Bale - The darkest sides of politics, I: Postwar Fascism, Covert Operations, and Terrorism

Chapter 1 originally appeared in an edited volume titled Making Sense of Proxy Wars , edited by Michael Innes. It has not been altered.

Chapter 2 was published in the journal Democracy and Security . I am happy to say that the fears of many analysts (myself included) that some toxic chemical or biological agents produced in connection with Project Coast may have been smuggled out of South Africa appear not to have materialized. The reconstruction of the actual details of this covert program, including special operations assassinations carried out with the use of these agents, has proven to be accurate. It has not been altered.

Chapter 3 was originally written for a graduate seminar course at the University of California at Berkeley and then published in Lobster . It has been slightly amended and updated.

Chapter 4 is an unpublished report that I prepared under contract for a U.S. government entity. It contains no classified information.

Chapter 5 was first published as a chapter in a book titled Jihadists and Weapons of Mass Destruction , edited by Gary Ackerman and Jeremy Tamsett. It has been slightly altered.

Here I would like to emphasize that I would have preferred to devote most of my research efforts in recent years to reconstructing particular jihadist terrorist plots and attacks, on the basis of an in-depth examination of judicial materials and other primary sources, which is the same methodology I employed for many years while doing research on neo-fascist terrorism. I did indeed adopt those tried-and-true methods in connection with both the 1999 Ahmad Rassam Millennium bomb plot (see Chapter 9 in this volume) and the 2004 Madrid train bombings (in a monograph titled Jihdist Cells and I.E.D. Capabilities in Europe: Assessing the Present and Future Threat to the West , which was published by the United States Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute in 2012). Unfortunately, given the proliferation of ill-informed nonsense being peddled after 9/11 by so many newly minted terrorism experts, most of whom had no prior academic background in the study of terrorism, Islamic history, Islamic religious and legal doctrines, or Islamist ideologies and movements, I increasingly felt compelled to try to promote more conceptual clarity about these broader issues. This seemed all the more necessary because nave and erroneous ideas about Islam and Islamism were exerting an ever-growing influence on the counterterrorism policies adopted by the United States and other Western nations, with predictably disastrous real-world consequences.

The next three articles included herein were therefore designed to counter widespread but misleading claims that (a) Islam is inherently a religion of peace (despite numerous Quranic sura s that explicitly enjoin warfare against non-believers, Muhammads own exemplary behavior as a warlord, and centuries of brutal Muslim conquests of infidel territory); that (b) Islamism, an intrinsically literalist, strict, and puritanical but in most respects orthodox interpretation of core Islamic doctrines, can be moderate with respect to its goals (as opposed to its methods); that (c) jihadist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam despite the fact that its Islamist sponsors and perpetrators correctly insist otherwise (and, indeed, obsessively cite canonical Islamic sources in order to justify every action they take); and that (d) Western counterterrorist policies should be based on promoting these absurd revisionist fictions instead of acknowledging reality. In these three chapters, my growing exasperation about the Wests stubborn refusal to recognize or acknowledge the nature of our Islamist adversaries is at times on display. Then again, this sort of denial of reality is rarely if ever a problem when one writes about fascism and neo-fascism. Although Islamist apologists are currently omnipresent in academia (and the media), as are communist apologists and cult apologists, fascist apologists have fortunately not been common there since the 1920s and 1930s. How does one explain the seemingly never-ending willingness of supposedly educated people to engage in such embarrassing apologetics for totalitarian ideologies and movements? As George Orwell once wryly noted, [t]here are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. American literary critic Lionel Trilling helped to explain why when he observed that [t]hose members of the intellectual class who prided themselves upon their political commitment were committed not to the fact but to the abstraction. Sadly, this is no less true today.