Totalitarianism and the Role of Intellectuals

During the long months of buildup to the war in Iraq, President Bush never did succeed in convincing most of the world of the justice or logic of what he proposed to do. Many people freely granted that, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States had solid reasons to wage war on Al Qaeda. But it was not immediately clear to many why an attack on Saddam Hussein would represent any kind of setback to Al Qaeda. The White House tried to suggest that the highjacker Muhammad Atta had met in Prague with an agent of Saddam, and that Saddam's Baath regime had conspired in Al Qaeda's September 11 attacks. Not even the tiniest evidence to back that suggestion was ever found (though who is to say what will turn up in the future?). And the failure to confirm the story about Prague and the secret meeting managed only to make the White House appear to be clutching at straws in a desperate effort to manipulate public opinion.

According to the conventional wisdom on the Middle East, Saddam's nationalist Baath regime and Al Qaeda's fundamentalist theocratic movement never had much in common, anyway, and were extremely unlikely to cooperate. But then, if the Baath and Al Qaeda were enemies more than friends, what could account for Bush's insistence on war against Saddam? And why the rush? Many people did feel honestly perplexed. Different theories were proposed. Perhaps the White House was driven by mysterious right-wing ideologies, or by an unthinking hotheaded zeal, or by imperialist greed. The impending war seemed, in any case, unjust and illegitimate, and doubly so because of the failure to win approval from the United Nations.

Worse, many people figured that Bush's war was only going to increase the dangers of terrorist attack. Tracking down Al Qaeda was hard enough already, and war against Saddam, by diverting energy and government resources, was only going to make it harder. Outraged Muslims around the world, indignant at an American attack on a Muslim country, were going to enlist in Al Qaeda's ranks, and the terrorist army was going to grow, instead of shrink. Such were the arguments. They were raised in the Senate, in the streets, in the news media, and in countries around the world. Bush answered feebly, or not at all.

And yet, the September 11 attacks did present a good reason to go after Saddam Hussein, at least in my own estimation. But in order to show how I arrive at that conclusion, I have to turn away from the Middle East of right now and glance, instead, at another time and place, which is the Europe of World War I and afterward.

World War I was the original sin in modern civilization. The war killed nine or ten million people, and killed something else as well. During the 19th century, many people around the world earnestly believed that mankind had discovered the secret of steady human progress, and that secret was the culture of liberalism -- the culture of rights, rationality, and innovation, which had arisen in Europe and spread to other places. But nothing in the simple liberal optimism of the 19th century had predicted, or could have predicted, an event as horrible as World War I. And, in the atmosphere of panic and disillusionment that followed the war, a series of radically anti-liberal rebellions broke out -- rebellions that dreamed of overthrowing liberal society and replacing it with something different, rocklike, solid, and permanent.

The first of those rebellions was left-wing -- the Communism of Lenin and Stalin. Then came a series of right-wing rebellions -- the Fascism of Mussolini, the Fascism of Franco, the Nazis, the Iron Guard in Romania, the extreme right in France, and so forth in every corner of Europe and in many other countries around the world.

Each of those movements differed dramatically from the others, and especially the left-wing rebellions from the right-wing rebellions. And yet, all of the movements shared some fundamental ideas and instincts. All of them looked on liberal civilization as a fraud and a menace. All of them proposed a paranoid interpretation of world events, which, in each case, followed the general contours of the story that you can see recounted in the Book of Revelation. In that story, there is a virtuous people of God. The people of God have come under assault from enemies within and enemies without, and the enemies have to be resisted. There is to be a war of extermination against the enemies within and without. And, at the conclusion of the terrible war, a new society will arise, as solid as a rock, a perfect and unchanging society, cleansed of inner contradictions and dissension -- the kind of society that is described in the Book of Revelation as the thousand-year reign of Christ, or the millennium.

Each of the rebellious anti-liberal movements assigned different names to the sundry elements in that story, such that the people of God became "the proletariat," or "the Aryan race," or the "Warriors of Christ the King." And, in that vein, each of the post-World War I movements described the new society of the future in a different way. To the Bolsheviks, the new society was going to be almost strictly modern, without ancient elements -- a leap into the sci-fi future, under the name of Communism. To the right-wing movements, the new society was going to be a leap into modernity, which, at the same time, was going to be a leap into the ancient past. The new society was going to be the Roman Empire dreamed of by Mussolini and by Hitler (the Third Reich was a reference to the First Reich, which meant Rome). It was going to be a return to the Catholic Crusade of medieval times, as dreamed of by Franco -- "the new Middle Ages." In any case, the new society was going to be a utopia, with no inner contradictions and none of the turmoil of liberal civilization.

