Abdullah Muhammad embodies the radicalization threat that many in the US national security apparatus most fear: a white American who rejects the society in which he was raised and becomes an admirer of its most feared enemy, Osama bin Laden. It is easy to devise psychological theories to explain his journey to extremism. Could his abusive upbringing have produced a rage that was then projected onto American society as a whole? Was his only way of escaping drug addiction to structure his life according to absolute moral precepts, a Manichean mind-set vulnerable to a fanatical belief in violent struggle between forces of good and evil? Did his childhood experiences give rise to a failure to adjust to reality, a relentless longing for a utopia where his life’s struggles could be redeemed? Maybe those were parts of the explanation. But remaining on a psychological level leaves out the bigger question of why his ideological journey took the particular form it did. In recent years, this question has been explored in theories of radicalization that attempt to explain the relationship between ideology and violence; those are examined in detail in the following chapter. In fact, the radicalization literature fails to offer a convincing demonstration of a causal relationship between holding an ideology and choosing to use violence. Nevertheless, within the logics of culturalism and reformism there is a shared mechanical view of the effectivity of ideologies. Extremist ideas—whether expressed in the classical Islamic texts or in Islamist discourse—are regarded as, in themselves, the ultimate cause of violence. The metaphors used to describe the impact of extremist ideology are illustrative: ideology is a “conveyor belt” that propels its adherents toward violent action, a “funnel” down which they slide toward terrorism, or a “virus” that infects those with whom it comes into contact.
Abdullah Muhammad was not directly involved in violence himself. He published online material that could be interpreted as a threat of violence against fellow citizens. The case raised the issue of whether Abdullah Muhammad’s online statement about the creators of South Park amounted to a threat that had the effect of undermining their right to free expression. There was certainly a case to answer. On the other hand, it is not hard to find other US Web sites that praise murderous violence without facing criminal sanction: the “Army of God,” for example, a Christian antiabortion group based in Virginia, openly praises the murder of abortionists as “justifiable homicide.”10 Yet in the prosecution’s submission, there was a different argument running alongside this legal question: what was at stake was not just an individual making a threat against someone perceived to have insulted his religion but an attempt to prevent a truth about Islamic ideology from being spoken. In his sentencing statement, federal prosecutor Neil H. MacBride centered his argument upon the following point:
The role of Muslims in the United States, the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, and the existence of links between Islam and terrorism are issues of major public importance. Yet anyone choosing to address them publicly must carefully weigh the risk of being marked for death by the likes of Morton for saying or writing something perceived as insulting while doing so. Left unchecked, that risk will hamper public policy decision making by dampening public discourse over some of the most consequential issues of our age.11
Abdullah Muhammad’s actions, in this view, presented the danger that America would stop speaking of the possibility of links between Islam and violence. He was not just threatening violence against those perceived to have insulted Islam but seeking to intimidate those who wanted to publicize Islam’s violent nature. This was his real crime, the basis for his long sentence, and why his online activity was considered completely differently from non-Muslim terrorist organizations that promote violence on the Internet without facing prosecution.
Macbride must have been aware that the episode of South Park was hardly an attempt to explore questions of Islamic theology and political violence. And there was no other evidence to ascribe to Abdullah Muhammad the wider motive of seeking to hide Islam’s alleged violent nature. But MacBride was following a generic war on terror paradigm in which ideology and violence are seen as functionally interdependent. In this view, Islamic ideology was the force that radicalized Abdullah Muhammad to make threats of violence, and the purpose of those threats was to prevent discussion of precisely this radicalizing force. Having presented the case as involving basic questions of Islam, it naturally followed that for Macbride the trial was a part of the ongoing clash of civilizations. He continued:
Determined enemies are striving through all means to destroy the West and snuff out our traditions of free thought, free speech, and freedom of religion. If they succeed, we will be enslaved … Failing to punish Morton in a manner that recognizes the true magnitude of his crimes will be—in the words of Mark Steyn—just another shuffling step into a psychological bondage of our own making.
The reference to the neoconservative Mark Steyn—who has written that Europe is being subjected to an Islamic “recolonization” due to its falling fertility rate12—indicated that a far Right decline of the West mythology was being drawn on.
But the larger problem with a paradigm that sees political violence as the mechanical product of an alien ideology is that it fails to comprehend the part played by Western states themselves in constituting the global conflict between the West and radical Islam. The only way to explain any one party’s behavior in the conflict is by analyzing its interaction with the other, and how each interprets the other’s actions. Abdullah Muhammad accepted at face value the official narrative that radical Islam was an existential threat to an American society he had come to despise, and he acted on that basis. He did not need an Islamist ideology to radicalize him into thinking the West was at war with Islam; the war on terror’s own militarized identity politics was enough. His definition of Islam as a violent rejection of Western values was ultimately derived from the very culturalist ideologues who were cited in his prosecution. He merely wrenched the labels of good and evil from the official war on terror discourse and inverted their positions. The technocratic, gentrified politics of post–cold war liberal societies, which no longer offered ideological alternatives promising to remedy the world’s injustices, had nothing to offer Abdullah Muhammad, but in his fringe version of Islam he could find a total opposition to global capitalism and a community of fully committed radical believers.
