Dan Simmons: The Time Traveller and the coming Islamic war

The below is a fictional piece, long winded, but certainly one of the most required short stories that should be read by all Americans, expecially those in political office.

The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a husky voice that he was a Time Traveler come back to talk to me about the future.

An exerpt from his followup piece:

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_05.htm

The Enemies of Civilization:

Lee Harris (Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason) almost certainly aren’t related, but the themes of their books are.

Lee Harris does not focus on Islam as the "enemy of civilization"—he’s wise enough to know that the enemies of civilization take many forms over the centuries—but he shows us that these enemies of civilization share one overriding commonality: they are transformational faiths and ideologies which must, invariably, see other human beings as means to their ends rather than as ends in themselves.

Not enough commentaries have been written about the absolute stupidity and uselessness of the 9/11 attacks—specifically about them being absolutely stupid and useless even from a sane global jihadist’s point of view. While an attack on the Pentagon might be rationalized in military or Clausewitzean terms, the more successful attack on the World Trade Center was totally devoid of real military or strategic value. There were no follow-up attacks. The attacks were part of no greater plan. The slaughter of 3,000 American civilians did absolutely nothing to further any jihadist "goals"—whether it be the removal of American troops from "sacred Muslim soil" or the weakening of the Arab regimes that were the jihadists’ real enemies.

Since humans are always in need of a metaphor or historical correlative in which to frame surprising new events, many Americans compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, but even those attempting that comparison must have known it was unhelpful in guiding our thinking. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 did follow Clausewitzean logic—wherein warfare becomes an "extension of diplomacy by other means"—and in the Japanese military’s attempt to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at harbor and thus neutralize our warmaking ability in the entire Pacific region for just long enough to allow the Japanese Imperial forces to occupy their objectives, expand their hegemony, and then sue for a separate peace with a weakened United States—the Japanese plan, although a long shot, had both military and strategic national policy merit. The central miscalculation—on the effect such an attack would have on the previously torpid American will to engage in warfare overseas—was profound (and fatal to the future of Imperial Japan and the Southeast Asian Coprosperity Sphere), but at least the military goals and execution were consistent with Clausewitzean realities. And the Japanese military follow-ups to the neutralization of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor—coordinated attacks from Southeast Asia through the Phillippines to Wake Island to Midway and beyond—were perfectly timed and, for a while, very successful. (And might have been completely successful had the American aircraft carriers been in port at Pearl Harbor during the attack—a mistiming amounting to less than 24 hours. Upon such near misses hinge the geopolitical fate of the world.)

The viciousness and senselessness and sheer "one-offness" of the 9/11 attacks against civilians in the World Trade Center and on the hijacked aircraft themselves guaranteed only that the United States would be roused again from its torpor and would be certain to use its military—the most powerful military in the history of the planet—against something and someone. From all rational perspectives, the 9/11 attacks were stupid and useless.

Except from the truly nonrational and mystical point of view of a transformational belief totally removed from reality.

In Civilization and Its Enemies, Lee Harris looks at the rise of Italian fascism in the 1930’s and explains why Mussolini’s destruction of any belief in the efficacy of the League of Nations and of the "international community" (that oft-cited but never truly sighted phantom) all but guaranteed another World War. This failure of all rational international efforts to prevent Italy from enacting its fascist fantasy ideology through the invasion of Ethiopia, which, like the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, had no rational Clausewitzean, foreign-policy, or military goals, but which rose instead from a collective fantasy Mussolini was sharing with the Italian people, cannot be understood through the Clausewitzean or other modes of reason in personal or international conduct, but only through acknowledging the power of transformative beliefs—

"The concept of belief , as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood, in order to avoid ambiguity. For most of us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us: I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. This belief is radically different from what might be called transformative belief—the secret of fantasy ideology. Here the belief is not passive but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, in which the make-believe becomes real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as "the power of positive thinking," or even the little train that thought it could. To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at his conclusion. Rather it means that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.

One doesn’t have to read William James to understand the terrible power and ubiquity of "The Will to Believe." In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan, the alien who is stranded on that distant moon and watching Earth through his telescopes is stranded precisely because his spaceship ran out of the most powerful fuel in the galaxy—UWTB—the Universal Will to Believe.

