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The Chechen separatists’ appalling attack on a
middle school in the Russian township of Beslan induced a chill below
blood freezing. Flaunted with a calculation of cold horror across tabloid
pages, the sickening debacle seemed but the latest example of Islamic
terror -- yet another craven and despicable attack to bring down the Western
world, though here and there lay mention of some, vague, larger conflict
in an isolated part of the world called Chechnya. A tragedy of this magnitude,
of this psychotic deliberation, demands both repudiation and analysis
in order to combat its perpetrators and confront the sources and forces
that impel them. It was all the more dismaying then, to see such dishonesty
among so many conservative commentators in their calls to confront the
reality of the attack while attempting to divorce it from its root causes.
Christopher Hitchens, Victor Davis Hanson and David Brooks all approach
this horror as if it sprung ex nihilo from the hearts of deranged jihadis
and downplay, to various disingenuous degrees, the sheer savagery that
Russia has visited on a long subjugated people as if those facts could
somehow be exculpatory. Explanations do not condone, justify, or forgive,
but contextualize, and it shows the common insecurity behind the thinking
of all three that they can not fully face recent history but only castigate
and condense a vile jihadist ideology as if its Chechen variant is entirely
detached from a long and exceedingly tragic conflict in the Caucuses.
The perpetrators of the Beslan massacres and their extremist beliefs must
be fought and denounced and Western democracies (and the Russian government)
cripple those efforts by denying understanding. The aim is not apologetics
but knowledge of origins, of facing the past that has shaped the present.
Underlying the contentions of all three commentators,
explicitly in Brooks, is a thesis put forward by Paul Berman in his impressive,
intriguing, and occasionally cogent “Terror and Liberalism.”
Berman examines the threats from the Islamic world now facing the West
and identifies the central doctrine of “Terror” as derived
from a totalitarian anti-modernism that runs from German romanticism to
Russian nihilism to Communism and Nazism and then on to Baathism and the
Islamic radicalism of the Egyptian scholar, Sayyid Qutb. His thesis is
that the overarching ideology of Terror is a reaction to liberalism, a
fear of its infection that will corrupt the pure peoples of the Reich,
Proletariat, or Ummah and which then compels them to rage against liberalism
through a cult of death. The Terror war then, is neither an imperialist
war nor a clash of civilizations but “a new phase of the war that
broke out in Europe more than eighty years ago and has never come to an
end.” Throughout his tightly argued book, Berman neglects an even
minimal analysis of the grievances of the Islamic world and one could
walk away from reading it with the notion that all this Terror fuss is
the result of a few seedy, but successful, Arabic thinkers who’ve
been practicing bad intellectual history. Christopher Hitchens on his
Slate.com
column follows in this vein, claiming that jihad is never an
understandable reaction to Muslim grievance:
Not to exaggerate or
generalize or anything, but in the past week or so it seems to have become
very slightly less OK to speak of jihad as an understandable reaction
to underlying Muslim grievances. The murder of innocents in a Russian
school may have been secondarily the result of a panic or a bungle by
Vladimir Putin's "special forces," but nobody is claiming that
the real responsibility lies anywhere but on the shoulders of the Muslim
fanatics."
A few paragraphs down, however, Hitchens does something
most curious, with a rather awkward half-acknowledgement:
"It's also true that
the French and Russian record could, if you looked at it in one way, be
a real cause of sacred rage. (The French authorities have backed Saddam
Hussein and many other regional despots, and the conduct of Russian soldiers
in Chechnya makes Abu Ghraib look like a blip on the charts.) But no serious
person would ever let these considerations obscure a full-out denunciation
of those who deliberately make war on civilians.
So, if we read Hitchens correctly here, it is “very
slightly less OK to speak of jihad as an understandable reaction to underlying
Muslim grievances,” yet “It's also true that the French and
Russian record could, if you looked at it in one way, be a real cause
of sacred rage.” It is not “OK” to understand, but is
possible with a certain perspective? That is a fudge, and a confused one
at that. Hitchens, at least reluctantly, mentions that there may be some
basis for “sacred rage” from the viewpoint of a brutally oppressed
people but skitters away from drawing out the history and repressions
of the “real cause”. If Hitchens were to be consistent in
his leveling of “full-out denunciations on those who deliberately
make war on civilians,” perhaps he could pause for a moment and
ponder the actions of a state on the United Nations Security Council that
killed 80,000 Chechens between 1994-1996, during their legally-justified
efforts to secede, according to the Bolshoy Gorod editor Masha
Gessen on the webpages of the very magazine of Hitchens’
queasy wobble. (Mind you, Gessen’s figures are only up to 1996 and
do not include the Russian re-invasion of 1999 and the thousands who have
been killed since.) Perhaps in dodging sustained and meaningful denunciations,
the perpetrators of these war crimes, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and
their blood-crazed generals, have a distinct advantage in the field of
public relations. The pictures of innocent, sickeningly massacred children
and the heart-wrenching number of their dead might be far easier to grasp,
mourn and condemn than the mind-boggling figure of 80,000 graves filled
by Russian barbarism.
