Lessons from the Red Terror About Islamist Organizations: an Interview with Prof. Anna Geifman
Geifman: For me, an overwhelming experience and a turning point was the Islamist atrocity at Beslan, a tiny town in the Russian republic of North Osetia, in the northern Caucasus. On 1 September 2004, amid the annual back-to-school festivities across the former Soviet Union, 32 heavily-armed, masked hostage-takers held nearly 1,200 children, their relatives, and teachers inside a school. For three days horror-stricken parents waited and prayed in the schoolyard. Negotiations with terrorists reached a stalemate after they rejected requests for hostages to receive food and medications. Children fainted, had seizures, hallucinated. Finally, on September 3 several blasts shook the school. As the security forces were making their way inside the burning building, amid smoke, screams, and confusion, half-naked boys and girls jumped out of windows and ran for their lives — and the terrorists methodically shot them in the back from the rooftop. 334 people died including 156 children.
By then, I had studied terrorism as an academic subject for 20 years, but images of armed men shooting point-blank at small children stripped of their clothes stirred terrible memories. We had already seen all this in the Holocaust — the defenseless nakedness, the ash and blood-covered bodies, the strangely composed, otherworldly faces. The ruins of that school, where hundreds of prisoners suffered from unbearable heat and dozens perished in flames, were not just the site of another terrorist act; for me, they were a symbol of mass homicide. For me as a Jew, they were akin to the chimneys of Auschwitz.
I wrote this book as a scholar, with academic standards of evidence and argument. After Beslan, though, terrorism was no longer an issue that I could tackle as an intellectual enterprise. Mass murder of civilians, whether at the World Trade Center in 2001 or Beslan in 2004, has become the terrorists’ top priority. I saw this personally when I did research and taught in the Israeli town of Sderot. There, between 2001 and 2009, approximately 12,000 Qassam rockets produced by Hamas exploded in residential areas. You can’t work on this material as a scholar without sharing the pain of the victims.
PJM: After the so-called Arab Spring, there’s a tendency to play down the terrorist connections of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamas, on the grounds that America has to deal with parties that win elections. What does your study of the Russian experience tell us about the evolution of terrorist organizations? Are they likely to become peaceable after they win elections?
Geifman: Russia was the first country ever to live under a totalist ideology upheld by men with extensive terrorist experience. Having taken over the administration, the Bolsheviks proceeded to implement government-sponsored machinery of state terror — relying on the pre-1917 terrorist mentality and practices.
Lenin and his associates perpetrated what they called the “Red Terror” — an instrument of repression in the hands of the revolutionary regime. Building on the notion of indiscriminate or “motiveless terror” of the early 1900s, the Bolsheviks launched their campaign of state-sponsored coercion against groups and individuals designated as “class enemies” of the proletarian dictatorship. Lenin repeatedly claimed that they “forced” terrorism upon the Bolsheviks, who had to kill “in self-defense.” In reality, he had planned mass repressions a decade before he had a chance to introduce them as a state policy. As early as 1908 he had envisaged “real, nation-wide terror, which reinvigorates the country.”
Seeking to become a single-party government, the Bolsheviks did away even with fellow-revolutionaries. We would see similar effort on the part of Hitler’s cohorts in their initial years in power. Presently, extremists contest political control in the not-yet-established Palestinian state and fight for its meager economic resources. For example, in July 2008, the Hamas eliminated Fatah supporters in Gaza — exactly the way in July 1918 in Moscow, Lenin had done away with the radical Left Socialists-Revolutionaries — the last obstacle to Bolshevik one-party rule. This example emphasizes the point: terrorists in power demonstrate determination to establish terror-based dictatorships.
Elections are hardly a guarantee against state terrorism. It does not matter that the Muslim Brotherhood was voted into government in Egypt via a democratic process. The chance that these jihadists will become more moderate is about the same as it was for the Nazis to seek peace after being elected to power.
Thank you for bringing our attention to Geifman’s book. I will read it.
As a retired academic, I find it interesting that massive terror on civilians seems to be connected to the building of ideologies by supposed intellectuals, like Lenin. The rigid cognitive structure which is ideology in modern man seems to replace not only processes formerly devoted to thinking, but emotional processes, such as sympathy and pity as well. I’ve tried to figure out when thinking processes began to be replaced by ideological structures and turned to literature to see if any authors describe such people. Dostoyevsky’s novel, “The Devils,” contains a few characters who demonstrate ideological cognitions that contrast with other characters who demonstrate regular thinking processes. This is the earliest example of terroristic-type cognition I’ve been able to find.
This topic is inherently intrinsic for those who really want to understand what is happening within the ‘progressive’ movement.
It is impossible to delve into the topic without first understanding the ties that bind the Red/Green alliance.
My blog commentary is rife with information on this issue, please read ‘The Red/Green Alliance…The Ties That Bind…Hillary Clinton & Huma Abedin Compromise US National Security’ – www,adinakutnicki.com.
Related commentaries can be found as you scroll down the HOME tab.
