Below is a review from the Guardian for some counterweight:
On 25 February 1830 Victor Hugo's play Hernani was performed to the most extraordinary scenes of riot and disorder in Paris. The subject of the now-forgotten work was the attempted assassination of a king by a Romantic Spanish outlaw hero, Hernani, who ends his days in a suicide pact. The play had been banned by the official censor, but on the first night Hugo gathered around him a gang of long-haired young bloods known as the Romantic Army, who fought pitched street battles to force the authorities to allow the play to go ahead. Hugo partisans all wore a badge bearing the Spanish word for iron, hierro, to identify them and mark their steely determination to fight the forces of conventional bourgeois liberalism.
For Paul Berman, the play is an early expression of the terrorist mentality. 'Murder as rebellion, suicide as honour, murder and suicide as the joint emblem of human freedom - those were Hugo's themes.' These, he argues, in a compelling challenge to modern liberal attititudes, are also the common thread in the terrorist mindset that links early anarchists and Bolsheviks in Russia to the hijacking and urban terrorism of the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s.
More radically, Berman also sees a link to the terrorism of al-Qaeda. The doomed assassin Hernani is not just the model for the classic anarchist or Marxist political terrorist, he is also a model for Mohamed Atta. As Malise Ruthven revealed in A Fury for God, the most enlightening of the flurry of books on al-Qaeda published in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, there were connections between Islamism and totalitarian ideology in the early twentieth century. The founder of the the Islamic revivalist Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, for example, was an admirer of the Nazis. Berman argues that the founder of modern Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, drew on the Marxist concept that 'truth can be obtained only through some kind of active struggle' in developing theories yoking the search for truth and martyrdom.
Berman draws similar links between fascism and Baathism, the Arab national socialism both of the fallen regime in Baghdad and of that which still rules neighbouring Syria. He quotes Sami al-Jundi, who helped found the Syrian Baath Party in the 1930s: 'We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche.' So, paradoxically, the drive towards Muslim or Arab purity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has its roots in a European ideology promoting Aryan purity in the nineteenth century. 'The Baathists and the Islamists were two branches of a single impulse, which was Muslim totalitarianism - the Muslim variation of the European idea,' writes Berman.
But their common origins do not mean that Baathism and Islamism are the same, as radical Shia opponents of Saddam Hussein's rule discovered. Baathism is an essentially secular nationalist movement that wished to recreate the glory of the Arab conquests in a modern context. That is quite different from the most extreme Islamist radicalism which aims to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate under sharia law.
At times Berman trips over the ingenuity of his own argument. The Romantic impulse of Victor Hugo's Hernani, glorying in death, assassination and suicide, mutates in Terror and Liberalism into every ideological monster of the twentieth century, including the totalitarian regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. To follow Berman's logic, the nihilistic suicide bombers of the Palestinian occupied territories are indistinguishable from the torturers of the concentration camps, a connection made by few but the most extreme representatives of the Israeli state.
The most chilling passage in Terror and Liberalism concerns what Berman describes as 'the most powerful of modern myths': that there is a single 'people of God' whose role it is to guide the world back to the path of righteousness, whatever the human cost. In this the godly are in cosmic conflict with the Satanic 'city dwellers of Babylon'.
Berman's version of this conflict has terrifying contemporary resonances. 'The war of Armageddon will take place. The subversive and polluted city dwellers of Babylon will be exterminated along with all their abominations. The Satanic forces from the mystic beyond will be fended off. The destruction will last only an hour. Afterward, when the extermination is complete, the reign of Christ will be established and will endure a thousand years. And the people of God will live in purity, submissive to God.' Today Babylon is better known as Hilla, a town south of Baghdad where the Reuters agency saw the first evidence of the American use of cluster bombs on civilians in Iraq.
In light of recent events, Berman's description of a paranoid 'people of God' convinced of its own righteousness, prepared to kill its enemies and sacrifice its own in pursuit of a realm of pure truth might just as easily apply to the United States as to its Baathist and Islamist foes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2003/apr/20/history.politics
ing. As for romanticizing suicide bombing, I always go back to the Pal-Arabs (and others, such as the excuses given for the Times Square bomber) who justify the killing of non-Muslim civilians as 'retaliation' for the killing of Muslim terrorists.
