviet Union the
guardian forces of the revolution did not originate
from a military culture but came from the secret
police that employed the same techniques as the police
apparatus. The result, however, was the same. For
in this case, the Bolshevik schools for the future
Comintern members accepted applicants normally from
the most promising students of major Russian cities
and, in the same fashion, the leading loyalist Comintern
agents went on to join the Politburo, which had control
over the military. Hence, in both the German and
Russian models the military and police academies
were joined under a single bureaucracy for command
and control. Meanwhile, because party loyalty was
essential for longevity and expansion of total rule,
a major part of the propaganda and indoctrination
was aimed at the young children.(23) This educational
scheme exists, also, in the present Jihadist movement.
Worrying to the Western governments is the madrasah (ﻪﺳﺮﺩﻤ),
which nurture young children the extremist Islamic
texts in countries as diverse as Egypt, Pakistan,
England, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Algeria, and Indonesia.(24)
Financed by Islamic charities and organizations like
the Moslem World League and the Moslem Brotherhood,
these schools are designed with a curriculum carefully
crafted to instill absolute devotion and martyrdom
at a tender age. Al-Qaeda's arm, the International
Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,
with direct links to the Moslem Youth Organization,
is a fertile ground for financing and training a
new generation of warriors against modernity. Since
9/11, the United States and its allies have tried
to crack down on these schools. Yet this pressure
has in fact made the Wahhabi ideas more attractive
for Moslem youth than ever, and the Jihadists are
its main beneficiaries, as the National Socialists
and Bolsheviks were from their youth schools.
As Arendt's account of the totalitarian
characteristics appears to apply to the Jihadis,
it is important to ask whether Jaspers' description
of totalitarianism would also apply to them and,
if so, to what degree. At first glance it seems that
this is a complex question, for it involves Jaspers'
view in relation to both the Jihadist phenomenon
and Arendt's account of totalitarianism.(25) To somewhat
untangle this complexity from the outset without
compromising the two Existenzen, it must
be acknowledged that their historicities (Geschichtlichkeiten)
are quite similar. But, of course, similar does not
mean
the same. Both being born and raised during Germany's
stormiest era and witnessing the ominous rise of
Hitler with loathing and dread, their wartime anxiety
as to what a final German victory would bring upon
their lives and to the world, their fear and anguish
at the emergence of nuclear Stalinism in the heart
of Europe, and their affections for democracy and
the United States, were their paralleled living experiences.
However, their authenticity and their individual
proclivities, as well as one being a Jewish woman
while the other being married to one, and one choosing
to migrate to America and the other deciding to stay
at home, among other things, gave them separate and
unique historicities. When Jaspers states that "The
nature of total rule has been brilliantly analyzed
by Hannah Arendt, and I am following her exposition...,(26)
it is true to a large extent. A part of it, though,
is a reflection of his typical modesty as well as
of his solidarity with and sweet sentiment for the
one-time student and a lifelong friend, who occasionally
was his houseguest spending hours of communication
on issues in philosophy, religion, politics, education
and psychology. Of primary interest here are Arendt's
and Jaspers' uses of "terrorism," her usage
being exclusively in the context of domestic politics,
while his is seldom domestic and often international.(27)
In the second sense Jaspers says:
Totalitarianism...wants to coerce.
It seeks world peace by conquest.... Not a league of free
nations but total rule by terroristic subjection. The remaining
nations constitute the arena in which the two great principles
of freedom and totalitarianism contend.(28)
This context is relevant to al
Qaeda and other Jihadis, since the primary interest
of these groups is to terrorize the international
community much like the previous totalitarian regimes.
However, in the following instance his usage is domestic.
The form of totalitarian rule is terror...requiring
constant purges and persecution of alternating groups,
new power concentrations or class structures — in
the army, in police, in industrial management, in the peasantry,
in the party machine itself.(29)
In spite of its parochial elements,
this passage applies, also, to the Jihadis, since
they do terrorize individual members of their own
community for security reasons, and anybody suspected
of contemplating betrayal or desertion will be shot,
beheaded, or stoned to death. In this connection,
a former Iraqi insurgent follower of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
(ﻱﻮﺎﻗﺭﺯﻠﺍ ﺐﺎﺴﻤﻮﺒﺍ) is quoted as saying: "There
are only two ways to leave that organization....
