Terror and Liberalism

by Paul Berman, Scott Brick (Narrator)

In Paul Berman's opinion, terrorism does not represent a paradigm shift in human thought; rather, it represents a return to the kind of totalitarian thinking that ravaged the European continent during most of the twentieth century. Berman shows how a genuine religious inspiration can be turned into murderous terrorism, and offers insights into how Islamic radicalism mirrors some all-too-familiar episodes in American and Europe. He condemns the foreign policy "realism" of the right and diagnoses the naivete of the political left. Finally, he calls for a "new radicalism" and "liberal American interventionism to promote democratic values throughout the world - a vigorous new policy of American liberalism. Drawing from the history and philosophy of religion and politics, Berman is a peerless interpreter of today's events.

Genres: Politics, History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Terrorism, Islam, War

Audiobook

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Paul Lawrence Berman is an American author and journalist who writes on politics and literature. His articles have been published in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate, and he is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias and Terror and Liberalism.

Berman received his undergraduate education from Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1971 with a BA and MA in American history. He has reported on Nicaragua's civil wars, Mexico's elections, and the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution. Currently he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, a professor of journalism and distinguished writer in residence at New York University, and a member of the editorial board of Dissent. Berman's influence has seen him described as a 'Philosopher King' of the liberal hawks."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Berman

"Paul Berman is a writer on politics and literature whose articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic (where he is a contributing editor), the New Yorker, Slate, the Village Voice, Dissent, and various other American, European and Latin American journals. He has reported at length from Europe and Latin America. He has written or edited eight books, including, most recently, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath, with a new preface by Richard Holbrooke for the 2007 paperback edition; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction, published in 2006 by the American Poets Project of the Library of America; and Terror and Liberalism, a New York Times best-seller in 2003. His writings have been translated into fifteen languages. Berman received a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Columbia University and has been awarded a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, the Bosch Berlin Prize, a fellowship at the New York Public Library’s Center for Writers & Scholars, and other honors.

Reviews

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berman on The Charlie Rose Show, discussing this book in 2003:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/inter...

This is an extremely sound-bite-ish "scarcely mammalian noise" of a fraction of a sliver of a byproduct of a spark of a blurb regarding this book:

I can’t say enough about Berman’s book, really. He lays out a very interesting and condensed yet comprehensive historical analysis of fascistic movements and the mythology based death-cults that fuel them. He carries this out by drawing from political history and theory (obviously), philosophy, and even literary works and movements such as the brief but effective references to Baudelaire and Camus. The parallels he fleshes out between these types of movements and the deep historical time-lines and conceptual trajectories that they occupy and create are very, very incisively perceptive and striking. Again, I think it’s a great book.

The basic thing that people like Paul Berman, Bernard-Henri Levy, Sam Harris (all left leaning liberals generally) and others have and continue to point out clearly and compellingly is that there is a general trend of delusional thinking on "the left" about the realities of what’s going on around the world and of a tendency to succumb to the pitfalls of selectively applying moral relativism (which is the way it's always applied and is subsequently its initial and key failure) and/or hypocrisy in an often times rather perilous way. The chapter "Wishful Thinking" was especially salient in its focus on these points and took Chomsky to task for many of his egregiously misinformed stances on international affairs.

There’s plenty more to say about this...

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Berman wrote Terror and Liberalism in 2002, heady days when a large percentage of the American populace fully expected to be hit by another terrorist attack, and the invasion of Iraq was starting to become the subject of a (lopsided) heated debate. It helps to keep this in mind when reading Berman's passionate, well-written and thoughtful book-length essay.

The principal theme that Berman wishes to expound upon is his belief that Islamism (not the same as the religion itself) represents another pathological strain of the "totalitarian cult of death". These strains - such siblings as Fascism and Communism - all share a common antipathy: fervent and unyielding hatred of Western liberal societies and everything they represent. They appeal to the easily seduced regions of the human psyche: to the heroic, the romantic, the apocalyptic, and, ultimately, to the deathwish. Berman shows how, to members of these totalitarian mass-cults, murder and suicide are but "two sides of the same system".

The largest part of the book consists of Berman describing the earliest manifestations of the totalitarian impulse; select criticisms and analyses of these manifestations by mid-century anti-totalitarian leftists (Camus is given pride of place); and the writings of post-Second World War Islamist philosophers and theologists to show how their beliefs and goals for Islam are - at heart - from this same anti-liberal family. Berman gives a superb dissection of the prodigious output of Sayyid Qutb, the towering intellect of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The remainder of the book sets out to detail how dangerously naive, apathetic and irrational many of the modern (and principally European) left-wing responses to such determined threats have become, including excoriating broadsides launched at José Saramago and Noam Chomsky. He concludes by offering his own preferred method for meeting this challenge: an aggressive war-of-ideas, but one backed up by determined and consistent military action when the ideological battle will not suffice.