Each of these movements was, in Mussolini's word, totalitarian. And, during those same years when the anti-liberal movements took root in Europe, a bitter disillusionment with liberal society swept the Muslim world, as well. The totalitarian impulse began to grow there, too, at a slightly slower pace. Communism was the first of the totalitarian movements to prosper in the Muslim countries -- and it prospered noticeably, too, such that, in the Iraq of the 1950s, to cite a pertinent example, the Communist Party came to dominate the Iraqi "street." And yet, the Muslim world also generated its own variation on the totalitarian impulse.

That idea, the Muslim twist on Europe's totalitarian concept, arose in the 25 years after World War I and can be summarized this way: Liberal civilization is a fraud and a menace and is the source of the world's unhappiness. Liberal civilization is subverting the Muslim and Arab worlds from within (in the form of liberal Muslims and the indigenous Jews of the Muslim world) and is attacking from without (in the form of Zionism and Western imperialism). The subversions and attacks are cosmic in character. They threaten to destroy the Arab and Muslim world, chiefly by invading the Arab and Muslim mind. The subversions and attacks should be resisted with a revolutionary movement that will resurrect the glories of the Muslim Caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world, except in a thoroughly modern version. And the proposed new glorious society, cleansed of Jews, imperialists, and foreign bodies generally, will be perfect, total, and permanent. A totalitarian society, in a word.

Muslim totalitarianism emerged in two principal forms. Those were the Islamists -- the politicized Islamic fundamentalists in the style of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1928). And there were the Pan-Arabists, whose most radical or totalitarian wing was the Baath Party, founded in Damascus in 1943.

The Islamists and the Baath differed in several ways. The Islamists dreamed of resurrecting the seventh-century Caliphate by reinstating Koranic law, or Shariah. The Baathists dreamed of resurrecting the seventh-century Caliphate by reinaugurating the Arab empire in a more secular version, though with the Koran as its spiritual core. The Islamists were theocratic and the Baathists were semi-secular. Those differences have led the Islamists and the Baathists into mutual massacres and persecutions over the years -- hence, the conventional wisdom about irremediable hatreds between Al Qaeda and Saddam's Baath Party. And yet, the two movements have not only pictured the same seventh-century goal but have pictured the same war on the way to that goal -- the war against liberal values, against Western imperialism, and against the Jews and Zionism.

The totalitarianism of Europe always ended up a cult of death; and the same has been true of the totalitarianism of the Muslim world. The branches of Muslim totalitarianism, the Islamists and the Baath, have massacred, between them, many millions of people, principally during the last 20 years. Those massacres have gone pretty much unremarked in the rest of the world -- unremarked partly because the Western world has been Eurocentrically absorbed in its own concerns; partly because the Western cult of Oriental exoticism excuses anything that is done in the "East" in the name of local color; and partly because of an anti-Semitic instinct, which has allowed people all over the world to imagine that, if millions of Muslims have been massacred and large parts of the Muslim world have sunk into horrible tyranny, the Jews and the crimes of the tiny Jewish state must surely be responsible. And yet, even if the larger world has managed to avert its eyes, mass death in the Muslim world has been all too real -- in the Iran-Iraq War, in Saddam's campaigns against the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, in Sudan's civil war, in the Algerian civil war, and so forth.

It should have been obvious all along that, if Muslim totalitarianism in its two principal forms was murdering people on a 20th-century European scale, sooner or later the murders were going to spread outward. And so they have. That was the meaning of the September 11 massacres -- killings that were committed for no rational reason at all, except to pursue the totalitarian cult of death. And yet, to many of us in the Western countries, such a likelihood had not been obvious, and the terrorist attacks took us by surprise.

From the perspective of my analysis, the war against the Baath in Iraq and the larger war against terror were always one and the same. For the problem, as it came to light on September 11, was larger than a single underground organization -- larger than Osama bin Laden and his coterie. The problem was posed by the wave of Muslim totalitarianism as a whole, of which bin Laden and Saddam were, both of them, exemplary representatives -- a problem generated by a larger culture of paranoid political worldviews and millenarian goals and a love of mass death. The solution to that problem can only be to roll back Muslim totalitarianism, not just in one or two of its strands, but as a whole. That is why, from my perspective, it has made perfect sense to follow the war against the Taliban (who are radical Islamists) with the war against the Baath in Iraq -- to set out to undo the several units and divisions of the larger totalitarian movement, one after the other, with the ultimate goal of undoing the culture of Muslim totalitarianism altogether.