You die in battle, or they kill you."(30) Obviously,
one's learning and telling other members of this
policy would make them so frightened that any inkling
of doubt about fighting for or remaining loyal to
the cause becomes unthinkable. In a "motivational" tape
al-Zarqawi himself has said: "It is either dignity
or the coffin."(31) Similarly, purges, persecutions,
summary interrogations, lack of due process, torture
and murder were common in the Third Reich and the
Soviet Union.
Yet, again, Jaspers' primary
concern is terrorism in an international context.
He speculates that, even in an event of a final democratic
victory over totalitarianism, the vanquisher would
have no choice but to rule by terroristic means.
A victorious totalitarian world would
stabilize its terrorism as the only means of quieting the
constant desperate discontent of men. But even if the free
world were to prevail in the last conflict – and
if a part of mankind should survive – the result
would be almost the same terrorism. For, in the course
of that war, the all-embracing power organization required
to fight the dragon would have made a dragon of the very
champion of freedom.(32)
First, in the event of a totalitarian
world conquest it is not too difficult to imagine
that the shadows of its internal terror will extend
more vigorously over the conquered peoples. Easier
still is to imagine how the international community
would be treated under ben Laden's Pax Islamica.
Historically, one need not be reminded of the anguish
and humiliation that the people of Czechoslovakia
experienced by the marching German troops in 1938,
the terror that the Polish population had to come
to grips with by the Russo-German non-aggression
pact of 1939, which led to the violent invasion of
that nation, the Blitzkrieg in the West that petrified
the Dutch, Belgian and French nationals in 1940,
or the Red Army's bloody suppression of the Hungarians
in 1956 and of the Czechs in 1968, and so on. In
each of these examples, the invader continued the
brutality and violence to frighten and control the
conquered people. In this case, wars of aggression
and terrorism, and national freedom and independence
from foreign tyranny, are interchangeable.(33)
Second, even if in an all-out
nuclear war a portion of the Western democracies
survive and be victorious, Jaspers is insisting that
the war machinery that had made this victory possible
would, like all bureaucracies, attain a life of its
own and, like an organism with the primary instinct
of self-preservation, resort to purging the undesirables,
liquidating the critics, and terrorizing the population
at large. In the wake of 9/11, many civil libertarians
are fearful of a shrinking of the Bill of Rights,
even though no nuclear world war has yet been waged
to be won or lost. Moreover, one ought not be forgetful
of McCarthyism in the face of the Soviet threat of
international communism, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
imperial presidency during World War II. These temporary
setbacks, relative to the dramatic scale of war as
speculated upon by Jaspers above, are drops in the
buck. As the old saying goes, "When there is
war, democracy has to wait!" In the above passage,
democracy may have to wait forever.
Third, regardless of which side
will be the winner of such a catastrophic nuclear
warfare, Jaspers seems to be suggesting that terroristic
dictatorship will persist because in the absence
of a balance of power, the victorious power will
impose its national, cultural and ideological prejudices
upon others. Freedom and tolerance, on the other
hand, are each other's eternal companions, for those
who are intolerant of other ways of life cannot let
others be free to choose the life that they want
to live. This is why, in spite of his boundless cosmopolitanism,
Jaspers' desire for the preservation of a pluralistic
global democracy compels him to oppose a single world
government.
Even the abstract illusion of a world
government set up by treaty, with a central police force
to keep the peace, could not fail at some time to lead
to the tyranny of those in power. Whatever combines all
forces in one hand will soon crush freedom.... [F]orce
must remain plural.... Peace lies in the freedom of
confederation....
Confederation can be made effective only by treaties between
nations living under free constitutions, with unlimited
freedom of speech and the desire to preserve that freedom
jointly.(34)
While the plurality of power
keeps the channels of international interests flowing
freely, the concentration of power in one person
or a single body of persons, which is symptomatic
of total rule, would keep these channels closed.
Contrary to pluralism, which is accommodative of
different needs and interests, totalitarianism imposes
conformity and uniformity and rejects authenticity
and individuality. Total rule hammers out policies
so intrusive that they would interfere with nearly
every aspect of one's public and private life. The
singularity of its principle finds expression in
its pointed apex. Philosophically, it is monistic,
holistic and dogmatic. The Oneness is the core and
immanent principle of totalitarianism. It is its
Absolute. Therefore the National Socialist slogan: "Ein
Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!" Alternatively,
in Arabic: "al-Tawhid" (ﺩﻴﺤﻮﺘﻠﺍ),
the unifying "Oneness" that
is normally reserved for Allah. For Jaspers, "Total
rule allows no parties. It is based upon a single
party.... The rule of the party knows no legal opposition....