What could Russia possibly expect as a response from
years of horrific oppression and mass slaughter? Compliance? If you were
a 15-year old Chechen boy in 1994, and witnessed such cataclysmic death
and violence waged against your people by a bitter historic foe, what
would your reaction be ten years later? Is it beyond our powers of empathy
to imagine that perhaps, just perhaps, said youth might seek out some
manner of fanatical vengeance? Such fanaticism should be stridently condemned
if it led to terrorism and the death of innocents, but with even a basic
knowledge of history, would it really be surprising?
The oppressed are not always pretty. A reliable minority,
often owing to loss, humiliation or just bad craziness, seeks out the
most extreme responses and the ideologies that justify them. Analogies
to other oppressed or occupied people are always inexact but it’s
intriguing to note the similar forms of “extremism” that are
intertwined even with successful independence movements. Nelson Mandela’s
ANC had some brutal and racially extreme factions in their conflict against
a brutal and racially extreme government, and throughout the struggles
of Jewish resistance fighters against the British Empire in Palestine,
terrorist acts such as the bombing of the King
David Hotel, which killed 91 (including 15 Jews), and other
violent activities of the Irgun
and the Stern Gang met with widespread revulsion and condemnation,
even from other Jewish groups, but are little remembered today. Furthermore,
during the 1940s, right-wing Zionist groups operating under the banner
of Irgun had distinct fascist and even pro-Nazi sympathies according to
Dr. Israel Shahak, the former chairman of the Israeli League for Human
and Civil Rights, in his essay “Yitzhak
Shamir, Then and Now”. A pro-Nazi Jewish liberation movement?!
How is that even possible? Dr. Shahak’s essay diligently outlines
how the still-honored Jewish resistance fighter, Avraham Stern (aka Yair),
killed by the British in 1942, deliberately mimicked Nazi conceptions
of state and self-determination in his own vision of a Jewish state, dismissed
Nazi anti-Semitism with sophistic distinctions between ‘verbal’
and ‘behavioral’ anti-Semitism, and became overexcited by
Axis victories against the British Empire in the Middle East: “LEHI
(the Stern Gang) showed its uniqueness in its very earliest political
strategy, namely in its persistent search for an alliance with Nazi Germany
throughout 1940 -- 41. Unlike all other Jewish groups of that time, the
LEHI men respected Hitler.” Respected Hitler! So much so that Stern
dispatched two delegations to Vichy-controlled Syria to meet with Nazi
embassies in the attempt to form an anti-British alliance. The focus of
Dr. Shahak’s essay is on Yitzhak Shamir, who faithfully adhered
to Yair’s Nazi friendly doctrines, inherited his organization after
his death, and then rose to become Prime Minister of Israel and leave
the lasting imprint of his harsh values on the Likud party he governed.
The puzzlement and revulsion we may now hold for his past beliefs did
not inhibit him from leading a modern democratic nation. (Nota Bene: Christopher
Hitchens, in a priorincarnation, wrote about this troubling history in
the pages of the Nation in 1989.)
This anti-democratic, decidedly fascist, and unabashedly
pro-Nazi ideology, in which a pure people must engage in a racist war
for a homeland of their own, is superb material for Paul Berman and his
“Terror and Liberalism” thesis. If Dr. Shahak, a Holocaust
survivor who died in 2001, was correct that tangible parts of Likud’s
party ideology and policies under Yitzhak Shamir do indeed stem from such
perverse roots, one wonders how it would alter Berman’s thesis:
to regard the responses of Palestinian extremism, and its Terror, as linked
to Israeli extremism (and a Terror of its own?). Would such an exercise
be beyond the limits of reason? Is extremism in defense of self-determination
an incomprehensible vice?
