…said Conan the Barbarian, gloomily.
*An interesting essay by John Gray.
"John Gray is a political philosopher and the author of twenty-six books translated into more than twenty languages. He is an emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom."
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/anomaly-barbarism
(…)
"For those who find the rise of ISIS baffling, much of the past century can only be retrogression from modern life. Even the regime that committed a crime with no precedent in history must be regarded as an example of atavism: the Nazi state has often been described as having taken Europe back to the Dark Ages. Certainly the Nazis exploited a medieval Christian demonology in their persecution and genocide of Jews, but Nazism also invoked a modern pseudoscience of race to legitimate these atrocities. Invoking a type of faux Darwinism, Nazi racism could have emerged only in a time shaped by science. Nazism was modern not just in its methods of killing but also in its way of thinking.
"This is not to reiterate the claim—made by Marxian theorists of the Frankfurt School—that modern scientific thinking leads, by some circuitous but inevitable route, to Nazism and the Holocaust. It is to suggest that when it is invoked in politics modernity is a figment. The increase of knowledge in recent centuries is real enough, as is the enlargement of human power through technology. These advances are cumulative and accelerating and, in any realistically likely scenario, practically irreversible. But there have been few, if any, similar advances in politics. The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality. Instead, the increase of knowledge has repeatedly interacted with human conflicts and passions to produce new kinds of barbarism.
"Using the most advanced technologies to demonstrate its transgression of civilized norms, ISIS is a peculiarly modern form of barbarism. Of course, the group exhibits distinctive features. The Paris attacks show that, more than any other jihadist group, ISIS has the capacity to meld urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare into a unified strategy. Any setbacks ISIS suffers on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq are likely to evoke further attacks on civilian populations in Western cities. ISIS distinguishes itself from other jihadist groups in publicizing its atrocities through the sophisticated use of electronic media. Applying techniques presented in a handbook, The Management of Savagery, published online in 2004, these atrocities implement a carefully planned strategy (one that has provoked criticism from Al Qaeda, from which ISIS emerged as a spin-off). Again, ISIS differs from other jihadist groups in its lack of specific demands. While Al Qaeda aimed to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Middle East, ISIS is dedicated to the destruction of the entire existing world order—a goal that suggests the group is more eschatological in its view of the world than its current jihadist rivals…."
