Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  Every transcendental eschatology proclaims the end of this world. But secular eschatology is always caught in its own contradiction. It projects into the past a vision of what never was, it conceives what is in terms of what is not, and the future in terms of what can never be. The remoter past becomes a mystical or mythical Age of Innocence, a Golden or a Heroic Age, an Age of Primitive Communism or of resplendent manly Virtue. The Future is the Classless Society, Eternal Peace, or Salvation by Race – the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.58

  In a study that is too little known, James Rhodes has provided a systematic examination of Nazism as a modern millenarian movement. Like the Anabaptists and other medieval millenarians, the Nazis were possessed by a vision of disaster followed by a new world. Seeing themselves as victims of catastrophes, they experienced sudden revelations that explained their sufferings, which they believed were the work of evil forces. They believed they had been called to struggle against these forces, to defeat them and rid the world of them in short, titanic wars.59

  This millenarian syndrome of impending catastrophe, the existential threat of evil, brief cataclysmic battles and an ensuing paradise can be seen in many modern political movements (including the Arma-geddonite wing of the American Right). It fits the Nazis closely and shows the poverty of any account of Hitler’s movement that sees it simply as a reaction to social conditions. Nazism was a modern political religion, and while it made use of pseudo-science it also drew heavily on myth. The Volk was not just the biological unit of racist ideology. It was a mystical entity, which could confer immortality on those who participated in it. Using the Kantian term ‘Ding-an-sich’, which means ultimate reality or the thing-in-itself, Goebbels declared that ‘Ding-an-sich is the Volk’, and produced a poem in which the semi-divine qualities ascribed to the Volk are clear:

  I arise, I have power

  To wake the dead. They awakened out of deep sleep,

  Only a few at first but then more and more. The ranks fill up, a host arises,

  A Volk, a community.60

  Without the vengeful war reparations of the Versailles settlement and the chaos of the interwar German economy, the Nazis would most likely have remained a fringe movement. They remained popular for as long as they did because they delivered material benefits to large sections of the German population. The efficiency of Hitler’s war machine may have been exaggerated, but Nazi economic policies were not dissimilar to those advocated by Keynes (as Keynes himself recognized) and delivered full employment in the run-up to the war. The popularity of the Nazis was sustained in the first years of the war by military success and the orgy of looting that it permitted in occupied Europe. Delivering these benefits to the German population was a major part of the Nazis’ strategy to gain and maintain power.

  At the same time the Nazis mobilized a potent mix of beliefs. Nazi ideology differs from that of most other utopian and millenarian movements in that it was largely negative. Nazi eschatology was a debased imitation of pagan traditions that allowed the possibility of a final disaster without any prospect of future renewal. This negative eschatology was linked with a sort of negative utopianism, which focused on the obstacles to future paradise more than on its content. The Nazis’ eschatology may have been less important than their demonology, which came from Christian sources (not least the Lutheran tradition). The world was threatened by demonic forces, which were embodied in Jews. The present time and the recent past were evil beyond redemption. The one hope lay in catastrophe – only after an all-destroying event could the German Volk ascend to a condition of mystical harmony.

  The name of the Nazi regime derived from Christian apocalyptic traditions. The ‘Third Reich’ comes from Joachim of Flora’s prophecy of a Third Age, passed on to modern times by Anabaptist Christians and popularized in interwar Germany by Moeller van den Bruck in his book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Empire, 1923). A ‘revolutionary conservative’ in the manner of Oswald Spengler (whose book The Decline of the West had a huge impact in the 1920s), van den Bruck believed that the problems of interwar Germany were not only political and economic but also cultural and spiritual. He had a strong interest in Dostoyevsky, co-editing a German translation of The Brothers Karamazov with the emigre Russian writer Dmitri Merezh-kovsky, himself the author of a book of apocalyptic speculation.61 Both writers were sympathetic to Dostoyevsky’s fantasy of Russia as a ‘third Rome’ that could produce spiritual renewal in Europe, and van den Bruck visited Russia in 1912. With these beliefs one would expect him to be sympathetic to the emerging Nazi movement. Yet –perhaps because he seems not to have shared their anti-Semitism – he and the Nazis never joined forces. On meeting Hitler in 1922 van den Bruck was repelled by the Nazi leader’s ‘proletarian primitivity’. Later the Nazis repudiated van den Bruck’s ideas, but a signed copy of his book was found in Hitler’s bunker and for a time van den Bruck supplied a scheme of thought that matched the Nazis’ sense of apocalyptic crisis and historical destiny. If the Holy Roman Empire was the first Reich and the united German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns (1871–1918) the second, the third would be the Nazi state that would last for a thousand years.

  It is wrong to see the Nazis as coming from outside the western tradition. Some Nazis saw themselves as anti-western, and it was a view adopted by some of their opponents, such as the once widely read but now almost forgotten writer Aurel Kolnai, who saw Nazism as part of a ‘war against the West’. A Catholic convert, Kolnai defined ‘the West’ in terms of Christianity,62 and it is true that some of the most courageous opponents of the Nazis were devout Christians; for example, Claus von Stauffenberg, a pivotal figure in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, was a pious Catholic. However, while many leading Nazis were hostile to Christianity and some Christians resolute anti-Nazis, it is also true that Nazism continued some Christian traditions. Eric Voegelin, a German scholar who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and whose work has done much to illuminate the nature of modern political religion, recognized that ‘Hitler’s millennial prophecy authentically derives from Joachitic speculation, mediated in Germany through the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation and through the Johannine Christianity of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling.’ As he summarized this development, ‘The superman marks the end of a road on which we find such figures as the “godded man” of English Reformation mystics … A line of gradual transformation connects medieval with contemporary gnosticism.’63

  Voegelin understood Nazism as being – like communism – a contemporary revival of Gnosticism. There can be no doubt that Gnostic beliefs have had a far-reaching influence in shaping western thought, and there may well have been Gnostic influences on medieval millenarian movements, but there are few points of affinity between Gnosticism and modern millenarianism. Like the Manicheans, with whom they had much in common, the Gnostics were subtle thinkers. They did not look to an End-Time in which the Elect would be collectively saved, but understood salvation as an individual achievement that involved release from time rather than its end. Again, few if any Gnostic thinkers envisioned a world in which human life is no longer subject to evil. While it undoubtedly had an influence, the impact of Gnosticism on modern political religion was not formative. The decisive influence was the faith in the End that shaped Christianity from its origins. In expecting a final struggle between good and evil forces, medieval millenarians harked back to this eschatological faith, as did modern totalitarian movements.

  TERROR AND THE WESTERN TRADITION

  The figure of the lonely metaphysical terrorist who blew himself up with his bomb appeared in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century … The real genesis of al-Qaeda violence has more to do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal world than with the Koranic conception of martyrdom.

  Olivier Roy64

  Nazism and communism are products of the modern West. So too –though the fact is denied by its followers and by western opinion –is radical Islam. The intellectual founder of radical Islam is
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual executed by Nasser in 1966. Qutb’s writings show the influence of many European thinkers, particularly Nietzsche, and they are full of ideas lifted from the Bolshevik tradition. Qutb’s conception of a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to the overthrow of corrupt Islamic regimes and the establishment of a society without formal power structures owes nothing to Islamic theology and a great deal to Lenin. His view of revolutionary violence as a purifying force has more in common with the Jacobins than it does with the twelfth-century Assassins. The Assassins devoted themselves to killing rulers they believed had deviated from the true path of Islam; but they did not believe that terror could be used to perfect humanity, nor did they see self-destruction in suicide attacks as a token of personal purity. Such views arose only in the twentieth century when Islamic thinkers came under European influence. Ali Shariati – the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian fundamentalists in exile during the reign of the Shah –defended martyrdom as a central practice in Islam, but his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death came from modern western philosophy. The fundamentalist redefinition of Shi’ism advanced by Shariati invoked an idea of existential choice derived from Heidegger.65

  Islamist movements think of violence as a means of creating a new world, and in this they belong not in the medieval past but the modern West. Talk of ‘Islamo-fascism’ obscures the larger debts of Islamism to western thought. It is not only fascists who have believed that violence can give birth to a new society. So did Lenin and Bakunin, and radical Islam could with equal accuracy be called Islamo-Leninism or Islamo-anarchism. However the closest affinity is with the illiberal theory of popular sovereignty expounded by Rousseau and applied by Robespierre in the French Terror, and radical Islam may be best described as Islamo-Jacobinism.

  Radical Islam is a modern revolutionary ideology, but it is also a millenarian movement with Islamic roots. Like Christianity, Islam has always contained a powerful eschatological element. Both Sunni and Shia Islam contain a Mahdist tradition that anticipates the arrival of a divinely guided teacher who will re-order the world – a tradition that Bin Laden has exploited when projecting his image as a prophet-leader.66 Some scholars question the orthodoxy of Mahdist beliefs but they exemplify a conception of history that is clearly Islamic. As one contemporary Islamic scholar has written: ‘The Mahdist “event” … is History as eschatology, giving history a progressive nature.’67 The apocalyptic beliefs of president Ahmadinejad of Iran are a version of this view of history.

  In thinking of history in this way Islam shares common ground with Christianity and with the secular creeds of the modern West. It is misleading to represent Islam and ‘the West’ as forming civilizations that have nothing in common. Christianity and Islam are integral parts of western monotheism, and as such they share a view of history that marks them off from the rest of the world. Both are militant faiths that seek to convert all humankind. Other religions have been implicated in twentieth-century violence – the state cult of Shinto in Japan during the militarist period and Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, for example. But only Christianity and Islam have engendered movements that are committed to the systematic use of force to achieve universal goals. At the same time the notion that Islam lies outside ‘the West’ neglects Islam’s positive contributions. It was Islamic cultures that preserved the inheritance of Aristotle and developed much of the mathematics and science that Europe later used. In the medieval kingdoms of Moorish Spain, Islamic rulers provided shelter for persecuted Christians and Jews when Christian Europe was mired in religious conflict. To erase these Islamic achievements from the western canon misrepresents history.

  The belief that Islam developed outside or against western civilization leads to a mistaken view of Islamist movements as being directed against ‘the West’. In fact the chief objective of Islamist jihad is to overthrow what are seen as infidel governments in Islamic countries. Qutb’s goal was to topple Nasser, while Osama Bin Laden has always viewed the destruction of the House of Saud as his major objective. Islamist movements seek the destruction of secularist regimes such as Baathist Syria and Iraq (where the work of destruction was done for them by the American-led invasion). The Palestinian Sunni Islamist organization Hamas began by attacking Fatah and the PLO, which are secular in orientation. To the extent that the US has intervened in these struggles, Islamist movements have been drawn into conflict with western governments, but this has not always been so. Throughout the Cold War western governments viewed Islamist movements as instruments in the struggle against communism. The Afghan muja-hadeen were western-armed, trained and financed, with al-Qaeda being among the organizations the West assisted. The Reagan administration developed close contacts with Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in order to contain Soviet influence in the Gulf, and the use of Islamist movements as western proxies continued after the Cold War had ended. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan had friendly relations with the United States until 9/11. As Ahmed Rashid, one of the best-informed writers on the subject, has noted,

  Between 1994 and 1996, the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western … [Many US diplomats] saw them as messianic do-gooders – like born-again Christians in the American Bible Belt.68

