By Hans Magnus Enzensberger
II. THE COLLECTIVE
But what happens when the radical loser overcomes his isolation, when he becomes socialized, finds a loser-home, from which he can expect not only understanding but also recognition, a collective of people like himself who welcome him, who need him?
Then the destructive energy within him is multiplied - his unscrupulousness, his amalgam of death-wish and megalomania - and he is rescued from his powerlessness by a fatal sense of omnipotence.
For this to take place, however, a kind of ideological detonator is required to ignite the radical loser and make him explode. As history shows us, such ideological detonators have never been in short supply. Their content is the least important thing about them. They may be religious or political doctrines, nationalist, communist or racist dogmas - any form of sectarianism, however bigoted, is capable of mobilizing the latent energy of the radical loser.
This applies not only to the rank and file but also to their commanders, whose attraction is based in turn on their own self-definition as obsessive losers. It is precisely the leader's deluded traits in which his followers recognize themselves. He is rightly accused of being cynical and calculating. It is only natural that he should despise his followers. He understands them all too well. He knows they are losers and, finally, he thus considers them worthless. And as Elias Canetti put it half a century ago, he therefore takes pleasure in the idea that if possible, everyone else, including his followers, should meet their death before he himself is hanged or consumed by fire in his bunker.
At this point, alongside many other examples from history, one cannot help being reminded of the National Socialist project in Germany. At the end of the Weimar Republic, large sections of the population saw themselves as losers. The objective data tell a clear story. But the economic crisis and mass unemployment would probably not have been enough to bring Hitler to power. For that to happen, it took propaganda aimed at the subjective factor: the blow dealt to people's pride by the defeat of 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles. Most Germans sought to blame others: the victorious powers, the "global Capitalist-Bolshevist conspiracy," and above all, of course, the eternal scapegoat, Judaism. The torment of being in the loser's position could only be compensated for by pursuing an offensive strategy, by seeking refuge in megalomania. From the outset, the Nazis entertained delusions of world domination. As such, their goals were boundless and nonnegotiable. In this sense, they were not only unreal, but also nonpolitical. Consulting a map was never going to be enough to persuade Hitler and his followers that the struggle of one small European country against the rest of the world was hopeless. On the contrary. The radical loser has no notion of resolving conflicts, of compromise that might involve him in a normal network of interests and defuse his destructive energy. The more hopeless his project, the more fanatically he clings to it. There are grounds to suspect that Hitler and his followers were interested not in victory, but in radicalizing and eternalizing their own status as losers.
Their pent-up anger discharged itself in a war of unprecedented destruction against all the others they blamed for their own defeats. First and foremost, it was a matter of destroying the Jews and the opponents of 1919. But they certainly had no intention of sparing the Germans. Their actual objective was not victory, but elimination, downfall, collective suicide, the horrible end. There is no other explanation for the way the Germans fought on in World War II right to the last pile of rubble in Berlin. Hitler himself confirmed this diagnosis when he said that the German people did not deserve to survive. At a huge cost, he achieved what he wanted - he lost. But the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans, and all the others are still around.
The radical loser has not disappeared either. He is still among us. This is inevitable. On every continent, there are leaders who welcome him with open arms. Except that today, they are very rarely associated with the state. In this field too, privatization has made considerable advances. Although it is governments which have at their disposal the greatest potential for extermination, state crime in the conventional sense is now on the defensive worldwide.
To date, few loser-collectives have operated on a global scale, even if they were able to count on international flows of cash and weapons. But the world is teeming with local groupings whose leaders are referred to as warlords or guerrilla chiefs. Their selfappointed militias and paramilitary gangs like to adorn themselves with the title of a liberation organization or other revolutionary attributes. In some media, they are referred to as rebels, a euphemism that probably flatters them. Shining Path, MLC, RCD, SPLA, ELA, LTTE, LRA, FNL, IRA, LIT, KACH, DHKP, FSLN, UVF, JKLF, ELN, FARC, PLF, GSPC, MILF, NPA, PKK, MODEL, JI, NPA, AUC, CPNML, UDA, GIA, RUF, LVF, SNM, ETA, NLA, PFLP, SPM, LET, ONLF, SSDF, PIJ, JEM, SLA, ANO, SPLMA, RAF, AUM, PGA, ADF, IBDA, ULFA, PLFM, ULFBV, ISYF, LURD, KLO, UPDS, NLFT, ATTF. "Left" or "right," it makes no odds. Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of "the masses." Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either; any concern for survival is alien to them. And this applies equally to their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing, shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in the area with a bed or a scalpel - for they have trouble distinguishing between mutilation and self-mutilation.
But none of these mobs has been able to keep up with globalization. In cases where their ideological exploitation focuses on national and ethnic conflicts, this is only natural. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, groups that see themselves in the tradition of internationalism have forfeited the support of a superpower in terms of propaganda and logistics. Under the pressure of global capital, they have abandoned their fantasies of world domination and now claim only to represent the interests of their local clientele.
Since this cut-off point, only one violent movement has been capable of acting globally - Islamism. It is undertaking a large-scale attempt to siphon off the religious energy of a world faith with some 1.3 billion believers that is not only still very much alive, but which even in purely demographic terms is also expanding on every continent. Although the umma is subject to much inner fragmentation and is badly affected by national and social conflicts, the ideology of Islamism is an ideal means of mobilizing radical losers because of the way it amalgamates religious, political, and social motives.
A further promise of success lies in the movement's organizational model. Turning its back on the strict centralism of earlier groupings, it has replaced the omniscient and omnipotent central committee with a flexible network: a highly original innovation that is entirely of its time.
Besides this, however, the Islamists are perfectly happy to plunder the arsenal of their predecessors. It is often overlooked that modern terrorism is a European invention of the nineteenth century. Its most important ancestors came from czarist Russia, but it can also look back on a long history in Western Europe. In recent times, the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s has proved a source of inspiration, with Islamists borrowing many of its symbols and techniques. The style of their announcements, the use of video recordings, the emblematic significance of the kalashnikov, even the gestures, body language, and dress: all this shows how much they have learned from these Western role models. There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the obsession with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, the revolutionary subject here is the umma; and the role of avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses is played not by The Party, but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement draws on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed, and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.
The movement's list of pet hates is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the other 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites, and other religious communities.
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