Any division of power is abolished in favor of the
one guiding power of the party...."(35) Thus,
the National Socialist Party of the Third Reich,
the
Communist Party of the USSR or, say, the Hezbollah
(ﷲﺍ ﺏﺯﺤ "Party of God").(36) For Jaspers,
the single-party system is a concrete application
of
the very oneness that is intolerant of and opposed
to diversity and plurality, individuality and authenticity,
liberty and democracy.
In Jihadism, the God of Abraham
is as heavy-handed as He was in the Middle Ages.
Even though the Crusaders themselves were jihadis
of a sort, it is obvious that the countries of their
origin have since been changed drastically. The present
Jihadis, on the other hand, have gone back to live
in the medieval past and wish to think of themselves
as purists. Deeply disturbed by what they see as
modernity's deviation from the ways of Moses and
Jesus, groups of them have the conviction that it
is their duty to rid the world of the Jews and Christians
who are not truly Jewish or Christian. This attitude
leads to some serious questions. Because, whether
this is their true feeling or it is politically motivated
to endorse an indiscriminate killing of non-Moslems,
one may wonder why peoples of other cultures should
not be allowed to think and to live the way they
want. If God does indeed exist, why should it not
be left to Him to judge them? Perhaps the modern
Christian is in essence anti-Christian, like the
Jews in The Koran who, in reference to the
Scriptures, were easily swayed against Moses by worshipping
the
Calf and became sinful rebels against God.(37) So
whose earthly business is it to decide who are or
are not
the true followers of this or that prophet, and then
kill those whom he decides are not? There are still
other, more fanatical groups of Jihadis who would
kill any Moslem who is not a Sunni, or would kill
even any Sunni who is not a Wahhabi or a Salafi.
Generally, it is clear that absolutism, dogmatism,
fanaticism and self-righteousness breed extreme intolerance,
belligerence and oppression. By placing the monotheistic
God of their sect at the head of their relentless
acts of violence, the Jihadists are committing kidnappings,
suicide bombings, mass executions, and televised
beheadings in His name. Jaspers, as a theist, and
Arendt, as a Jewish thinker, never went far enough
to speak of monotheism critically in this context
and to address its intrinsic tendencies toward total
rule. Nevertheless, given their pro-democracy and
pro-Israeli sentiments, it is not hard to imagine
that had they lived to see the Jihadis' acts of terror
against the Jews, Israel and the United States, how
they would have reacted against their religious zealousness
and its application in their politics and violence.(38)
Incidentally, there are photographs of the Croat
Muslim SS units (12. Waffen-Gebirgs-Division der
SS Handschar)
engaged in the battlefield as well as their reading
the pamphlet, Islam und Judentum.(39) When
asked why an SS division had a religious basis, Himmler
replied
that "Islam [is] a good religion for warriers."(40)
In summa, the characteristics
of totalitarianism, namely, the centrality of Oneness
(One Goal, One Book, One Leader), totalistic ideology
with a universal mission, terrorism and brute force,
militarism and paramilitarism, propaganda and indoctrination,
youth schools, suicidal loyalty, purging and liquidating,
and secrecy and rituals, all and all, exist in the
Jihadi movement. Nevertheless, in spite of sharing
these characteristics with the totalitarian systems
of the past, this movement is still quite different
from them, and it is, in fact, different from any
global power that ever existed. This distinct difference
is due to its stateless status. To be stateless means
to lack at least one of the following essential elements
of the state, namely, land, population, government
and sovereignty. Within these elements, the state
may be defined as "a specific land inhabited
permanently by a population that is ruled by a government that has sovereignty."(41) First, in contrast
to the nation-states as well as national liberation
and separatist guerrilla combatants, the Jihadis
do not consider any particular piece of land to be
theirs, and in fact operate in the territories of
different countries. Islam (like Christianity) is
cosmopolitan, and the Islamic fundamentalism adamantly
rejects patriotism and nationalism, considering them
as forms of idolatry. Second, with regard to population,
the Jihadis live and blend with different peoples
but have no concentrated or specific population of
their own in a normal sense. Third, the Jihadis do
have a definite ruling body with organization and
hierarchy. Yet this is technically not government,
since their organization has no cabinet, lacks formal
governmental departments (or ministries), and functions
only as a loose paramilitary entity. Fourth, in lacking
land, population and government, they have also no
sovereignty. Nor do they believe in it. To them,
only Allah is sovereign! As a result of these considerations,
had they lacked only one of the four elements of
the state, they would have been stateless. But the
fact that they lack all the four makes them all the
more so.
