By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Today, the dangers of utopianism are denied. It is believed there is nothing to stop humans from remaking themselves and the world in which they live. This fantasy lies behind many aspects of contemporary culture, and in these circumstances, it is dystopian. How do we know when a project is unrealizable?

As we understand it today, utopianism began to develop along with the retreat of Christian belief. Yet the utopian faith in a condition of future harmony is a Christian inheritance, and so is the modern idea of progress. Though it may seem at odds with the belief that the world is irredeemably evil and about to come to an end, an idea of progress has been latent in Christianity from early times. It may be in the last book of the Christian Bible - St John's Revelation - that it is first advanced, but our second case study already has shown that this is not so.

This brings us next to nineteenth-century anarchists such as Nechayev and Bakunin, Bolsheviks like Lenin and Trotsky, the regimes of Mao, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Guard in the 1980s, radical Islamic movements and neo-conservative groups mesmerized by fantasies of creative destruction. These highly disparate elements are at one in their faith in the liberating power of violence. Thus Christianities eschatological hopes only returned as projects of universalism.

Like many revolutionaries, after them, the Jacobins introduced a new calendar to mark the new era they had begun. They were not mistaken in believing it marked a turning point in history. The age of political mass murder had arrived indeed arrived.

But to come back to our actual subject, in the end, post-millennialist Christians propagated beliefs mutated into the secular faith in progress. Still, so long as history was believed to be governed by providence, there was no attempt to direct it by violence. While Christianity was unchallenged, Utopia was a dream pursued by marginal cults. The decline of Christianity and the rise of revolutionary utopianism, however went together. When Christianity was rejected, its eschatological hopes did not disappear. They were repressed, only to return as projects of universal emancipation dictatorial regimes and now as one of the examples, rising Islamic militancy.

Let us be clear: this is no return to stability. The post-Cold War world was one in which the geopolitical patterns set in place after the Second World War broke up. The American defeat in Iraq has set in motion a further reconfiguration of global politics. The attempt to project American-style democracy worldwide has been a steep decline in American power. For the first time since the 1930s, undemocratic regimes are the rising stars in the international system, while the US has ceased to be the pivotal player in some of the system's most significant conflicts. China, not the US, is central in the crisis in North Korea, and without the engagement of Iran and Syria, there can be no peace in Iraq. America has become a great power like others in history and faces dilemmas that are only partially soluble.

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Bush's talk of universal democracy as mere hypocrisy. For a time, American power became a vehicle for an attempt to remake the world. The disaster that continues to unfold in Iraq is not the result of policy being shaped by corporate interests or any conspiracy.

In' fact, terror was practiced during the last century on a scale unequaled at any other time in history, but unlike the terror that is most feared today, much of it was done in the service of secular hopes. The last century's totalitarian regimes embodied some of the Enlightenment's boldest dreams. Some of their worst crimes were done in the service of progressive ideals. At the same time, even regimes that viewed themselves as enemies of Enlightenment values attempted a project of transforming humanity by using the power of science, whose origins are in Enlightenment thinking.

The role of the Enlightenment in twentieth-century terror remains a blind spot in western perception. Libraries are stocked with books insisting that mass repression in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China was a by-product of traditions of despotism. The implication is that the people of the countries were subject to the communist rule that is to blame, while the communist ideology is innocent of any role in the crimes these regimes committed. A similar lesson has been drawn from the catastrophe that has ensued as a result of the Bush administration's project of regime change in Iraq: it is not the responsibility of those who conceived and implemented the project, whose goals and intentions remain irreproachable. The fault lies with the Iraqis, a lesser breed that has spurned its freedom.

There is more than a hint of racism in this way of thinking. During the last century, mass repression was practiced in countries with vastly different histories and traditions whose only common feature was that they were subjects of a utopian experiment. The machinery of terror - show trials, mass imprisonment, and state control of political and cultural life through ubiquitous secret police - existed in every communist regime. Mongolia and East Germany, Cuba and Bulgaria, Romania and North Korea, Eastern Germany and Soviet Central Asia all suffered similar types of repression. Before they became subject to communist rule - democratic or otherwise - the kind of government, these countries had made very little difference. Czechoslovakia was a model democracy before the Second World War, but that did not prevent it from becoming a totalitarian dictatorship after the communist takeover. The strength of the Church in Poland may have prevented the imposition of full-scale totalitarianism, but like every other communist country, it suffered periods of intense repression. If communist regimes had been established in France or Italy, Britain, or Scandinavia, the result would have been no different.

The apparent similarities between countries with communist regimes imposed on them stem from their shared fates rather than their earlier histories. At the same time, some Communist regimes made advances in social welfare, all experienced mass repression and endemic corruption, and environmental devastation. Terror in these and other communist countries partly responded to these failures and the resulting lack of popular legitimacy of the regimes. Still, it was also a continuation of a European revolutionary tradition. The communist regimes were established to pursue a utopian ideal whose origins lie in the heart of the Enlightenment. Though the fact is less widely recognized, the Nazis were also children of the Enlightenment. They had only scorn for Enlightenment ideals of human freedom and equality. Still, they continued a powerful illiberal strand in Enlightenment thinking and used an influential Enlightenment ideology of 'scientific racism.'

The Twentieth century, of course, also witnessed many atrocities that owed nothing to Enlightenment thinking. Though it was facilitated by the history of colonialism in the country and by the policies of France - the chief, former colonial power - the genocide that claimed a million lives in Rwanda in 1994 was also a struggle for land and water. Rivalry for resources has often been a factor in genocide, as have national and tribal enmities. So has sheer predatory greed. The genocide committed in the Belgian Congo by agents of the various ‘King Leopold's but most particularly Leopold II, when he ruled part of Africa as his fiefdom between 1885 and 1908, eventually claimed somewhere between eight and ten million people, who perished from murder, exhaustion, starvation, disease, and a collapsing birth rate. Though he justified his enterprise in spreading progress and Christianity, Leopold's goal was not ideological. It was his enrichment and that of his business associates.

The pursuit of Utopia need not end in totalitarianism. So long as it is confined to voluntary communities, it tends to be self-limiting, though, when combined with apocalyptic beliefs, as in the Jonestown Massacre in which around a thousand people committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, the end can be violent. When state power is used to remake society, the slide to totalitarianism begins.

Many criteria have been used to mark off totalitarianism from other kinds of a repressive regime. One test is the extent of state control of the whole of society, which is a by-product of the attempt to remake human life. Bolshevism and Nazism were vehicles for such a project. At the same time - even though the term 'totalitarian' first came into use in Italy during the Mussolini era - Italian fascism was not. Nor - despite being at times extremely violent - was the clerical fascism of central and eastern Europe between the two world wars. There are plenty of very nasty regimes that cannot be described as totalitarian. Pre-modern theocracies used fear to enforce religious orthodoxy, but they did not aim to remodel humanity any more than traditional tyrannies. Leninism and Nazism sought to achieve such a transformation. Describing these regimes as totalitarian reflects this.

The Bolsheviks aimed to create a new type of human being from the start. Unlike the Nazis, they did not see this new humanity in racial terms, but as the Nazis, they were ready to employ science and pseudo-science to achieve their goal. Human nature was to be altered so that 'socialist man' could come into being. Such a project was impossible with the scientific knowledge available at the time. Still, the Bolsheviks were ready to use any method, no matter how inhuman, and adopt any theory, however dubious, that promised to deliver the transformation of which they dreamt. From the early twenties onwards, the Soviet regime harassed genuine scientists - purposes of terror. By the late thirties, human subjects - German and Japanese prisoners of war, soldiers and diplomats, Poles, Koreans and Chinese, political prisoners, and 'nationalists' of all kinds (including Jews) - were being used in medical experiments in the Lubyanka prison in the center of Moscow. Despite attempts to resist the process, science became an integral part of the totalitarian state.1

It has become commonplace that Russia's misfortune was that the Enlightenment never triumphed in the country. In this view, the Soviet regime was a Slavic version of 'oriental despotism,' and the unprecedented repression it practiced was a development of traditional Muscovite tyranny. In Europe, Russia has long been seen as a semi-Asiatic country - a perception reinforced by the Marquis de Custine's famous journal recording his travels in Russia in 1839. He argued that Russians were predisposed to servility.2

Theories of oriental despotism have long been current among Marxists seeking to explain why Marx's ideas had the disastrous results they did in Russia and China. The concept of oriental despotism goes back to Marx himself, who postulated the existence of an 'Asiatic mode of production. Later Marxian scholars such as Karl Wittfogel applied it to Russia and China, arguing that totalitarianism in these countries was' a product of Asiatic traditions.3

Indeed, Russia never belonged entirely in what is now called the West, that is, in the metaphorical sense of the word, the way it tends to be ‘understood’ today. What is East or West ‘as such’? Of course, is it always a matter of where your point of view originates in the world? Eastern Orthodoxy defined itself in opposition to western Christianity, and there was nothing in Russia akin to the Reformation or the Renaissance. From the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1543, the idea developed that Moscow was destined to be a 'third Rome' that would lead the Christian world from the east. In the nineteenth century, an influential group of Slavophil thinkers argued on similar lines and suggested that Russia's difference from the West was a virtue. Rejecting western individualism, they maintained that Russian folk traditions embodied a superior form of life. This anti-western is easy to imagine that in this it is different from the one that has just ended.

So long as it is confined to voluntary communities, it tends to be self-limiting though, when combined with apocalyptic beliefs, as in the Jonestown Massacre in which around a thousand people committed mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, the end can be violent. When state power is used to remake society, the slide to totalitarianism begins.

Many criteria have been used to mark off totalitarianism from other repressive regimes. One test is the extent of state control of the whole of society, which is a by-product of the attempt to remake human life. Bolshevism and Nazism were vehicles for such a project. At the same time - despite the fact that the term 'totalitarian' first came into use in Italy during the Mussolini era - Italian fascism was not. Nor - despite being at times extremely violent - was the clerical fascism of central and eastern Europe between the two world wars. There are plenty of very nasty regimes that cannot be described as totalitarian. Pre-modern theocracies used fear to enforce religious orthodoxy, but they did not aim to remodel humanity any more than traditional tyrannies. Leninism and Nazism sought to achieve such a transformation. Describing these regimes as totalitarian reflects this.

The Bolsheviks aimed to create a new type of human being from the start. Unlike the Nazis, they did not see this new humanity in racial terms, but as the Nazis, they were ready to employ science and pseudo-science to achieve their goal. Human nature was to be altered so that 'socialist man' could come into being. Such a project was impossible with the scientific knowledge available at the time. Still, the Bolsheviks were ready to use any method, no matter how inhuman, and adopt any theory, however dubious, that promised to deliver the transformation of which they dreamt. From the early twenties onwards, the Soviet regime harassed genuine scientists.

Contrary to the views of most western historians, there are few strands of continuity linking Tsarism with Bolshevism. Lenin came to power as a result of a conjunction of accidents. If Russia had withdrawn from the First World War, the Germans had not given Lenin their support, Kerensky's Menshevik provisional government had been more competent, or the military coup attempted against the Mensheviks by General Kornilov in September 1917 had not failed, the Bolshevik Revolution would not have occurred. Terror of the -kind practiced by Lenin cannot be explained by Russian traditions or by the conditions that prevailed when the Bolshevik regime came to power. Civil war and foreign military intervention created an environment in which the survival of the new government was threatened from the start. Still, the brunt of the terror it unleashed was directed against popular rebellion.

The aim was not only to remain in power. It was to alter and reshape Russia irreversibly. Starting with the Jacobins in late eighteenth-century France and continuing in the Paris Commune, terror has been used wherever a revolutionary dictatorship has been bent on achieving utopian goals. The Bolsheviks aimed to make an Enlightenment project that had failed in France succeed in Russia. In believing that Russia had to be made over on a European model, they were not unusual. They were distinctive in their belief that this required terror, and here they were avowed disciples of the Jacobins. Whatever other purposes it may have served - such as the defense of Bolshevik power against foreign intervention and popular rebellion - Lenin's use of terror flowed from his commitment to this revolutionary project.

From 1918 onwards, a rash of peasant revolts spread across much of Russia, and from 1920 to 1921, the civil war became a peasant insurgency. The Bolsheviks were determined to crush peasant resistance. Entire villages were deported to the Russian north. It is commonly believed that the Soviet security apparatus was inherited from the late Tsarism. Indeed, Peter the Great used the forced labor of convicts - not least in building St Petersburg, an enduring Russian symbol of modernity. Yet on the eve of the revolution in 1916, only 28,600 convicts were serving forced labor sentences.4

There is a huge disparity between the size of the penal and security apparatus in Tsarist Russia and that established by the Bolsheviks. In 1895 the Okhrana (Department of Police) had only 161 full-time members. Including operatives working in other departments, it may have reached around 15,000 by October 1916. In comparison, the Cheka had a minimum of 37,000 investigators in 1919 and 1921 reached over a quarter of a million. There is a similar disparity between the numbers of executions. During the late Tsarist period from 1866 to 1917, there were around 14,000 executions, while in the early Soviet period from 1917 to 1923, the Cheka carried out around 200,000 performances.5

The techniques of repression employed by the Bolsheviks owed more to contemporary western practice than the Tsarist past. In creating the camps, they were following a European colonial model. Spain used concentration camps to quell insurgents in colonial Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century and by the British in South Africa during the Boer War. Around the same time, they were established in German South-West Africa when the German authorities committed genocide on the Herero tribe. (The first imperial commissioner of German South-West Africa was the father of Hermann Goering, and medical experiments were carried out on indigenous people by two of the teachers of Joseph Mengele.6

Thus the methods of repression used by the Bolsheviks were not an inheritance from Tsarism. They were new, and they were adopted to pursue utopian goals. The central role of the security apparatus in the new Soviet state was required by its project of remaking society.

No traditional tyranny has had an aspiration and which the Tsars certainly lacked. As has been correctly noted, 'Before the appearance of the Soviet party-state, history offered few, if any, precedents of a millenarian, security-focused system.' 7

To call the Soviet state tyranny is to apply an antique typology to a radically modern system. The western opinion followed the Bolsheviks in seeing the Soviet regime as an attempt to realize the ideals of the French Revolution. It is a telling fact that Soviet communism was most popular in the West when terror was heightened. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1934 - when around five million people had perished in the Ukrainian famine - the British Labourite intellectual Harold Laski declared: 'Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in the Soviet regime.'

The methods of repression used by the Bolsheviks were not inherited from Tsarism. They were new, and they were adopted to pursue utopian goals. The central role of the security apparatus in the new Soviet state was required by its project of remaking society - an aspiration no traditional tyranny has had and which the Tsars certainly lacked. As has been correctly noted, 'Before the appearance of the Soviet party-state, history offered few, if any, precedents of a millenarian, security-focused system. ' To call the Soviet state tyranny is to apply an antique typology to a radically modern system. The western opinion followed the Bolsheviks in seeing the Soviet regime as an attempt to realize the ideals of the French Revolution. It is a telling fact that Soviet communism was most popular in the West when terror was heightened. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1934-- when around five million people had perished in the Ukrainian famine - the British Labourite intellectual Harold Laski declared: 'Never in history has man attained the same level of perfection as in! the Soviet regime.' In much the same vein, in 1935, the renowned Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (In later editions of the book, the question mark was dropped.)

For these western enthusiasts, Stalinism was the highest point in human progress. The American literary critic Edmund Wilson went still further. In the Soviet Union, he wrote, 'I felt as though I were in a moral sanctuary, where the light never stops shining.’ Western progressive intellectuals never doubted that the USSR was a regime dedicated to Enlightenment ideals. They would have been horrified at suggesting that the Soviet state was no more than Tsarist despotism in a new guise. It was only when it was clear that the Soviet system had failed to achieve any of its goals that its use of terror was explained as a Tsarist inheritance.

For the most part, western opinion saw in the Stalinist Soviet Union an image of its utopian fantasies. It projected the same image onto Maoist China, where the human cost of communism was even more significant. Some thirty-eight million people perished between 1958 and 1961 in the Great Leap Forward. As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have written: 'This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century - and all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these millions of people to death.' 8

As they did in the Soviet Union, the peasants suffered most from a policy - alien to Chinese traditions - that aimed to subjugate the natural environment to human ends. Around a hundred million were coerced into working on irrigation projects. Often without proper tools, they used doors and planks taken from their homes to construct dams, reservoirs, and canals - most of which collapsed or were abandoned. In a spectacular display of the Promethean, spirit sparrows have deemed pests fit only for extermination. The peasants were ordered to wave sticks- and brooms so that the birds would fall exhausted from the sky and be killed. The result was a plague of insects. A secret message had then to be sent to the Soviet embassy in Beijing requesting that hundreds of thousands of sparrows be sent as soon as possible from the Soviet Far East.9

The cultural cost of the Maoist regime was evident in the Great Proletarian Revolution of 1966-7. Like the Bolsheviks, Mao saw the persistence of the past as the main obstacle to building a new future. China's ancient traditions had to be wiped out. In effect, the Maoist regime declared war on Chinese civilization. It was the Cultural Revolution that achieved its highest popularity in the west.

When Maoism was abandoned, western opinion interpreted its rejection as the beginning of a process of westernization, when in fact - as in the case of the collapse of the Soviet system - it was the opposite. Post Mao, China rejected a western ideology not to adopt another one but in order to carve out a path of development that owed little to any western model. Given China's worsening ecological problems and the social dislocation that has accompanied the phasing out of the 'iron rice bowl,' which ensured lifetime employment and basic welfare for most of the population, the upshot remains in doubt. Still, the period in which China struggled to implement a western ideology IS over.

Wherever it has come to power, communism has meant a radical break with the past. Late Tsarism had far more in common with fin de siecle Prussia than with the Soviet system.10

As Nekrich and -Heller has written: 'Lenin was obsessed with the historical precedents: first, the Jacobins, who were defeated because they did not guillotine enough people; and second, the Paris Commune, which was defeated because its leaders did not shoot enough people.' 11

And a Kolakowski, author of the definitive study of the rise and fall of Bolshevism, has put it, 'Stalinism was the natural and obvious continuation of the system of government established by Lenin and Trotsky.' 12

The millions of deaths that accompanied Stalin's agricultural collectivization policies were larger than anything contemplated by Lenin, but they were a consequence of policies that Lenin began. In turn, Lenin's policies were genuine attempts to realize Marxian communism. Despite Marx's repudiation of utopian thinking, his vision of communism is thoroughly utopian. As we noted before, no one can ever know enough to plan the course of an advanced economy. But the utopian quality of Marx's ideal does not come only from the impossible demands it makes on the knowledge of the planners. It arises even more from the clash between the pursuit of harmony and the diversity of human values. Central planning involves an enormous concentration of power without any institutional checks, as Lenin made clear in his 'scientific' definition of proletarian dictatorship. A system of the arbitrary rule of this kind is bound to encounter resistance. The regime's values will surely not be those of everyone or even the majority. Most people will continue to be attached to things - religion, nationality, or family - the regime sees as atavistic. Others will cherish activities - such as aesthetic contemplation or romantic love - that do not contribute to social reconstruction. Whether they actively resist the new regime or - like Dr. Zhivago in Boris Pasternak's novel- simply insist on going their way, there will be many who do not share the regime's vision of the good life. While every Utopia claims to embody the best life for all of humankind, it is never more than one ideal among many.

One difficulty of utopian social engineering is that it contains no method for correcting mistakes. The theory that guides the construction of Utopia is taken to be infallible; any deviation from it is treated as an error or treason. There may be tactical retreats and switches of direction - as when in 1921 Lenin abandoned War Communism and adopted the New Economic Policy allowing peasants to keep their grain - but the utopian model remains beyond criticism.

However, given human fallibility, the model is sure to contain flaws, some of which may be fatal. The result of persisting in the attempt to realize it is bound to be a society very different from the envisaged one. It feeds on myths that cannot be refuted. For Lenin and Trotsky, terror was a way of remaking society and shaping a new type of human being. And around 80 percent of the people being held in camps were peasants or workers.

While it had apocalyptic consequences, the Bolshevik revolution failed to usher in the Millennium. Tens of millions died for nothing. Even now, the number of deaths resulting from forced collectivization cannot be known with certainty, but Stalin boasted to Churchill that it reached ten million. Robert Conquest has estimated the overall number of deaths in the Great Terror at around twice that figure, an estimate that is likely to be fairly accurate.13

The toll in broken lives was incalculably larger. The land was scarred with manmade deserts and dead or dying lakes and rivers. The Stalinist Soviet Union became the site of the largest humanly induced ecological disasters - probably only surpassed by those in Maoist China.14

The genealogy that traces Nazism back to Nietzsche is suspect, if only because it was promoted by his Nazi sister, Eliza beth Forster- Nietzsche (1846-1935) - who looked after Nietzsche in his last years and whose funeral Hitler attended. But several Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity comprised several different species. Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created. Immanuel Kant - after Voltaire, the leading Enlightenment figure and, unlike Voltaire, a great philosopher -, more than any other thinker, gave intellectual legitimacy to the concept of race. Kant was at the forefront of the science of anthropology that was emerging in Europe and maintained that there are innate differences between the races. While he judged whites to have all the attributes required for progress towards perfection, he represents Africans as being predisposed to slavery, observing in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), 'The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.’ 15

Beliefs of this kind are found in many Enlightenment thinkers. It is frequently argued on their behalf that they were creatures of their time, but it is hardly a compelling defense. These· Enlightenment thinkers not only voiced the prejudices of their age - a failing for which they might be forgiven were it not for the fact that they so often claimed to be much wiser than their contemporaries - they also claimed the authority of reason for them. Before the Enlightenment, racist attitudes rarely aspired to the dignity of theory. Even Aristotle, who defended slavery and the subordination of women as part of the natural order, did not develop an approach that maintained that humanity was composed of distinct and unequal racial groups. Racial prejudice may be immemorial, but racism is a product of the Enlightenment.

Many of those who subscribed to a belief in racial inequality believed that social reform could compensate for the inherent disadvantages of inferior breeds. Ultimately all human beings could participate in the universal civilization of the future - but only by giving up their ways of life and adopting European practices.

Thus Nazi policies of extermination came from nowhere. They drew on powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in operation in many countries, including the world's leading liberal democracy. Programs aiming to sterilize the unfit were underway in the United States. Hitler admired these programs and America's genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples: he 'often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the "Red Savages" who could not be tamed by captivity. The Nazi leader was not unusual in holding these views. Ideas of 'racial hygiene were by no means confined to the far-Right.

A belief in positive eugenics as a means to progress was widely accepted. As Richard Evans has put it: Seeing that Hitler offered them a unique opportunity to put their ideas into practice, leading racial hygienists began to bring their doctrines into line with those of the Nazis in areas where they had failed to conform. A sizeable majority, to be sure, was too closely associated with political ideas and organizations on the left to survive as members of the Racial Hygiene Society ... Writing personally to Hitler in April 1933, Alfred Ploetz, the moving spirit of the eugenics movement for the past forty years, explained that since he was now in his seventies, he was too old to take a leading part in the practical implementation of the principles of racial hygiene in the new Reich. Still, he gave his backing to the Reich Chancellor's policies all the same.16

Many shared the Nazi belief in 'racial science.' The Nazis were distinctive chiefly in the extremity of their ambitions. They wanted an overhaul of society in which traditional values were destroyed. Whatever the conservative groups that initially supported Hitler may have hoped, Nazism never aimed to restore a standard social order. Defeatist European intellectuals who saw it as a revolutionary movement - such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the French collaborator who praised the Nazis for their commonalities with the Jacobins.17 The Nazis wanted a permanent revolution in which different social groups and branches of government competed with one another in a parody of Darwinian natural selection. But - as with the Bolsheviks - Nazi goals went beyond any political transformation. They included the use of science to produce a mutation in the species.

The eighty thousand inmates of mental hospitals who were killed by gassing were murdered in the name of science. The thousands of gay men who ended up in concentration camps (where around half perished) were classified as incorrigible degenerates. 'Criminal biologists' had long categorized the quarter of a million Gypsies who died during the Nazi period as belonging to a dangerous racial type. The belief that not only Jews but also Slavs also belonged to an inferior racial group allowed the Nazis to view with equanimity the vast loss of life they inflicted in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.

Without the construction of race as a scientific category, the project of annihilating European Jewry could scarcely have been formulated. Anti-Semitism is coeval with the appearance of Christianity as a distinct religion: Jews were persecuted from the time of Rome's conversion from paganism and throughout the Christian Middle Ages. In contrast, medieval anti-Semitism was reproduced in the Reformation by Luther. However, while antiSemitism has ancient Christian roots, the project of exterminating Jews is modern. If the Holocaust required modern technology and the modern state to be executed, it also needed the modern idea of race to be conceived.

If a historical comparison can be made, it is with the attribution of demonic power to Jews in medieval Europe. The drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition. A belief in the diabolical powers of Jews was a significant feature in the millenarian mass movements of the- late Middle Ages. Jews were shown in pictures as devils with the horns of a goat, while the Church made attempts to force Jews to wear horns on their hats. Satan was given what were considered Jewish features and described as 'the father of the Jews.' Synagogues were believed to be places where Satan was worshipped in the form of a cat or a toad. Jews were seen as agents of the Devil, whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world. Documents such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a hugely influential forgery. But even racial hygiene ideas were by no means confined to the far-Right. A belief in positive eugenics as a means to progress was widely accepted.

The singularity of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews comes from the scale of the crime and the extremity of its goal. Jews were seen as the embodiment of evil, and their extermination as a means of saving the world. Nazi anti-Semitism was a fusion of a modern racist ideology with a Christian tradition of demonology. Several observers recognized the similarities between Nazism and medieval millenarianism at the time. Eva Klemperer, the wife of the philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer, compared Hitler with John of Leyden. So did Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the aristocratic author of an anti-Nazi book entitled History of a Mass Lunacy, published in 1937.18

James Rhodes has systematically examined Nazism as a modern millenarian movement. Like the Anabaptists and other medieval millenarians, the Nazis were possessed by a vision of disaster followed by a new world. Seeing themselves as victims of catastrophes, they experienced sudden revelations that explained their sufferings, which they believed were the work of evil forces. They thought they had been called to struggle against these forces, to defeat them and rid the world of them in short, titanic wars.19

Many modern political movements can see this millenarian syndrome of impending catastrophe, the existential threat of evil, brief cataclysmic battles, and an ensuing paradise (including the Armageddonite wing of the American Right). It fits the Nazis closely and shows the poverty of any account of Hitler's movement that sees it simply as a reaction to social conditions. Nazism was a modern political religion, and while it used pseudo-science, it also drew heavily on myth. The Yolk was not just the biological unit of racist 'ideology. It was a mystical entity that could confer immortality to those who participated - using the Kantian term 'Ding-an-sich,' which means ultimate reality or the thing-in-itself.

At the same time, the Nazis mobilized a potent mix of beliefs. Nazi ideology differs from that of most other utopian and millenarian movements in that it was largely negative. The Nazis' eschatology may have been less critical than their demonology, which came from Christian sources (not least the Lutheran tradition). The world was threatened by demonic forces, which were embodied in Jews. The present time and the recent past were evil beyond redemption. The one hope lay in catastrophe - only after an all-destroying event could the German Yolk ascend to a condition of mystical harmony.