Berman is a skilled writer, and his viewpoints are laid out soberly and clearly. I found myself persuaded by certain of his arguments; others less so. He falls into the somewhat tired position of considering left-wing hawks vis-a-vis the Afghanistan and the (then looming) Iraq military offensives as inherently serious, and left-wing opponents as inherently pacifistic and misguided. There were quite valid reasons to oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions that were based neither upon a naive desire for peace-at-all-costs, nor a contemptible refusal to accept Islamism as a serious threat or to take its radicals at their word. If it is absurd to reduce all military action arguments to being the propaganda of warmongers, it is equally absurd to conflate all opposition to war, especially the war envisioned by the Bush administration, as born from a cowardly closing of ones eyes to a harsh truth about a religio-cultural challenge. Like other American authors writing about Europe, at times he seems to forget the long and strife-ridden history of the continent when attacking its military hesitations and cautions, and to expect a political unity between European countries similar to that between US states. However, most of its two-hundred plus pages are excellent, and it is well worth the investment of the reader's time.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book, admittedly more of a pamphlet... almost a diatribe... than a book, when it was first published in 2004, and thought it was quite good. It is an attempt by a left-leaning liberal to expose what he sees as the essentially fascistic undertones in Islamism, and thus an attempt to block the apolegetics for Islamism and for Islamic terrorism that has long been issuing from the Left. I fully accept his indentification of Sayyid Qutb with fascism. Berman cites extensively from Qutb's own writings, and I think the case is incontrovertible.

I discussed this book with a man I knew, a very well placed journalist, who was then -- and has long been -- intimately connected with the backrooms (as a sort of hidden advisor) of Israeli politics. He granted that Berman had a point, but objected that it oversimplified the conflict in the Middle East. I think that he is right in so far as it fails to address entirely the Palestinian 'problem' and much else, but that is not Berman's target -- his target is the pan-Islamism of Qutb and al-Qaeda. It is possible (I don't recall) that he uses too broad a brush; but that should not detract from his fundamental point.

At any rate, worth a quick read.

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently wrote an article which made what I thought was a fairly germane point about radical Islamism's ideological links with contemporary European revolutionary and totalitarian movements. Traditionalist Islamic scholars had been making this point for a long time, so I was surprised at the outrage over this argument (from leftists). Among other things I was accused of lifting ideas from this particular book, which I had in fact scarcely even heard of. And so, I decided to give it a read.

The book makes the point I expected, and elaborates on it rather beautifully. It is truly an admirable work in the sense of its broadmindedness and its absolutely wonderful, energetic prose. Whatever else you may think of him Berman is a truly fantastic writer - witty, erudite and even darkly humorous. Furthermore his illuminations on contemporary European totalitarianism's infatuation with both murder and death - the flip side of the concepts of progress and skepticism/rebellion - were explicated wonderfully. He makes the argument that the totalitarian forces unleashed after WW1 were finally defeated in Europe and elsewhere but still thrive in much of the Muslim world. Islamic radicalism is not a radical other; it is the same extremism familiar to Europe albeit dressed in local garb. In making this argument he marshals and impressive array of history both European and Islamic to make his point, and its one that rings true.

This book was written before the horrors of the Iraq War, which it in fact advocated. So I give it some type of sympathetic leeway. Nonetheless it strikes me that America, and even to a degree Berman himself, were themselves caught up in a "pathological mass-movement" after 9/11, which contained hints of madness echoing totalitarianism. America went to war in a national mania, and the ideas advanced in here of a global liberal jihad strike me as no less Utopian. This book fails or doesn't even attempt to engage in self-analysis. We're good, they're bad, the details don't matter and let's get on with it. History has borne things out rather differently.

Nonetheless this is a useful and in many respects beautiful book - at least aesthetically. It articulates a specific mood and feeling and really reads as a manifesto for that "muscular liberalism" which has sadly with time shown itself to be yet another regrettable endeavor.

[The American Conservative]

'Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism is a wide ranging, sometimes witty, and often incisive polemic for the idea that the fate of the free world depends on a decisive Western victory over fundamentalist Islam. It is more subtle than the writing of many of the hawks who (recognizing the utility of an ally from the Left) have embraced his book, and a far better argument for pre-emptive war than President Bush makes himself. Terror and Liberalism has much to interest those who might disagree with its particulars and its general thrust.'