  If western governments have often been able to use Islamists as allies it is partly because Islamists have not seen western power as their principal enemy. Though it harboured al-Qaeda, the Taliban regime was at war not with the West but with the people and culture of Afghanistan – banning songbirds and kite-flying because they distracted the population from religious observance, and rejecting the authority of tribal law. The Taliban were an extreme manifestation of ‘salafism’, the family of fundamentalist movements that aim to return to the original purity of Islam. In other countries such as Yemen (where its followers have attacked the privileges accorded to descendants of the Prophet) and Saudi Arabia (where a version is embodied in the powerful Wahhabi clergy), salafism has been intensely hostile to local cultures. Wherever salafism has taken root it has attempted to counter the influence of Sufism, which has been more tolerant of indigenous practices.

  In all its varieties radical Islam is a movement of rejection of traditional cultures – whether Islamic or ‘western’. Islamists talk of restoring a caliphate – a form of Islamic government that claims to go back to the Prophet (though the succession was contested almost from the beginning) that was last embodied in the Ottoman Empire. Yet Islamist movements recruit some of their most active members in highly advanced societies – notably amongst deracinated Muslims in western Europe. Islamism is a by-product of the conflicts that go with accelerating globalization.69

  A clash of civilizations may yet occur, but thinking of radical Islam in terms of cultural conflicts mistakes its true character. If it aims to achieve a traditional goal – the ummah, or universal community of Muslims – it does so by waging war on traditional Islamic societies. Like other modern political religions, radical Islam is a hybrid of apocalyptic myth and utopian hope, and in this it is unmistakably western.

  Of course, ‘the West’ stands for nothing fixed. Its boundaries shift with cultural changes and geo-political events. There are those who think the medieval world was a synthesis of the whole of western civilization, but to think of ‘the West’ in this way is to leave out the inheritance of pagan polytheism and tragic drama, Greek philosophy and the lamentations of Job, the inheritance of Rome and Islamic science. During the Cold War the countries of the Soviet bloc were described as being outside the West or opposed to it though their governments subscribed to a European ideology. Later, post-communist Russia was expected to become part of ‘the West’ despite the fact that it had rejected this ideology and resumed an older identity of which anti-western Orthodox Christianity was an important part.

  Nowadays ‘the West’ defines itself in terms of liberal democracy and
human rights.70 The implication is that the totalitarian movements of the last century formed no part of the West, when in truth these movements renewed some of the oldest western traditions. If anything defines ‘the West’ it is the pursuit of salvation in history. It is historical teleology – the belief that history has a built-in purpose or goal –rather than traditions of democracy or tolerance, that sets western civilization apart from all others. By itself this does not produce mass terror – other conditions including large-scale social dislocation are required before that can come about. The crimes of the twentieth century were not inevitable. They involved all kinds of historical accidents and individual decisions. Again, there is nothing peculiarly western about mass murder. What is unique to the modern West is the formative role of the faith that violence can save the world. Totalitarian terror in the last century was part of a western project of taking history by storm. The twenty-first century began with another attempt at this project, with the Right taking over from the Left as the vehicle of revolutionary change.

  3

  Utopia Enters the Mainstream

  The ultimate similarity between Marxist and bourgeois optimism, despite the initial catastrophism of the former, is, in fact, the most telling proof of the unity of modern culture.

  Reinhold Niebuhr1

  A belief that a single economic and political system was coming into being throughout the world began to shape the policies of western governments from the late 1980s onwards. An expression of the Enlightenment faith that humanity is evolving towards a universal civilization that, in a different form, shaped communist regimes, it was strengthened rather than weakened by the Soviet collapse. A confident expectation that liberal democracy was spreading worldwide dominated the nineties, and the events of 9/11 triggered an attempt to accelerate the process throughout the Middle East. If the débâcle in Iraq has undermined these hopes the rise of authoritarian Russia and China has shattered the assumption that post-communist countries are bound to take western institutions as their model. Yet, despite this refutation by history, the myth that humanity is moving towards adopting the same values and institutions remains embedded in western consciousness.