I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely vivid example of a contemporary violent essentialism we can witness in many different places and with changing force. There are the extreme right-wing nationalists and Christian religious fundamentalists in Europe and the US, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn activists in Greece, the Le Pen nationalists in France, the Tea Party in the US, as well as the Polish nationalist youth, with neo-Nazi and pagan ties, who recently tried to interrupt Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław.

All these groups seem to play on a fantasy of a bygone era of a harmonious society formed solely by “us,” without outsiders or deviations from the unanimously accepted norms, “inventing” their traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm would have named it. The past is idealized into the present in a form deeply conservative but also modernly total, one in which men rule and women obey; the “we” are the masters, the “others” are the slaves. There is no space for sexual freedom or mental sickness. Foucault’s descriptions of these freedoms in the Middle Ages seem, on the contrary, extremely modern.

In this sense, the current fundamentalist movements are essentialized ideas of a glorious past, devoid of any ambiguity. They are definite, brutal and all-encompassing in a way only an extreme mixture of Enlightenment and Totalitarianism could lead to. They are belief systems based on a logic of the elimination of “otherness.”

The past to which they refer, never was. The refusal to acknowledge the ambiguous, heterogeneous, histories of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and civilizations, makes these movements arrogantly, violently contemporary.

When we substitute a philosophic truth for politics, as I observed in yesterday’s post on the new political correctness, both truth and politics are compromised, and in extreme form, totalitarian culture prevails.  On the other hand, factual truth is the ground upon which a sound politics is based.  As Hannah Arendt underscores, “the politically most relevant truths are factual.”  That Trotsky could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, is definitive of the totalitarian condition.  I know we haven’t gotten to this point, but there are worrying tendencies.

Fact denial seems to be the order of the day, from fictoids of varying degrees of absurdity (Obama the Kenyan post-colonial philosopher and the like), to denial of scientific findings: including evolution, climate change and basic economics.  (I can’t get over the fact that it seems to be official Republican Party policy that cutting taxes doesn’t increase deficits.)

The political consequences of denying the truth of facts are linked with the substitution of truth for politics.   In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth and their relationship with politics clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI.   The causes of the war are open to interpretation.  The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances.  The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central.  Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around.  A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation.  There must be an openness to opposing views.  But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI.

Arendt observes how Trotsky expressed his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.   And, in her classic essay, “Truth and Politics,” she notes his tragic fate:  eliminated from Soviet history books and then assassinated.  The assassination followed the lie.

I am concerned that our politics are more and more becoming involved in this sort of vicious circle.  Fictoids are the least of our problems.  If we politically debate energy and transportation policy with one side denying the facts of climate change, to take the prime example, the debate will not yield consequential compromise and consensus, we will not be able to act effectively. We will be ill prepared to politically respond to the very real economic challenges of the future, and our capacities to address a central global problem will all but disappear.

Other nations free of know nothing politics will be working to adapt to the changes that are forthcoming.  They will have new energy industries and high speed rail systems, while the United States will decay.  But since the United States has the largest economy, by far, our gas guzzling pollution machine could bring the whole world down with us.  It’s time to face facts.