Text published in August 2016 in the brochure n°21bis “Islamisms, Islamo-leftism, Islamophobia », Second part: Islam, extreme right, totalitarianism, from war to domination et posted online the following year.

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Is there no better symbol of submission to Muslim imperialism than the image of the Algerian people prostrating themselves five times a day towards their conqueror located in Arabia?

Why I am not a Muslim,
Ibn Warraq, ed. The Age of Man, 1999, p. 249

The ambition of this text is to put forward some elements of analysis for the purpose of understanding the Islamist phenomenon. This requires getting rid of a certain number of preconceived ideas, fruits of a tree whose ideological roots will not be analyzed here. ¹ . But three of them, particularly salient, nevertheless deserve to be cited in this introduction in order to clarify our point.

Approaching Islamism: Three preconceived ideas

The first is to believe that the way of life of Western societies embodies the "ideal" of human societies - in other words that their attractions prove that, as we often hear, "deep down everyone wants to live quietly" with their family, their house, their dog and, by implication, the entire consumer societyThis touching ethnocentrism wants to ignore the march of History as much as the complexity of the human psyche: if comfort and indifference can effectively anesthetize for a while the quest for meaning, the need to belong, the tendencies towards domination and monopolization, the murderous impulses and the desire for death, they do not eliminate them.

The second, a logical implication of the first, would be that the disorders of the world, its violence, its chaos and, consequently, Islamism, find their sources in this same West, its transitory imperfections, its difficulties of access and that, consequently, only him would be able to solve them. This is confusing influence from the western area on the march of the world on one side and the reactions that it arouses from the other. These reactions are as diverse as the multitude of societies and cultures which must assume Full responsibility: Islamism belongs to Islam ² like the Meiji era in Japan.

The third received idea would like to reduce, admittedly with increasing difficulty, Islamism to terrorism, preferring to deny what we must resolve to call progressive Islamization of our societies by civil means. Far from spectacular violence, this nagging, daily, harassing phenomenon is a groundswell without a real center, a capillary movement resonating with millions of Muslims in the four corners of the globe. What guides them is well known: boundless adulation for a warlord called Mohammed, the adoration of a "Holy Koran", the obsession with the pilgrimage to Mecca - a compulsive proselytism. For a hundred years, a Resurgence of Islam towards which a myriad of apparently unrelated acts converge: it is a veil that is put on, an ambiguity that is displayed, a mutual aid that is communitarianized, a consumption that is " halalise" or liturgical practices (festivals, fasting, prayers, etc.) which are expanding, becoming more systematic and more rigid. Islamism is this historical current, so fascinating by its immanence that it seems to constitute the sense of history. It seems to mimic the forms of the European and American workers' movement from the 17th to the 20th century, the last wave of this current of emancipation that has so singularly revolutionized Western societies since the early Middle Ages, taking human ideals to an unequaled point. This is to say that Islamism, by the formation of counter-societies, is led to transform in turn and in depth all the societies in which it is deployed.³.

It is therefore a real civilizational dynamic that we are confronted with, and that we must understand. This is the objective of the few remarks that follow, which are in no way definitive.

The first part questions contemporary Islamism from the point of view of the analysis of the totalitarian phenomenon: if Islamism can effectively be fully qualified new totalitarianism, it presents traits resolutely foreign to historical totalitarianism which push us to question both the latter and the singularities of Islamism which distance us from it. This is the subject of the second part, which brings out the notion ofimperialism in the historical sense of the term to try to identify, under its totalitarian aspects, this attempt to re-establish a Caliphate millennium. Finally, it is the eminently religious dimension of this which is explored in the third and final part, in particular by going back to the origins of monotheism, the breeding ground of millenarianism – this activism which wants to put an end to History.

I – Islamism as totalitarianism

While calling Islamism totalitarianism is not innovative,⁴, and even becomes common today without further question, the implications and the aporias that this raises for political thought are always left in the shadows.

Totalitarianism as the unlimited expansion of rational control

Let us first of all summarize in a few lines the characteristics of a totalitarian regime. This is born from a clean slate, whether it is provoked by prior historical shocks or actively sought by an aspiration to total war. It is from such a shock that a power arises which aims at the Unity of society, that is to say its complete enslavement by its State, and the fusion of the latter with the Party, its Apparatus and its Summit. The ideology, monolithic and unquestionable, is imposed, hammered, incorporated and seeks not the assent but the surrender of souls, through official lies, indoctrination, training, terror and the establishment of an absurd arbitrariness which empties daily existence of all meaning. This is of course the reign of denunciation, of the police and of the deportations of entire populations, of work camps and of systematic massacres of extermination. This " Absolute Evil " for H. Arendt, this " Monstrous " for C. Castoriadis, has been identified as the reversal of a logic of Western origin against the West itself and the emancipation of which its history is the bearer.

Many analyses have been made of it, but those of C. Castoriadis seem to us to contain the most relevant elements and, as we will see, to lead to unsuspected fruitful reflections.⁵.

The institution of totalitarianism, one of the sinister creations of the 20th century, constitutes for him the place of the limitless deployment of an ideological element of origin western : the blind search for theunlimited expansion of rational mastery, which emerged at the end of the Renaissance. This tendency towards the incessant control of men and things is found in the development of capitalist mechanisms, the techno-scientific race or the exercise of state powers. But this logic meets in the society of rights (the "Human Rights" are essentially a protection against the state), struggles (workers' movements against the reification of work), limits set by traditions, the resistance of ordinary people, and all the reflexes, mentalities, principles and institutions that the struggles for emancipation have wrested from successive European regimes for at least four centuries. This balance of power does not exist, or no longer exists, under a totalitarian regime, which sweeps any source of conflict to establish a society totally under rational control – that is to say, totally delusional (North Korea embodies it to the point of caricature).

Historical convergences with Nazism

This analysis allows us to read as a first approach what is happening to Muslim regions and countries: the classical Islamic tradition, " closed in on itself, inevitably dogmatic, theocentric and self-referential » ⁶, has been subjected for one or two centuries to Western influence which is causing an unprecedented existential crisis, delivering unarmed populations without endogenous emancipatory practices to the unlimited madness of local despots who are effectively using all the technical or institutional levers provided by the West. ⁷The information filtering out from the regions of the world where state or capillary Islamism dominates, what we know about the functioning of the institutions, groups and jihadist squadrons that claim to be part of it, what we see in the crude or muffled propaganda processes, and the impression that emerges from confrontations with ordinary neo-Muslim mentalities converge to draw without too much difficulty the effective contours of a new totalitarianism.

His training is also concomitant with that of the other two, National Socialist and Bolshevik. ⁸ , and the historical links with Nazism (and fascism) have also been widely established; whether it is the proximity of the Mussolini and Hitlerian apparatuses with Arab leaders such as Rachid Ali el Gaylani, Mohammad el-Maadi or the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (the latter playing a significant role in the "Final Solution"), the organization of anti-Semitic pogroms, the formation of Muslim armed corps in the service of the Axis, the massive integration of Nazi officers into Arab-Muslim government services after the war or the active support of their sympathizers for the Palestinian cause ⁹ . The anti-Jewish Muslim hysteria, which we will see as ontological, has even been largely underestimated by the Leader – we will pass over the successes which have been renewed ever since in Muslim lands Mein Kampf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But, whatever these obvious convergences, the Iranian and Saudi regimes present, like Italian fascism, the characteristics of an "incomplete" totalitarianism and in particular the absence of systematic massacres of their own populations. Several factors could explain this. The main one seems to us to reside in the specificity of their economy almost exclusively based on hydrocarbon rents; this permanent and abundant windfall requiring no particular effort could have accompanied the still semi-feudal (or even frankly slave-owning) characteristics of these regions. Thus the penetration of the capitalist mental universe would have been limited, and mainly the multiplier lever represented by the world of the factory, a totalitarian microsociety where the tendentially absolute control of the organization, the maximization of the influence of the machine, the scientific rationalization of the gestures and behaviors of workers are experimented.

Analytical Similarities with Bolshevism

Whatever about these ending regimes ¹⁰ , they seem to have provoked an echo of a revival of Sunni Islam, and the Islamism of the 21st century in Nigeria, and from the Maghreb to the Philippines via Afghanistan, presents itself in a different light. It is with the USSR that the rapprochement could be the most relevant, particularly from the point of view of their conditions of emergence.

Because Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was a society "only" disoriented and in crisis, the Nazi party inherited a functional state and a people who were largely literate, educated, cultured and with a strong identity, allowing it to to parasitize society and to fully develop the delirium of a "real" totalitarianism ¹¹. It was quite different for the Russian Bolsheviks of the same period, whose country was literally devastated and decimated by the First World War, the decay of the Tsarist state and the ravages of the Civil War. The regime had to truly to build a State (on the model of the Party) and, in the same way, try to set up a company from top to bottom, equip it, structure it, and above all hold it together by creating a social bond from scratch which goes beyond particularisms. This very singular situation of exclusion of any modern heritage which seems to have given free rein in the USSR to other social logics than "purely" totalitarian ones - we will come back to this - seems to be found in the regimes resulting from jihadism: the Taliban from Afghanistan and Pakistan,Islamic state from Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the Caucasus Emirate Chechnya reigns over territories and populations that are ruined, if not devastated, at least in the process of being so, and traditional modes of coexistence that are highly destabilized by the penetration of Western culture and the repeated failure of decolonization. These situations of chaos deep and extensive, at multiple levels, this social dismemberment, seems to be, as for Russia, one of the main springs of the establishment of totalitarian regimes, and especially self-maintained, something that some jihadist theorists seem to be fully aware of. ¹².

The course of events will tell whether contemporary Islamism is capable of building a totalitarian regime. loan or " pure " on the Nazi model (for example in Turkey) or if its determinations will lead it to develop a form closer to the Bolshevik type. We are only at the beginning of a real territorial anchoring - and this could take new forms - but already some of its intrinsic characteristics would rather push us to opt for the second option.

A baroque totalitarianism

Because if contemporary Islamism can be assimilated at first to a totalitarianism, even singular, it possesses "new" particularities, in any case troubling and now familiar.

First, and although this first point still seems uncertain, it does not seem that we find this mobilization in Islamism. total, permanent bases et passionate masses beyond the reasonable that characterized totalitarianisms (including Iranian). Even in the case of theIslamic state, jihad reinforced remains the fact of groups, squadrons, professional battalions or in any case of fanaticized recruits while the populations, who are not all enrolled, are assigned "only" to a role of support, production and propagation of the dogma ¹³ . Similarly, there are no sinister "re-education camps" there, with prisoners simply appearing to be eliminated en masse.

It is then and above all the status of the rationality in Islamist currents. All historical totalitarianisms, as well as their derivatives, were hyper-rationalisms : Nazism claiming to be based on the so-called laws of Nature "revealed" by Charles Darwin, while Marxism-Leninism was based on those of History "discovered" by K. Marx. All of them truly and passionately believed in the effectiveness of rationality, even if not immediately instrumental, and struggled to try to form capable individuals themselves, minima, to maintain and operate complex techniques and societies (which ultimately relied only on a thin technocratic elite inherited from the previous period or imported – exfiltrations of Nazi engineers). On the other hand, a society only semi-modern as are Arab-Muslim societies ¹⁴ and possessed totally by Islam, a religion of medieval obscurantism which proudly proclaims its naive obscurantism, will immediately find itself faced with a anthropological impasse, inducing to persist a collective schizophrenia already familiar to these circles, and exasperating it ¹⁵.

The situation is strictly the same as regards the aims: all the totalitarianisms of the 20th century were hyper-progressivism which announced radiant times such as humanity had never known, an unheard-of sophistication of technology, science, knowledge, culture, Art. Islamism only proposes a nostalgic return to the prophetic gesture of its "Golden Age" of domination - and seems, as has always been the case, not being able to maintain oneself without to parasitize ou pill in any case the companies around or establish various situations of rents ¹⁶ From this point of view, there is an economy of means, in any case a coherence, which we will see as profound: it is no longer a question of claiming glittering Socialism or the glorious Reich to better install industrial slavery, but more serenely of promising Paradise – by creating Hell on Earth.