And how can the totalitarian culture be undone? Only in one way, which is by building up its opposite, namely, a liberal civilization, a society based on rationality and tolerantly divided into separate spheres of church and state, public and private, the state and the economy, the society and the individual, each with its own rights. For there is only one way to defeat a rebellion against liberalism, and that is to ensure the victory of liberalism. And how to do that? I have supported the American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Still, military action cannot be the ultimate response. For the only genuine victory consists of persuading millions of people who cling to totalitarian ideas to abandon those ideas, in favor of other, more liberal ideas -- ideas that are not dominated by paranoid visions of the world and that do not lead people to yearn for mass death. The ultimate response to totalitarianism has got to be, in short, a war of ideas -- with military action only as an emergency measure or to set the stage for a more effective battle of doctrines.

That is my analysis. The analysis invites all sorts of questions. A number of people have suggested that it mirrors the neoconservative view in Washington, which is taken to be a devastating criticism. But my analysis mirrors the neoconservative view only in one respect. The neoconservatives do seem to have arrived at a genuinely ambitious program for the Middle East, and I congratulate them on the grand scale of their concept.

But the war of ideas seems to play a fairly small role in the neoconservative outlook, judging from Washington policy. Bush has done very little to promote liberal ideas in his own oratory and diplomacy. Instead of mounting a sustained campaign of ideas around the world, his administration has done little more than launch a program of Madison Avenue propaganda -- a laughable response to something as profound as Muslim fundamentalism. Does that dismissive attitude toward the war of ideas reflect the neoconservative instinct? I can imagine that it does. One of the intellectual sources of neoconservatism lies in the political tradition of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, which emphasizes the community of the intellectual elite and the reign of esoteric or concealed ideas, unavailable to the unwashed masses. That sort of impulse comports all too easily with a main foreign-policy tradition of the Republican Party, too -- the political tradition of trying to manipulate public opinion instead of trying to persuade, a tradition of the covert, as in the huggermugger policies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In any case, the Bush administration's failure to take up the war of ideas flies in the face of my own analysis of the totalitarian impulse and its current Muslim manifestation.

My own views derive from sources that have very little in common with the inspirations of Leo Strauss and the conservative political tradition in America. My argument draws on Albert Camus and other liberal writers from the mid-20th century, in their campaign against totalitarianism. And I draw some arguments from André Glucksmann in France, whose own view owes something surely to Karl Popper, the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies. I point in my new book to Léon Blum, the French Socialist, as one of my political heroes. Where does that leave me in regard to the heirs of Leo Strauss? We are ships passing in the night, I judge.

Analyses like mine have also been criticized for harboring a grandiose naiveté -- a liberal zealotry, which is all too easily converted into an anti-liberal zealotry. I can see the point in that criticism, given that, in an earlier generation, some of America's fiercest liberals and leftists ended up cheering on the mad American plunge into Indochina, on grounds of desperado anti-totalitarianism. People do wonder if the current struggle against Muslim totalitarianism could end up in a similar disaster. It could. We are well advised to worry about such a possibility. "Be radical, be radical, be not too damned radical," Walt Whitman said; and I am definitely a disciple of Whitman.

Still, zealotry of that sort is a prospective danger, which we should guard against. But meanwhile, we face an extreme danger that is already at hand. It is the danger of a totalitarianism in the Muslim world that, in generating a cult of death, has already attacked American society and will very likely stage further attacks, perhaps more deadly than before, unless we can somehow undo the culture that leads people to dream of committing random massacres.

The overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan represented a valuable first step in the effort to undo those movements (though the Bush administration, in failing to transform Afghanistan into a model of how a totalitarian country can profitably turn in liberal directions, has lost one more opportunity, the biggest of all so far, to wage the war of ideas). The invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Baath Party, together with the defeat of the Iraqi militant group Ansar al-Islam (which has, in fact, maintained an alliance with Al Qaeda), represent a valuable next step. There will have to be further steps, many of them, one after the other.

But because the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers (and, worse, its anti-neoconservative advisers) have placed such little emphasis on matters of persuasion and ideas, those other steps will have to depend on what other people do, not the Bush administration but the rest of us, beginning with the liberal intellectuals of the Western countries and the Muslim countries alike. We intellectuals will have to put up our own fight against Muslim totalitarianism, just as liberal intellectuals did in the past against Fascism and Stalinism. But, I wonder, to what degree are liberal intellectuals doing so? Have too many people gotten drunk on the vapors of rancor against Bush, who all too easily inspires rancor? There do seem to be more than a few people who have lost the ability to distinguish between a flawed liberal democracy such as the United States and an out-and-out totalitarian dictatorship such as Saddam's Iraq -- more than a few people who cannot distinguish between a fascist war and an anti-fascist war.