Read the full review, "An Imperialism for the Left," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Worthless Bum · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this fascinating and eloquent work by "the Philosopher King of the hawkish left", a diverse array of literary, political, philosophical, and especially historical elements are brought to bear upon the appropriate reponse of liberalism to fascism and totalitarianism. Berman discusses the historical development of modern radical Islamism, citing the influence of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, the philosophy of Pan-Arabism, and the unexpected influence of European literature, Nazism, and Communism to the philosophical influence of modern day Islamic extremism.

Berman draws a number of incisive connections between early anarchist revolutionaries, who would fastidiously refuse to carry out political assassinations if there was any chance that innocent bystanders would be injured, and the increasing erosion of that fastidiousness over time, such that a greater and greater willingness to injure innocent people in acts of assassination and terrorism were used, culminating in suicide bombers who haplessly target innocent civilians. This historical progression is tied together with a like one in European literature, in which a liberal treatment of ethics is followed by nihilisticly random acts of violence.

The hawkish left view is also explored in contrast to the "realist" position of the hawks on the right, and with an opposing view on the left exemplified by Noam Chomsky. The connection Berman makes between Chomsky's views about generative linguistics and politics is very interesting, and has to do with an underlying similarity that all humans share in the generative linguistic framework, and which, Berman says, leads Chomsky to make similar assumptions in the political realm.

Interesting and insightful are the seemingly disparite areas of discourse the Berman manages to bring into a unified whole. Berman seems to have a knack for this sort of multifarious connectivity, and his wonderful literary writing style adds an artistic flourish to his insight, making this a doubly pleasurable read.

[Amari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary in scope, remarkable in its erudition, this is nothing less than a courageous, probing study of human nature. Berman, on top of everything a writer's writer, is unfazed by the necessity of posing extremely basic questions about individual and social character; he exposes logical and tragic dichotomies without oversimplifying the political events he cites. Bravo.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Paul Berman's opinion, terrorism represents a return to the kind of totalitarian typical of the European continent during most of the Twentieth Century. Berman shows how a genuine religious inspiration can be turned into murderous terrorism and makes convincing arguments that totalitarianism is just institutionalized terrorism. He offers insights into how Islamic radicalism mirrors episodes in American and Europe. This analogy approach is engaging and interesting but what really grabbed me was the extensive exploration of the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic scholar, theorist, revolutionary, poet, and a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960. While his point of view of Christianity and Judaism is to me no less narrow-minded than popular views of Islamists it suggests an approach to consider the "other side" in this 'clash of civilizations' as equally intellectually adept at constructing a basis for hate.

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I followed the threads of this essay without a sense of where I was being led, but when I had finished it, I did feel that I had learned something, even though I am unsure of how much I agree with Berman. Berman offers a new angle of analysis of the so-called War on Terror without proposing a definitive or detailed solution.

The author refers to "liberalism" in the sense of Western democracy, an ideology that unites Americans and Europeans; the word is not used at all in reference to the political left-wing, as common parlance has it. In fact, while speaking glowingly of liberalism, Berman is highly critical of certain elements on both the left and right in the United States and in Europe.

Of the constant Islamist talk of the necessity of martyrdom, Berman says, "This is not exotic. This is the totalitarian cult of death. This is the terrible thing that got underway more than eighty years ago." (p. 120) Martyrdom attracts a share of Western sympathy, too. Berman was present at the 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference in New York when the crowd applauded an argument in favor of suicide bombing. "Violence attracts," he explains. "The images [of suicide bombings] did suggest that, in Palestine, a mass pathology had broken out. I believe that everyone who paid attention to those images, all over the world, was shocked by those scenes. And the philosophical conundrum was unavoidable." (pp. 131-132) His point, I think, is that when outsiders begin to assess the complexity of the Middle East, they often do not know with whom they should side, and sometimes they may even side with a suicide bomber.

