McVeigh went to his death defending Yousef and Osama bin Laden; they were, he said in his last interviews, people merely responding to the crimes of the United States against the rest of the world. Had he lived, McVeigh might have followed, in his mind at least, the trajectory of many militants of white Caucasian origins – from John Philip Walker Lindh (the Californian captured fighting with the Taliban against the US in Afghanistan in 2001) to the numerous American and European devotees of ISIS.
In one of his last recorded messages to the West in 2006, Osama bin Laden himself appeared to have moved on in his bookish exile from his grievances with US foreign policy and Islamic theology to anxieties about global warming, and the inability of a Western democracy hijacked by special interests to avert it. Anwar al-Awlaki seemed to be channelling Noam Chomsky, and baiting authentically Salafi preachers (who recoil from un-Islamic texts and references), when in his hugely influential lectures he denounced a:
global culture that is being forced down the throats of everyone on the face of the earth. This global culture is protected and promoted. Thomas Friedman, he is a famous writer in the US, he writes for The New York Times. He says the hidden hand of the market cannot survive without the hidden fist. McDonald’s will never flourish without McDonnell Douglas – the designer of F15s.
Awlaki, exhorting DIY jihad to his listeners, also invoked the example of ‘African-Americans’, who ‘had to go through a struggle; their rights were not handed to them … that’s how slavery ended, and the struggle has to continue’. Abu Musab al-Suri, al-Qaeda’s leading strategist, quoted Mao as frequently as he did the Prophet Mohammed in The Global Islamic Resistance Call. He ridiculed Jihadis who did not learn from Western sources for their failure to ‘think outside the box’. He stressed that most of his arguments did not derive from Islamic ‘doctrines or the laws about what is forbidden (haram) and permitted (halal)’ in Islam, but from ‘individual judgments based on lessons drawn from experience’: ‘Reality,’ not God, he insisted, ‘is the greatest witness.’
Such ideological eclecticism only became possible because all these ‘lone wolves’ – Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009, Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, and Omar Mateen – possessed a will to violence and mayhem untrammelled by any fixed doctrine, Islamic or otherwise. Mateen could not tell the difference between such bitterly opposed groups as ISIS, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah; his most significant ideological act during his killing spree was checking his Facebook pages and Googling himself. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the spiritual father of ISIS, had been a small-town pimp and drug-dealer before he set out to establish a Caliphate in Iraq in double-quick time through theatrical displays of extreme savagery. Such exponents of Gangsta Islam hope to eradicate the manifold evils of self and society with a few great strokes; above all, they believe, in Bakunin’s words, in the ‘passion for destruction as a creative passion’.
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In the recent past, several individuals and groups – from the IRA in Ireland and Hamas in Palestine to Sikh, Kashmiri and Baloch insurgents in South Asia, Chechens in the Caucasus – have used terrorist violence as a tactic. In an almost forgotten atrocity in 1985, a bomb planted by Sikh militants fighting for Khalistan, or ‘Land of the Pure’, brought down a Boeing 747 travelling from Montreal to Delhi, killing 329 people. The Sri Lanka Tamils, who were fighting for a separate homeland, pioneered suicide attacks. One of them, a woman suicide bomber, assassinated the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Their Sinhalese opponents, officially Buddhist, responded with ethnic cleansing.
There is a much longer history of fanaticism and zealotry in the defence of a traditional society threatened with extinction by a modern power. The first jihad of the modern era, as we have seen, began in Germany in 1813 against a military and cultural imperialism embodied by Napoleon, or ‘the Devil’ as he was widely called by Germans. Two subsequent centuries showed how the kind of imperialism that seeks to reshape a whole society, makes people subordinate, morally and spiritually, and often goes under the name of a ‘civilizing mission’, can provoke ferocious backlashes in the name of culture, custom, tradition and God.
The Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Mahdist revolt in Sudan in the 1880s and the Boxer Rising in China in 1900 all signified a desperate desire to resurrect a fading or lost socio-cultural order. Tolstoy was one appalled witness to Muslim resistance to the barbaric mid-nineteenth-century Tsarist wars of expansion in the Caucasus Mountains. As he wrote in a draft of his great novella Hadji Murat (1902), extreme violence was ‘what always happens when a state, having large-scale military strength, enters into relations with primitive, small peoples, living their own independent life’.
Over time, the local defence of autonomy against invaders and colonizers tends to be radicalized, and linked to global battles, as has happened in both Chechnya and Kashmir, where Salafi-style Islamism overwhelmed traditional Sufi Islam. Still, secessionists and separatists, and such holy warriors defending their nomos as the American Sniper, seem much easier to figure out, even at their most psychotic. Many of them refer to their interests explicitly while offering a justification for their actions and motives. They seem to possess a minimum of rationality even while engaged in irrational acts of violence, attempting to demonstrate that the pursuit of specific interests can legitimately involve killing and subjugating other human beings.
Many nation-builders and imperialists from the Jacobins to the regime-changers and democracy-promoters of today have arrogated to themselves the monopoly, once reserved to God, of creating the human world, and violently removing all obstacles in their way. The Jacobin politician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat wondered why those accusing him of a reign of terror ‘cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number’. ‘Proletarian violence,’ Sorel argued, serves the ‘immemorial interests of civilization’ and may ‘save the world from barbarism’. Stalin notoriously justified his carnage with the claim that ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. In 2006, as Israel pulverized Lebanon, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered a Bush administration spin on Marat’s, Sorel’s and Stalin’s revolutionary amoralism: the bombs were part of ‘the birth pangs of a new Middle East’.