Antitotalitarianism
The war on terror paradigm that makes ideology the root cause of political violence derives from the cold war theory of totalitarianism, which presumed a similar direct causal connection between ideology and the repressive practices of political control. To understand the modes of thinking that have been central to war on terror analyses of extremism and radicalization, it is instructive to begin by tracing the contours of cold war antitotalitarianism. Like today’s liberal analysts of extremism, liberal theorists of totalitarianism constructed political threats as external ideological intrusions into an essentially benign Western cultural space, failing to acknowledge their own positioning as participants in violent political conflicts. Ideologies were thought of as sets of alien ideas that by their very nature gripped followers and produced a fanatical mind-set that led mechanically to violent modes of politics.
During the cold war, the violence of ideology was seen as the aspiration to control every aspect of life, down to the very thoughts of citizens—a total approach to government that communism was meant to share with fascism. In both cases, the origins of state political repression were seen as lying in unrestrained ideological thinking and contrasted with Western societies, in which Lockean liberalism was held to have inspired postideological forms of government that protected basic freedoms. The American proposition of liberal democratic capitalism positioned itself between twin extremes of right and left, which shared a commitment to ideologically driven totalitarian government. The slogan Les extremes se touchent (The extremes meet)—originally a middle-class polemic against the moral corruption of both upper and lower classes in prerevoluti
onary France—became a staple formula of cold war discourse. The political spectrum was not a single line but one that looped round, so that communism was paradoxically closer to nazism than liberalism. In The Vital Center Arthur Schlesinger wrote that the
integrity of the individual [was] the unique experience and fundamental faith of contemporary liberalism [and] will continue to be under attack from the far right and the far left … The totalitarian left and the totalitarian right meet at last on the murky grounds of tyranny and terror.13
On this basis, the energies unleashed in World War II against Nazism could thereafter be redirected to the cold war fight against communism, as former ally the Soviet Union was rebranded an enemy as monstrous as Nazi Germany.
The formula of antitotalitarianism did designate real differences between systems where social and political freedoms were more or less available. But the straight lines it tried to draw between ideology and practices of political control were too neat and convenient. It was mistaken to think of even the most politically tolerant of societies as somehow free of their own ideological drives. There is perhaps nothing more ideological than claiming to be postideological. As the theorist Terry Eagleton has noted, the cold war use of the concept of ideology was inconsistent: it stood for both a passionate, rhetorical, fanatical, pseudoreligious way of seeing the world as well as for a schematic, coldly rational conceptual system which seeks “to reconstruct society from the ground up in accordance with some bloodless blueprint.”14 Certainly the West’s slogans of political tolerance bestowed an aura of innocence on liberal states, shielding their own ideological practices from scrutiny in the name of defeating the greater evil of Soviet totalitarianism. At least as much evidence could be gathered to suggest that what led societies to fall under systems of total political repression was not the ideas of the party in power but the material circumstances that prevailed there. Was not totalitarianism in Europe inseparable from the new forms of mass warfare that unfolded on the continent during the twentieth century?15
The most elaborate attempt to develop a liberal analysis of totalitarianism for the cold war was produced by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in her three-volume The Origins of Totalitarianism. The books contain within them two countervailing arguments. Written between 1943 and 1946, volumes one and two held that the “conditions of possibility” of the Nazi “total” state lay in European colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the plantocracy racism of the US South. Volume three was written in the years just before the entire series publication in 1951, by which time the cold war had begun and Arendt had shifted her attention from Nazism to the Soviet Union. At this point, the analysis changed course. Political theorist Corey Robin writes that by 1949, in Arendt’s writing “racism merged with Marxism, Auschwitz with the Gulag, and Fascism morphed into Communism.”16 Totalitarianism was now taken to be a radically novel form of government that made terror its organizing principle and sought to remake reality in accordance with the logic of a ruling ideology. It aimed at accelerating history’s natural laws, such that human beings became raw material for the forces that ideology revealed. The total state was made possible by modern “mass society” in which the space for a meaningful and thoughtful public life collapsed, leaving the individual unusually vulnerable to being swept up in great ideological causes that rendered him subsumed to the party. These causes had seized power in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but they were a general threat in all modern societies. Rather than locating totalitarian rule within the West’s history of racism and imperialism, as volumes one and two had implied, the third volume referred to its linkage to “Oriental despotism,” which had, Arendt said, always rested on “the mass man’s typical feeling of superfluousness,” a feeling long-standing in India and China but only appearing in modern Europe with the industrial era’s atomization, breakdown of social stratification, and masses of lonely individuals.17 In this way, the concentration camps were, on some deep level, externalized from the history of the West and viewed as resulting from the corruption of European politics by an alien form—thus warding off the dreadful thought that the Holocaust was due not to the breakdown of Western modernity but to the culmination of its inner logic.18 Her model for this process of alien corruption was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. European colonizers, confronted by the “savagery” of the colonized population, degenerated into “savages” themselves, setting a precedent for the would-be totalitarian leaders of the European “mob.”19 Thus, the origin of “our” savagery lies in “their” culture; Western civilization can be corrupted by the barbarism of others but does not give rise to any distinctive barbarism of its own. The experience of World War II had led Arendt to write one of the century’s greatest analyses of racism; the experience of the cold war had taken her in the opposite direction.