Berman takes issue with Noam Chomsky for trying to discover and cling to a rational explanation for violence across the world. Sometimes, Berman says, violence is driven by irrational philosophies. After the US withdrew from Vietnam, for example, "It began to look as if pathological movements do exist." (p. 147) Yet after 9/11, Chomsky would still not entertain

"[t]he notion that, in large parts of the world, a mass movement of radical Islamists had arisen, devoted to mad hatreds and conspiracy theories; the notion that radical Islamists were slaughtering people in one country after another for the purpose of slaughtering them; the notion that radical Islamists ought to be taken at their word and that shariah and the seventh-century Caliphate were their goals, and that Jews and Christians were demonic figures worthy of death; the notion that bin Laden had ordered random killings of Americans strictly for the purpose of killing Americans..." (p. 149)

This part of the book seems to exist in tension with an earlier part of the book that addressed the more rational complaints of fundamental Islam. Berman analyzed some of the work (in English translation) of the prolific, twentieth-century, Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb and, in particular, Qutb's complaint about the Western separation of church and state. Qutb called this intellectual compartmentalization a "hideous schizophrenia." (p. 75) Berman said, "if Qutb was right, the Muslims had to undergo the same crisis or experience of schizophrenia because it had been imposed on them from the outside, which could only make it doubly painful--an alienation that was also a humiliation." (p. 76) This is a rational complaint, at least significantly more so than affiliation with a death cult for the sake of death alone. Berman's thesis would have been improved if he had described a method for teasing apart the rational from the irrational complaints, especially as he thinks the most salient part of the War on Terror is the war of ideas.

"The totalitarian movements arise because of failures in liberal civilizations" (p. 206), Berman assesses. He interprets the modern War on Terror as a "clash of ideologies" (p. 183) to be fought

"on the plane of theories, arguments, books, magazines, conferences, and lectures. It was going to be a war about the 'cultural influences' that penetrate the Islamic mind, about the deepest concepts of modern life, about philosophies and theologies, about ideas that draw on the most brilliant writers and the most moving of texts. It was going to be, in the end, a war of persuasion..." (p. 185)

Without taking a clear stand on whether the US should have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place, Berman says the loftiest justification and motivation for these invasions is to spread democracy, rather than to pursue treasure or perhaps even to secure American borders. Most people would agree that spreading democracy is indeed a lofty cause, but I am not completely convinced that the motivation for war, especially when held merely as the private opinions of individuals, affects the execution of the war. By this, I simply mean that Iraqis suffer the same under American bombs regardless of whether I happen to think the occupation is a lofty cause or a national shame. Perhaps, if American leaders really cared about spreading democracy and began to "fight the war" on the intellectual front, it would make a real difference in the lives of Afghans and Iraqis; but unfortunately, President Bush "had no ability or language to articulate the ideas of the modern age, and neither did any of the people around him." (p. 196) This is the change that Berman, writing in 2003, hoped to witness.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Berman's work is enlightening and interesting. It is more of an essay on the philosophies behind radical Islamism and its various iterations. It also compares radical Islam to totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century (communism and fascism). He calls them all ideologies of death and says they are a continuum of hatred and death that try to knock out liberalism (democracy and the like). This is all very interesting in that his thesis is that liberalism (the philosophy on which America and the West were founded--individualism, democracy, capitalism, etc) is under assault from these types of worldviews and, hence, liberalism needs to be guarded carefully and defenders of liberalism (not Modern Liberalism--or the "L" word as Pres George HW Bush 41 called it--or Teddy Kennedy Liberalism, but broad individualistic Lockean liberalism) should seek to engage radical Muslims intellectually (and if need be Islamist paramilitary non-state actors by military means) and others who try to assault freedom and democracy as a system of hedonism. He examines the Egyptian cleric and one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (in the 1950s) Sayidd Qutb's work which is the work the Osama bin Laden has read and used to propogate his hate-filled, extremism. What is interesting about this is that Berman is a leftwinger in the socialist tradition, not a rightwing conservative. He will be criticized by Arabs and Arab Muslims for being a Zionist propagandist (as a Jewish American with sympathies for the Jewish state of Israel), but his message is clearly one of freedom and liberty (which are what America was founded on) vs. the opposite which the acolytes of Qutb want and that is a system of Islamist expansion globally with customs and mores that belong in the seventh century not the twenty-first century. If you are interested in global terrorism, the War on Terror, global Islam, you should read this book. It is discursive at times (since it is a rambling essay, not a work of methodical political science or history empirically), but nonetheless it is an important work in conceptualizing what the US is fighting for in Iraq today.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A striking book written in between 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq War about the nature of the extremist Islamic threat and where it fits in broader strains in history. The central argument is that extremist Islam is best understood as one of the mass totalitarian pathologies or death cults that we have seen before in the 20th century: Fascism, Nazism, some forms of Christian extremism. I've heard this argument before but no one brings it home better than Berman.