Statelessness is not disadvantageous
for the Jihadis, as it has actually worked quite
well for them. Soon after the 9/11 attacks and before
and during the coalition campaign to topple the Taliban
regime in 2001, the American and British leaderships
repeatedly claimed that they were going to "smoke
the terrorists out of their caves," but in effect,
they smoked them into their caves or into new caves.
At any rate, the outcome of this low-intensity war
showed that a conventional military action, including
the preemptive option, which is as old as the history
of warfare, is ineffective in eradicating the Jihadis,
and the Afghan campaign has in fact made them more
insidious and pervasive in the world at large. True,
the return of wealthy ben Laden to an impoverished
Afghanistan in 1996 appeared at first to be beneficial
for both al Qaeda leadership and the Taliban government.
However, this once ostensibly mutual benefit now
appears not to have been absolutely essential for
the survival of either of the two, since al Qaeda,
as the presumed "parasite," has continued
its life after the collapse of its organic Taliban "host," and
the Talibans, too, have remained menacing to the
Karzai (ﻯﺍﺰﺭﺎﮐ) government to the extent of reducing
the capital Kabul virtually to a walled city-state.
As indicated above, unlike the national liberation
guerrilla fighters or separatist terrorist groups,
the transnational Jihadis make up a cosmopolitan
movement that is fighting for nothing less than an
Islamic world government. This ambition is unnegotiable
to them, and irreconcilable to all governments on
earth. However absurd this ambition, their stateless
quality has proven vital in their perpetual war against
the world. It has now become clear that Jihadism
is more than just terrorism. It is a movement and
a way of life. It has a peculiar mindset. Its global
dispersion and loose and semi-independent operational
cells are offset by the universality of their monotheistic
faith, singularity of The Koran, absolutism of the
code law, namely the shariah(ﻪﻌﻴﺮﺸ), and the hadith(ﺙﯾﺩﺤ), words and deeds of Mohammad. To give a glimpse
of this mindset, the following tales depict a day
in the lives of two jihadis, one in Afghanistan and
the other in Iraq.
In a low intensity battle zone
like Afghanistan, a Jihadi lives like Jesus, spending
much time in the wilderness, praising God, rejecting
the material world, and believing in afterlife and
the divine judgment. But unlike Jesus, who often
spoke of love and peace, the Jihadi is obsessed with
battling the infidels, killing them, and with being
a martyr and thus hastening to meet his Maker. Everyday
he wakes up at dawn, performs his ablutions and prays
toward Mecca. He does not know the meaning of the
Koranic words he is murmuring in his prayer, for
he speaks only Pashtun (ﻥﻮﺗﺷﭙ). He eats a moderate
breakfast (normally bread and cheese with tea), takes
his old AK-47, leaves his hut and walks or rides
on a donkey to the nearby village where he converses
with the elders about religious politics, righteousness
and falsehood, and at the end of each phrase he praises
Allah by pronouncing ﺭﺑﮐﺍ ﷲﺍ ("God is great!").
During today's conversation he is advised by a white-bearded
elder to take Hajji Mustafa's youngest daughter,
Zaynab, as a third wife. He utters, ﷲﺍ ﺀﺎﺸﻧﺍ ("God willing!"). At noon, he goes to the village
mosque, performs his ablutions and prays toward Mecca.
He does not know the meaning of the Koranic words
he is murmuring in his prayer, for he speaks only
Pashtun. There he listens carefully to a sermon in
Pashtun from the shariah on the female modesty
and chastity. He praises Allah! Soon after, he is
approached
by the mullah (ﻼﻣ, "village parson") who
gives him some afghanis for his weekly expenses
from the general fund collected from the faithfuls' zakāt (ﺖﺎﻜﺫ).(42)
So he praises Allah! In the nearby dusty alley, he
meets with five comrades to organize a
plan of action for the next day to bomb a gendarmerie
station seven leagues away. Their small number insures
that no enemy informer can learn their chain of command
or discover the whereabouts of their local commander.
After working out the details of tomorrow's attack,
they go to a secret location for target practicing
and bomb-making. Subsequently, they perform their
ablutions and pray toward Mecca. They do not know
the meaning of the Koranic words they are murmuring
in their prayer, for they speak only Pashtun. Then
they go hunting some snow-rabbits to grill for lunch.