The murder of thousands of civilians on II September 2001, brought apocalyptic thinking to the center of American politics. At the same time, it re-energized beliefs that form part of America's myth. The Puritans who colonized the country in the seventeenth century viewed themselves as creating a society that would lack the evils of the Old World. Established on universal principles, it would serve as a model for all of humankind. For these English colonists, America marked a new beginning in history.

Many impulses led to war in Iraq, not all of them conscious or rational. The invasion was meant to secure American energy supplies; at the same time, it was intended to remake Iraq as a model of liberal democracy for the rest of the region. The first of these objectives was compromised by the war, while the second was unrealizable. A third - dismantling Saddam's WMD program - was a pretext. In an attempt to legitimate an act of aggression, the Bush administration, along with the Blair government, represented the attack on Iraq as a response to a threat posed by a developing weapons program, but their argument was incoherent. If there was a weapons program under development, it could be dealt with without war by intrusive inspection procedures and other methods. If Sad dam already possessed biological or chemical weapons, there was no reason to think they posed a danger to the United States - as analysis released by the CIA concluded, he was likely to use them against the US only in an American invasion. A predictable effect of the war was to demonstrate to 'rogue states' around the world that they would be better off having the WMD that Saddam lacked. Otherwise, like Iraq, they would be vulnerable to American attacks. Rather than slowing it down, the war accelerated the proliferation of WMD. There was, in fact, no cogent argument for the war in terms of American or global security.

The goals of the war lay elsewhere. Among the geopolitical objectives advanced by neo-conservatives was the argument that the US must decouple from Saudi Arabia, which they viewed as complicit in terrorism. If it was to disengage in this way, the US needed another secure source of oil in the Gulf and another platform for its military bases. Iraq seemed to fit these requirements. By controlling a crucial part of the Gulf's oil reserves, the US could detach itself from an ally it no longer trusted. At the same time, it could ensure that it remained the dominant power in the region, with the capacity to limit the incursions of China, India, and other energy-hungry states.

This was always a great scenario. Oil production in post-war Iraq has never achieved the level it did under Saddam, and the oil price has risen dramatically. In the anarchy that prevails throughout much of the country - the Kurdish region, where there are no American forces, remains peaceful- a return to previous production levels is impossible. Over time, production will still fall further due to declining investment and the costs of protecting facilities. As a result of the Iraq war, America's oil supplies are more insecure than before. The notion that post-Saddam Iraq would accept the transfer of its oil reserves into American hands was delusional. Why should a democratic Iraq - if that had been possible - get the expropriation of its resource base? Even as an exercise in realpolitik, the war was a utopian venture.

Regime change in Iraq was part of a global resource war soon after the Soviet collapse. What is sometimes called the first Gulf War - a title that overlooks the savage conflict between Iraq and Iran some years earlier - was a resource war and nothing else. None of the parties to it pretended that it had anything to do with spreading democracy or curbing terrorism. The objective was sole to secure oil supplies. This was a significant objective of US policy throughout the nineties, underpinning the establishment of military bases in Central Asia and spurring closer relations with Russia. Throughout the twentieth century, geopolitics - the struggle for control of natural resources - was a decisive factor shaping conflicts between states. Securing oil supplies was a significant issue in the Second World War, helping to trigger Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It continued in the abortive attempt by Britain to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. The British- American overthrow of the secularist Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh in the CIA-led 'Operation Ajax' in 1953 was mounted to prevent Iran from coming under the increased influence. Its chief goal was to reassert western control of the country's oil.

The rivalries of the post-Cold War period have developed against a different background. The balance of power between producers and consumers of energy is shifting, with oil-producing states able to dictate the terms they do business with the world. Russia uses its position as an oil and natural gas supplier to reassert itself in global politics. At the same time, Iran has emerged as a contender for hegemony in the Gulf. Underlying these shifts is that international oil reserves are being depleted while global demand rises. Oil is not running out simply, but the theory of 'peak oil' suggests that global production may be near its maximum. Peak oil is taken seriously by governments. A report by the US Department of Energy entitled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management, released in February 2005, concludes: 'The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.' When dwindling oil is combined with accelerating industrialization, the result will be an intensifying rivalry for control of the world's remaining reserves. The geo-politics of peak oil is shaping the policies of great powers.

The role of oil as the supreme asset was recognized by the Bush administration's most potent strategist. In a speech at the Institute of Petroleum's autumn lunch in 1999, when he was CEO of Haliburton, Dick Cheney observed: Producing oil is a self-depleting activity. Every year you've got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, to stay even. This is true for companies in the broader sense as it is for the world ... So where is the oil going to come from? Oil is unique in that it is so strategic. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world's economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality. The degree of government involvement makes oil a unique commodity.

Governments and national oil companies control about 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies:' Cheney's remarks show a clear understanding of peak oil, which was reflected in the first Bush administration's decision to reclassify energy policy under the heading of national security. There can be little doubt that oil was a vital factor in the decision to launch the Iraq war. The US acted to install a regime that would secure America's oil supplies and signal its determination to control the reserves of the Gulf as a whole.

The adventure ran aground on the impossibility of establishing an influential state in place of the demolished one. It has become conventional wisdom to think that disaster could have been avoided by planning for post-war reconstruction. This view is supported by the fact that some planning did occur in the US State Department's 2002 paper on the future of Iraq, for example, but was disregarded by Bush and Rumsfeld. Yet the belief that the chaos that followed the American invasion could have been averted is groundless. It assumes the war goals were achievable when in fact, they were not. If there had been anything resembling realistic forethought, the war would never have been launched. Establishing liberal democracy in the country was impossible while overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state.

None of this is hindsight. The insurgency that followed the initial military success was widely anticipated. At the same time, the history of Iraq shows that the risks of majority rule in the country were well-understood generations ago. First known as Mesopotamia, the state of Iraq is primarily the work of the British diplomat Gertrude Bell, who - along with T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and Harry St John Philby, the British colonial officer and father of the Soviet spy Kim Phil by constructed it from three provinces of the collapsed Ottoman Empire and established it as a Hashemite kingdom in 192I. With the fall of the Ottomans in 1919, Bell - the first woman to be appointed a political officer in the British colonial service - became secretary to the British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and began building a new state. In 1920 Bell met Seyyid Hasan al-Sadr, the leading figure among Iraq's Shias and great-grandfather of Moqtada aI-Sa dr, the commander of the Mahdi Army that rebelled against the American occupation in 2004. She recognized that democratic government would mean theocratic rule: 'I do not for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, despite their numerical inferiority, because otherwise, we will have a theocratic state, which is the very devil.' One of her chief goals was to 'keep the Shia divines from taking charge of public affairs, which required rule by the Sunni elite. British strategic interest was to retain control of the country's northern oilfields. By creating a new kingdom in which the Shias were kept from power, and the Kurds denied a separate state, these objectives could be achieved together.

One reason Bell was able to construct the new kingdom was that she was deeply versed in the region's culture. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, she translated the verses of the Sufi libertine-mystic Hafiz into English. She founded the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, later the National Museum of Antiquities, which after nearly eighty years of conservation of the country's treasures, was looted in the aftermath of the American invasion. The looting - which occurred while the Oil Ministry alone among government institutions was under American guard - drew from Donald Rumsfeld's comment, 'Stuff happens.' From the early 1920S onwards, Bell was out of sympathy with British policy in the country. In 1926, sidelined by the colonial service and lacking influence over events, she took an overdose of sleeping pills in Baghdad, buried in the British cemetery.

Bell knew the state she had created could never be democratic. In the Shia regions, democracy would mean theocracy; in Sunni"areas, sectarian conflict and separatism in the Kurdish north. The kingdom Bell created lasted until Nasserite officers murdered the royal family in 1958, two years after the collapse of British power in the region that followed the ill-conceived Franco-British attempt to seize control of the Suez Canal. Saddam's despotism was based on the same realities of sectarian division and Sunni rule that sustained Bell's kingdom. Overthrowing the regime meant destroying the state through which it operated and creating the theocracy Bell had warned against. While it was never as fully totalitarian, Saddam's Iraq was an Enlightenment regime on the lines of Soviet Russia. It was thoroughly secular, the only state in the Gulf not ruled by Islamic Sharia law but by a western-style legal code, and implacably hostile to Islamism - a fact accepted by the US in the 1980s when it supplied Saddam with weaponry and intelligence in the war with Iran.

Iraq has always been a composite state with deep internal divisions. Though it was more repressive, Saddam's regime was built on the same foundations as Bell's kingdom. Saddam held Iraq together while repressing the Shia majority, the Kurds, and others. Destroying Saddam's regime emancipated these groups and left the Iraqi state without power or legitimacy. Democracy was impossible, for it required a degree of trust among the communities that make up the underlying society that did not exist. Minorities need to be assured that they will not be permanent losers, or else they will secede to set up a state of their own. The Kurds were bound to follow this path, and the five million Sunnis were sure to resist majority rule by the Shias. The fissures between these groups were too deep for Iraq's rickety structures to survive. States that suddenly become democratic nearly everywhere tend to break apart, as happened in the USSR and former Yugoslavia. There was never any reason to think Iraq would be different, and by the time of Saddam's sordid and chaotic execution in December 2006, the Iraqi state had ceased to exist.

Though, at every stage, it has been joined with a crazed version of realpolitik, the neoconservative project of regime change in Iraq is a classic example of the utopian mind at work. For the neo-conservatives who masterminded the war, democracy would come about simply by overthrowing tyranny. If there were transitional difficulties, they could be resolved by applying universal - that is to say, American - principles. Hence the construction of an imaginary structure of federalism that followed. The system devised for Iraq expressed a faith in paper constitutions that hardly squares with the history of the United States, which achieved national unity only via the route of civil war.

In practice, the Bush administration was clueless. Weeks before the invasion, it had no idea how the country would be governed. Opinion oscillated between installing a military-style governor on the model of post-war Japan and implementing an immediate transition to democracy. Donald Rumsfeld - a military bureaucrat and American nationalist rather than any kind of neo-conservative - never interested in bringing democracy to Iraq, but equally, he had never proposed any strategy for governing the country once the Saddam regime had been overthrown. Replacing Saddam with a military governor - as some British officials suggested - was not a realistic option. It meant setting up what would, in effect be a colonial administration whose longer-term viability would be highly dubious and which the US was, in any case, predisposed to reject. For a powerful faction in the Bush administration, the war had always meant imposing American-style democracy on the country. This was notably true of Paul Wolfowitz. James Mann, author of a study of the self-styled 'Vulcans' - the circle of defense strategists who made up George W. Bush's war cabinet - has written that Wolfowitz became the administration official most closely associated with the invasion of Iraq. Amid the invasion, Americans working in the war zone came up with the nickname Wolfowitz of Arabia for the deputy secretary of defense; the phrase captures the degree of intensity, passion, and even, it sometimes seemed, romantic fervor with which he pursued the goals of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and bringing democracy to the Middle East. For Wolfowitz, the chief architect of the war, the invasion was a prelude to democratizing the entire region. In the event that Bush's proconsul's incompetence in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, was so devastating that a sudden move to democracy in Iraq soon came to be accepted as the only way the American administration could pretend to have any kind of kind of legitimacy.

In his first communique in May 2003, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and sacked Baathist public officials, including university professors and primary school teachers, nurses, and doctors. The Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has described Bremer's decision: ... on May 23, Bremer issued CP A (Coalition Provisional Authority) Order Number 2, Dissolution of Iraqi Entities, formally doing away with several groups: the Iraqi armed forces, which accounted for 385,000 people; the staff of the Ministry of the Interior, which amounted to a surprisingly high 285,000 people because it included police and domestic security forces; and the presidential security units, a party of some 50,000 ... Many of these men were armed.

Disbanding Iraqi forces came after Bremer's Order Number 1 De- Baathification of Iraq Society - which had barred senior Baathist party members from public office. Taken together, the two orders which The CIA station chief vehemently opposed ricks reports in Baghdad -leftover health million people unemployed. In a country where families average around six people, over two and a half million - about a tenth of the population - lost their income. Bremer appears to have issued the orders on the advice of Ahmed Chalabi, who aimed to install his allies in the positions left vacant.

The effect of Bremer's orders was to dismantle the Iraqi state. The police and security forces ceased to be national institutions and were captured by sectarian militias, which used them to kidnap, torture, and murder. Outside the Green Zone - the high-security area in central Baghdad where the American and British embassies and the coalition-backed Iraq government are located - the country became anarchy zone. By the end of 2006, around a hundred people were being killed every day, and according to the UN, estimated torture was worse than under Saddam.

The perception fostered by the Bush administration that Iraq has a fledgling government that is rebuilding the country has no basis in reality. The American-backed government is a battleground of sectarian forces, while the Iraqi state has disappeared into history's memory hole. If Saddam had been assassinated or had died of natural causes, the regime would most likely have survived. By imposing regime change, the Bush administration created a failed state, with a fragile government heavily dependent on the Shia militias - a fact ignored in Bush's buffoonish criticisms of its policies. The resulting chaos has left the declared goal of the invasion - finding and destroying Saddam's supposed WMD program - beyond reach. If Saddam possessed any chemical or biological weapons - as he certainly did in the nineties, they have disappeared along with the state of Iraq.

Some argue that the failure of American forces to pacify Iraq is due to their being deployed in insufficient numbers. Indeed, the war plan drawn up by Donald Rumsfeld went severely wrong in not anticipating the insurgency that followed the collapse of Saddam's forces. Rumsfeld - who throughout his time in the administration was a forceful proponent of a 'revolution in military affairs' involving high levels of reliance on technology and the limited use of ground forces - was loathed by the military for imposing an unworkable strategy for the war and was first to be sacrificed when American voters rejected it. But a larger deployment would have made little difference. Despite having over 400,000 troops in the country in the aftermath of the First World War, Britain was unable to impose its will by military force; when a type of order was created, it was by political means. The British invaded Mesopotamia in 1914 partly to secure crude oil supplies for their warships, which Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had switched from coal to more efficient oil-burning engines. The course of the occupation was far from smooth - between December I9I5 and April I9I6, the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force suffered over 20,000 casualties at the hands of Ottoman forces at Kut-al-Amara, resorting later to razing villages by airstrikes (a tactic the British also used in Afghanistan in the 1920s).

The state of Iraq was constructed to achieve a condition of peace that the use of military force could not acquire. In contrast, American military operations in Iraq have not been accompanied by any achievable political objectives. By early 2007 over 3,000 Americans had been killed - more than died as a result of 9/I I - and over 20,000 wounded for the sake of goals that, insofar as they were ever coherently formulated, were unrealizable. American forces have made mistakes and committed some crimes, but the blame for American defeat cannot be attached to the soldiers sent to discharge an impossible mission. The responsibility lies with the political leaders who conceived the mission and ordered its execution.

Indeed, US forces were severely equipped for counter-insurgency warfare of the kind that began after the occupation of Baghdad. In the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in Vietnam and Somalia, US military doctrine has been based on 'force protection' and 'shock and awe.' In practice, this means killing any inhabitant of the occupied country that might conceivably pose any threat to US forces and overcoming the enemy through overwhelming firepower. Effective in the early stages of the war when the enemy was Saddam's forces, these strategies are counter-productive when the enemy comprises most of the population, as is now the case. The current conflict is what General Sir Rupert Smith, who commanded the British 1st Armoured Division in the Gulf War, UN peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo, and the British Army in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998, has called a 'war; among the people.' In a conflict of this kind, superior numbers count for little, and the heavy use of firepower is useless or counter-productive. Any initial sympathy sections of the population may have had for American occupying forces evaporated after the razing of the city of Fallujah in early 2004. Involves cluster bombs and chemical weapons (a type of white phosphorus, or 'improved napalm.' The American use of chemical weapons in Fallujah has been confirmed in the US Army's Field Artillery Magazine, March/April 2005.20

In 'shake and bake' operations against the city's population, this was an act that can almost be compared with the destruction by Russian forces of the Chechen capital city of Grozny. In military terms, it was a failure - a few days later, the insurgents captured the bigger city of Mosul, where they were able to seize large quantities of arms - and it demonstrated a disregard for Iraqi lives that fuelled the insurgency. A senior British officer, speaking anonymously in April 2004, commented: 'My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as Untermenschen.21

Torture was used widely by the Russians in Chechnya, the French in Algeria, and the British in Kenya in the 1950s. Unlike these predecessors, who inflicted extremes of physical pain, however, American interrogators focused on applying psychological pressure, particularly sexual humiliation. The torture methods employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims. Using these techniques, the US imprinted an indelible image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime could have legitimacy in Iraq.

From the start of the 'war on terror,' the Bush administration flouted international law on the treatment of detainees. It declared members of terrorist organizations to be illegal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. Since Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has continued to defend the use of torture, while military judges, the CIA, and the US military have continued to resist the practice. In February 2006, the CIA's chief counter-terrorism officer Robert Grenier was fired for opposing torture and 'extraordinary rendition.' 22

As with the administration's use of unverified intelligence, its decision to employ torture was resisted in all the leading institutions of the American government. As before, the administration carried on with its policies. The disaster in Iraq was hastened by the willingness to use inhumane and counter-productive methods. Some of these errors may have been avoidable, but a pattern of arrogant incompetence was built into the Bush administration. It refused to accept advice from the branches of government where expertise existed, such as the uniformed military, the CIA, and the state department. Instead, it relied on the counsel of those in the administration whose views were shaped by a neo-conservative agenda, including the Office of Special Plans. But the picture of post-war Iraq that neo-conservatives disseminated was a tissue of disinformation and wishful thinking. At the same time, the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends showed the utopian mind at its most deluded.

The ease with which a wildly unreal assessment of conditions in Iraq came to be accepted in America had several sources. Public opinion took the war only after a campaign of disinformation. It was persuaded of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda when it was known that none existed and informed that Saddam's regime was engaged in an active weapons program of which there was no reliable evidence. The neo-conservatives who orchestrated the campaign were themselves blinded by illusions, some of them innate to their way of thinking. They believed the methods needed to achieve freedom were the same everywhere: the policies required in Iraq were no different from those used to spread freedom in former communist countries. But what is feasible on the banks of the Danube may not be possible on the Euphrates - even supposing peace prevailed in Iraq as it did in most of post-communist Europe - and this ardent neoconservative belief in a universal "model went with profound indifference to the particular history of the country. If other cultures are stages on the way to a global civilization that already exists in the US, there is no need to understand them since they will soon be part of America. This adamant universalism aims to raise an impassable barrier between America and the rest of humanity that precludes severe involvement in nation-building.23

In Iraq, this cultural default reached surreal extremes. In the shelter of the Green Zone, interns on short-term secondment from Washington - some from neo-conservative think tanks - plotted the future of Iraq insulated from any perception of the absurdity of their plans. Had the goals of the American administration been achievable at all, it would only be after many decades of occupation. Instead, the impossible was attempted in months. The armed missionaries who dispatched American forces to Iraq expected the instant conversion of the population, only for these forces to be repulsed as enemies. Robespierre's warning to his fellow Jacobins of the perils of Napoleon's program of exporting revolution by force of arms throughout Europe was vindicated again, two centuries later, in the Middle East.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend because he has no imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility sufficient to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.24

However, the configuration of ideas and movements that led to America's ruinous engagement in Iraq included more than a fusion of the neo-conservative utopians, Armageddonite fundamentalists, and Straussian seers. And in the end, 9/11 was a further development of earlier types of unconventional warfare rather than a qualitative change like the conflict. Aided by the internet, which enables violent jihadists who have never met to form virtual cells, al-Qaeda extends its influence and reach. At the same time, developments in weaponry are improving the arsenal available to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. But Islamist terrorism implements no coherent strategy and cannot command the resources of any great power. It is still far from being anything like a mortal threat to civilized life of the kinds confronted and defeated in the twentieth century.

This situation will change if terrorist groups gain access to the means of mass destruction. Not only al-Qaeda but also cults such as Aum have demonstrated an interest in biological warfare. Information technology enables types of cyber-war to be waged that can disrupt the infrastructure of modern societies - power stations and airports, for example - with the potential of causing large-scale casualties. The most catastrophic risk comes from nuclear terrorism. Using 'suitcase bombs' or 'dirty bombs' (conventional explosives salted with radioactive waste), terrorists could kill hundreds of thousands of people and paralyze social and economic life. No doubt the materials needed for such devices are heavily guarded, but if any of the world's nuclear states were destabilized, the danger of these materials falling into terrorist hands would be high. In Pakistan - a semi-failed state in which fundamentalist forces are heavily entrenched - that risk is already present. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence officer who died in London in November 2006, weeks after receiving a lethal dose of radiation, suggests that nuclear terrorism may already be a reality. American policies have accelerated the risk of proliferation.