The main mechanism by which political movements become totalitarian death cults is as follows: many groups start with a totally Manichean, millenarian view of the world and a vision of utopia (the racial paradise, the restored Caliphate, the communist utopia, the end times) that will follow a giant final war against the internal and external enemies (The Jews, the Crusaders, the Slavs, the capitalists). Because it is impossible to create a utopia, these groups usually end up worshipping the deeds and sacrifices made to achieve the utopia, i.e. mass death and mass killing, as the end point slips farther and farther away. They become mass forms of pathology in which people show their devotion to the singular cause through death and killing. The thinking of groups like AQ or Hezbollah isn't that far from those of the communists or fascists. Liberalism at its core is an anti-totalitarian ideology, but it has to recognize that this tendency exists, that other people (and maybe oneself) can go truly mad, and that these people must be fought with guns if necessary but always with ideas.

This brings us to another fascinating point of this book. There's a long discussion in here about the liberal need to explain things in rational terms. Enlightenment inspired liberals tend to see everything as having a reason or at least flowing from a certain logic. When people do something horrible, like blow themselves up on a bus in Tel Aviv, they must have a reason. When societies do horrible things like glorify teenage suicide bombers and worship their deaths and try to maximize the number of innocent people they kill, they must have a reason: deprivation, humiliation, dispossession, violence. Without dismissing these reasons, Berman claims quite logically that they don't quite add up to the culture of violence and the glorification of death in many radicalized Islamic communities. Critics of Israel, France, or the US, often seem to argue that the terrorist violence committed against these societies proved that they have done wrong: They must have done wrong because no one would commit these crimes without a reason. We have to acknowledge that societies are often engulfed in mass pathology, conspiracy-thinking, the worship of death, and an almost unlimited taste for violence.

There's one more important takeaway from this book: the war on terror isn't just about culture, but it is largely about culture. Left wing types and most political scientists will downplay or totally ignore the cultural aspects of this conflict. Berman doesn't give in to the clash of civilization narrative because the major figures of Islamic extremism are far too cross-cultural, far too hyphenated in their identities and experiences to be mere products of monolithic cultures. However, he does show, through a brilliant survey of Sayyid Qutb (probably the most central figure in modern Islamic extremism/totalitarianism) that culture is at the center of the Islamist explanation for why the West is an enemy. In keeping with the ur-myths of all totalitarians (and Qutb is nothing if not a totalitarian, as was Khomeini), Qutb believed that God and the divine law must rule over all aspects of human life. Western thought, dating to Paul and Constantine, had separated the divine from the political; liberalism, starting some time after the Wars of Religion in Europe, tried to push religion into a corner and separate it as much as possible from politics, daily life, and other spheres. This was against God's intention, and for Qutb nothing is outside of God's purview. Qutb believed a war with the West was necessary and inevitable, but the immediate threat to Islam was the infiltration of Western ideas and practices that separated God from the world: women's rights, secular nationalism like that of Nasser or Ataturk, freedom of speech, complete freedom of religion, consumerism, the sexual revolution, etc, etc. Cultural concerns and their theological implications so suffuse the writing of Qutb, Khomeini, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and others that we would be utterly blind to miss the fact that they conceive of this conflict (not totally but in a big way) as cultural and ideological as well as political/policy-based. I didn't totally accept this argument: I think Berman overlooks the importance of US support for brutal regimes like those in Egypt or Iran who have put down and radicalized Islamists. Still, it's crucial for thinking about how we fight the GWOT to see the deep cultural bases of this conflict along with the policies; we have to see how these factors work together rather than letting assumptions about rationality or political correctness get in the way.

This book could have easily been a screed, but it is far from that. It is not triumphalist about liberalism; rather, it treats liberalism (probably would have to include moderate conservatism here) as the ideology most cognizant of the flaws of each individual but the also necessity of defending itself against the many challengers to Islam. For Berman, the key point is that totalitarian death cults can't just be erased on the battlefield; their ideas must be defeated, and then re-defeated as they re-emerge. This is a rear-guard action that liberals will always have to fight because the roots of the totalitarian temptation lie in human nature. Berman is the heir of great anti-totalitarian tradition of Orwell, Schlesinger, Arendt, Niebuhr, and others. These people recognized after WWII that something new was happening; fascism and communism had morphed into something unprecedented in their danger and willingness to die and shed blood. They recognized the need to spell out what liberalism means, to think seriously about its accomplishments and value (not just its flaws), and defend it against this challenge. 9/11 was another one of those moments, and Berman keeps this tradition going. He defends the liberal society as the answer to the totalitarian challenge while also arguing that the Islamist threat is real (something many leftists are loathe to do). I think anyone interested in terrorism, Islam, liberalism, totalitarianism, and political philosophy will find this a challenging and refreshing book.