Shortly after finishing their meal, they shake hands
and say "So long!" On his way back, the
Jihadi visits the flea market, haggles over prices
and at each interval he praises Allah! Near the sunset
he is back to his hut. He performs his ablutions
and prays toward Mecca. He does not know the meaning
of the Koranic words he is murmuring in his prayer,
for he speaks only Pashtun. Subsequently, he sits
and crosses his legs, murmurs some words of The Koran
without knowing what they mean. He then imagines
tomorrow's firefight, thinks about martyrdom and
praises Allah! And before sleep, he performs his
ablutions and prays toward Mecca. He does not know
the meaning of the Koranic words he is murmuring
in his prayer, for he speaks only Pashtun. He then
falls asleep and dreams in Pashtun, and sometimes
murmurs in Arabic without knowing what the words
mean.
In a high intensity urban war zone like Iraq's Sunni
triangle, the Jihadis live a faster life. Somewhere
in the city of Ramadi (ﻯﺩﺎﻤﺮ, population 350,000)
in the Anbar (ﺮﺑﻧﻋ) province a Jihadi rises up at
dawn, performs his ablutions and prays toward the
Mecca. He thinks he knows fully well the meaning
of the Koranic words he is murmuring in his pray,
for his mother tongue is Arabic. In spite of resenting
all kinds of patriotism, most of all Arab-nationalism,
he cannot help being proud of speaking the very words
that God revealed to the Prophet Mohammad through
the Angel Gabriel. He has come all the way from Tunisia
to perform his God-given duty of rushing the infidels
to Hell. After the prayer he joins his comrades who
share the same sense of duty. They are sitting on
the floor and eating bread and butter with dates
while sipping hot tea from small clear glasses. They
do not use silverware. They smash the butter and
spread it on the bread by their thumbs. They are
in the habit of placing a sugar-cubic in the corner
of their mouths and let the hot liquid dissolve it
down their throats. The ringleader is from Qatar,
one is a Sudanese, another is a Yemeni, and there
are two brothers from Syria. After finishing his
brief breakfast, the Jihadi gets up and praises Allah!
Others immediately respond by praising Allah! Then
they open their laptops to send email and visit some
Islamic websites. But he must run some errands. He
gets ready. Before leaving, he looks at his Kalashnikov
that is leaning against the wall. But today he does
not need to take it with him. He just picks up a
cellphone and leaves the safehouse. Out in the ally,
a group of barefooted children who always get fascinated
by his gear, see no Kalashnikov in his hand and no
ammo-belts hanging over his shoulders. But they still
show their admiration by shouting with one voice, "God
is great!" He reminds them of the insurgents
they see every night on Al Arabiya (ﻪﻴﺒﺭﻌﻠﺍ) satellite
TV. They want to be like him when they grow up. He
walks to the pickup truck that was donated to his
cell by a former Ba'athist captain who converted
to their movement and was recently killed by an Apache's
missile. He drives to the bazaar where he visits
with a teenage-member of a group that participates
in the insurgency. The boy's job is vigilantly putting
an ear on the asphalt to hear the coming of coalition
convoys so that when he is hearing them coming, he
would immediately yell, and in a person-to-person
chain of yelling they quickly relay the information
all the way to a roadside bomber who is waiting to
press the car-alarm remote control button to detonate
the improvised explosive device (IED). After a little
chat with the teenager, the Jihadi meets with a demolition
Saudi whose expertise is to equip cars for suicide
missions. Then the Jihadi goes back to his truck
and drives to the main mosque in downtown, walks
to its courtyard, sits by the turquoise-colored mosaic
pond and performs his ablutions by washing his hands,
face and feet with the clear water. He then notices
the muezzin standing on the minaret's high balcony
and, with both hands behind his ears, calling to
prayer. So he joins the mass and prays with them
toward Mecca. After the prayer he seeks and finds
his mentor, a zealot sheik, and humbly follows him
to a quite corner in the courtyard where under the
cool shadow of the great dome the sheik reviews his
previous lessons on the immortality of the soul and
divine justice. The sheik promises him that soon
after expelling the American infidels and before
destroying the Zionist state, the Shi'ites will be
dealt with, for the last time. In this connection,
the Salafi sheik stresses the Oneness (al-Towhid)
of God, the Oneness of the Word, and the necessity
of emulating the way of God's last and greatest Prophet.
The sheik concludes by reminding his disciple of
God's demand for self-sacrifice in Jihad against
His enemies. The Jihadi praises Allah! He then drives
back to the safehouse. He knows that this is his
last return to this place. He feels totally uplifted!
