Demons Under Western Skies
Terror in books and in our cities.

By Roger Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion
From the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review

ncomprehensible horror sparks a frantic search for comprehension. Among the bookish, this search often takes the form of a hunt for literary parallels. Accordingly, in the aftermath of September 11, one found many invocations of Dostoevsky and Zola, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Dostoevsky's great novel Demons (1871) was inspired partly by the brutal murder of a student by an anarchist-terrorist called Sergei Nechaev. In Zola's novel Germinal (1885), an exiled Russian nihilist called Souvarine sets off a bomb that floods a mine, killing many. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), James presents Hyacinth Robinson, an impoverished aesthete, who is seduced by radicals working for a German terrorist. Conrad portrayed anarchist terrorism in both The Secret Agent (1907), which features a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, and Under Western Eyes (1911), whose character Peter Ivanovitch offers a chilling portrait of evil incarnate. (Conrad called him and another character "apes of a sinister jungle.")

What do these books have to tell us about terrorism today? Well, evil is all of a piece, and with characters like "the incorruptible professor," who walks around London with a bomb strapped to his body, Conrad gives us a portrait of a murderous, megalomaniacal fanatic who is at home in any century. The Secret Agent ends with the professor walking about town

averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable — and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world.

Nevertheless, the world of the Russian nihilist or of the French or German anarchist was very different from our own world. Conrad speaks of one character, "the perfect flower of the terrorist wilderness," whose "banality" is as notable as his "monstrosity." "Banality" is too pedestrian a quality to apply to unvarnished evil such as that unleashed on New York and Washington. Indeed, Hannah Arendt was memorable but wrong when she spoke of "the banality of evil." Evil is horrifying, not banal, however petty, small, and inconsiderable its perpetrators may be.

My own view is that the venerable literary productions of the 19th and early 20th centuries are not particularly relevant to contemporary terrorism. There are, to be sure, local insights, psychological resonances, striking coincidences of theme or imagery. But in the end, such great works of literature are too refined — artistically too good, if you will — to explain the gutter phenomenon of contemporary terrorism. To understand that, one does not require so sophisticated an instrument as Henry James or Fyodor Dostoevsky. One requires something blunter, less delicate, more malevolent.

If one wants a literary parallel that sheds light on the operation of Osama bin Laden, one should look not to classic novels but to another sort of literary enterprise altogether. I mean that enormous bestseller, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, Mein Kampf.

Few people today take the trouble to look into this compendium of evil. But for anyone who has, the murderous evolution of National Socialism is not surprising. Hitler was nothing if not candid about his ambitions, his aversions, his pathologies. His virulent hatred of the Jews is patent on every page, as is his narcissistic egotism, his sense of himself as a destiny, his cold-blooded lucidity. Mein Kampf is the testament of a man bent on war and slaughter. But who in the 1920s and '30s took that seriously?

Osama bin Laden has been similarly candid. In a 1999 interview published in Esquire, bin Laden was perfectly clear that his first ambition was to remove the American military from Saudi Arabia, a country that has cities sacred to Islam that, he believes, are polluted by the presence of Westerners. "Every day the Americans delay their departure," he said, "they will receive a new corpse."

It does not require much hermeneutical ingenuity to understand that sentence. Nor was bin Laden ambiguous about his willingness to attack civilians: "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa."

So we tell the Americans as people and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef [a bomber of the World Trade Center in 1993] and others did.

When the U.S. Marines landed in Somalia at the end of 1992 as part of a U.N. humanitarian effort, bin Laden's troops were there, shooting down our helicopters and dragging the bodies of our men naked through the streets. Reflecting on that event, bin Laden said that his followers were "surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."

No action ever taken by Bill Clinton, who assumed office in the immediate aftermath of the Somalian debacle, did anything to dissuade bin Laden of this conviction. What lessons should we learn from this? The same lessons the world ought to have learned in the late 1930s when Hitler occupied the Rhineland, remilitarized, and set about gobbling up his neighbors and attempting to make the Third Reich Judenfrei. The first lesson is that weakness is provocative. Power without the exercise of authority breeds contempt, and contempt elicits insurrection. The world learned this the hard way in the late Thirties when efforts to mollify, to ignore, to reason with totalitarian evil had the effect of enflaming it.

The second lesson also involves power. The possession of power carries with it responsibility. This is something the British understood throughout the 19th century and up until at least 1914. "Imperialism" has a bad reputation today, thanks in part to anti-Western agitators like Edward Said. It is time to rehabilitate the word "imperialism," to understand that there are many states and half-states and pseudo-states that cannot yet govern themselves. To abandon those entities to "self-determination" is to abandon them to chaos and anarchy: horrible enough for them and intolerable to the civilized world if exported. In itself, imperialism is neither good nor bad. It is a political and social arrangement that can be exercised in a humane and enlightened fashion or in a brutal fashion.

The West has become afraid of its power and negligent about its responsibilities. As the military historian John Keegan noted some months ago, "The great work of disarming tribes, sects, warlords and criminals — a principal achievement of monarchs of the 17th century and empires in the 19th — threatens to need doing all over again." No nation except the United States has the resources to undertake the task today. As of this writing, it looks as if President Bush has mustered the necessary resolve. The outstanding question is whether the spineless forces of anti-Americanism — the Barbara Lee contingent, the coddled academic pacifists, the left-leaning media culture — will sap that resolve and open the way for an even greater carnival of murder. Dostoevsky saw it all clearly when, in a famous passage of Demons, the half-mad anarchist Pyotr Verkhovensky outlines the malignant if unwitting forces that he can call upon:

Do you know that we are tremendously powerful al ready? . . . Listen. I've reckoned them all up: a teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle is on our side. The lawyer who defends an educated murderer because he is more cultured than his victims . . . is one of us. . . . The juries who acquit every criminal are ours. The prosecutor who trembles at a trial for fear he should not seem advanced enough is ours, ours. Among officials and literary men we have lots, lots. . . . Do you know how many we shall catch by little, ready-made ideas? When I left Russia, Littré's doctrine that crime is insanity was all the rage; I came back to find that crime is no longer insanity, but simply common sense, almost a duty; anyway, a gallant protest.

There has been a lot of talk about terrorist "sleepers" in the United States and elsewhere: followers of bin Laden who may have integrated themselves into society and are waiting for marching orders. That is a possibility very much worth worrying about. Yet at the moment even more worrisome, because more certain, are the forces of capitulation: those who, not "sleepers" themselves, induce slumber in others by means of sentimentality (masquerading as progressiveness), moral blindness, and culpable lack of courage.