Christopher Hitchens - The Enemy

The Enemy

Christopher Hitchens

Recalling a forbidding figure of early authority in his Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison wrote that whether we liked him or not, he was never out of our minds. That was a secret of leadership. In reaction to a certain mode of flag-displaying faux national unity after the cataclysmic events of 11 September 2001, I wrote an article that proposed instead a sort of activist reticence that might be better designed for a long and arduous confrontation. In this attempt, I annexed a slogan that was adopted by some French citizens after the agonizing loss to Germany of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Always think of it: never speak of it. Instead of grand proclamations about a Global War on Terrorism, or consoling but misleading injunctions from President Bush to consider America on the one hand and the terrorists on the other, it would be better to cultivate a low but intense flame, designed to burn indefinitely rather than to flare up, and directed not merely at the remorseless grinding-down of al-Qaeda as an organization but at its discredit ; at the steady, detailed refutation of Osama bin Ladens false claim to ventriloquize the wretched of the earth. As a matter of work and habit I am a vocal person, so I cannot seriously claim to have kept literally to the second part of the injunction. But it did have the effect of ensuring that I thought about the founder and leader of al-Qaeda almost every day, and either read something about him or wrote something about him almost every month, very persistently over the next decade. And, now that he is dead, the requirement to reflect upon him has by no means been cancelled.

It became a commonplace to say that everything changed on that brilliant fall morning in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Nobodys life has been untouched. Onerous and risible travel restrictions, involving the collective punishment of the innocent, have had their impact at the level of banality. The decision of the Bush administration to try and prohibit real-time transmission of bin Ladens video-sermonslest they convey coded messages to sleeper cells!tested ordinary definitions of stupidity as well as added to the aura of mystique, scope and potency that rapidly formed around his person. The decision to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world, and to forcibly replace the Taliban and Baath Party despotisms in Afghanistan and Iraq, either was or was not the harbinger of the inspiring if vertiginous Arab Spring that burst out of such apparently unpromising soil in the opening months of 2011. On either interpretation, those interventions had momentous consequences that had not been foreseen by bin Laden, who had convinced himself and persuaded others that the United States no longer possessed the will to fight.

I live in Washington and slightly knew one of the passengers who was flown into the outer walls of the Pentagon that morning. Im also a frequent visitor to the television studios that have, as their picture-window backdrop, a commanding view of the United States Capitol. To this day, I seldom pass the Dome without trying and failing to imagine how it might have looked if another flightUnited Airlines 93had plunged into it: a contingency that was only a few minutes flying time away, and averted only by a heroic combat on the part of the passengers. This catastrophe for democracy would have been visible over the shoulders of the network anchors The Dome is made of wrought iron and not, as many people suppose, out of marble. One has to picture molten metal obliterating that mornings deliberations of Congress, and within a few yards of the Supreme Court and of the spacious Thomas Jefferson room of the Library of Congress. The long-planned aggression might have been, and was fully intended to be, very much worse than it was. Meanwhile, surveying the cloud of noxious dust and pulverized human remains that enshrouded the lower part of my beloved Manhattan that sunlit morning, I wrote in a first-response article for a London paper that it was as though Charles Manson had been made king for a day.

Of the various later reactions, which included a suddenly exaggerated faith in a government that had demonstrated itself as almost inconceivably unfit for the elementary constitutional mandate of securing the common defense, as well as a paranoid subcultural spasm that immediately suspected government collusion with the attackers, a frequently heard one was a warning against demonizing the Other. On this reading, Osama bin Laden was not to be categorized with that simplistic (but somehow indispensable) word evil but was to be regarded in the light of a nemesis. In his words and actions we were supposed to detect a reproach to our contentment and arrogance, and a reminder that many millions of people lead lives of immiseration and oppression. His claim to speak for Islam or for all Muslims might be contested, but the religion itself was an expression of deeper yearnings that needed to be sympathetically understood. On no accountand this imperative was put forward by President Bush as well as by many liberalswere the less tender elements of his doctrine to be used as a critique of religion. A hitherto marginal propaganda term, Islamophobia, underwent a mainstream baptism and was pressed into service to intimidate those who suspected that faith might indeed have something to do with it.

It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or objectify them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau termslike Stalinism, sayjust as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Ladens writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.

At the time, I wrote that the attacks on our civil society and institutions were an expression of fascism with an Islamic face. This involved a back reference to Alexander Dubeks definition of Czechoslovak reformist communism as socialism with a human face, and to Susan Sontags echoing irony in calling martial law in communist Poland fascism with a human face. Obviously, these allusions cant be preserved in every reiteration, and so a slightly vulgarized versionIslamofascismgot into the language and was briefly used by the White House before being dropped on the grounds of cultural sensitivity. (I have heard it argued that one would not blacken another monotheism in this way. Nonsense. In the 1930s the expression clerical fascist was in common use on the left, to describe the sympathy of the Vatican for reactionary and violent movements like those of General Franco in Spain, Ante Paveli in Croatia, and Father Jozef Tiso in Slovakia. To this day, the papacy continues to struggle for a form of words that conveys an apology for its actions and inactions during that period.)

Overused as the term fascism may be, bin Ladenism has the following salient characteristics in common with it:

It explicitly calls for the establishment of a totalitarian system, in which an absolutist code of primitive lawsmost of them prohibitionsis enforced by a cruel and immutable authority, and by medieval methods of punishment. In this system, the private life and the autonomous individual have no existence. That this authority is theocratic or, in other words, involves the deification and sanctification of human control by humans makes it more tyrannical still.It involves the fetishization of one book as the sole source of legitimacy.It glorifies violence and celebrates death: Not since Francos General Quiepo de Llano uttered his slogan of Death to the intellect: Long live death has this emphasis been made more overt.It announces that entire groups of peopleunbelievers, Hindus, Shia Muslims, Jewsare essentially disposable and can be murdered more or less at will, or as a sacred duty.It relies on the repression of the sexual instinct, the criminalization of sexual deviance, and the utter subordination to chattel statusmore extreme than in any fascist doctrineof women.It has, as a central tenet, the theory of paranoid anti-Semitism and the belief in an occult Jewish world conspiracy. This manifests itself in the frequent recycling of the Russian czarist fabrication The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion once the property of the Christian anti-Semitesand, in bin Ladens famous October 2002 Letter to the Americans, the published fantasy of a Jewish-controlled America that was first published by the homegrown American Nazi William Pelley in 1934.Next page