It is about two months now that he has been waiting
for tomorrow — the day to meet his Maker.
The above caricatures are not
entirely fictitious. Islam's rejection of tribalism
and modern nationalism is exemplified by the Battle
of Badr (ﺭﺪﺑ) in 624 in which Mohammad, as the commander
of the Moslem army, crushed the tribe of his origin,
the Quraysh (ﺶﻳﺭﻘ, Qhoraysh). Islam contends
that patriotism is instinctual, animalistic, and
totally
unworthy of true humanity; one fights only for Allah!
This is why the Jihadi is indifferent to the land
he is fighting on or to the inhabitants who may perish
in the crossfire. This radical cosmopolitan valuation
leads to the transnationality of membership in Jihadism.
The Afghan Jihadi above would have fought anywhere
outside of Afghanistan, should it have been a higher
priority for Islam and if he had the means to travel
there. In the second story, too, the Jihadis will
not be forced out of Iraq as long as there is some
support from the general population. To die out,
they must first lose the Arendtian "walls of
protection," but even then, they would go fight
elsewhere as opportunity arises in a seemingly unending
quest to defeat their enemies or to die as martyrs.
In either case, they think they will be the winner.
This transnational tradition, which was revived during
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, conforms to
the stateless characteristic of this movement. A
typical newspaper report: four men suspected of being
members of Jema'ah Islamiah were brought before the
court in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in December 2004. One
of them was from Egypt, two from Cambodia, and one
from Thailand. Their group, Umm Qura, was running
a Saudi-funded madrasah while the suspects
were plotting to car bomb the British Embassy.(43)
Even though the Jihadis' cosmopolitan
transnationality is a revival of earlier Islamic
history, their present statelessness is an entirely
new phenomenon. Islam's initial rise to power took
place in the Arabian Peninsula, and the consequent
Islamic Empire ruled over an extensive landmass.
The present stateless totalitarianism, on the other
hand, could not have been possible without modern
technology and modern means of transportation, telecommunication,
electronics, and cyber space. The Jihadi hijacks
an airliner to terrorize and to make a radical political
point, communicates by cellphone and emailing with
his fellow Jihadis, terrorizes on websites and propagandizes
via the satellite dish, and fights with remote-control
devices, missiles, automatic firearms, RPGs and IEDs.
Yet he is equipped with no tanks, has no air force,
and needs no navy. Since he lives on no particular
land, has allegiances to no nation, and is dependent
upon no economic infrastructure, he can dodge more
bullets and spend hardly any money. Because of his
deep desire for the ultimate self-sacrifice, he has
reduced himself into a mere cellular existence to
function in an organic landless totalitarian whole.
Because of his suicidal fanaticism for an ancient
religion and living in a stateless, spaceless condition,
the transnational Jihadi is an alienated contender
of globalization. He is living in and for a bygone
past, and in and for the future, which does not exist
by definition.
Historically, while the concrete
geophysical base was essential for the previous totalitarian
regimes to exist and thrive, this was also disadvantageous
for them since, as a confining factor, it defined
and exposed them to either direct military attacks
or indirect financial strangulation. It is well known
that fascism and National Socialism were in the end
defeated militarily on their own turfs. Likewise,
the Soviet Union was restricted to its physical boundaries,
and even though its superb nuclear and delivery systems
deterred any military assault on its territory, its
eventual collapse, nonetheless, had to do with a
physical geography that, under the pressure of a
costly arms race, eventually brought its demise by
braking down its infrastructural foundations.(44)
For being completely pervasive, Islamist totalitarianism
is free from any physical geographical restrictions
and is therefore uncontainable. The tactical necessity
of being inconspicuous and undetectable in an open-ended
stateless atmosphere has allowed them to be invisible.
Their operating in the shadows in more than sixty
countries across the globe – as diverse as
Algeria, Singapore, Albania, Oman, Kyrgyzstan, England,
Somalia, and Indonesia (with all its 17,000 islands) – protects
them from the traditional military and economic retributions.
