Greats interviews Terrorist Nihilism and the Crisis of the West The terrorist attacks on Atocha and the Twin Towers and the affirmation that values and truth no longer exist: symptoms of a disintegration of the “I,” of a nihilism that pervades all of society and sends it into crisis. West against West? We talked about this with one of today’s most authoritative intellectuals edited by José Luis Restán e David Blázquez The fundamental thesis of your thought lately is that terrorism is challenging the Western world, the free and democratic world. More precisely, it is nihilism’s challenge to civilization. The menace surrounding us is something multiform, not describable in definitive terms and hard to name, whose source of action is what you call nihilism. What is the nihilism that you posit as the origin of modern terrorism and that we saw in its radical form in the March 11th attack? Terrorist nihilism is not a product of Islam, and it is not this simply because it is a modern product and because the murderers kill, first and foremost, Muslims themselves. I have followed terrorism in Algeria closely, and the victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslim children, peasants, and women. Precisely for this reason, I do not want to reduce the problem of terrorism to something that is born solely out of the Islamic world. In my opinion, nihilist terrorism is above all a war against civilians. And this war was already going on in the twentieth century in the totalitarian regimes that set themselves up in order to terrorize people. The cry that arises from Manhattan, the cry that arises from the murderers in Atocha–“Long live death”–is, after all, equal to the statement they wrote right after the attacks: “You love life, we love death.” The new thing about this terrorism is that it has been transformed into a world phenomenon. This nihilist terrorism was first described by Dostoevsky in his novel Demons. In it he describes a terrorist group made up of very different people, each with his own beliefs. Some believed in God, others declared He was dead, those beyond them believed in the great Russia, and those even farther along did not believe in anything, but they all had in common the will to destroy and pleasure in destruction. And it is precisely this that makes up nihilism. Nihilism cannot be only love for God, because one can be nihilist and believe in God (this is Bin Laden’s position), or not believe in anything, or believe in race (like the Nazis or Bolsheviks). Whatever the case, what characterizes nihilism is that it does not consider it evil to do evil. Nihilism does not place itself beyond good and evil, but thinks that everything it does is good. Indeed, Bin Laden thinks he is an envoy of God. But one can also be atheist and thus, even without realizing it, one becomes God, because, as Dostoevsky said, “If God is dead, all is permitted.” The problem, then, is not that of believing or not believing in God, but evil. The problem is that for nihilism there is no evil, all is permitted, there are no taboos. You can murder anyone, in any way. Remember Atocha: they were workers from poor neighborhoods, all of them against the war in Iraq, but this did not stop the terrorists’ attack. What I call nihilism is the capacity to destroy and to generate terror just for the pleasure of destroying and of generating fear. In Europe, there are many intellectuals who lately have proclaimed a radical relativism, i.e., a break with the bonds of traditional society. Many of them state that neither truth nor falsehood exist, but everything is relative: a radical cynicism. It is true that these intellectuals are not in favor of terrorism, but by doing this, a cultural and moral base is being cultivated that is incapable of standing up to the challenge of terrorism, isn’t it? There are two forms of nihilism, Nietzsche said. On one hand, there is the active form of nihilism that tends to destroy, that enjoys destruction, that shouts “Long live death!” On the other, there is passive nihilism, the kind that lets the terrorists shout, that lets the cry of “Long live death!” ring out, that lets populations be destroyed. This passive nihilism is widespread in Europe. Thus, there is a European–but also American–crisis, and when I say that the West is against the West, I say this because I really think there is a crisis of civilization. Let me recall here that Bin Laden asked Europeans to accept the terrorist power of the Muslims without opposing Islam by withdrawing their troops from Iraq. To my mind, the problem is that if we start to give in to this blackmail, we end up yielding all the way. Here arises the problem of Islamic veils in school, but not only this. Bin Laden is demanding a part of Spain (Al-Andalus) that belonged to a caliph of Baghdad centuries ago. Passive nihilism, which I tried to express in the title of my latest book [West Against West], is not just the opposition between Europe and America—Europe is divided, each person is divided in his conscience. There is a great division within the West, a profound, philosophical division. This is nothing new: all happy civilizations–and we, in the midst of all our difficulties, are the happiest in the world–have wanted to believe that their happiness was eternal, but happiness is always threatened. What characterizes the West ever since ancient Greece is the capacity to fight whoever threatens our happiness. In your book, you say that Europe is no longer able to say “I;” it no longer knows who it is. You also say that the European institutions do nothing more than manage a conceptual desert. But it seems that among politicians and intellectuals, there