Arendt was keenly aware of the ways in which democracies themselves could take on some of the characteristics of mid–twentieth century totalitarianism. And her analysis of European colonial expansion remains a forceful demonstration of the ways in which imperialist mass violence had a tendency to boomerang back to the metropole. But the more widely read third volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism offered her contemporary readers—and a good many war on terror propagandists—a way to avoid these issues by falling back on the more comforting formula that political violence was always the natural product of alien ideologies. In a 2004 New York Review of Books essay by Samantha Power, later a special assistant to President Obama and a member of his National Security Council, The Origins of Totalitarianism is offered as a model for explaining “Militant Islam.” Arendt’s “wisdom for today’s dark times” consists in recognizing that if “one could pierce the veil of mystery that shrouds al-Qaeda, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, one might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with totalitarian movements.” Of course, the lessons contained in Arendt’s account of imperialism in Volume two are ignored. Power mentions in passing Arendt’s argument that overseas empires generate racism at home but does not apply this insight to today’s America.20
The general trend among cold war theorists of totalitarianism was to neglect material circumstances and specific political contexts, preferring to deduce the existence of total political repression a priori from an “ideological original sin.”21 In Karl Popper’s two-volume treatise The Open Society and Its Enemies, written during World War II but going on to become another key text of cold war antitotalitarianism, he applied this approach on a grand scale. Totalitarianism was rooted in a purely intellectual error: the doctrine that a chosen people would inherit power according to an inevitable process laid down by the laws of history. In Marxism, the proletariat is the chosen people destined to inherit the earth; in fascism, it is race that plays the same role. “Both theories base their historical forecasts on an interpretation of history which leads to the discovery of a law of its development.”22 What matters is the underlying template that is essentially the same in each case and which always leads to violence and intolerance when allowed to influence society. Such thinking ultimately derives from Plato and takes its modern form with Hegel, who is not “to be taken seriously” and has “helped to produce two world wars so far.”23 By implication, German Idealism took a wrong turn after Kant, and all continental philosophy derived from it is suspect. An open society needs to protect itself against the threat of such “historicist” ideologies that view history as following inexorable laws of development. Paradoxically, it needs to proclaim its pluralism and tolerance of different worldviews yet prevent a historicist worldview from taking hold of society. Popper turned to an odd metaphor in his attempt to resolve this paradox: we should let the “searchlight” of normal historical interpretation “play upon our past” and “illuminate the present by its reflection,” but historicism, which is an ideology “of a peculiar kind,” “may be compared to a searchlight which we direct upon ourselves,” and which therefore “makes it difficult if not impossible to see anything of our surroundings.”24
In a
frequently quoted footnote, he argued: “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law.”25 No doubt Popper was thinking of the failure of Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic to prevent the rise of Nazism, and wanted liberal societies not to repeat the mistake of indulging ideological enemies. But he ignored the ways in which the coming to power of fascism in Europe was also enabled by the desire for strong opposition to communism. Fascism acquired respectability as a counterweight to Bolshevism for many liberals among the Italian and German governing elites.
In Popper’s work on scientific discovery, the exceptions to laws were at the center of his model. If an empirical exception to a claimed universal law could be found, that was enough to claim it as false. It was the possibility of such falsification that distinguished genuine science from mere metaphysics. In his political work, the exception to the laws—the moment when the usual rules of pluralism are suspended in the name of defense against an ideological enemy—is accorded a mere footnote rather than being taken as the starting point for a theoretical elaboration. Like other cold war theorists, Popper held that liberal societies had to know when to break their own rules of tolerance if they were to defend themselves against the intolerance of totalitarian ideologies. But the possibility that such a moment of emergency could itself become permanent and be normalized as a paradigm of government—what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”—was not explored.26 The possibility that his antitotalitarianism could itself foster unexpected forms of totalitarian rule was alien to Popper’s thought. Cited whenever cold war and war on terror liberals seek to justify the adoption of illiberal measures, his tolerance footnote was thus the backdoor by which political repression could slip unnoticed into an open society.
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 12