This statelessness, in addition to Islam's strong
sense of spirituality and certainty of afterlife,
has given them an eerie, ghostlike existence. One
cannot simply defeat an enemy who is everywhere and
nowhere. Nor is it possible to make them disappear
when they are already invisible, and whenever they
become visible they blow themselves up into fiery
pieces and disappear again, only to reappear shortly
before vanishing in another blast, and so on. And,
all these occurring and recurring episodes are stemming
from a population boom with an inexhaustible supply
of appearing, disappearing, and reappearing guerrilla
fighters and suicide bombers. They are numerous,
ferocious, uncompromising, and live only to be martyred.(45)
This spooky threat becomes evermore
frightening when the weapons of mass destruction
are actually introduced to it. The odds support the
idea that this is inevitable. For as long as military
force cannot eliminate these phantom warriors, or
their leaders be not willing to compromise or negotiate,
or it be not possible to bribe their stoically Islamist
ethos, or it be not possible to blackmail the shadows
who have nothing to be blackmailed for, and given
their obsession with acquiring the nuclear weapon,
it is only a matter of time that al-Qaeda or its
like-minded terrorist allies attain and detonate
series of atom bombs in urban areas and destroy millions
of lives. When asked, "Do you think a terror
group actually has a nuclear device?" the director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), Mohammad el-Baradei (ﻰﻋﺪﺍﺭﺑﻠﺍ ﺩﻣﺤﻣ), replied: "Remember
after the cold war, there was a period of time when
lots of nuclear material was not adequately protected
in the former Soviet Union." And to the question, "Has
Al Qaeda acquired these weapons?," he replied: "We
know they were interested in acquiring nuclear weapons.
In Afghanistan there were documents looking at the
possibility of developing or acquiring a nuclear
device." Lastly, "Didn't you warn the [Bush]
administration about the disappearance of the explosives
HMX and RDX in Iraq, and do you know where they are?," el-Baradei
responded, "No, we don't. They are high explosives
that could be used for nuclear detonations — 350
tons were missing...."(46) With regard to al-Qaeda's
other possible sources of obtaining these weapons,
one must refer to the 600 tons of unsecured nuclear
materials in the former Republics of the Soviet Union.(47)
The real concern is not the so-called "dirty
bombs" that could radioactively kill only tens
or hundreds and scare millions, but it is the bombs
that are each capable of destroying an entire metropolis,
killing millions in a blink, and terrorizing the
rest of the world indefinitely. Yet, this could only
be the beginning. For instead of insurgent attacks
in one country exploding conventional bombs in several
towns, there could be atom bombs exploding in several
cities on a single day. Even worse, the petrified
leftover of the global village would be watching
on their nightly television news several mushroom
clouds devouring nations day after day. A terrorist
leadership, like al Qaeda's, would not hesitate to
unleash its suicide nuclear-bombers to annihilate
country by country and threaten to exterminate the
entirety of humanity, unless the surviving population
convert, genuinely and convincingly, to Wahhabism.
In fact, this threat of convert-or-die is reminiscent
of the medieval Islamic warriors who slashed their
way through numerous nations and established the
rule of fear-and-pray. In view of its bloody heritage
and recent revival, its weapon of choice has changed
from the curved Arabian sword and double-edged Damascus
daggers to the RPG and IED, and now to obtain and
to use the WMD. Words like "indiscriminate killing," "mass
homicide" or "genocide" do not mean
much to the Jihadi, who is absolutely convinced that
living on earth is a temporary test for one's virtue,
that the material life is inherently unclean, that
death is only a beginning, and that the ideal way
of dying is by martyrdom.
These looming clouds of a stateless
totalitarianism of the spirit make the Cold War era
look like the good ol' days. In that period, for
both the NATO and Warsaw Pact governments, the existence
of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed
with multiple nuclear warheads guaranteed a peaceful
coexistence under the dark shadow of the Balance
of Terror. The existence of Strategic Missile Forces
(SMF) was in fact a guarantor for deterrence through
the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
In this Cold War spirit, Jaspers stated that
Both Russia and America, the two great
powers with large stocks of atom bombs, can destroy each
other's cities and industrial centers with hydrogen bomb-carrying
guided missiles — each from her own territory or
bases.... But they cannot thus win a war, for each would
expose herself to the same destruction by an instantaneous
counterblow.(48)
This view was true and will
always be sound as long as the two parties are
rational and confined by international boundaries.
It is clear, however, that the MAD doctrine is
inapplicable to the mad Jihadi. He would in fact
welcome this mutuality, believing that his enemies
will be sent to Hell and he, himself, will be hasten
to Haven.(49)
As if suicidal nuclear bombing
is not horrible enough, suicidal bioterrorism
can be far more devastating. For, in this case,
the
Jihadi needs no bomb, no detonator, and no suicide
vest. All he needs to do is to shave-off his
beard, get himself infected with an incurable,
contagious
bio-cocktail (blended strains), and enter the
country of his most preferred choice, America,
as a tourist,
and associate with the people. By the time of
his death (normally a week or so), and the first
noticeable
symptoms of his victims, it is already too late
for a quarantine to protect the rest of the nation,
as an unknown number of recently infected individuals
show no signs of the disease while thousands
upon thousands show some symptoms and begin to
die.
