Counterrevolutionary Meditations

Lee Harris, writing in the October/November issue of Policy Review, concludes his review essay of Andrew Bostom's superb The Legacy of Jihad by positing a crash of civilizations model for the interactions of the West and the dar-al-Islam in the early twenty-first century. Positing neither philosophical nor doctrinal similarities between fascism and Islam, as do the apologists for the vulgar, obsfuscating neologism "Islamo-fascism", Harris argues:

If jihad were being used simply as a means of conducting Clausewitzian warfare, it would indeed be a relic of the past about which none of us in the West would need to worry overmuch. If Muslim civilization only decided to clash with ours, we could clash back, and with overwhelming military force. If we were confronting the armies of Omar or of Tamerlane, there is little doubt which side would secure the victory. But the objective of jihad is not Clausewitzian politics continued by other means. Its objective is the destruction and dissolution of politics as we have come to understand it in the West. The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos.(Emphasis mine.)

Continuing his explication of this theme, and expressly likening Islamic tactics and strategy to that of Nazis in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Harris writes:

After the failed Munich putsch of 1923, Hitler resolved never again to try to seize state power by force. Instead, the Nazis elected to follow a policy designed to make the Weimar system incapable of governing through normal political channels. Make the system unworkable; make parliament unable to handle crises; force the government to govern through emergency enabling acts; compel the head of state to assume more and more dictatorial powers — do all these things, and before long a situation would be created in which liberal politics was no longer an option and the people, in desperation, would seek an alternative to the clogged and deadlocked machinery of the parliamentary system — just as had happened when Mussolini’s Brown Shirts, a tiny faction of fanatics, made their celebrated march on Rome and vanquished the Italian Republic for which so many nineteenth-century idealists had shed so much blood.

Nevertheless, while this analogy between the tactics employed by the Nazis and those employed by Islam in its present confrontation with the West is certainly illuminating, and could be extended and deepened by an historical analysis of the traditional Islamic institution of the razzia, of which most contemporary acts of terrorism could be seen as present-day instantiations, Harris' argument goes slightly awry when he states that jihadists, like any group of subversives intent upon the displacement of the status quo of political institutions in their host nation,

...need only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardized. This fear of anarchy — the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason — can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets.

Were are present circumstances characterized merely by a sort of dithering, by a want of will to exert requisite force against our adversaries, perhaps this more thoroughly distilled analysis of the objects of the jihadists and the political dynamics of the confrontation could be sustained. However, the weakness of the West is not merely a want of will; the weakness of the West is merely a modulation of a more originary weakness or defect. Our will is corrupt, deflected from its just objects, our intellect darkened and enfeebled, its capacity to discriminate between those just objects and the objects presented to it by our collective, historical Wormtongue, its malign tendrils coiled round our every intellection and every sentiment, drawing them nigh into fathomless night, debauched and adulterated by our prostitution before this idol - this idol of self-annihilation, liberalism. For our enemy has taken our measure, has weighed us in the balance and found us wanting:

(Tariq) Ramadan insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by "common values" but as though they were already(Emphasis mine.) living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others. Muslims in non-Muslim countries should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, "under the terms of Western liberal tolerance," society as a whole should be obliged to respect that choice. - Srdja Trifkovic, writing in the December issue of Chronicles

Comprehension of precisely what is entailed, existentially, by the confluence of Islamic doctrine and Western ideals of tolerance should follow upon contemplation of the deteriorating conditions in many of the cities of Europe, and upon the pursuit of a simply thought experiment. Imagine, for a brief, horrible moment, that during the Cold War, we maintained that enclaves of communists ought to be permitted to organize for the actual practice of communism in areas in which they could exert their influence - collectivising property and the lot of it. We would have been addled to the point of madness. No, it is no want of will to exert force, but a want of will to repudiate the ideological framework which, as a parasite, imperils our civilization, a want of the integrity of heart that would come with the recognition that our civilization possesses an historic essence, and that Islam as a public doctrine and practice has no part in that essence, and only then a want of will to act accordingly by proscribing all propagation of the doctrines of jihad and the end-state at which they aim, sharia, inclusive of the many petty manifestations which are inimical to public order and custom as these have always existed in the West.

Our enemies have taken our measure, and known us intimately; and they intend to exploit that knowledge to the uttermost, by turning our public philosophy against us. That is the significance of such incidents as the provocations of the so-called "Flying Imams" and the intermittant episodes of fly-biting from organizations such as CAIR. Fortunately, our public philosophy does not express our most profound traditions, but is a late epiphenomenon, when considered against the broad background of our history. And it is always possible to remove encrustations of repugnant substances, is it not?