Yes, according to the National Review’s Victor
Davis Hanson in his
analysis of the Beslan massacre. For him, there is no self-determination
struggle in any of the world’s Islamic hotspots -- only fascistic
terror in the name of Islam:
. . . there is something else going on
here besides the cloak of so-called Chechen nationalism. . . . At some
point, the leaders of the Western world (if there are any left besides
George W. Bush and Tony Blair) are going to look at all this madness worldwide
and come to the bitter conclusion that there is a disgusting pattern:
Not every Muslim is a fascist terrorist, but almost every fascist terrorist
is a Muslim. Killers are not screaming "Hail Mary" when they
machine gun children in the back, slit the throat of airline stewardesses,
or blow pregnant women up on buses across the globe. And they are not
the subjects of condemnatory fatwas in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Their grievance is not really Russian imperialism, or the 5 to 10 percent
of the West Bank under dispute, or black African encroachment on Arab
land, or purported French insensitivity to legitimate Islamic pride, much
less an American "crusade" to harm Muslims.
As to the “Hail Mary” crack it might surprise Hanson to learn
that until fairly recently there was a largely Catholic terrorist war
against perceived British imperialism, and Protestantism, in an area of
the world known as Northern Ireland. The crimes of the IRA, some quite
similar to the one’s he described above, though forgotten by Hanson,
are probably still remembered by their English and Irish victims. It might
occur to him as well that no predominantly Catholic countries are still
occupied by American, Israeli or Russian armies. As for the Muslim world,
Hanson plainly doesn’t buy any of “their grievances”
or the Chechen claims to a self-determination struggle, and he heaps scorn
on the decimated Chechens with the following analogy:
The recent slaughters in Russia were the proverbial straw
that broke the camel's back of excusing or explaining away radical Islamic
terror. If the Estonians can break away from post-Soviet oppression and
free themselves from Russian authoritarianism without slaughtering schoolchildren
and blowing up airplanes, then the Chechens can as well — but only
if they wish to create democracy rather than an Islamic fascist state.
The Estonians?! On August 19th, 1991, Soviet tanks rolled into Tallinn,
the capital of Estonia as part of the hardline coup d’etat against
Mikhail Gorbachev. The grim and farcical coup collapsed on the 22nd and
Boris Yeltsin’s new Russian government recognized
an independent Estonia on the 24th. That’s how Estonia
broke away. According to Parameters (the journal of the Army War college)
in
an article on the first war, Chechnya, emerging from centuries
of Czarist Imperialism and Soviet repression, existed as a somewhat peaceable
independent republic under the former Soviet General Jokar Dudayev for
two years before Boris Yeltsin staged a coup attempt against him that
backfired. Humiliated by President Dudayev’s parading of captured
Russian security agents and provocateurs before news cameras, Yeltsin
ordered a debilitated and grossly unprepared Russian army into the two-year-old
autonomous republic in 1994, with orders to retake the city of Grozny
and crush the established Chechen state. How can Hanson even think to
compare Estonia’s bloodless coup with the over 80,000 dead wiped
out by the institutionally barbaric Russian army? It is an analogy as
false as it is dumb.
Incongruously, and not unlike Hitchens, Hanson seems
to realize that he might be on exceedingly weak ground here, with his
uncertain acknowledgement that:
True, this war can be lost if we fail
to address the hearts and minds of the Arab people — if we fail
to offer something better than the false choice between jihad and autocracy.
Chechnya of the 1990s proves that perhaps. But it cannot be won by aid
and diplomacy alone — any more than the Kaiser, Mussolini, Hitler,
Tojo, and Stalin and his successors could be talked or bought out of their
extremism.
Note how buried the Chechen bone is. What Hanson evades
here is how appalling it is to realize that in the midst of a campaign
of wholesale slaughter, bordering on ethnic cleansing against the Chechens,
the Western world did nothing. The only people that intervened, that provided
money, arms and equipment for the beleaguered Chechens with which to fight
back against a historical enemy bent on subjugation were the forces and
fundraisers of international jihad, who saw and exploited the conflict
as a perfect opportunity to export their brand of Islamic revolution.
After all, who else cared? Where was America, the great lover of freedom
struggles and ally of those oppressed by Soviets? Behind Hanson’s
all too breezy shirk is a sordid history of moral abandonment. Is the
attempt to deny the very logic of how a besieged people could turn to
the only force and ideology that aided them in their hour of desperation
linked to the Western world’s outrageous neglect?