When the news of this mysterious, incurable pandemic
is nationally broadcast, the panic will quickly
spread internationally. At this point, not only
the best of lovers begin to mistrust each other
about being a carrier of the disease, but also
nobody would want to be in public places. As
the death toll continues to snowball everywhere,
the
scared employees and managers do not show up
at work. This includes the healthcare professionals.
The closure of stores, markets, banks and postal
service, and stoppages of the food and fuel supply
will soon make the remaining population homebound.
Then, within a week death from a different source,
starvation will ensue. This will make some to
scavenge
or consume the fresh corpses in their neighborhood,
while others may resort to homicide for cannibalizing
their victims and extending their lives for a
few more days. Meanwhile, the international travelers
who had reached their destinations a week ago
are
already dead or dying, and the pandemic is now
killing the rest of humankind. The only unworried
individuals are the remaining Jihadis in rural
areas of the devastated global village who continue
to praise God, perform their ablutions and pray
toward Mecca until the disease reaches them and
they die, too. Strangely, while no human has
survived in this process, every human construct
has remained
intact.
Can this doomsday scenario
become real? Could a single bioterrorist bring
the human species into a complete extinction? Suppose
the answer is negative. Surely, though, if number
matters here, what if, instead of one, several
contaminated Jihadis simultaneously passed through
different international entry-points in the United
States and begun the epidemic in different locations.
Now, would this not be enough? It definitely would.
But, still, even one infected Jihadi could be enough
to bring about the human extinction. This, of course,
will depend on what the "bio-cocktail" really
is. To answer this, it must be realized that during
the Cold War the clandestine operations known as
Biopreparat, which spread across the Soviet Union
and employed well over thirty thousand biotechnologists,
managed to genetically alter and blend varieties
of viruses in order to make them considerably more
lethal and their vaccination impossible.(50) Some
of these bioweapons are reportedly so incredibly
powerful
that only one particle of them is sufficient for
the victim's quick death.(51) Consequently, their
contagious quality would wipe out the entire population
of
the primates on earth. Known as "black biology," the
production of these weapons included "binary" (bio-chemical
combinations) and the more exotic varieties like "designer" (combining
genes and viruses with grown organisms as well
as "chimeras," which mingle existing
agents), "neo-zoonotic" (animal viruses
genetically altered to become human), and "stealth" (unsymptomatic,
silent killers).(52) The mystery surrounding the
whereabouts of some of these bio-weapons in the
former Soviet
republics, in addition to the proximity of Afghanistan
to three of these republics and particularly the
intelligence and terrorist activities of al-Qaeda's
arm, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, in that
region, are reasons to fear. Equally troubling
is the question concerning the whereabouts of most
of those thirty thousand plus biotechnologists,
who became unemployed and needy in the wake of
the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union.
It is staggering that the totalitarian National
Socialist challenger of the international system
that was interested in biology primarily for racial
reasons was succeeded by a totalitarian Soviet
regime that took over this science from the ruins
of Berlin and weaponized it for the next world
war, and that now, from the remnants of this bio-weaponry,
a third totalitarian contender, al-Qaeda, is intending
to acquire and to use it in a jihad against humanity.
As suggested thus far, a resolution to defeat this
latest totalitarian force is not in sight. Jihadism,
because of being in a perpetual state of war and
continuously thriving and uncompromising, is bound
to obtain and use nuclear and biological weapons.
It has been frequently stated
that the human animal is the only species capable
of bringing itself to extinction by a world war.
The advent of modern science and technology and
their impact on weaponry and warfare have evoked
deep concern in peace activists and moral philosophers.
Perhaps several thousand years after a virological
catastrophe some advanced visitors to this planet
will be bewildered as to what happened here and
raise questions similar to the ones we ask when
staring at the ruins of the Incas. If the evolution
of the species has not been based on accidents
but it is pressed on by an infra-conscious force,
then this force, in the aftermath of the extinction
of present primates, will have to redirect its
creative energy toward another genus as it apparently
did when it found enough room for the mammals in
the aftermath of the failed dinosaurs. Experience
has shown that nothing remains unchanged and everything
has an ending. The weapons of mass destruction
may indeed bring an apocalyptic ending to the human
domination of this planet.
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