The intellectuals of the United States, and in countries all over the world, should say to themselves: "It is easy enough to rail against Washington, D.C. But what am I doing, I myself, to combat the totalitarian cult of death that has swept so much of the world today? Am I trying to argue for liberal values against the totalitarianism of the Muslim world and its defenders in the West?"

I hope that the intellectuals of the United States will ask such questions. The American military has performed its role pretty well. But are the intellectuals doing likewise? Are the universities putting up a fight against the totalitarianism of the Muslim world? And engagement in the war of ideas is precisely what will make the engagement of armies less necessary, not more, in the future. And how should we engage in that kind of fight? One could imagine a million programs and initiatives. But surely the first thing is to re-examine the whole problem of totalitarian movements in the modern age -- that problem many of us thought had disappeared after the fall of communism, but that lingered on all too malignantly in the Muslim world, to the detriment of everyone.

Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, published last month by W.W. Norton & Company.

Then came a series of right-wing rebellions -- the Fascism of Mussolini, the Fascism of Franco, the Nazis, the Iron Guard in Romania, the extreme right in France, and so forth in every corner of Europe and in many other countries around the world.

A favorite tactic of the left. Somehow link fascism to the "right wing." What does the "right wing" believe in? Smaller government, lower taxes, freedom to own a gun, freedom to speak your mind, freedom to do what you want with your private property, protection of babies, equality under the law, etc. Did anyone of these fascist countries ever do anything remotely in these avenues? Fascism is a shade darker than the liberals we have today.

This intellectual seems to stumble to the right conclusions from all sorts of wrong reasons. The so called intellectuals should first clean out their own house by examining the role they have played in the totalitarian nightmares of the 20th century. A good place to start, might be admitting that Nazism was just a nationalistic version of socialism and that the Baathist are simply Arab Nazis. The intellectuals of the 20th century, have failed miserably at almost everything they have set their minds to, with the exception of the physical sciences and medicine.

The intellectuals of the 20th century, have failed miserably at almost everything they have set their minds to, with the exception of the physical sciences and medicine.

There's some irony in this. It is the success in the sciences that prompted the intellectual errors. This author, by the total equation of warfare with totalizing intellectuals confuses both the nature of warfare, ideology, and the role of the intellect. His naïveté his apparent in this soggy hope: "in the war of ideas is precisely what will make the engagement of armies less necessary."

"right-wing rebellions -- the Fascism of Mussolini, the Fascism of Franco, the Nazis..."

In 1939, the official party line of the left was that the National Socialists and Italian Fascists were fellow comrades in the socialist revolution. The liberal press led by New York Times described Moscow's policy as "middle of the road" (Sept. 4, 1939 - Page 1) - even as Moscow's empire extended into Poland and then north to Finland. The "German High Command" were led by 'Herr Hitler' to "occupy" France. Later, the NYT would call them 'Nazi invaders' when they entered Russia.

Ever since the German invasion of Russia, the left has followed Stalin's spin doctors in reclassifying the fascists as right wing counter-revolutionaries.

I quit reading after the line...

Not even the tiniest evidence to back that suggestion was ever found

CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague--in Dec. 1994 and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information.

It's not just Gross who stands by the information. Five high-ranking members of the Czech government have publicly confirmed meetings between Atta and al Ani. The meeting that has gotten the most press attention--April 9, 2001--is also the most widely disputed. Even some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met al Ani on that occasion. They believe that reports of the alleged meeting, said to have taken place in public, outside the headquarters of the U.S.-financed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, suggest a level of sloppiness that doesn't fit the pattern of previous high-level Iraq-al Qaeda contacts.

Whether or not that specific meeting occurred, the report by Czech counterintelligence that al Ani ordered the Iraqi Intelligence Service officer to provide IIS funds to Atta might help explain the lead hijacker's determination to reach Prague, despite significant obstacles, in the spring 2000. (Note that the report stops short of confirming that the funds were transferred. It claims only that the IIS officer requested the transfer.) Recall that Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but was denied entry because he did not have a valid visa. Rather than simply return to Germany and fly directly to the United States, his ultimate destination, Atta took pains to get to Prague. After he was refused entry the first time, he traveled back to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and caught a bus back to Prague. He left for the United States the day after arriving in Prague for the second time.

Weekly Standard - Memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith