We want to glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women. We want to destroy museums, libraries and academies of all kinds.
For fifteen months in Fiume, D’Annunzio rabble-roused through his experiment in ‘beautiful ideas’, in contemptuous defiance of all the world’s great military powers. His occupation ended tamely, after the Italian navy bombarded Fiume in December 1920, forcing D’Annunzio to evacuate the city. But a whole mass movement – Mussolini’s fascism – carried on where he had left off. The poet-imperialist died in 1938, three years after Italy had invaded Ethiopia – a ferocious assault that he predictably applauded. Today, as alienated radicals from all over the world flock to join violent, misogynist and sexually transgressive movements, and political cultures elsewhere suffer the onslaught of demagogues, D’Annunzio’s secession – moral, intellectual and aesthetic as well as military – from an evidently irredeemable society seems a watershed moment in the history of our present: one of many enlightening conjunctures that we have forgotten.
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Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.
Unquestionably, forces more complex than in the previous two great wars are at work. The violence, not confined to any fixed battlefields or front lines, feels endemic and uncontrollable. More unusually, even this war’s most conspicuous combatants – the terrorists – are hard to identify.
Attacks on Western cities since 9/11 have repeatedly provoked the questions: ‘Why do they hate us?’ and ‘Who are they?’ Before the advent of Donald Trump, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) deepened a sense of extraordinary crisis in the West with its swift military victories, its exhibitionistic brutality, and its brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and America.
ISIS has seemed to pose to many even more perplexing questions than al-Qaeda did. Why, for instance, has Tunisia, the originator of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the most Westernized among Muslim societies, sent the largest contingent among ninety countries of foreign jihadis to Iraq and Syria? Why have dozens of British women, including high-achieving schoolgirls, joined up, despite the fact that men from ISIS have enslaved and raped girls as young as ten years old, and have stipulated that Muslim girls marry between the ages of nine and seventeen, and live in total seclusion?
An anonymous writer in The New York Review of Books, a major intellectual periodical of Anglo-America, says that ‘we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled’ and that ‘nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse’.
Some of the Islam-centric accounts of terrorism have translated into the endless ‘global war on terror’, and no less forceful – or quixotic – policies aimed at encouraging ‘moderate’ Muslims to ‘prevent’ ‘extremist ideology’, and ‘reform’ Islam. It has become progressively clearer that political elites in the West, unable to junk an addiction to drawing lines in the sand, regime change and re-engineering native moeurs, don’t seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.
They have counterbalanced their loss of nerve before the political challenge of terrorism with overreaction, launching military campaigns, often without bothering to secure the consent of a frightened people, and while supporting despotic leaders they talk endlessly of their superior ‘values’ – a rhetoric that has now blended into a white-supremacist hatred, lucratively exploited by Trump, of immigrants, refugees and Muslims (and, often, those who just ‘look’ Muslim). Meanwhile, selfie-seeking young murderers everywhere confound the leaden stalkers of ‘extremist ideology’, retaliating to bombs from the air with choreographed slaughter on the ground.
How did we get trapped in this danse macabre? Many readers of this book will remember the hopeful period that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse of Soviet Communism, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and human rights appeared to be the right formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression; the words ‘globalization’ and ‘internet’ inspired, in that age of innocence, more hope than anxiety as they entered common speech.
American advisors rushed to Moscow to facilitate Russia’s makeover into a liberal democracy; China and India began to open up their economies to trade and investment; new nation states and democracies blossomed across a broad swathe of Europe, Asia and Africa; the enlarged European Union came into being; peace was declared in Northern Ireland; Nelson Mandela ended his long walk to freedom; the Dalai Lama appeared in Apple’s ‘Think Different’ advertisements; and it seemed only a matter of time before Tibet, too, would be free.