I have written on Barbara Tuchman’s great book “The Proud Tower”, by far a much better book than the “Gun’s Of August”. Tuchman’s analysis of 18th through 19th century anarchists is a must read for anyone seriously engaged in understanding the relation between anarchists and militant Islamists.
Anarchists always loved “the propaganda of the deed.” This was the satanic method of advertising their cause through violence. Hadn’t Chechen rebels murdered innocent Russian children, if only to prove a political, cultural point that they remember and resent Stalin’s genocide and mass deportations?
Islamic theology has no Incarnation. The implications for this are enormous. The only analogue that can adequately express God is POWER! Their is no concept or use of reason, nor ethics. Although I am simplifying a most difficult topic, there is a relation between anarchists and militant Muslims. They both believe that ATAVISM is the equivalent of GLORY. Perfect philosophical analogues as conduits for Islamic theology.
Which begs the question, what is Brevik? The monster that recently mowed down children and other innocents execution style at a vacation island in Norway.
Neither his manifesto nor his fetishes for medievalism really portray him as suffering from any disabling mental illness. I think the key to Brevik is found in Boston. Let me explain.
Richard Landes teaches at Boston University, he has written “Heaven On Earth: The Varieties Of Millennial Experience.” Landes believes that Breivik is similar to other catacylsmic apocalypticists. Whether they be Christian, Marxian, Islamists, Secularists, Nazi’s or even Environmentalists, the impluse is pervasive over time and throughout cultures. The impulse is of a piece within an arch.
These adherents firmly believe that the socio-political world is in huge tension, similar to tectonic plates about to crack. These people believe that if they can set off a small explosion in the right place it will unleash a far greater force. He was creating a spectacle, energizing a cause. By murdering, he believed that he was entering into the propaganda phase of his campaign.
This is exactly what al Qaeda hoped to achieve with 9/11. Don’t take my word for it, just read the New York Times Op-Ed pages in the days following 9/11. You will find a great article by Dr. Hernando de Soto, always on the short list for a Nobel, known for his defeat of the Peruvian terrorist organization ‘Shining Path.’ His article is titled ‘The Constituency of Terror’, he advised policy makers throughout Washington and London that 9/11 ‘was a giant political trap’.
What is it that the millennarians believe? They firmly hold to the position that all manner of redemptive possibilities immediately lie on just the other side of a crucible of unspeakable chaos and suffering. Identical ambition is embodied with Islamic terrorists.
During his arrest, he told the police that his actions were atrocious but necessary. Ditto for Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro and every other freak leader who subscribed to ‘the end justifies the means.’
Other than the brutal murders, having a mass murderer with pretensions of intellectual sophistication is unbearable.
What we witnessed with Brevik, was the embodiment of an impulse, far more psychological than social or political that defines a broader swath of the ideological spectrum of fringe groups from the European right.
Given the sheer impossibility of linking an Islamic God to the pretensions of ‘this world’ without an Incarnation, effectively linking cosmology to the transcendence of God, Islam is hindered to address its shortcomings embodying its affinity to moral relativism, the key to justify the violation of moral norms.
William Holland
William Holland 