There’s a connection. Which is why we shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that Islamism is some kind of legitimate religious faith: it’s a murderous, suicidal, death-worshipping totalitarianism, built around the structure of a religion. It is our times’ Nazism and Communism. Drawing on Western notions of revolutionary violence and mass murder, it has tied itself, as Francoism did, to the trappings of traditional faith. But even atheistic communism needed religious fervor to keep it afloat. A reader sends in this wonderful comment from Malcolm Muggeridge, who observed the religiosity of the Soviet murder-cult in its early days. It’s from 7 June 1933:
I often used to think, when I was in Russia, that the general attitude towards the G.P.U. must be like the general attitude in the Middle Ages towards the Powers of Darkness – quite irrational; quite unrelated to knowledge or experience of its manner of working; yet somehow understandable, somehow in keeping with the facts of the case. There is, mixed up with it all, a kind of mysticism. I turned up once in a back number of “Pravda” an obituary notice of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka and first head of the GPU, written by his successor. It described Dzerzhlnsky as a saint, an ascetic, a man who rose above petty bourgeois emotions like pity, or a respect for justice or for human life; a man of infinite industry; a rare spirit whose revolutionary passion was unearthly and uncontaminated.
The very prose of the obituary notice was lyrical. It had a rhythm like a religious chant. I thought, and still think, that I had found in it the quintessence of revolution and I hated this quintessence because it is a denial of everything that has been gained in the slow, painful progress of civilisation; because it was beastly, because it idealised and spiritualised evil because it glorified destruction and destruction and, going beneath the animal, beneath hate, beneath lust, beneath every kind of appetite, founded itself on impulses which though they have in the past sometimes been organised into, abominable, underground cults, have never before held sway over a hundred and sixty million people inhabiting a sixth of the world’s surface.
We face the same threat today – except this time, on the verge of being empowered with some of the most dangerous weapons known to man. And we face the same response in the West today as well: widespread denial, cowardice, prevarication, and beneath the surface among some on the far right and left, an actual attraction to the murderousness and evil of the enemy.
The Dish 