This crude aspect, finally, is increased tenfold by the barbarity itself (torture, throat-slitting, slavery, systematic rape, pedophilia, etc.). Of course, it had been practiced by totalitarianisms and often required of any new recruit, but the new fact is that she is there assumed as such and above all staged as an element of propaganda. Brute force, direct violence and terror become, in themselves, positive values. Massive and now daily facts that provoke perplexity, tetany, denial in any average observer – or fascination.

A Outside of the West

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to see at work in these different aspects of the collective dynamics specific to the totalitarianisms of the past as they emerged in Europe and Russia. All these signs, with others that we will discuss later, point to a outside, elsewhere from the west, and are based on concepts that are very external to a modernity, even a debilitating one, such as it had self-secreted since the end of the wars of religion. ¹⁷.

In reality, as with a growing number of phenomena that have appeared since at least the end of the Second World War and which go beyond inherited sociopolitical frameworks, understanding what is at stake here requires a departure from the frameworks of strongly Western-centric contemporary thought – the totalitarian phenomenon already invited us to do so. This amounts to reconnecting with long history as all the thinkers of modernity conceived it, and which the progressivism common to Hegelian-Marxism and liberalism has permanently frozen. We must therefore break with the certainties of an accumulation of human history heading, bumpily and asymptotically, towards a global society governed by justice and freedom, and thus leaving the comfortable shores of Western ethnocentrism in order to consider the existence ofother civilizations existing or possible, past or future.

II – Totalitarianism as imperialism

Most thinkers of totalitarianism have examined it from a Western point of view: H. Arendt saw its genesis in the fragmented and desocialized people of mass democracies mired in their contradictions and victims of their own imperialisms; Cl. Lefort detected its advent in the appearance of modern societies that did not recognize any authority external to themselves and were therefore susceptible to unlimited self-enslavement; C. Castoriadis, as we have seen, considered this unleashing of a rational mastery of the social as lying in the invention of merchant capitalism and then especially industrial capitalism. Each of them wanted, rightly, to recognize the extraordinary novelty of the totalitarian phenomenon by minimizing the weight that the history of each singular culture placed on its own shipwreck. ¹⁸.

Other thinkers, without their theses being incompatible with the previous ones, insisted on the contrary on a certain historical continuity: thus K. Papaïoannou saw in the USSR the expression of a Byzantine-Mongol heritage by the destruction of all the intermediary social bodies as it had been carried out by Ivan IV called the Terrible (1547-1584) ¹⁹ ; or KA Wittfogel for whom the Stalinist empire was reconnecting with an "oriental despotism" established by K. Marx himself but unexpectedly forgotten by his descendants ²⁰ … Similarly, for Maoist China, one can easily find in the works of an É. Balazs or a J.-F. Billeter the traditional features of a mandarin and literate bureaucracy on which the most murderous regime the world has ever known relied. ²¹ .

The anthropological dimension

Because if totalitarianism is born from a tabula rasa, he is not born ex nihilo, from nothingness, but rather, in one way or another, from the debris of ancient traditional societies, heteronomous and all more or less despotic, tyrannical, dictatorial, authoritarian. The thing is even more evident from the angle of the individual.

So, it is clear that if theHomo sovieticus, the individual shaped by totalitarian society, is of recent appearance ²², it relies on anthropological types much older, individuals banally inhabited by ethnocentrism, chauvinism, xenophobia, patriarchy, clanism, expansionism, militarism, but also fatalism, careerism, nepotism, etc. ²³The incorporation of totalitarian culture requires from these personalities both an exacerbation of these character traits and an erasure of the social frameworks in which they were expressed until then so that they can change objects according to the needs of power (hating today the one who was adulated yesterday – mobilizing against theE, until then an unwavering ally of theOceania in 1984), that is to say a suspension, intended to be definitive, of the ordinary decency.

To believe that one can go beyond the founding imprint, the modeling that the institution of society imposes, each time singular, on the human psyche, either to fantasize about a new man, or to create an infinitely manipulable uprooted person is the common horizon of liberalism, cultural leftism and totalitarianism: the permanence of the anthropological type is a fact that the thinking of the end of the 20th century seems to have completely evacuated but that the understanding of the world to come urgently requires us to re-appropriate.

