ISIS, Communism, and the Lure of Violent Utopianism
9th March 2015
Absolute belief renders ISIS’ atrocities not only explicable but seemingly almost mandatory. After all, if you hold the keys to the perfection of life on Earth, then anyone who stands in your way is actively depriving everyone else of that outcome and thereby ensuring the continued suffering of millions. Eliminating such people therefore serves the good of all mankind. (And the grisly beheadings, crucifixions, immolations? They can be justified on the same grounds as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: They will shock and awe the enemy into an earlier surrender, and thus save lives in the end. Mercy becomes a justification for cruelty.)
None of this is new. A century ago another Utopian movement behaved very much the same.
The communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin committed a reign of terror just as heinous and unbridled as the Islamic State’s. The Cheka—a secret state police force created by Lenin and a precursor of the KGB—was tasked with liquidating all those suspected of opposition, including clergy, the children of military officers and the well-to-do. It butchered thousands of innocents and inflicted ghastly tortures, from skinning victims alive to tying them to boards and pushing them slowly into furnaces.
Such savagery was not an aberration; it was policy. “Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice,” Lenin declared.
Islam is really just an older and more successful model. Bother are oppressive totalitarian ideologies with which no co-existence is possible.