North Korea acquired nuclear capability due to a transfer of know-how from Pakistan - a country whose role in the 'war on terror' insulated it from sufficient pressure to stop leakage of this kind. The risks have been increased by the Bush administration pulling out of arms control agreements and by a change in US nuclear doctrine that allows the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against countries believed to have WMD programs. Above all, after Iraq, everyone knows that the only way to be safe against American attacks was to possess the WMD capability Saddam lacked. According to an announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency in November 2006, six Islamic countries have indicated they wish to acquire nuclear technology. Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey insist they want it for peaceful purposes, but a nuclear arms race may already have begun. Other countries that may be interested include Nigeria and Jordan. It is not beyond the realm of realistic possibility that the state of Iraq - if it still exists - might at some time in the future acquire a nuclear capability of the kind pre-emptive military action by the US was meant to prevent.

There seem to be some in the US who see an attack on Iran as a means of deterring proliferation, but, as in the case of Iraq, the effect would be to increase it. A large swathe of the Middle East and Asia, which at present contains three theatres of war - in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan - would become a zone of armed conflict, while the lesson of Iraq - that the only way to be safe from American attack is to possess nuclear weapons - would be reinforced. At the same time, an attack could well fail to halt Iran's nuclear program. Though it is ethnically diverse, Iran is unlike most other countries in the region in being a reasonably cohesive state. The home of an ancient and rich Persian civilization, it currently practices a type of democracy - in effect, a more stable version of the system developing in Iraq - that gives its present leadership a degree of legitimacy. An" American air assault could increase the legitimacy of this leadership, which has already gained in popularity from the nuclear program. Even if a more liberal version of democracy were to develop, there is no guarantee that Iran would renounce its nuclear ambitions. Worse, a bombing campaign could fail to destroy the nuclear program while weakening the country's government to the point where it would no longer be able to control whatever nuclear facilities exist in the country. Worse still, an American attack could trigger an upheaval in many Islamic states, including Pakistan - which is already a nuclear power and could quickly become another failed state. From the standpoint of global security, few things are more important than preventing the leakage of atomic technology beyond the control of states. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) forestalled the use of nuclear weapons for over half a century. Deterrence of this kind may not give complete security against an atomic state headed by an apocalyptic prophet. Still, since some among its leadership will want to go on living, it affords some protection. When the enemy is an elusive network whose branches can be based anywhere globally, deterrence breaks down completely. If their identity is unknown, agents of mass destruction cannot be threatened with annihilation. The American arms-control analyst Fred Ikle has written, 'Military history offers no lessons that tell nations how to cope with a continuing global dispersion of cataclysmic means for destruction.'

A crucial part of the task is preventing state collapse. States have failed throughout history - we need only think of the centuries of anarchy that followed the fall of the Roman Empire or the era of Warring States in ancient China. It will not always be possible to prevent states from failing in the future. To encourage that failure is folly, especially when the development of technology makes anarchy more threatening than ever before. Yet that is what overthrowing governments while lacking the ability to put anything in their place means in practice.

The 'war on terror is a symptom of a mentality that anticipates an unprecedented change in human affairs - the end of history, the passing of the sovereign state, universal acceptance of democracy, and the defeat of evil. This is the central myth of apocalyptic religion framed in political terms and the common factor underlying the failed utopian projects of the past decade. The promise of an imminent transformation was not a cynical ploy attached to policies adopted on other grounds by leaders who did not themselves believe in it. Bush and Blair genuinely thought such a change was impending or could be brought about, as did the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who supported them in Iraq. Apocalypse failed to arrive, and history went on as before but with an added dash of blood.

Nazism and communism are products of the modern West. So though the fact is denied by its followers and by western opinion - it is radical Islam. Analyzing it from a socio-psychological point of view, we have shown parallels with Fascism.

Radical Islam is a modern revolutionary ideology, but it is also a millenarian movement with Islamic roots. Like Christianity, Islam has always contained a powerful eschatological element. Both Sunni and Shia Islam hold a Mahdist tradition that anticipates the arrival of a divinely guided teacher who will re-order the world - a practice that Bin Laden has exploited when projecting his image as a prophet leader. (See or example  Timothy R. Furnish, 'Bin Ladin: The Man who would be Mahdi,' The Middle East Review, vol. IX, no. 2, spring 2002.) Some scholars question the orthodoxy of Mahdist beliefs, but they exemplify a conception of history that is Islamic. One contemporary Islamic scholar has written: 'The Mahdist "event" is History as eschatology, giving history a progressive nature.' 25

 

1. For an authoritative account of the assault on science in the USSR and Soviet experiments on human subjects, see Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science, Cambridge MA, Westview Press, 2001, pp. 127-31.

2. See Journey of Our Time: The Journal of the Marquis de Custine, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001.

3. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New York, Random House, 1981.

4. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, London, and New York, Allen Lane, 2003, p. 17.

5. See John J. Dziak, Chemistry: A History of the KGB, New York, Ivy Books, 1988, pp. 35-6. For numbers of executions in late Tsarist and early Soviet times, see ibid., pp. 191-3.

6. On links between German South-West Africa and the Nazis, see Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 18-20.

7. Lenin's statement is quoted by Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Study of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2004, p. 251.

8. On the human cost of the Great Leap Forward, see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, London, Jonathan Cape, 2005, Chapter 40, especially pp. 456-7. See also Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine, London, John Murray, 1996, pp. 266-74.

9. For Mao's campaign against sparrows, see Chang and Halliday, Mao, P449.

10. For this, see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia.London, 2006.

11. Nekrich and Heller, Utopia in Power, p. 661.

12. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, London, and New York, W. W. Norton, 2005, p. 962.

13. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990.

14. For an account of the Soviet ecological disaster, see Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege, London, Aurum Press, 1992.

15. To discuss Voltaire's political relativism, see my Voltaire and Enlightenment, London, Phoenix, 1998, pp. 36-47.

16. J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, London and New York, Allen Lane, 2005, pp. 506-7.

17. See Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Chronique Politique, I934-I942, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.

18. For another comparison of Hitler and John of Leyden by Klemperer and Reck-Malleczewen, see Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp. 4-5.

19. See James R. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Moder Millenarian Revolution, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press,1980.

20. See 'US Army article on Fallujah white phosphorus use,' Scoop, 11 November 2005, http://www.scoop.co.nz/storiesIHL05II/SooI73·htm .

21. See 'US tactics condemned by British officers,' Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2004.

22. See 'CIA chief sacked for opposing torture, Sunday Times, 12 February 2006.

23. For a discussion of the cultural aspects of American foreign policy, see George Walden, God Won't Save America: Psychosis of a Nation, London, Gibson Square, 2006.

24. George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays, New York, Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 87.

25. Kaveh L. Mrasiabi, 'Shiism as Mahdism: Reflections on a Doctrine of Hope,' www.payvand.com/news/03/novIII26.html .

 

 

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