Restoration of the Caliphate

In the same way, a brief glance at the history of Islam shows without a doubt that what Islamists claim today, whether it is practices, projects, frameworks of thought, mental reflexes, in short their vision of the world, is found to varying degrees in a Muslim heritage shared by nearly a billion individuals. We have thus been witnessing for ten years now attempts explicit of restoration of the Caliphate, the only way to apply the entirety of the sharia, that is to say, a return to the Arab-Muslim Empire as it was able to reign for almost a millennium and a half (that it quickly fragmented from its foundation – 661 ​​– until its final collapse – 1924, end of the Ottoman Empire – only reinforced the fantasy of a united, unique and universal entity encompassing theUmmah). This imperial caliphal reference may seem crazy or folkloric: it is nevertheless constitutive of the Muslim mentality. It is even consubstantial with the Muslim religion since, unlike Judaism or Christianity, as we will see, Islam is born in, through and for the empire.

Let's recap: if Islamism can be considered an imperfect, and even very baroque, totalitarianism, perhaps these particularities can be clarified in light of a historical and cultural dimension which can be all the less easily ignored since it is sealed by a very particular political form, the empire.

Imperial logic

Empire: what are we talking about? Let us leave Western ethnocentrism here again, and especially its intellectualized variant, the Marxist vulgate, which sees no imperialism than western, and let us look at the world history of empires. The work of G. Martinez-Gros based on the thought ofIbn Khaldûn offers a very precise analysis of the imperial typology ²⁴, which can be summarized in a few broad outlines: first, the constitution of an authoritarian state with a universal vocation, reigning over multicultural populations, divided, stratified and assigned to production, taxed and sacrificed on occasion. Then the absolute monopoly of violence by an army of mercenaries recruited in the peripheries of the empire, or in its possible internal margins, and who gradually integrate themselves through this means into the imperial apparatus, until constituting a new dynasty. Finally, a geographically expansionist, conquering aim, aiming at the annexation of new populations and productive territories at the same time as the enlistment of new combatants. This imperial logic, this mechanism brought to light by, perhaps, the only classical thinker of the Arab-Muslim world comparable to a Tocqueville or a Marx, would be observed in all the great historical groups, from Assyria to the empire of Alexander, from Rome to Han China then Tang, from the Umayyads to the Mongols, up to the empire of India.

Europe, from the end of the Roman Empire, escaped this logic by gradually developing fiefdoms, then autonomous cities, notably from the 11th century, forming a lasting polycentric whole at all levels of sovereignty and gradually establishing the incredible people in arms. It is in this context ofimpossibility of empire ²⁵ that we can spot there imperial thrusts such as the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars or the various colonial campaigns, but none of them ever resulted in completed forms capable of unifying irreducible political entities into a whole. ²⁶ spread over a territory which is itself surprisingly fragmented ²⁷ .

Ancient Imperialism under Modern Totalitarianism

Italian fascism or German Nazism, which shattered the framework of the nation-state established in Europe in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia, can also be considered as attempts toestablishment imperial at the very heart of European modernity, and likewise Bolshevik Russia after several decades of Westernization brutally interrupted ²⁸. O. Spengler would probably speak of historical pseudomorphosis to describe an old cultural matrix expressing itself in contemporary forms.

Totalitarianism then takes on a more precise meaning: much more than the hypostatized expression of traditional autocratic or tyrannical traits equipped by Western rationality, it would be the irruption of millennial imperial tendencies. inside of a modernity which is foreign to them, but which offers previously unknown means for the deployment of power and domination. If the forms and means are of Western inspiration, the ends and the historical dynamics are imperial. Thus Cl. Lefort, questioning the status of the Law, a key invention of modernity, in a totalitarian regime, noted that " There is no reason to conclude that the notion of legality has been abolished or has become indifferent. In the absence of any reference to legality, the system of domination would be unsustainable. (…) Strange as it may seem, the investigating commissioners take literally prescriptions which, paradoxically, in their literal acceptance, give rise to arbitrary interpretations. The reign of violence is therefore combined with that of formalism. » ²⁹ How can we make it clearer that totalitarianism is the result of the interaction between imperial despotism and the Western world, of the resurrection of the former in the latter?