‘Spengler’s’ article is an important overview of the subject at hand.
The link is http://www.adinakutnicki.com. Oops….
The rigid cognitive structure which is ideology in modern man seems to replace not only processes formerly devoted to thinking, but emotional processes, such as sympathy and pity as well.
You are absolutely correct. In fact, I recall an instance where Lenin himself admitted that it would be nice to listen to some soothing classical music at that moment but that he was NOT going to do so because it would likely make him soft and sentimental; he felt it was wrong for a Bolshevik to be soft and sentimental.
I wish I could cite the book and page number but I’ve read too many books on Lenin and his merry band of murderers to remember what each one said.
Thank goodness no modern American political figure could be associated with terrorists who foresee the need to murder millions of Americans in order to impose their totalitarian ideology on the survivors…
That’s funny right thar! Heh! I don’t care who you are, that’s funny!
“Thank goodness no modern American political figure could be associated with terrorists who foresee the need to murder millions of Americans in order to impose their totalitarian ideology on the survivors…”
Yup, thats funny…
Our president being longtime buddies with a serial bomber and such.
Yuckety yuck.
Its right up there with the Medias obsession with images of underwear on a prisoners head, calling it a “War Crime” and an “Atrocity” for damn near a decade, while never making “Belsan” the household word they turned “abu Graib” into…
Funnn-EEEE
“I asked [at a meeting of the Weather Underground terrorist group led by William Ayers], “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.” Twenty-five million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. And they were dead serious.” Larry Grathwohl
http://pjmedia.com/blog/eyewitness-to-the-ayers-revolution/
About the time that exchange took place, the pupulation of the United States was about 250 million, so the kill figure could have been stated as 10 percent. That is about the same casualty/purge rate infli ccted on the new Soviet Union after the revolution, and the same rate infliced on the newly communized Baltic countries, Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine in 1940. (see various works particularly by Robert Conquest). Extrapolating to 21st Century America, the WeatherCommies and comrades would be looking at eliminating about 30 million of us if they consolidated power. I deliberately selected that particular pronoun.
I was in the Soviet Putin, popularly called Russia in 2004 and watched the affair in Beslan on Russian tv. My Russian host was appalled. Although her parents had been simple minded supporters of Stalin (they could not separate Mother Russia under Nazi attack from Father Stalin), my host, a professor of French (a last lingering influence of refinement by Napoleon on Russian culture), seemed to exhibit a sort of a fatalistic horror, so to speak, a “it is about time for something”. Based on the interview I have the impression that Prof. Geifman has concentrated upon the revolutionaries, free of civilized contraint, who, following their “totalism” (wow, excellent term), enter into terrorism as a matter of principle. When all is said and done, state terrorists on principle such as Lenin and Trotsky were highly educated people. Prof. Geifman notes that Lenin made use of “pre-1917 terrorist mentality and practice”. The Leninists (and not they alone) made use of “bottled up rage”.
Pardon, I accidentally pressed the “Submit” key. I ended my interrupted comment noting that Lenin used “bottled up rage”. Whose “bottled up rage”? The answer to that question introduces a perspective to Prof. Geifman’s study (such as I understand it from the interview, not yet having bought the book) which I find lacking. The possessors of said “bottled up rage” are, to invent a term, the “plebian totalists of the de-civilized”. With the “rebelion of the masses” (to borrow a term from Ortega y Gasset) the bearers of the “bottled up rage”, the masses, effused a “plebian totalism” in Russia coinciding with Father Tzar’s lost civilizing prestige amongst the underclasses. I will quickly illustrate the point, a point that reminds me of the tales told about Cambodia.
The White General Anton Ivanovitch Denikine had to flee from Petrograd in order to get to the White armies that he would lead against the Red Army. Denikine noted that, in order to avoid detection on the train out of town, he had to avoid wearing anything that even smacked in the slightest of bourgeois tastes, not to mention, aristocratic leanings. Denekine had to appear to be an indistinct unit of those who had thrown out civilization in their rage for revenge. In other words, there was a sort of a totalism of the masses that de-civilized them and impelled them to strike at anything socially “above” them. The “unbottled rage” was a rage of the de-civilized masses. I am suggesting that the terrorist policies of the Bolsheviki found resonance in the “masses” because said masses themselves had lost all sense of civility and were possessed by “rage” against civilized life. It always has amazed me how so many Russians, well aware of the horrors of Stalin, could retrain their faith in the Father of Mass Totalism, Stalin. The long and the short of my comment is: I find the rage of the masses has possibly not been sufficiently examined and might add a supplementing view to Prof. Geifman’s fine study.
In my first book on the mythopoetic origins of Marx’s Marxism I sought to show in effect the “religiofication” of a socio-economic notion, e.g., the proletariat, as an embodiment of “romantic irony” (and the young Marx shows indications of late German Romanticism). The genius of Marx does not lie in his understanding of the laws of history, etc., rather in his ability to insert socio-economic categories into a religiofication that mystifies said salvational totalism, enabling it so appear to be “scientific”. And this religiofication lies also at the mythopoetics of Lenin.
