Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  25. Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, London, Atlantic Books, 2006, pp. 1–2, 4.

  26. Dziak, Chekisty, p.3.

  27. Harold Laski and Edmund Wilson are cited in Nekrich and Heller, Utopia in Power, p. 257.

  28. On the human cost of the Great Leap Forward, see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, London, Jonathan Cape, 2005, Chapter 40, especially pp. 456–7. See also Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine, London, John Murray, 1996, pp. 266–74.

  29. For Mao’s campaign against sparrows, see Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 449.

  30. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947, London, Allen Lane, 2006, presents a comprehensive history of the Prussian state.

  31. Nekrich and Heller, Utopia in Power, p. 661.

  32. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, London and New York, W. W. Norton, 2005, p.962.

  33. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945, Volume 1, Chapter 9.

  34. Varlam Shalamov, ‘Lend-Lease’, in Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad, London and New York, Penguin, 1994, pp. 281–2. For a systematic account of Kolyma, see Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, Oxford and New York, Oxford University, Press, 1979.

  35. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990.

  36. For an account of the Soviet ecological disaster, see Murray Fesbach and Alfred Friendly Jr, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege, London, Aurum Press, 1992.

  37. Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1958.

  38. See Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds.) The Proper Study of Mankind, London, Chatto and Windus, 1997, pp. 243–68.

  39. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London, Verso, 1979.

  40. I discuss the political risks of Romanticism in my Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge and New York, Polity Press and the New Press, 2000, pp. 119–22.

  41. For a more extended discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, see my Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, London, Routledge Classics, 2007, pp. 161–6.

  42. Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a–Half Truths, ed. Harry Zohn, Montreal, Engendra Press, 1976, p. 107.

  43. For a discussion of Voltaire’s political relativism, see my Voltaire and Enlightenment, London, Phoenix, 1998, pp. 36–47.

  44. I have examined the Positivists in greater detail in Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, 2nd edn, London, Faber and Faber, 2007, Chapter 3.

  45. See Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe fromthe French Revolution to the Great War, London, HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 226–7.

  46. Richard Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism’, in Richard A. Wilson and James E. Force (eds.), The High Road to Pyrrhonism, Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company, 1980, p. 85.

  47. Immanuel Kant, ‘Of National Characteristics, So Far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’, http://www.public.asu.edu/∼jacquies/kant-observations.htm

  48. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 80.

  49. Popkin, ‘Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism’, p. 89.

  50. See Michael Coren, The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells, London, Bloomsbury, 1993, p.66, for this quote from Wells’s Anticipations (1901).

  51. John Toland, Adolf Hitler, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p. 702.

  52. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, London and New York, Allen Lane, 2005, pp. 506–7.

  53. See Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Chronique Politique, 1934–1942, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.

  54. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 534.

  55. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, London, Serif, 1996, p. xii. For an account of the medieval Christian demonization of witches and heretics, see Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom, London, Pimlico, 2005.

  56. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, London, Pan Books, 2000, p.7.

  57. For the comparisons of Hitler and John of Leyden by Klemperer and Reck-Malleczewen, see Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp. 4–5.

  58. F. A. Voigt, Unto Caesar, London, Constable, 1938, pp. 49–50. I owe my acquaintance with Voigt’s work to a conversation with Norman Cohn.

  59. See James R. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 1980, pp. 29–30.

  60. Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern, 6th edn, Munich, Franz Eher Nachf, 1935, pp. 96–7. The passage is cited in Rhodes, The Hitler Movement, p.115.

  61. Dmitri Merezhkovsky, The Secret of the West, trans. John Cournos, London, Jonathan Cape, 1931.

  62. Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West, London, Victor Gollancz, 1938.

  63. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1952, pp. 113, 125–6.

  64. Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, London, Hurst, 2004, p. 44.

  65. For the role of Shariati and the influence of Heidegger on his thought, see Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005.

  66. On al-Qaeda and Mahdism, see Timothy R. Furnish, ‘Bin Ladin: The Man who would be Mahdi’, The Middle East Review, vol. IX, no. 2, spring 2002.

  67. Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, ‘Shiism as Mahdism: Reflections on a Doctrine of Hope’, www.payvand.com/news/03/nov/1126.html

  68. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 176–7. Rashid’s comment is cited by Robert Dreyfuss in his excellent Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2005, p.326.

  69. I discuss the modern character of radical Islam and its relations with globalization in Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern.

  70. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit claim that liberal democracy is ‘the idea of the West’ in Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, London, Atlantic Books, 2004.

  3 UTOPIA ENTERS THE MAINSTREAM

  1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Faith and History, New York, Scribner’s, 1949. Cited in Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria, London, Victor Gollancz, 1964, p.10.

  2. Thatcher’s remark is cited by Jason Burke in ‘The history man: a profile of Francis Fukuyama’, Observer, 27 June 2004.

  3. For an account of how laissez-faire was engineered in early Victorian England, see my False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, London and New York, Granta Books, 1999, pp. 7–17.

  4. Hoskyns’ paper was presented at a private dinner in late 1977. So far as I know it has not been published. It is archived at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

  5. Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, London, Pan Books, 1993, p. 113.

  6. For a brilliantly perceptive account of the rise and dominance of Thatcherism, see Simon Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, London, Allen Lane, 2006.

  7. Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History, Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1972, p. 81.

  8. Smith’s thought has been the subject of a number of valuable recent studies. See especially Charles L. Griswold Jr, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, and Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2001.

  9. Gr
iswold Jr, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, p. 302.

  10. Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order, pp. 78–9.

  11. For an examination of the role of economics as a contemporary religion, see Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

  12. I discuss some common misunderstandings of Spencer’s thought in Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge, 1989, Chapter 6, pp. 89–102.

  13. I have given a critical assessment of Hayek as a liberal theorist in my Hayek on Liberty, 3rd edn, London and New York, Routledge, 1998, pp. 146–61.

  14. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston, Beacon Press, 1944, p. 140.

  15. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, London, Routledge, 1960, p. 57.

  16. ibid., p. 61.

  17. Blair’s statement was made to the Labour party conference in September 2004 as part of a defence of his role in the Iraq war. See Guardian, 29 September 2004.

  18. For samples of neo-conservative thinking, see Irwin Stelzer (ed.), Neo-conservatism, London, Atlantic Books, 2005, which contains a contribution by Tony Blair; and Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, New York, Free Press, 1995.

  19. John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, London and New York, Free Press, 2004, p. 173.

  20. Tony Blair, prime minister’s speeches, http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1297.asp

  21. ibid.

  22. Tony Blair, speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, 1 August 2006.

  23. Tony Blair, ‘Defence – Our Nation’s Future’, 12 January 2007, http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10735.asp

  24. See Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War, London, Politico’s, 2005, pp. 62–6, 131–3. See also Brian Jones, ‘What they didn’t tell US about WMD’, New Statesman, 11 December 2006.

  25. BBC News World Edition, 5 February 2003, ‘Leaked report rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda link’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2727471.stm

  26. The quote from the ‘Iraq Options’ paper is cited by Henry Porter, ‘It’s clear. The case for war was cooked up’, Observer, 5 November 2006.

  27. Gary Leupp, ‘Faith-based intelligence’, Counterpunch, 26 July 2003.

  28. A full version of the memo together with other leaked documents (including Jack Straw’s memo to Blair of 25 March 2002) can be seen at www.downingstreetmemo.com

  29. For an account of the meeting at which Bush and Blair agreed to go to war whatever the UNdecided, see Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules, 2nd edn, London, Penguin, 2006.

  30. Bush’s offer to Blair is detailed in Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004. The conversation between Bush and Blair was published in an excerpt from Woodward’s book on www.washingtonpost.com on 24 April 2004, under the title ‘Blair steady in support’.

  31. For a penetrating account of political lying in the Blair era, see Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying, London and New York, Free Press, 2005.

  32. Raymond Aron, Foreword to Alain Besançon, The Soviet Syndrome, trans. Patricia Ranum, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, pp. xvii–xviii.

  4 THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE APOCALYPSE

  1. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Appendix to the Third Edition, www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/sense6.htm

  2. Herman Melville, White Jacket, London and New York, Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1924, p.142.

  3. See http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html

  4. See Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy and Belief in Modern American Culture, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 68–70.

  5. John Galt, The Life and Studies of Benjamin West, London, 1819, p. 92; cited by Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 95–6.

  6. For the theological context and content of Locke’s thought, see John Dunn’s pioneering The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969 and 1982.

  7. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism, London, HarperCollins, 2004, p.51.

  8. For a discussion of de Tocqueville on American exceptionalism, see Hugh Brogan’s definitive biography, Alexis de Tocqueville, London, Profile, 2006, p.270.

