That is the title of the article about the Islamic State that V.S. Naipaul has published in the Mail on Sunday, Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper. Born in Trinidad, British by adoption, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, he is just about the only person with the authority to compare the twin totalitarianisms of Islamic State and Nazi Germany. Travels in Muslim countries have given him a lot of experience. His essential quality as a writer, I would say, is the insistence that the world is to be understood only through reason and the use of the mind.
The Islamic State, the self-defined new caliphate, exemplifies mindlessness. Its dedication to the general mass-murder of “Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis and anyone it can” is pure Nazism. Other similar characteristics include a belief in racial superiority; and pride in anti-democratic and anti-Semitic bigotry. Hitler’s Germans constructed a false past, and Islamists have the conviction that their history is so unique and important that the history of other people counts for nothing. These ignoramuses are destroying ancient cities and archaeological sites like Nimrud and Hatra. As Naipaul puts it, we all lose “everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.” Decolonization gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilization is to be condemned as “colonial.” Barbarism, in this perspective, is confused with independence and freedom.
Normally anyone who applies adjectives such as “vicious, barbaric and threatening” to Muslims has to face a barrage of accusations of Islamophobia. Naipaul, a very old friend, has taken so much criticism for his insights into the Third World that he rises above it. If the world really wants its ideological and material freedoms, he concludes, the military annihilation of Islamism will have to be a condition of it. Already picked up in many other countries, this is an article that at last explains what we have to do, and why, if civilization is to have a future.