In listening to Obama and the American left, I often find myself wondering: When are they going to call for eating the rich or just plain killing them? It would be a natural outgrowth of “they don’t pay their fair share, they don’t deserve what they have because they didn’t build it,” etc. Dehumanizing the rich sets the predicate for eradicating them.
You must have missed the signs at the OWS rallies:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=eat+the+rich&qs=IM&form=QBIR&pq=eat+the+rich&sc=8-12&sp=1&sk=
“When all is said and done, state terrorists on principle such as Lenin and Trotsky were highly educated people. ”
Actually, while there were SOME well-educated people among the Bolsheviks, a great many of them were very poorly educated, at least in terms of formal education. Read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Court of the Red Tsar to see how minimal the educations of many of Stalin’s Politburo colleagues were. Several of the Politburo members had not finished primary school, let alone obtained university degrees.
Of course the Bolsheviks tended to make a virtue of this rather than a deficit. They thought they represented the true voice of the proletariat; poor educations just proved they weren’t from the hated elites of the upper classes.
Re: Islamic barbarity, here is a YNET report on 4 of Assad’s captured by the ‘freedom loving rebels’ being tuned into human tartare by machine gun fire.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4263386,00.html
I’m not an expert on the Russian Revolution and Civil War, but from what I have read the sanctuary and assistance offered by state sponsors (Germany) was important. In our day Islamic-themed terrorism and insurgency depends on state sponsors with Iran as a notorious and principal example. If this is the case now, how much more so when Iran acquires a nuclear umbrella?
You are correct and not totally correct. Sometime back the German magazine “Der Spiegel” published an article and made a dvd with the title (translated): “The Bought Revolution”. 90 Years Ago: How Kaiser Wilhelm II Financed Lenin’s October Revolution”. KAISER Wihlem sent Lenin and other revolutionaries to Russia in order to provoke a revolution against his cousin Tzar Nicholas. (Note please: “Kaiser” and “Tzar” both stem from “Caesar” and imply a civilized country and government.) Kaiser W did more than just send back some revolutionaries (and the Kaiser hated Marxists) to Russia, he or, better, his gov. (having lost effective control during the war) heavily financed the Bolsheviki. And such fiancing was critical for ultimate seizure of power by the “Reds”. You might remember that the Kerenki gov., although replacing the Tzarist regime, continued the war against Germany, thereby placing the German military in a two-front war and alienating the Russian masses. The Kaiser Reich had to bring down any Russian gov. still fighting the war if the Reich still could maintain hopes of winning the Western Front (and do not forget the Pres. Wilson was pouring in supplies and soldiers supporting England and France). (Wilson’s attempt to make the world safe for democracy led to the defeat of a civilized gov. and society in Germany that made way for the uncivilized Nazies. So much for democratic reform!)
You are correct if you mean to say that the German government supported financially a group of revolutionaries who would supposedly bring down a gov. fighting Germany. Furthermore, the radical revolutionaries introduced state terrorism. It would be incorrect to hold that the Kaiser gov. was consciously and wickedly supporting state terrorism. If only the Socialist Kerenski had made peace, the Bolsheviki would be but a footnote in history. Despite the Wilsonian propaganda against Kaiser Germany (and my grandparents were German immigrants to America who dared not speak German on the streets–a low-key version of Wilsonian war-making bordering on “terrorizing” pro-German sentiment in America of those days), the Kaiser soldiers were as civilized (or uncivilized) as their opponents. Neither side entered into the mass elimination of civilians based upon principled terror such as the Communist gov.s from Lenin to Stalin (particularly that mass terrorist) and beyond.
The Kaiser gov. did support radical revolutionaries against the Tzar. That has for pragmatic reasons of war. It is, I hold, false to associate that gov. of long ago with the current gov. in Iran. The Iranian gov. follows an ideology, a religiofication, of terrorism and, for that reason, is not civilized as was the Kaiser Reich.
Professor – I salute your expertise in matters including early Marxism, WWI and the Russian Revolution and will happily settle for being “correct and not totally correct” on this point.
Leonard;
Helas, I’m reading this great article & comments today, sorta too late; mea culpa. I hope you’ll still have a peek.
May I say, you’re correct & not completely so. My family has been involved fighting the Bolsheviks, Nazis & Commies for 3 gens. Some paid for it the ultimate price. First hand experience is quite different than mere academic one. No worries, we are a well educated bunch. Here is what I knew already as a child eavesdropping on the grownups talk around the large kitchen table.
Lenin lived in Zurich, Switzerland prior to that infamous sealed freight train to St. Petersburg. That train crossed two front lines, unchecked! Lenin had on him 9 Mio $$ in gold (100+ Mio $$ today!)to finance the revolution (think of the mutiny on the cruiser Aurora, etc.) As far as I know from reliable dissident sources, that money came from German, British, even the US Morgan, banks. It was a very profitable investment for them.