  9. Woodrow Wilson speaking at Pueblo, 25 September 1919, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wilsonleagueofnations.htm

  10. Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, Power and Impotence: The Futility of American Foreign Policy, London, Victor Gollancz, 1966, p. 15.

  11. Conrad Cherry (ed.), God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1998, p. 11. I am indebted to Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, New York, Viking, 2006, where Cherry’s statement in cited on p. 129.

  12. For a discussion of the role of ideas of divine covenant in modern nationalism, see Anthony Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.

  13. See Lisa Myers and NBC team, ‘Top Terrorist Hunter’s Divisive Views’, NBC Nightly News, 15 October 2003. For an analysis of Boykin’s role in the Bush administration and fundamentalist support for the war, see Paul Vallely, ‘The fifth crusade: George Bush and the Christianisation of the war in Iraq’, in Re-Imagining Security, London, British Council, 2004, pp. 42–68.

  14. Bush’s use of biblical phrases in the speeches has been analysed by the American theologian Bruce Lincoln in Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion After 9/11, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  15. Haaretz, 26 June 2003.

  16. Statement cited in Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, p. 305.

  17. See David Kuo, Tempted by Faith: An Insider Story of Political Seduction, New York, Free Press, 2006.

  18. ‘Bush: Intelligent Design should be taught’, SF Gate, 2 August 2005.

  19. ‘Bush tells group he sees a “Third Awakening” ’, Washington Post, 13 September 2006.

  20. For further details of the Newsweek poll, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, New York, Basic Books, 2003, p.108.

  21. The Homeland Security document can be viewed at www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/report/2004.hsc-planning-scenarios-jul2004–intro.htm

  22. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, New York and London, Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 264.

  23. Lind, Made in Texas, p.144.

  24. Time/CNN poll, Time, July 2002. Cited in Phillips, American Theocracy, p. 96.

  25. Lind, Made in Texas, p.112.

  26. For an account of the far-reaching character of Bush’s push to faith-based government, see Gary Wills, ‘A country ruled by faith’, New York Review of Books, vol. 53, no. 16, November 2006.

  27. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge, 1960, p. 192.

  28. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics, New York, American Enterprise Institute/Simon and Schuster, 1982, p. 18.

  29. Michael Novak, ‘Neocon: some memories’, www.michaelnovak.net.

  30. See Irving Kristol, ‘Memoirs of a Trotskyist’, New York Times Magazine, 23 January 1977, reprinted in Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neocon-servative: Looking Back, Looking Forward, New York, Basic Books, 1986.

  31. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, National Interest, summer 1989. Fukuyama developed the views presented in this article in The End of History and the Last Man, New York, Free Press, 1992.

  32. Criticizing Fukuyama’s original article in October 1989, I wrote: ‘Ours is an era in which political ideology, liberal as much as Marxist, has a dwindling leverage on events, and more ancient, mo
re primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian, are contesting with each other …If the Soviet Union does indeed fall apart, that beneficent catastrophe will not inaugurate a new era of post-historical harmony, but instead a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars.’ See John Gray, ‘The End of History – or of Liberalism?’, in National Review, 27 October 1989, pp. 33–5. This article is reprinted in my Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, London and New York, Rout-ledge, 1993, pp. 245–50.

  33. See ‘Neo-cons turn on Bush for incompetence over Iraq war’, Guardian, 4 November 2006, and David Rose, ‘Neo Culpa’, Vanity Fair, 3 November 2006.

  34. See Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads, London, Profile, 2006, p. 55. The scholar who identified Fukuyama’s ‘passive “Marxist” social teleology’ is Ken Jowitt, author of the interesting Study, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley and Oxford, University of California Press, 1992.

  35. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards, pp. 11, 17–18.

  36. See M. Oakeshott, Rationalismin Politics and Other Essays, ed. Tim Fuller, Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1991. I have criticized Oakeshott’s philosophy in my ‘Reply to Critics’ in John Horton and Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, London, Routledge, 2006.

  37. For a discussion of Kojeve and Schmitt, see Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, New York, New York Review of Books, 2003.

  38. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 181–2.

  39. ibid., p. 164.

  40. For the claim that Strauss’s thought condoned deception in politics, see Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

  41. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, New York, Free Press, 1959, pp. 115–16.

  42. For a careful discussion of Strauss and neo-conservatism, see Stephen B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006.