[Loren · Rating 1 out of 5]

Goodreads
When I picked up Berman's book called Terror and Liberalism, I stupidly thought that's what he would be addressing. Instead he makes the almost factual correlation of terror and Islam as well as the incongruous association with right wing rhetoric with liberalism. When he suggests that the "Terror War" is not an imperialist war nor a clash of civilizations, I hoped he would of come to a more evolved asertation, which is that it is purely a war over resources and whoever has those resources, gains their freedom.

[Marieke · Rating 3 out of 5]

a good illustration of my teardrop theory...that the far left and the far right are not polar opposites but rather meet, pulling the political spectrum into a bulging teardrop.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot I could say about this book, but I'm saving it for MFSO. We'll need something to chat about in those languid, post-coital moments.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book is pretty misleading given it’s content. What this book actually discusses is the history of conflict between liberalism and totalitarianism. Berman then goes on to argue that this spirit of totalitarianism that was allegedly defeated by liberal forces in the 20th century has merely shifted its geographic base to the Islamic world. The War on Terror, then, is akin to the Second World War or the Cold War where the conflict, at its roots, is between liberalism and its totalitarian opponents.

What does this argument imply? It implies that, not only are Middle Eastern totalitarian movements like Islamism or Ba’athism not unique, they also derive their intellectual history from the West.
This initially seems off-base and strongly contradicts with Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory.
However, Berman points out a common mythology shared by the fascists, communists, Islamists and Ba’athists, all of which take root in Western myths. The myth goes as follows:
There has always been a people of God, whose life and customs had been undermined (the proletariat, the descendants of Rome, the Aryan race, the Arab people, the pious Muslims). There were always those inside who had corrupted the righteous people’s way of life (the bourgeoisie, the Freemasons, the Jews). There was some foreign force that was bolstering this domestic enemy of the People (the international capitalists, Anglo-Soviet pressure on Nazi Germany, foreign support for the Jews). Despite their struggles, there was always a Promised Land (the Age of the Proletariat, the New Roman Empire, the Third Reich, the United Arab nation, the resurrection of the caliphate). The coming reign would be pure, cleansed of the ailments that plagued the previous society (unexploited labor and abolishment of hierarchies, biological purity, unadulterated Islam). Before this perfect reign could be achieved, a massive war of death and destruction had to occur (the Class War, the Race War, Islam’s rejection of the West).

Even if one is not convinced by these similarities that link European and Islamic totalitarianism to the same source, consider the fact that the pioneering, leading figures of both Ba’athism and Islamism spent considerable amounts of time in the West, were often Western educated, and frequently cited Western philosophers. Surely, one would think movements as anti-Western and native as Ba’athism and Islamism could not derive from the West. Berman, however, convincingly argues that they do.

What does this mean about the War on Terror? According to Berman’s analysis, the War on Terror is an extension of the wars of the 20th century. The War on Terror is another theater of the conflict that defeated fascism and communism. Berman wrote this in 2002, so what does the clearly divergent outcome in liberalism’s victory against fascism and communism and apparent defeat to the forces of Islamism mean? I’m left with the unanswered question after reading this book of “why has Islamism not been defeated?”. Certainly, communism and fascism were much more formidable foes, materially speaking at least. This question will not be answered in this book given it’s release date but I am curious nonetheless. Because Islamism was not defeated, does this imply that is is another monster altogether, influenced by the totalitarian movements of the West but supported by something entirely different? Or is the answer much more practical? Communism and fascism were fought on traditional/conventional fronts whereas the liberal-Islamist war is an unconventional one whose liberal champion (the US) is ill-equipped to combat. Maybe I am just speaking prematurely and Islamism will die out on its own accord in 20 years. I’m not sure but this is a beautifully written book with interesting ideas and worth your time.

[Cool-Burne Psmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's cliche to say, but this book is as fresh and relevant now as it was on its release date in 2003. I look across the news and again see leftist students and professors taking to the streets in astonishing numbers to voice support for an authoritarian, ultra-conservative Islamist group, and again I see American bombs devastating civilians in the Middle East. Whether this continued relevance is a tribute to Berman's revelatory ideas, or the inanity of the last 20 years, I cannot tell. But what I can tell, is that this is enlightening political commentary.