is not a clear intention to want to define what Europe is, to want to acknowledge their own tradition and roots. Can the future of the European Union be built on the basis of the person, setting aside this identity that pertains to Europe? I believe that Europe’s problem now is that it is not able to evaluate the evil that surrounds it and the disasters that can occur. It is precisely for this reason that we are amazed by events like what happened at Atocha, just as the Americans were struck dumb by the attack on Manhattan. This consciousness of disaster in common is what can unite Western civilization, not a shared conception of God or Paradise. Even if this has been the case and there has not been unity, as you have said, what is true is that there were shared traditions, common experience. But now, the impression I have is that the individual is radically isolated, as though the elements of society that transmitted tradition and the value of the world (from the family to religious communities) no longer existed and the social fabric were weaker and weaker. Is this situation a solid base for being able to fight against the great challenge of terrorist nihilism? Ever since the Greeks, Europe has not been built on a solid social fabric. Go read Plato’s dialogues, and you will see the Greeks’ problems: adolescents who said what Mom and Dad had told them. We see this in Plato’s dialogues in ancient Greece five centuries before Christ. The crisis of the social fabric exists not only in modern times, but since the beginning of the West, and, quite rightly, the capacity of Western culture to face this crisis is what has kept it united. The alternative is this: to face this crisis or to sleep serenely, pretending not to see the problems. The capacity to face the challenges of the current situation is the most important thing about Europe (as we can see in the Greek tragedies, in Homer…). But, on the other hand, the greatest mistake is to close one’s eyes in front of the world. During World War II, in 1938 and 1939, France lived in a peaceful, idyllic world and sang a popular song that said: “Everything is going very well!” And when the Third Reich fell, Europe and American sang: “The big battles are over! Violence is no more. There are only small conflicts, low-level conflicts.” During the ten years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrible “success” in Manhattan, American intellectuals said: “We are living the end of conflicts.” And it was not true. I have always said that letting women be killed in Afghanistan, leaving their dictators in place, was not only a problem of the people of Afghanistan, but also of the Americans of Manhattan. How do you judge the phenomenon of the pacifism that has invaded our European cities since the US intervention in Iraq? I have been very critical of pacifism for a number of years. I started by criticizing the German pacifists when they took to the streets to manifest against American missiles, against the missiles that were defending us from the Soviet missiles. The expression “Make tea, but not war” is entertaining, but totally useless. Making tea is good for the digestion, but it does not solve the problems. The pacifists are not true pacifists; if they were true pacifists, they would not have risen up against the intervention in Iraq, forgetting to protest the worst of wars that a particularly important power, which is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, Russia, is building up against the Chechen people. Where were the pacifists when Grozny was destroyed? Where are they when a people like the Chechen one is threatened? To be sure, the Chechen population is not huge, at the most a million people, but is this any reason not to ask for peace in Chechnya? The fundamental reason why people fill the streets for peace in Iraq, but not for a people that is close to destruction, is that in one case they would have to take to the streets against Putin, but no one is interested in demonstrating against Putin, and in the other case they have to demonstrate against Bush. The pacifists are not pacifists, but anti-American and anti-Bush. I do not understand how we can accept not defending the Chechen people, when everyone declares himself to be a “friend of peace.” There is a great hypocrisy and great irresponsibility on the part of the demonstrators who say they are pacifists. This is nothing new–there were pacifist demonstrations in 1947 in favor of the Communists and against nuclear weapons (because, at that moment, only the United States had them), but from the moment when Stalin also had his nuclear armament, nobody remembered to demonstrate until the 1980s. The idea that pacifism claims to be an absolute truth should already be reason enough not to trust it. I have always asked the pacifists why they did not demonstrate against the war in Chechnya, but I never got an answer, while the Chechen people is destroyed in the most complete silence. Let’s go back one step. You cited as a characteristic of European history the subjecting of everything to criticism. But criticism is always sustained on a previous point, i.e., on the fact that there was a tradition that was put up for discussion. But there is a core of certainties that has always been untouchable: the idea that killing is evil, the idea that what happens in the Congo has to do with me in Madrid. I have the impression that an educational cultural effort that generates this type of conscience does not exist. I would like to ask, from where do we start today? Where can we find the energy to stand up to a challenge like this one, if there is nothing positive from which to start? I