The Russian hoi polloi still are at large a barbaric mob. The beginnings of it becoming ‘institutionalized’ go back to Peter the Great who tried to bring Mother Russia into the EU-fold 200 H years after Renaissance & the Russian people refused that. The following is also for Anna G.: Part of this equation is also the historical Russian anti-Semitism – the word “pogrom” is Russian, after all. Pushkin already lamented the lack of civilization of the masses & preferred speaking French. Further, Tolstoy (member of the lower gentry) lived in Dark Ages squalor w/ his muzhiks. Talking weird!
Lastly, I am surprised that ‘Der Spiegel’ published such an expose re: the Kaiser & the Tsar (they were in-laws). Along w/ ‘Der Stern’, it is a writ by the so-called salon [lounge] Left as we call it where I came from. My father & I have cancelled our subscriptions decades ago. If you read/speak German (Anna & Leonard), I recommend the Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung. The Germans are not fond of it. Some of the best Russian poetry written during the Stalin’s Rein of Terror came from the pen of Anna Akhmatova.
I’m not an expert on the Russian Revolution and Civil War, but from what I have read the sanctuary and assistance offered by state sponsors (Germany) was important.
While the German General Staff DID arrange a private train to send Lenin and his closest (exiled) associates to St. Petersburg to stir things up in the spring of 1917, the German government was strongly hostile to Communism during WW I and gave it no sponsorship besides the aforementioned one way trip to St. Petersburg. It offered no sanctuary whatever that I am aware of. Lenin had been in exile in Europe for many years but never in Germany.
Islam has the key elements of both communism and Naziism in its ideology. The Russian “communists” were taken hold of by an hysterical inspiration of terror and nihilism, out of control, while Nazis were in principle rational, ordinary citizens who were compelled to submit to authority and obey orders.
Islam combines this by using a perfectly sovereign god, who demands obedience, with no guarantee of citizenship or nationhood in return. This frustrating mix is intentionally vitriolic and unstable. The worst of both worlds, but the best fit for the 7th century. Or the 21st century. Or, any century! I maintain that it is a perfectly engineered ideological weapon, even on the psychosexual level. They are the masters of hazing, controlled or uncontrolled.
Ordinary people are susceptible to all of the above, because of force disparity. Either anarchy or obedience is a force amplifier, and it is enough to overcome any soft philosophical opposition. They make an atmosphere where people follow force like water finds its own level, and it doesn’t take much leverage to point it in the right (or left) direction.
Many Germans, millions of them, were in the Nazi Party. These masses were not “in principle rational”, rather they learned to affirm (not compelled to do so) obedience to the “Gemeinwesen” (“Communal Being”). Within this context Nazies could be pragmatically rational, though their “Glaube” (= “Faith”) enunciated by Hitler was to expanded the control of the “Herrenrasse” over Europe and to terminate groups not worthy of living, number 1 being the Jews, but gypsies and slaves coming in a strong second. That is not rationality, rather destructive hate ridden irrationality. The “common” German or, for that matter, the “common” Nazi was integrated into a system of wanting and striving with German orderliness to fulfill the destiny set by the “Führer”. (The “Arbeit Macht Frei” posted on the gates of extermination camps was not just a phoney statement, but reflected the credo of the Nazi totalist ideals. That makes the matter horrifying!) The degree and nature of the willing participation of “common” Germans is a point of historical controversy. There is no controversy when it comes to the leading hierachy in Nazi land. They were IN PRINCIPLE terrorists of the type discussed by Prof. Geifman, striving to dehumanize their victims on the way to murdering them.
The question that raises from the thoughts of Prof. Geifman and David Goldman’s remarks is whether the higher-ups in the Islamic governments are “totalists” (as I, alas, think) or are they just frustrated victims of history given here and there to extremism as our Pres. Obama seems to think. No amount of appeasement stopped the Nazies, the Leninists or Stalinists, all totalists. Is the current American appeasement of, say, the Brotherhood Islam types a repeat of Chaimberlain re Hitler, or has our pres. found something relative to which I must be blind. I prefer to be wrong, though I think I am right.
“They were IN PRINCIPLE terrorists of the type discussed by Prof. Geifman, striving to dehumanize their victims on the way to murdering them.”
This is true for Jews; I won’t argue this. For everyone else, the dehumanization the Nazis used was the same as in any other war. It’s for the survivors, not the dead. Propaganda makes it easier for my aforementioned rational citizens to do what they must. Excluding the racial and religious quirks of the inner party, Germany’s wars were not so personal; it was and is a very densely populated country with very little room to live. It must now outsource its “own” reproduction. The jihad, on the other hand, is expansionist as a principle, not as a condition.
Saudi Arabia shows the confidence of the ultra long run, glacial pace of Islam. They will compromise for entire centuries, knowing that they are an endurance hunter, and that their terrorist counterparts would cover them in an emergency. They have most, maybe all of their bases covered to some degree.
