Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo massacre: Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?

[Ken Burch]

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacre-are-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity

However, do the terrorist fundamentalists really fit this description? What they obviously lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation.

It is here that Yeats’ diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of the terrorists bears witness to a lack of true conviction. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper? The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of their own superiority.

The recent vicissitudes of Muslim fundamentalism confirm Walter Benjamin's old insight that “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution”: the rise of Fascism is the Left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize. And does the same not hold for today’s so-called “Islamo-Fascism”? Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim countries? When, back in the Spring of 2009, Taliban took over the Swat valley in Pakistan, New York Times reported that they engineered "a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants". If, however, by “taking advantage” of the farmers’ plight, The Taliban are “raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal,” what prevents liberal democrats in Pakistan as well as the US to similarly “take advantage” of this plight and try to help the landless farmers? The sad implication of this fact is that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the “natural ally” of the liberal democracy…

[Ken Burch]

1. And this:

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystifying, reaction, of course - against a real flaw of liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core values is a renewed Left. In order for this key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left. THIS is the only way to defeat fundamentalism, to sweep the ground under its feet.

To think in response to the Paris killings means to drop the smug self-satisfaction of a permissive liberal and to accept that the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max Horkheimer had said about Fascism and capitalism already back in 1930s - those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism - should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

[silverweb]

2. Good read.

[flying rabbit]

3. K&R nt

[SunSeeker]

4. "... secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them."

Well, that explains Anwar Al Awlaki seeking a blonde woman for a wife, but not much else.

[CJCRANE]

5. The westerners attracted to ISIS are of a certain type:

Young men, who were petty criminals and attracted to the urban gangster lifestyle.

ISIS gives them the opportunity to join a bigger, more powerful gang, but one with a mission and a simple narrative to explain their sociopathy.

The young women who join ISIS are incredibly gullible and naive and run away for a sense of adventure.

Emboldened with weapons, vehicles and money that almost just drop into their laps, they have created their own "Lord of the Flies" style of society based on a stripped-down Twitter generation version of Islam.

[Ken Burch]

6. Often, the European Muslims who join ISIS and other "jihadi" groups

are, in fact, MORE assimilated than those who avoid violent extremism.

[CJCRANE]

7. And then they flip to the opposite extreme.

But bottom line, they're just bullies.

[Igel]

8. Misses the point.

I was in a church that was fundie. It insisted on proselytizing. People were to be intense about applying the doctrines to themselves and preaching. I knew people up at 4 to study and pray until they left for work at 6:30 a.m. They never missed church, Bible study, or anything else.

The church also said members shouldn't condemn others and pronounce sentence on them--not on civil or criminal juries, not on the street. We shouldn't be in the military, and members went to jail in WWII and the Korean War for this. This was doctrine. Members were as intense about that as about anything else. They didn't vote. They were not their brother's wardens; if their brother chose to sin, they may counsel him but not lock him up and keep him. There was no mandate to command what was good and prohibit what was wrong. There was just "there is no compulsion" over your equals. Whether in religion or in secular affairs. There was a doctrine that we were all equal. (This didn't apply to hierarchies like at work. You take a job, you have a contract, it's not compulsion but voluntary engagement and submission to a set of rules.)

Passionate intensity can mean being coercive. I had a roommate in college who was a new convert and insisted on trying to reform me from my evil, sinful ways of Sabbath-keeping. I had to keep Sunday and believe and do as he did. He took the command to preach to mean "change behavior." We fought. He lost. I've avoided Campus Crusade for Christ members ever since then. Fortunately that hasn't been a problem.

I've known non-Christian others who were as deeply offended by injustice and immorality around them as some Xians. The non-Xians thought they had a positive command as "the best nation" and were upset that they were not in a position of power to do something about promoting virtue and preventing vice. They thought they'd be judged for not extending the rule of their faith to ensure compliance with what the only true natural order was--not just preaching, but enforcing so that the corrupt would become better and the good be kept good. There was no compulsion in religion--but in society they were clearly pointed as as superior and had a clear role in ruling others. You may believe in Xianity, but you should not be allowed to tempt the good and pure, you should not be allowed to corrupt society.

Passionate intensity can be passive and self-applied or actively applied to others. We don't have to ignore some possibilities just to preserve the illusion that we have it all sorted out and others can only be like us. Some terrorists may fit the bill; but to say that they all fit the description of the OP is a self-serving delusion to protect our illusions of superiority and avoid saying something about members of a group that may be taken as broad-brushing all members of that group.