believe that Europe has always united “against” and not “in favor of”–but, for example, when someone fights an illness, it is because he has some idea what health is. Being in a democracy means living in the regime that is least bad of them all, but it does not mean living in Paradise, because democracy is what enables us to fight against certain ills, against oppression. But good is relative to evil. Doctors do not know what perfect health is. When one wants perfect health, he is not a physician but a charlatan. In my opinion, it is the same thing in politics and philosophy; we have an idea of what is false. Even if we do not have an idea of what eternal life is like, we know that two plus two is not five, we have some idea of evil, we know that concentration camps are an absolute evil, and thus we have points on which we can come together and define a life that is less bad. The wisdom of the West is this. I am less positive than you are, because I do not think that we lost the roots and idea of good ten or twenty years ago. It is sufficient to see that the stage on which the greatest massacres of the twentieth century were perpetrated is Europe. Hitler was born in Europe, as was Communism with its millions of dead, and so we are not innocent, we are not angels, we fought wars of religion long before Islam, we were capable of genocide long before the rest of the world. Indeed, the idea of genocide is already there in Greek literature, in the Odyssey and the Iliad, in which the city of Troy is destroyed. The worst of evils is that of closing one’s eyes in front of the evil we commit and that we are able to think up. Shakespeare does not tell us that the whole world is good and has grand intentions; he does not tell us that all we have to do is drink tea for violence to disappear. Shakespeare analyzes the roots of violent behavior: envy, malice… This is culture: to open our eyes even when it hurts. And to my mind, this is what is missing today. We are full of good intentions, we have grand ideas about our innocence, but we have left free room in the world for great crimes to be committed, while we were celebrating the end of wars and the reign of reason. Neither the UN nor the United States nor Europe intervened in the last great genocide of the twentieth century: Rwanda. There, for three months, 10,000 Tutsis were killed every day; in other words, a million in three months. Thus, we cannot declare ourselves innocent, but must open our eyes to our own complicity. We are facing one of the most important moments in history. Reflect on this: immediately after the attacks on the Twin Towers, people called the site Ground Zero. This was the term used to refer to the place where the atom bombs dropped before Hiroshima exploded. People, seeing the attacks of September 11th, felt they were facing a power of devastation analogous to that of the H-bombs. In 1945, men discovered that history could end, that man could come to an end with his existence. Before that time, only God’s power could put an end to mankind, but it was inconceivable that man himself could put an end to the human adventure. In 1945, a great responsibility was born for the country that had the H-bomb. We discovered from Manhattan that the power of devastation and the will for evil are much more widespread than we thought. There is no longer a monopoly in the hands of nations with nuclear capabilities. The power of the nuclear bomb is in the hands of the first madman passing by. What happened at Hiroshima can happen again. Atocha would have been much worse if the trains had not been late. About 10,000 people could have died. There is a great power of destruction in the hands of empty-headed people who can kill cheaply, because we must not forget that the attacks on the Twin Towers cost roughly the price of two apartments in Madrid. Now we are much more responsible than we were before. I do not say we should be optimists or pessimists; what I am saying is that we have to be much more responsible. We have gone from the era of the nuclear bomb, the H-bomb, to the human bomb, the h-bomb. The temptation is to avert our gaze and to try to live happily as though nothing had happened, but when one yields to this temptation, reality comes crashing in as at the Twin Towers or Atocha. We have to be sentinels to danger. Biography by Benedetta Villani André Glucksmann was born on June 19, 1937, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. He studied in Lyon and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud, earning a degree in philosophy. He is currently one of the most famous intellectuals and polemicists of our time. In the 1970s he was a protagonist of the debate initiated by the nouveaux philosophes, along with Bernard Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. During the 1980s he was a precise and attentive commentator on political change in Eastern Europe. He has long been committed to the causes of the Soviet dissidents, the Vietnamese boat-people, and, more recently, the Chechens. For some years, he has devoted his attention to analyzing the international social-political situation in light of the new events connected with Islamic terrorism. Works by B.V. Glucksmann published his first book (Le Discours de la Guerre) [The Discourse of War] in 1968, but his reputation grew on the basis of two essays, La Cuisinière et le Mangeur [The Cook and the Eater] (1975), in which he drew a parallel between Nazism and Communism, and Les Maîtres Penseurs [The Master Thinkers] (1977). Among his most recent books are Le Bien et le Mal [Good and Evil] (1997) and the Troisième Mort de Dieu [The Thirteenth Death of God] (2000).