David Satter: Yesterday Communism, Today Radical Islam
[David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale), which is being made into a documentary film.]
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emphasis should not be on speeches and ceremonies but rather on the lessons of the fall of communism for the war on terror.
Although they seem different--one claims to be religious whereas the other was, supposedly, a perfect science--communism and political Islam are essentially the same. Both are radical ideologies that divide the world into the elect and the profane. Both deny individuality and suppress free will. And both treat man-made dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently reacted to a question about ideology by saying, "That's so yesterday." Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The drive of an ideology to apply a false idea on the basis of its own inner logic independent of external reality is a mortal threat to the West and will be for generations to come. Accordingly, the experience of communism can do the world some good--if its implications are understood.
The following lessons of communism could prove vital to the West in the war against radical Islam:
The challenge must be confronted at the level at which it is posed.
An ideology is a system of total explanation. It rejects universal morality and insists that right and wrong are determined by the interests of a specific group--the proletariat, the master race or the ummah. In effect, the adherents of totalitarian ideologies deify themselves, even if they pretend to be "religious."
Our response to the claims of totalitarian ideology is traditionally to defend freedom. By answering an ideology that claims infallibility and promises to create heaven on earth by defending "freedom," however, we immediately raise the question of "freedom for what?" We also leave the contents of the ideology completely unchallenged. The failure of the West during the Cold War to challenge the claims of communist ideology was always taken by the communists to mean that the West did not believe in anything.
In fact, it is necessary to confront the terrorist ideology directly. Instead of treating freedom as an alternative to ideology, we need to attack radical Islamic ideology as an insult to sanity. It needs to be pointed out that supposedly religious Islamic radicalism is based on man-made dogma and that it relies on the same psychological mechanisms and has the same results as atheistic Communism and Nazism. It is only by attacking Islamic radicalism as an idea that we avoid the impression that the terrorists' interpretation of themselves is implicitly accepted. At the same time, by attacking radical Islam as based on false values, we automatically call attention to our own. In the Soviet Union, it was often noted by pro-Western Soviet dissidents that "it is difficult to beat something with nothing." Our task is to make explicit that the West stands for universal values, and those values are "something."
Forget about "right" and "left."
For years, attitudes toward communism in the West were heavily dependent on considerations of domestic policy. Those who liked the idea of free medical care and guaranteed employment tended to sympathize with communism. Those who were opposed tended to be anti-communist. But in both cases there was little awareness that the real issue was not the communist social system but the attempt to redefine morality and zombify the personality. The split between left and right in the West in relation to communism was manipulated by the Soviets and left us divided in facing a common threat.
There is little risk that radical Islam will evoke sympathy from either the right or the left in the U.S. But there is a danger that tactical disagreements on how to wage the war on terror will take on a partisan coloring. As the experience of communism shows, venomous internal disputes weaken the resolve of the country as a whole...
Read entire article at Forbes
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emphasis should not be on speeches and ceremonies but rather on the lessons of the fall of communism for the war on terror.
Although they seem different--one claims to be religious whereas the other was, supposedly, a perfect science--communism and political Islam are essentially the same. Both are radical ideologies that divide the world into the elect and the profane. Both deny individuality and suppress free will. And both treat man-made dogma as infallible truth and seek to impose it by force.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently reacted to a question about ideology by saying, "That's so yesterday." Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The drive of an ideology to apply a false idea on the basis of its own inner logic independent of external reality is a mortal threat to the West and will be for generations to come. Accordingly, the experience of communism can do the world some good--if its implications are understood.
The following lessons of communism could prove vital to the West in the war against radical Islam:
The challenge must be confronted at the level at which it is posed.
An ideology is a system of total explanation. It rejects universal morality and insists that right and wrong are determined by the interests of a specific group--the proletariat, the master race or the ummah. In effect, the adherents of totalitarian ideologies deify themselves, even if they pretend to be "religious."
Our response to the claims of totalitarian ideology is traditionally to defend freedom. By answering an ideology that claims infallibility and promises to create heaven on earth by defending "freedom," however, we immediately raise the question of "freedom for what?" We also leave the contents of the ideology completely unchallenged. The failure of the West during the Cold War to challenge the claims of communist ideology was always taken by the communists to mean that the West did not believe in anything.
In fact, it is necessary to confront the terrorist ideology directly. Instead of treating freedom as an alternative to ideology, we need to attack radical Islamic ideology as an insult to sanity. It needs to be pointed out that supposedly religious Islamic radicalism is based on man-made dogma and that it relies on the same psychological mechanisms and has the same results as atheistic Communism and Nazism. It is only by attacking Islamic radicalism as an idea that we avoid the impression that the terrorists' interpretation of themselves is implicitly accepted. At the same time, by attacking radical Islam as based on false values, we automatically call attention to our own. In the Soviet Union, it was often noted by pro-Western Soviet dissidents that "it is difficult to beat something with nothing." Our task is to make explicit that the West stands for universal values, and those values are "something."
Forget about "right" and "left."
For years, attitudes toward communism in the West were heavily dependent on considerations of domestic policy. Those who liked the idea of free medical care and guaranteed employment tended to sympathize with communism. Those who were opposed tended to be anti-communist. But in both cases there was little awareness that the real issue was not the communist social system but the attempt to redefine morality and zombify the personality. The split between left and right in the West in relation to communism was manipulated by the Soviets and left us divided in facing a common threat.
There is little risk that radical Islam will evoke sympathy from either the right or the left in the U.S. But there is a danger that tactical disagreements on how to wage the war on terror will take on a partisan coloring. As the experience of communism shows, venomous internal disputes weaken the resolve of the country as a whole...