While terrorists can be mastered with stalling and compromise, the spiritual conflict is a much tighter nut to crack, and vastly more serious, even in a world with WMDs. There is no easy answer, but I suspect a Kevin B. MacDonald method of confronting Islam as a rationalist evolutionary strategy would be a body shot to their spiritual health. Judaism has withstood this kind of scrutiny, and everything else for that matter, but the unconscious masculine ego of Islam might have it as its weak point.
The secondary problem, that the West is infertile and dying, is because the poison of feminism, the “blue pill”, has blinded and made impotent the common man, and Islam wins by default. Modernity has an interesting feature in that enlightenment in evolutionary psychology, the “red pill”, is exactly what the Western man needs to strengthen himself, but it is also what would disarm the third option, rejecting both views, that traditionalists like Muslims take. The burden of knowledge would crush their spirit. Western man is deciding which bird to throw his stone at, watching as they fly away, not considering that he has a shotgun and can get them both!
Your reply was learned and interesting re thesis. I do think that you are not fully correct relative to distinguishing the hate, as a theoretical fator, that the Nazis had for Jews and for slaves (and for gypsies), a hate not typical of previous German wars. As perversely “funny” as it may sound, the Hitlerites had a rational economic problem to solve within the framework of their totalist goals. Simply put, the Third Reich did not have the sufficient means during the war to realize all such goals. Himmler showed his “talent” (sic) in Hitler’s eyes by arranging for the elimination of the Jews DURING the war. But after the war Himmler noted that millions of slaves must be similarly eliminated. During the war millions of Russian prisioners died in miserable and dehumanizing conditions, scorned by their captors. Look up the use or misuse of Russian prisioners or prisoners in general for slave labor. Such labor was not used rationally, i.e., often left to starve and not afforded shelter re allied bomb attacks. (Do not forget that Hitler saw the international Jews behind the Bolshevikis–an indicator of direction of hate re its object.) In a paradoxical way the need for slave labor did save the life of some few Jews who were needed for the work force and then managed to survive.
I have seen no evidence that the Western allies treated German prisoners in the same way as Nazis treated their prisoners. Indeed, whole German armies fought at the end NOT to get to Berlin (as Hitler ordered), rather to get to areas controlled by Western armies and not Russian armies. There they wanted to surrender. The mistreatment of prisoners of war by Stalin Russia evinces the features of religiofications of de-civilized leaders. From the ca. 300,000 man strong 6th Army of the Germans, only about 5,000 returned home 10 years after the war’s end. The difference between Soviet/Nazi AND Amerian/British treatments of prisoners suggests that the totalist temptation informed the first alternative. And that is a distinction that makes a difference.
As to the bulk of your comments I have no expertise. I do find myself in general agreeing with your remarks. Thank you for your thoughts.
Who cares? I do. Current and past post-WW II (now dead) GERMAN historians care. Jewish scholars care. Anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of a most monsterous tyranny care. Why do not you care? Something is wrong in your lack of caring. Such a lack of caring for the tyrannized in Germany of the 1930s did historically contribute to the successful seizur of power by tyrannts.
My caring about what happened then in Germany, does not exclude my caring about what happened in Soviet Russia or what Islamic totalists are CURRENTLY doing. Tyranny per se is an object of caring to know and to understand, past or current.
I had years ago students from Germnay studing in America who were internally “messed up” because they were trying to understand what their parents generation had been involved in. They cared unto almost madness. It is to the honor and glory of the German government since its reconstitution after WW II that it does not want to forget what Germany did. Based upon such not forgetting the German government wants that such atrocities will never again happen on German soil. I find that praiseworthy and something that justifies my care. And your care?
“The degree and nature of the willing participation of “common” Germans is a point of historical controversy”
And, who actually cares, then or now?
Dresden…That was the solution to a civilization gone mad.
Think “Mecca” and/or any/all places where the “common” Mohamadan believer congregates.
They have stated their goals.
Its time to make them “live up to the deeds of their leaders”.
We didnt care when it was other “christians” incinereated by the tens of thousands…Happily bombed by American boys with names like “Shultz” and “Schwartz”
We should not care now.
And, who actually cares, then or now? Dresden…That was the solution to a civilization gone mad.
Red herring, sir. Dresden was not the act of a totalitarian government against its own citizens. Bombing civilian cities was a German invention, and in an all-out war to protect civilization from German aggressors, retaliation in kind helped hasten the end of the war and the return of civilization. A civilization which did not enslave its own citizens as postwar Russia did, and which did achieve such a welfare state that it has spent itself silly at its children’s expense.
Dresden was not a military target? The Russians were not begging us to bomb it?
Even Hiroshima was a military target.
You miss the point. There is nothing mad at all about obeying authority. It’s hypernormal, if anything. Islam’s key feature is that it combines hypernormality with madness. Islam, unlike Nazis, but like communists, is very adapt at madness attacks like suicide bombings and human wave assaults. Strategically, it is every bit as rational as Nazis, but it is an unconscious rationalism, that would crack and crumble if explicated by science.