The transformative beliefs of the 20th Century that destroyed the Sonnenschein family’s future (and the Sonnenschein family itself)—fascism, German National Socialism, and Communism—could all be correctly described as collective fantasies that empowered millions of human beings through their collective and individual will to believe.

Lee Harris continues this discussion of groups that seem to rise "out of nowhere" (but which are actually imbedded deep in the cultural and religious and political underpinnings of the host society) and quickly, by historical standards of time, become compelling fantasy ideologies that sweep millions (or billions) into their folds and then often sweep the world into war—

"In even the most casual survey of history, one is repeatedly struck by the fact that certain groups do not seem to have the knack for realistic appraisal of themselves: they seem simply incapable of seeing themselves as others see them or of understanding why other groups react to them the way they do. A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classical examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic; Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire; Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.

Added to that—reads the text and subtext of the books I reported on in the April Message—is the current transformative-belief fantasy-ideology of resurgent Wahaabist radical Islam with its dream of reinstating the global Caliphate and its need for martyrs and martyrdom as instruments of that magical transformative belief.

Lee Harris’s essential point—not just about the current state of Islam but about all such fantasy-ideologies past and present, (whether the fantasy arises from a religious or a political will to believe, or, as in the case of Islam, from both at once)—is that the essential and central ingredient of any transformative belief is that other people must serve as means to a greater transformative end. In this real sense, such collective fantasies as Italian fascism, Soviet Communism, German Nazism, and Wahaabist Islam are required to violate (or ignore) the greatest single advance in humanism and Western thought (including Christian Western thought)—i.e. Martin Buber’s explication of the I-Thou relationship. (Simply put, that human beings must never be used as a means to an end, but must always be treated as ends unto themselves.)

This is why, during the month the "April 2006 Message from Dan" was online, in the midst of the sentencing part of Zacarias Moussaoui’s trial—when Mayor Giuliani and survivors and family members of those who died so horribly at the World Trade Center and Pentagon were testifying to the horrors and their emotions, Moussaoui could laugh, sneer, and say—"No pain, no gain."

The innocents who must die mean nothing—literally nothing—to the 9/11 hijackers or to the suicide bombers in Palestine or in Iraq or to the Al Qaeda operatives planning the next bombing in Madrid or London or elsewhere. It is their martyrdom—their magical transformation and their immediate ascendance into paradise—that is first and last in their minds, even unto the moment of impact or detonation, and if the Caliphate just happens to be restored through the transformative magic of their martyrdom or the Cause of destroying and supplanting Israel incidentally furthered, so much the better.

As Harris says in The Enemies of Civilization—"For us, the hijackings, like the Palestinian ‘suicide’ bombings, are viewed merely as a modus operandi, a technique incidental to the larger strategic purpose. Consider the standard Arab apologist’s ‘explanation’ of such acts: They don’t have jet fighters, so what other means do they have of fighting back? But even those who are most unsympathetic to the Arab fantasy-ideology look upon the suicide of the hijackers, like that of the Palestinian terrorists, as merely a makeshift device, a low-tech stopgap, and nothing more. In our eyes, these attacks represent simply Clausewitzean war carried out by other means—in this case by suicide.

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide plays an absolutely indispensable role. It is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into the act of martyrdom— martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to it.

How hard it was after 9/11 (and 7/7 in London) for anyone in the non-Islamic West—either the decriers or the apologists for these acts of barbarism—to understand that the goal of the attacks was not the destruction of the World Trade Center towers or of the Pentagon or the London Underground, but was the transformative acts of the suicides themselves. The ensuing destruction and death—including what bin Laden later acknowledged was the surprising collapse of the Twin Towers themselves—amounted to a bonus.

Al-Qaeda did not bring down the towers. The nineteen hijackers did not bring down the towers. God brought down the towers.

Elsewhere in The Enemies of Civilization, Lee Harris suggests that the true enemies of civilization tend to be…intellectuals. Those individuals within even the most ethically advanced societies who see things in terms of black and white, those men and women who are incapable of pragmatism and compromise but who deal in absolutes. They are the men and women, so frequently the privileged elite in each era, who see the need to transform the world for the better. And the instrument of that transformation is, invariably, blood and more blood.

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