Berman draws a direct line between the revolutionary ideas that inspired activists across Europe to give their lives to political causes in the first half of the 20th century right through to Islamists doing the same in the name of martyrdom today. Just as in 2023 we watched in horror as Hamas militants raped, burned and murdered Israeli civilians, Berman watched the horrors of 9/11 just before he wrote this book, and Orwell watched the horrors of the Spanish communists and fascists before writing Homage to Catalonia, and Koestler watched the horrors of Romanian communism before writing Darkness at Noon.

In his contemplations, Berman renders Islamism perfectly comprehensible to a Western mind. The anti-capitalism, the blindingly arrogant ethnic pride, and the yearning for paradise. We have already seen this all in Europe. We have seen communist revolutions that yearned for a workers' paradise. We have seen fascist movements that yearned for a cleansed ethno state paradise. We have seen, in our holy books, the Armageddon and Apocalypse that lead to paradise. And we have seen the destruction and horror adherents wrought in aid of their vision. These are not new movements, they are written into the DNA of the West. So why, when we look at the mind-numbing terrorist acts of Islamists, do we act as if it is foreign and beyond our ability to comprehend? It is actually so familiar it hurts. Islamic terrorism is an intimate relative of the totalitarianism that almost destroyed Europe a matter of decades ago.

I wonder how long it would have taken those great thinkers of the mid 20th century, Orwell, Camus, Arendt and Koestler to recognize Islamists for what they are. However long, Berman carries the torch for them into the 21st century and we would all be wise to pay attention.

Liberal societies must be war-like in the face of totalitarianism. As uncomfortable as that idea might be to face, and as difficult as it is to see through the fog of the present, it's a principle that we must be willing to embrace. No one wants to be remembered in the way we remember the French socialists that bowed to Hitler.

[Jordan Sheppard · Rating 3 out of 5]

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Berman writes actually rather generously about an early leading thinker in the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qubt of Egypt. You might say he even compelled me to wade through his Qu'ranic commentaries In The Shade of the Qu'ran which I did not expect from this book in the least. Berman also seems to understand to a certain extent the connectivity between the need for rebellion and social/regime change and the unfortunately terrible consequences that can come from such angst. The connections he draws between the nihilists of Dostoevsky's The Devils with a propensity for Russian terrorism, the anti-imperialist French socialists of the second World War who incidentally supported Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini; Camus's writings on totalitarianism of the 20th century, were all enlightening in their own right. His brief history of the Leninist movement – a combination of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries and Lenin's own movement, the Bolsheviks, with the double-sided coin of "a noble program (that of Social Democracy) and an air of fastidious moral severity (that of the Socialist Revolutionaries)" was also informative.

Berman's entirely one-sided perspective on Palestine and his continual reference to the almost exclusively necessary reaction of Israeli military force to Palestinian "terror" was almost unbearable to read – it is as though he hasn't opened a single page of Said.

Not to mention his criticism of Chomsky felt cheap and frankly goofy at times. "[T]he instinct for greed and for freedom" – Berman's knock-down summation and simplification of the barebones of Chomsky's political theory – stand to reason when you consider the binary nature of this particular mode of description: oppressors and oppressed.

These are a few of my thoughts on this book – which I actually read rather quickly and enjoyed. Overall it was amass with information and comparative social/historical criticism.

[Cat {Pemberley and Beyond} · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah, the war on totalitarian, nepotistic regimes that were created with the aid of foreign powers!

I had a fantastic time arguing with Berman at almost every step of this book. But when I stopped arguing, and thought about how the Iraq War's legacy I was, metaphorically, crushed.

Written and published when the memory of the Islamic terrorist attack, 9/11 was freshly seared into the West's collective memory, Berman attempts to raise the subsequent "War on Terror" to a war on the undemocratic Saddam H. Just that. No oil profits to be made here, folks.

In a nutshell: yes, I agree with Berman's argument that Islamic fundamentalists have vicious, totalitarian ideas. DAESH showed us that in later years, when they sprung up in regions weakened and destabilised by previous wars. But just because one group of people is, frankly, evil, it does not logically follow that everyone who disagrees with them is good.

3 stars because he summarised the contemporary neo-liberal (and neo-colonialist) argument for invading Iraq so very well. But only 3 stars because his laziness of equating Islamic fundamentalists with all practitioners of the Islamic faith, whilst avoiding mention of all other ideological extremists (barring the Nazis) has allowed horrific seeds of hatred, and racism to grow in liberal societies.

[Lauren Laielli · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains some good, historical information. However, it is based strongly on one viewpoint. It could have been better with some additional introspection by the author and the presentation of additional viewpoints. It was difficult to read in some chapters, as there was some overlapping information I felt was unnecessary to make the new point.