Dresden was every bit as obnoxious as most Nazi “crimes” of war. But, Nazis were hypocrites in their treatment of captured pilots. For the final refrain, ordinary soldiers only obey orders.
to Gloria @ 1
While doing my graduate studies, I read Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ ( Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski of Polish parents but born in Russia 1857 ) which describes a kind of mindset which I believe is universal. Hope this helps.
regards
SF
For your information, Konrad/Conrad could not have been born in Poland in 1857 because Poland simply didn’t exist. It had been partitioned out of existence between Austria, Prussia and Russia in the late 1790s and wasn’t restored until the peace conferences after WW I.
Funny, the loss of boundaries did nothing to obliterate Polish language and culture. Neither Conrad nor those who knew him would have called him ‘Russian’. Would you assert that a Frenchman born in 1942 should be called a German?
So why is it that one gets so much trouble (in Wikipedia, for example) referring to someone as born in the “land of Israel”, instead of some arbitary Roman or Turkish subdivision – or worse, some mythical place called “Palestine”? The person in question certainly thought HE was living in the Land of Israel.
This article appears to back up my oft commented idea that (by only a slight extension) the Saudi financed madrassas and mosques in Northern Virginia are in effect Muslim “cells”. Certainly it’s not any great leap to suggest that the tactics and strategy of subversion and infiltration by resident Muslims here in our society right now is an exact parallel to that of those 1930′s resident Soviet subversion and infiltration efforts of America institutions. We should review the Franklin Roosevelt era for the then effective Soviet espionage….and our then hesitant efforts to combat it, at least publicly.
Dearborn-istan is a fact.
Inch by inch, time is no problem, Muslims will build more mosques and madrassas for their male youth as training grounds for future terrorists.
The enemy is “Us” in the sense that we’re suffocating ourselves with our nauseous and lethal “political correctness” mindsets.
We are (again, I say) “hoist upon our own petard”. Our Muslim enemy is using our democratic institutions as vehicles for our own destruction.
I say “damn the A.C.L.U. and the C.A.I.R.”, we’ve got to learn to outsmart these Muslims at their own game.
Agreed!
And all the while more and more eventual victims of terrorism desperately seek a “nice” means of helping bad guys see “reason” – as if such a thing actually existed. What could possibly go wrong?
What made Nihilism and its offshoots so appealing to Russia’s growing middle class during the 2nd half of the 19th century? This seemed to my amateurish eyes the foundation that Lenin built his terror on. I can’t help but compare to the growing English middle class during the 19th century. This group had very strong affiliation with the various non-Anglican sects.
Hugh Seton-Watson pointed out that the growing cohort of university graduates in late Czarist Russia had expectations of lofty jobs as gentlemen and ladies, and that the large numbers of them who did not receive such sinecures were easily influenced by violent radicals to join in a seizure of power by violence to emplace themselves at the top as their demonic God intended. Communism was indeed the religion of the intellectuals.
Thanks for the reply. Similiar to all those graduates in Tunisia who couldn’t find a job eventually exploding into the Arab “Spring” (quotes intentional). I doubt anything like that will happen here but what is the future with all these millenials who were sold a bill of goods, college = guaranteed ticket to middle class, and now their expectations are shattered. I don’t think it is going to improve because of the massive destruction of paper wealth and the unsustainable path of entitlements Boomers and Xers like me might work until we drop dead.
Professor Geifman’s thesis is interesting and timely. Indiscriminate terrorist organizations that take power lead to goverments that institute terror on their own populations and neighbors. This has been seen in the efrench revoultion, Bolshivik revoultion, Cambodia, Congo and Zimbabwe. One question arises, how did the Israel avoid this state of affairs given the fact that many (but not all) elements of the Irgun and stern gang engaged in indiscriminate terroist acts and yet when their leaders came to power, they wer most respectful of democratic and leagal norms?
The Irgun and Lechi were not terrorist groups; the British gave them that label, and it was also a convenient label which Socialist Zionists used to delegitimize their Revisionist Zionist opposition; Revisionists largely had middle-class values and valued freedom and capitalism – they were willing to engage in sabotage and even limited kidnapping and assassinations in order to expel the British from Palestine. It should be noted that the British had promised the Jews a national homeland (1917 Balfour Declaration), but reneged, giving most of Mandate Palestine to Arabs, and they prevented Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine, and imprisoned thousands of Holocaust survivors; they also executed Jews and brutalized others just for possessing weapons to defend themselves against Arab attacks.
Not an expert, but I would give two reasons:
(1) The Haganah was in charge; Begin was in permanent opposition until the 80′s.
(2) Such terrorism that was employed by the Irgun (and there was some real terrorism) was measured couter-terrorism, as they felt that the British were not stopping the Arabs from murdering Jews. Not too different from the so-called “underground” counter-terrorists of the ’80s. It was not “totalist” or unlimited.
Sorry, Begin was first PM in the late 70′s. Don’t really know anything about Lechi or its splinters.
