Author: Charles Krauthammer
Publication: The New York Post
Date: October 16, 2001
Europe's great religious wars ended
in 1648. Three and a half centuries is a long time, too long for us in
the West to truly believe that people still slaughter others to vindicate
the faith.
Thus in the face of radical Islamic
terrorism that murders 6,000 innocents in a day, we find it almost impossible
to accept at face value the reason offered by the murderers.
Yet Osama bin Laden could not be
clearer. Jihad has been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence
thwart the triumph of Islam, and whose success and example -- indeed, whose
very existence -- are an affront to the true faith. As a leader of Hamas
declared at a rally three days after the World Trade Center attack, "the
only solution is for Bush to convert to Islam."
To Americans, who are taught religious
tolerance from the cradle, who visit each other's churches for interdenominational
succor and solidarity, this seems simply bizarre.
On September 25, bin Laden issues
a warning to his people that Bush is coming "under the banner of the cross."
Two weeks later, in his pre-taped post-attack video, he scorns Bush as
"head of the infidels."
Can he be serious? This idea is
so alien that our learned commentators, Western and secular, have gone
rummaging through their ideological attics to find more familiar terms
to explain why we were so savagely attacked: poverty and destitution in
the Islamic world; grievances against the West, America, Israel; the "wretched
of the earth" -- Frantz Fanon's 1960s apotheosis of anti-colonialism --
rising against their oppressors.
Reading conventional notions of
class struggle and anti- colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical
Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense.
If poverty and destitution, colonialism
and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the
Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human
culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff.
At first, Taliban soldiers tried
artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban
had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered
100 cows in atonement -- for having taken so long to finish the job.
Buddhism is hardly a representative
of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly
a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative
faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of
both was intolerable.
The distinguished Indian writer
and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic
world in two books (Among the Believers and Beyond Belief), recently warned
(in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We
are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization."
In places like Afghanistan, "religion
has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy
themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They
are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down."
This kind of fury and fanaticism
is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You
cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is
worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."
This insight offers a needed window
on the new enemy. It turns out that the enemy does have recognizable analogues
in the Western experience.
He is, as President Bush averred
in his address to the nation, heir to the malignant ideologies of the 20th
century. In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and
death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating
life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism.
The destruction of the World Trade
Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan
Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and
grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel.
They had to be destroyed.
This worship of death and destruction
is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then
art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment
tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image
of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed
by glorious images of desecration of the infidel -- mutilated American
soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack
endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood."
Bin Laden appears on the tape to
counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other
world...die in the right cause and go to the other world."
In his October 9 taped message,
al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith gloried in the "thousands of young
people who look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living."
Once again, the world is faced with
a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love
death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble.
Upon witnessing the first atomic
bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited
a verse from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds."
We tremble because for the first
time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons
of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have
the means to match his ends.
Which is why the war declared upon
us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the
life of civilization itself.