[Rasmus Højegaard-Vibild · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting take on the origin of islamic absolutism, it's close connection to European ideas and philosophies and its connection to present day terrorist organisations. Definitely worth a read.

[Bert Bruins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read.

[Pete Whitelock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outdated now, but very thought-provoking and beautifully written

[Jeremy Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for anyone who wishes to understand the 21st century, the Middle East and its relationship with the West, and contemporary political realities.

[Ashton Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boring. Some interesting parts, it overall not worth reading. Too many references to literature and other off-topic stuff for a book on recent history.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant observations that are just as true today as when it was written.

[Phil Dyess-Nugent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't re-read this since it was published soon after the invasion of Iraq, but as I remember it, Berman makes a strong case for the use of military intervention against terrorist states as being in keeping with a liberal political tradition. If the book hasn't held up as well as Berman might have hoped, that may have less to do with any flaw built into the theoretical arguments than with a couple of places where reality intruded, especially in Berman's clincher that liberals should support war against Islamic regimes in the name of feminism. (Of course, the effect of the Iraq War was to put more power in the hands of clerics in what had been a secular society.)

But what really hurts the book from today's standpoint is Berman's insisting, these days, that although he supported toppling Saddam Hussein, he was always opposed to the Bush administration's "way of doing it", which makes it sound as if this book wasn't originally intended as a brief in support of the war. Of course it was; in both the book itself and the interviews he gave to promote it, Berman criticized those who let their instinctive distaste for George Bush get in their way of supporting what he saw as a war that couldn't wait that had to be conducted by the only government we had. His point was that sometimes it's more important to be honorable than smart, but his dishonesty about where he stood in 2003 undercuts the reader's ability to appreciate now what he had to say that was smart about a war he got wrong.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once riveting and alarming, Paul Berman's book on the origins of Islamic terrorism (and the Western world's response to it) traces the roots of this worldwide phenomenon back through the twentieth century and all the way back to what he calls "the ur-myth" - the Book of Revelation.

He explores how militant Islam found a friend in Nazi Germany, and how much of Nazi ideology (and methods) was absorbed into the modern Islamist movement.

And he explores the bizzare roots of the 19th and 20th century's many "death cults" - from the pre-Marxist anarchist bomb throwers and the French Revolution Terror, all the way up to the Palestinian suicide bombers.

Finally, he looks at the West's stubborn myopia toward Islamic terrorism - the refusal to recognize that here is something truly different, truly outside the experience (and reach) of Western logic and reason - something that we may never find common ground with.

Written in an easily accessible style and with impeccable logic, I have no trouble recommending this to anyone seeking to understand events in today's world.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Presents an interesting case for liberals to back the Iraq invasion in 2003. I like that he took the path less traveled, but in trying to argue something that one might agree with (namely: that radical Islamists following Sayyid Qutb and others really mean what they say, and that Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses was actually addressing the dueling reality of living in modernity and the past at once), he loses a lot of nuance.

There's practically sleight of hand if not outright falsification about Lenin and Stalin, the Jonestown cult is treated as a suicide as opposed to a mass murder, and Hitler and Saddam are somehow treated as bigger or more arbitrary killers by numbers than Stalin, even though there were quotas by region and mass purges of the party to say nothing of the kulaks.

It is worth reading, though, as both an interesting book and one full of facts, although it's worth getting a second source on at least the Russian ones.

[Krishan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berman gives us a bird's eye history of the intellectual currents that drove totalitarianism across the globe. From the ashes of WWI, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, totalitarianism was thought to have been defeated, but Berman shows us that these movements are alive and kicking in modern mutations. Baathism, Islamsism, Wahabbism, Salafism etcc are all descendants of European totalitarianism. The depressing tendency of the liberal minded to excuse, deny, or otherwise fail to oppose these ultra-violent revolts against liberalism was a common story in the 20th century. Berman's book shows us that the voices of the modern left-wing intelligentsia have a disturbing echo....

See also Nick Cohen What's Left

[Brent Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berman shows totalitarianism, its causes, and impact on society, in a way that leaves liberalism as a more reasonable and, in comparison,a more conservative solution. He describes "liberal" in the philosophical sense based on liberty. His point is that it is the liberal societies that have prospered in the last centuries and that have produced successes. On the opposite side, or maybe both sides, of this success have been extremes that by their very nature all are totalitarian. Connecting those extremes and particularly Nazism, Communism, and Islamic Extremism is made clearer by Berman's use of Albert Camus's book the Rebel.