David Brooks, as he correctly castigates the Beslan horror,
follows
Hanson’s tactic of divorcing it from “whatever”
Russia perpetrated upon the Chechens:
Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated
upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack,
the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact
that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds
of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries,
and then blow them up . . . They're [those who seek to understand the
motives of terrorist] still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed
after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even
the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable
must be, in some fashion, reasonable."
So in the world Brooks (and Berman) inhabit, one carefully
divided between the forces of reason and unreason, are we to assume that
the Russian Army with its notorious brutality and history of oppression
is a force of reason? That the mass killings perpetrated on the Chechen
people in their legal-constitutional quest for independence from a long
history of Russian imperialism and Soviet repression were completely reasonable
acts? That unreason just springs unbidden and unprovoked from “reasonable”
actions? That despicable acts of unreason exist only in a separate context
all their own?
As horrific and seemingly beyond comprehension as attacks
on civilians and children are, the Western world has seen it before and
labeled such conflicts ‘total war’. In response to the fascist
imperialism and unprovoked attacks of World War II, America waged total
war against civilians in Germany and Japan and allied itself with Stalinist
terror to do so. Such are the hard, dehumanizing calculations of total
war and the cost of necessary victory. While regretful, history has validated
those agonizing choices. Victory has become the essential nature and ends
of those acts. If what we’re witnessing in the Caucuses is, indeed,
total war, then perhaps it is relevant to ask who initiated it.
The New York Times, which publishes Brooks’ column,
seems to be going to some length to repudiate Brooks’s Berman-derived
thesis. Recently articles like “Chechen
Rebels Mainly Driven By Nationalism,” analytically describe
the intertwining of a jihadist ideology with Chechen tribal codes and
national aspirations, posits that Al Qaeda was much more interested in
Chechnya than Chechen separatists were interested in a global religious
war, and that Russia is overstating the jihadist influence to avoid the
secessionist question. The
Times profile on the Chechen guerilla
leader and chief terrorist, Shamil Basyev, notes that, “But even
as he gained victories, this personification of the Chechen warrior began
to suffer war's toll, losing much of his family, surviving injury and,
after communing with foreign Islamist militants, evolving to a darker
form. He became a scarred man waging total war.” Total war, note
the word.
In taking credit for the Beslan horror,
Basayev denies taking money from Al-Qaeda and ties the attacks directly
back to the Chechen war. Make no mistake, the calls for jihad and many
aspects of its insidious creed are alive and well in the Chechen warzone,
but it is telling that Basayev promotes nationhood first and foremost.
The foul nihilism typical of bin-Laden’s form of
jihad, call it a death cult if you wish, lives as a latent bacillus within
most societies. Idiot
metalheads in Norway are picture-perfect exemplars of Berman’s
thesis -- wannabe terrorists straight out of Dostoyevsky -- but they’ve
little conflict to ignite and broadcast their dark dreams of apocalypse
in the safe and dull environs of Nordic socialism. These nihilistic strains
are catalyzed by violent tragedy, war and oppression and they’re
present even here in America. Identifying and analyzing catalysts doesn’t
justify them, but is a precondition to combating them or resolving the
impelling crises than they’ve capitalized on. Let us take seriously
Masha Gessen’s numbers and compare them to the Chechen population
in the Chechen Republic, according to the Danish
Refugee Council estimate of 2000, which
lists 774,000 persons. That would mean that since the 1994 war of subjugation
over ten percent of the Chechen population has been killed off within
the republic. After the stunning nihilism of the Oklahoma City bombing,
imagine what the American militia movement would cook up in response to
a similar wholesale onslaught from a foreign power bent on complete domination
and the installment of a puppet regime in our homeland. The Chechens who
committed this brutally inhuman atrocity did so in retaliation to imperial
conquest, and as we wholeheartedly condemn them we should ask what it
would take to drive a former human being to do such a thing. If you believe
it is solely a jihadi ideology dropped from the sky and divorced from
the flow of historical events then Hitchens, Brooks, and Hanson have the
easy answers for you. But, if you seek to add weight to your condemnation,
the grim, almost unbearable weight of comprehension, then the reward is
awareness of the root cause of a deeply barbarous act, the long chain
of recent inhumanity that impelled the present inhumanity. A chain that
cannot be broken while ignored.
Read the extended exchange
about this essay by clicking here.
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OTR Politics - November, 2004