The Grand Inquisitor

Recently I've noticed an increasing frequency of articles and commentary, both on the Web and elsewhere, that seek to explain the conflicts and tensions of the contemporary world in terms of the legacy of the past - in other words, what we see in the rise of militant Islam, for example, is a "sequel" to the Communist-inspired movements that characterized the last century. Indeed, at Belmont Club, a recent article is headed "The Communism of the 21st Century", proposing just such a thesis, and quoting Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, who makes an analogy between the disillusionment with Western democracy that affected Western liberals and intellectuals who converted to Communism and their counterparts today:

It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

Wretchard notes:

Jean Paul-Sartre seized upon Dostoevsky's dictum that "if God did not exist, everything would be permitted" to justify existentialism. He forgot that Dostoevsky added that if God did not exist, we would be compelled to invent him. For if, as Sartre argued "in the present one is forsaken" why should the future when it arrives be less forlorn than today? For good or ill, man can as much live under a heaven swept of stars as endure a sky without stars to dream of. If Augustine of Hippo was right, that "our soul is restless until it rests in Thee" then when all the lights of the Tabernacle are extinguished the Kaaba will beckon in the desert.

Perhaps what such analyses leave out is the recognition that, far from being consecutive, sequential phenomena, the viruses of Nazism, Communism and Islamism are actually simultaneous threats to the peace and stability of the world. Nazism and Communism did not somehow disappear, to be replaced by a more modern variant - as anyone who reads the work of a Pacepa or a Bukovsky can perceive, the universal witches' brew of totalitarian ideology and praxis that threatens the values of the West and the Enlightenment is one that is constantly fermenting, and has been since as far back as the first three decades of the twentieth century, when Communism and and Fascism were more or less interchangeable, Benito Mussolini was an avowed admirer of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and the German Gestapo learned most of what they knew from the Russian Chekists. Similarly, later on, Yassir Arafat and the PLO were created in Moscow, while Saddam Hussein and Baathism derived in equal measure from the personality cults and state terror practised by National Socialism and Stalinism. And the force that became "Islamism" really grew not from a mosque, but from the barrel of a gun.

While it's true that Nazism, Communism and Islamism have sought and still seek to exploit what their followers perceive as a lack of moral and spiritual content in Western secular "bourgeois" democracy, the real ideological basis of their activity is a nihilistic one - centred on the conviction that human beings are essentially worthless, and that it's the task of the strong individual to rise above them and enslave them, asserting the principle of absolute power in the enforced imposition of the totalitarian state. If Dostoyevsky is to be cited in the context of the modern world's problems, it's the message of the Grand Inquisitor that needs to be borne in mind.