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March 12, 2006
Hitler, Stalin and...bin Laden?
Keith Burgess-Jackson highlights this excerpt from Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature (emphases are mine):
The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. [...] The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn't matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.
And both National Socialism and Marxist socialism were united in holding a virulent enmity towards liberal democracy. Of course, the term "Nazi" is a favorite of the liberal arts academy--it's liable to be applied to anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky.
After reading this it occurs to me that there's a third, more contemporary group to add to PInker's unholy dyad: the term Islamofascism is pretty spot on. The struggle of one group over another, the moral inferiority of certain groups, the glorification of violence--all are characteristic teachings of the jihadists.
I'm just starting Mary Habeck's Knowing the Enemy and it promises to fill in some big gaps in my knowledge of the jihadists' motivation. I'll let you know if my assumptions hold up.
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