Armageddon

The Neocons may like to describe the fully-escalated form of their confrontation with radical Islam as the Third World War, but my Bulgarian friend refers to the "coming" conflagration as Armageddon, an allusion that may be deeply appropriate.

According to Paul Berman the "ur-myth" of the battle of Armageddon has a lot to answer for. Ever since its appearance in the Revelation of St. John the Divine it has exerted a powerful pathological effect on our history. Essentially it allows a group of people to position themselves as the People of God in opposition to the commercially-inclined city dwellers of Babylon and their Satanic backers. It thus becomes their mission to usher in the thousand year reign of God, a unified, flawless society "whose very shape and structure ruled out any challenge to its own shape and direction."

In the twentieth century this ancient worldview has solidified as political theory. The Pure and their nihilistic Leader − an individual typically freed from the "humiliating limitations" of conventional morality − have variously revolted against liberal civilisation and its rationality, seeking to crush the polluted Babylon and its Jews, Freemasons, Cosmopolitans, Bourgeoisie etc. in a final war of extinction.

Such sects are highly prone to celebrate the sacrifices of murder and suicide. As Berman points out, one of Franco's most reactionary generals José Millán Astray was fond of proclaiming: "Viva la Muerte!"

I have yet to finish Berman's book but it's already clear that he holds the view that Islamism is a new mutation of the West's oldest auto-immune syndrome. It may just be the Muslim way of dealing with the current global domination of the Great Satan, just as the Jews before them had sought their Messiah whilst under the Roman cosh, and the Germans their Führer after the humiliation of defeat in the First World War.

Islam might have looked very different proposition when it controlled most of the Mediterranean world under the Caliphs, but Mohammed's message nevertheless originated as a revolt against the Babylon of his own era, the pluralist, commercial society of Mecca. The Prophet was another instance of these conductors of a downtrodden select that sought to reestablish society beyond both difference and doubt, ushering in a world based on the godlike "ideal of the one, instead of the many".

I used to think that this periodic pathology could be traced back to the classical alternative polities of Athens and Sparta, transcendental models of totalitarian collective and pluralist democracy. Yet Robin Lane Cook has made it clearer to me that both these model societies emerged as a response to the then perceived threat of tyrrany, not the Whore of Babylon (pictured). The subsequent merging of the collective ideal with submission to a singular authority, together in opposition to the corrupting effects of the free conscience, was the later contribution of the Middle East − the curse of desert monotheism.

Islamism is the modern world's most obvious exponent of the Babylon-Armageddon myth, and pretty much everything the American Neocons are doing right now is surely feeding the beast. Yet liberal civilisation has its historical enemies within too − Christianity in all its denominations has repeatedly become contorted by a repressive revulsion from its secular mores.

President Bush was driven to invade Iraq in part because his worldview is under the sway of another potent Biblical myth, the Zionist one. Two ancient myths, two great blobs of near-eastern nonsense, locked in combat. You'd have to hope that the world's irrationalists could conveniently exterminate each other without spoiling the planet for the rest of us, but there are hardly any grounds for optimism on that front.