It does not matter that the Muslim Brotherhood was voted into government in Egypt via a democratic process. The chance that these jihadists will become more moderate is about the same as it was for the Nazis to seek peace after being elected to power.
Attaining positions of power engenders a sense of righteousness. Hardly puts you in a mood to accommodate your opponents.
I see the similarities of “terrorist” tactics wherever and whenever, the main purpose of randomness and uncertainty of attacks being psychological destabilization of a population.
Islamic terrorists, however, view themselves as fulfilling a mandate from God, which shifts the category/justification somewhat from others using terrorist tactics.
The Beslen massacre was nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around, that human beings could do such things.
Religion cannot be separated from government.
When you attempt to take religion out, something else very much like religion creeps back in.
Soviet ideology is a religion.
Terrorism is now our reality. Read,’THE COMING: A TRUE STORY OF HORROR’@Amazon.com to learn more-Unbelievable!!!
EPA Official: EPAs “philosophy” is to “crucify” and “make examples” of US energy producers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze3GB_b7Nuo&feature=player_embedded
How does this help the poor, and middle class?Answer: It does not!
Thank Goodness someone has brought to light the “Red Terror” and reminded us the Bolsheviks were not humanitarians looking to make life better for Russians. They were ruthless Marxist barbarians indiscrimiately murdering for political power.
Americans need to educate/re-educate ourselves about life under “socialist reformers” AKA dictators and the dangers of big governments. Also, we need to take notice of the characteristics of the terrible tyrants of the last century…and compare them to present politicians…lest we allow one to seize power here.
Lenin and Hitler were both mezerizing speakers, both suckered their people in with glib speech and lies, both cast aside laws and social conventions to create “new societies and socialist men”.
Remind you of anyone?
I have not read Anna Geifmans book, but I plan to. I am sure she has made many good points to support here view here. However, Isalm did not need Russian revolutionaries introduce terrosism into Islamic culture. Islam invented terrorism and began with Sabah Bin Hassan (whom Marco Polo called “The Old Man of The Mountain) and his “Hashishem”.
The Assassin cult didn’t engage in random acts of mass terror against civilians as far as I know.
The Assassins had no weapons of mass terror, first of all. Explosives are a necessary terror ingredient.
No the Assassins did not, but I will nominate the Kharijitesas another much earlier Muslin faction which did, from as early as the mid Seventh Century. Curiously, they also seemed to have contained the seeds of a sort of proto-communism, and islamo-anarchism “There is no ruler but Allah”.
According to historians and military experts the first “modern” terrorists were the Zealots and especially the Sicarii, the terrorists that are known as the ones who fled to Masada and ended as known: dead, but probably not through mass-suicide but rather through mass-killing, very similar through mass killings and few suicides in Jamestown 1979.
There is little controversy that the Sicarii were the model for the assassins and for other terrorists later in history. Interestingly enough there is a criminal and terrorist gang in South America calling themselves after the Sicarii…
Prof. Geifman brings up a theory about Russian terrorism and Islamic terrorism that – in my humble opinion – gravely and grossly misses the historic, ideological, religious and cultural point. I’d need much more space and time to explain my claim than I’m ready to invest free of charge here
But Russian and Islamic terrorism have almost nothing to do with each other. And Prof. Geifman’s reasoning path is a very narrow, limited one, oriented towards self-fulfilling her working hypothesis.
We shouldn’t leave out of consideration that the pre-revolutionary Russian terror had many different fathers and sons, coming from very different political and social corners of the Russian “society”.
We also shouldn’t keep out of mind that the Russian terror, except for the religion based one was under heavy active participation of all kind of Jewish revolutionaries of all colors and affiliations. I not only studied this aspect for more than two years in the 70ies, I could also count a number of earlier family members to those Prof. Geifman would call pre-revolutionary, revolutionary, post-revolutionary and anti-Nazi terrorists …
Pro. Geifman fails in her not scientifically but ideologically motivated attempt to put Bolshevik and Islamist terror into the same basket. And she should not leave out the Jewish role in terrorism 1890 – 1945
Thanks and regards
I agree, there is a litany of Jewish revolutionaries involved through out Russia and Europe during those times. Some of them made their way into America, where they set up labor parties, communist parties etc. Today, in America, we have David Axelrod ( Possibly related to Pavel Axelrod , a communist revolutionary of the Bolshevik era? ), Emmanuel, Alinsky, and numerous more Jewish neo-revolutionaries doing their damnedest to ruin this country. They need to be called out and exposed by their fellow Jews who value this country.
Spengler, this would be a great essay topic for you.
I believe behind every dictator and revolutionary, is the ideology of power and greed, not totalism.
I would be interested in Dr. Giefmans opinion of the Mexican Revolution which involved pointless, nihilistic violence.
The increcibly violent Mexican Revolution resulted in a single party dictatorship which relied mainly on economic coercion to maintain power.
The political oppositon was not dragged off to the gulag, they were excluded from economic success in what was a corrupt, statist economy.
I guess I will have to e-mail her.
In the 20th century, this mode of structured violence [aka Totalism] has taken on a life of its own. It is no longer rooted in a a particular social context and accumulated destructive energy.
You look at Giefman and you gotta say, “Whoa, smart, inquisitive, disinterested academics still exist.” And she survived Harvard, no less.
While it’s true that Moslems predated Bolsheviks by about 1,300 yrs, it’s also true that Moslems aren’t creative, not even in their rasions d’etre of hate, violence and tyranny. So leave it to Judeo-Christians to develop the ideological framework for modern terror for the Moslems, who if nothing else are good executors.
***
I hope her next book expands on the thesis of Death Orders to examine the great role played by mass media in creating, and holding together, “movements” that exist for no particular reason. Instead of being aware of the nihilism that brought Communism to power, we have kids in the suburbs wearing Che tee shirts, as if he were a hero and not a scumbag working the mind set described by Giefman.
Anything’s possible now. For example, it’s theoretically feasible to bring to power a person who intentionally hid his personal background from the electorate, and publicly bragged of having two terrorists for political mentors and two anti-American insurgents, one the last major Communist figures in the country, another who’s gotten rich fomenting socialist revolution based on racial hatred. This, of course, would only be feasible with the aid of a Bob Schieffer, Matt Lauer, Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Rosie O’Donnell, Keith Olbermann and such. Without these hard working news entertainers, it wouldn’t be possible to build a network of anti-Americans, and make attractive the idea of destroying freedom in the name of liberty.
Thank you, and I never say that enough especially to those who have given help, so great that they do not know of it.
What we are seeing with UK and other parts of Europe, is the Left recruiting a militant wing from among the newly arrived Muslims.
Historically, I am sure that the Left realizes that, in the more developed parts of the continent, they were too slow to recruit ‘head count’ to their cause, except in Russia.
Now, they see that opportunity to use Muslim muscle to further their aims using some vapid arguments from the Marxist model as over.
The issue is not what people say, but what they do, and the Left is working to recruit an army to replace the one that vanished.
I am almost more impressed w/ the comments than the article itself. Just as the comments on PatriotPost e-zine. This gives me hope re: real change come November.
People like me, who survived communism have nowhere else to go.
I’d like to bring up a more recent permutation of the red/poison-green coalition.
The Soviets have trained already in the 60′s Muslim terrorists in the former Czechoslovakia. Moscow supported Egypt against Israel. We were rooting for Israel during the Six Day War huddled around the heavily jammed RFE broadcast.
More recent still is the Ba’ath party of the late S. Hussein. As if taken from the Nazi/Socialist playbook: The National Iraqi Socialist Workers Party; bingo!
Leonard, could you point us to your book(s)?
I am re-posting my blip re: your earlier comment; I’d like your comment on it:
Leonard;
Helas, I’m reading this great article & comments today, sorta too late; mea culpa. I hope you’ll still have a peek.
May I say, you’re correct & not completely so. My family has been involved fighting the Bolsheviks, Nazis & Commies for 3 gens. Some paid for it the ultimate price. First hand experience is quite different than mere academic one. No worries, we are a well educated bunch. Here is what I knew already as a child eavesdropping on the grownups talk around the large kitchen table.
Lenin lived in Zurich, Switzerland prior to that infamous sealed freight train to St. Petersburg. That train crossed two front lines, unchecked! Lenin had on him 9 Mio $$ in gold (100+ Mio $$ today!)to finance the revolution (think of the mutiny on the cruiser Aurora pointing its 20″ guns at the Winter Palace, etc.) As far as I know from reliable dissident sources, that money came from German, British, even the US Morgan, banks. It was a very profitable investment for them.
The Russian hoi polloi still are at large a barbaric mob. The beginnings of it becoming ‘institutionalized’ go back to Peter the Great who tried to bring Mother Russia into the EU-fold 200 H years after Renaissance & the Russian people refused that. The following is also for Anna G.: Part of this equation is also the historical Russian anti-Semitism – the word “pogrom” is Russian, after all. Pushkin already lamented the lack of civilization of the masses & preferred speaking French. Further, Tolstoy (member of the lower gentry) lived in Dark Ages squalor w/ his muzhiks. Talking about weird!
Lastly, I am surprised that ‘Der Spiegel’ published such an expose re: the Kaiser & the Tsar (they were in-laws). Along w/ ‘Der Stern’, it is a writ by the so-called salon [lounge] Left as we call it where I came from. My father & I have cancelled our subscriptions decades ago. If you read/speak German (Anna & Leonard), I recommend the Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung. The Germans are not fond of it. Some of the best Russian poetry written during the Stalin’s Rein of Terror came from the pen of Anna Akhmatova.
In the latest Batman movie, Gotham City is returned to the “people” under a similar totalism approach. If things continue the way they are, the Batman movie could be prophetic. Totalism already prevails in the American Academy, it is called the American Inquisition, where heresy is rooted out by campus Torquemadas