The totalitarian phenomenon would therefore be the modern expression of'a millennial imperial logic non-western.

We thus find among all analysts of totalitarian systems the same dismay at such anti-Western characteristics, even in the German concentration camps where they meticulously apply themselves to destroying this institution so typical of the West, individuality. And symmetrically equality, memory and, finally, History itself. H. Arendt: " The Western world has, until now, even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered: it was to recognize as self-evident the fact that we are all human (and economic It was only because Achilles went to Hector's funeral, because the The most despotic governments honored the slain enemy, because the Romans allowed Christians to write their martyrologies, because the Church kept its heretics alive in the memory of men, that all was not lost and could never be. The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (…) dispossessed the individual of his own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and that he belonged to no one » ³⁰. We find here the historiographical treatment of mass exterminations and great imperial massacres, almost without traces.

Post-Stalinist Russia: A Return to Empire?

The late analyses of a C. Castoriadis on the evolution of the Russian regime would tend to support this thesis of an imperial logic at work in the totalitarian phenomenon. The author, at the beginning of the 1980s ³¹, considered that the transformations of the Russian regime since the death of Stalin (1953) were such that a new type of society had been born, the stratocracy (stratos : army). Fragmented by particularisms and nationalisms, Russian society saw the Army constitute itself into a body foreign, self-employed closest determinant in the functioning of the bureaucracy and establishing Force, Brute Force without any ideological justification as the ultimate principle of all politics. We find here typical aspects of an imperial functioning. Certainly, C. Castoriadis explicitly defends himself against it ³², but perhaps he would have admitted that, using himself and extensively the expressions of " Russian empire » ³³ and D'" nationalist-imperial imagination ", such features strongly resembled a transitional state, certainly confused and bastardized, from the totalitarian form towards the imperial restoration which has been taking shape more and more precisely within the very Putinist Russian Federation.

From imperial revival to Muslim totalitarianism?

This USSR, born from chaos and forced to invent herself ex abrupto, but weakly Westernized, would have reconnected thirty years after its foundation with this old imperial logic which had shaped its past. Thus Stalinist Russia, but also Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, would have been totalitarianisms tending to the Empire ³⁴ The parallel with contemporary Islamism is striking but the phenomenon seems reversed: Islamism, through the Caliphate, would be an attempt at imperial restoration. tending towards totalitarianism. Can he afford it?

Probably not. Firstly, for the reasons already given when examining the formation of Bolshevik Russia. Secondly, because the Muslim world, which is natively divided, seems extraordinarily fragmented today: the eternal Sunni/Shiite rivalry is compounded by the absence of a leading state capable of legitimately founding a civilizational center as are the United States, Russia, India, China or Brazil (neither Turkey, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Egypt, nor Pakistan nor Indonesia manage to impose themselves within the Sunni world). Certainly, this fragmentation has always fed in return the unifying drive, the original schism is a mimetic dynamic of radicalization and at the infra-state level religious and ethnic homogenization is almost everywhere complete, as the mosaic of Muslim practices is in the process of aligning with Salafist doctrine. But it is precisely the latter which rejects modernity with even more force than the Muslim Brotherhood or the Wahhabi current. The Muslim world resembles more the heart of the European Middle Ages, with its imperial nostalgia and its dispersion, than a true renaissance (Nahdha).

Last reason: the era is precisely no longer one of expansion of this same rationality. C. Castoriadis, again, diagnosed very early the exhaustion of modernity in the middle of the 20th century: growing insignificance of language and morals, extinction of social-historical creativity, decline of the great social and political struggles, absence of significant innovations even in the techno-scientific fields and, we could add, decay of capitalist mechanisms in favor of the antique auri sacred fames in the short term; only the inertia of past centuries still maintains the West at the height of its power. In these conditions, attempts at imperial establishment are no longer made with the power of a radiant modernity, but with the diminished means and dull aims of postmodern decline. In other words: with the end of modernity, the time of totalitarianism, this shoot of imperialism subverting and annexing the products of rationality, would have passed. The new forms of domination are then in formation, taking up and hybridizing ancestral logics in the process of awakening, and contemporary Islamism seems to embody the most advanced point.

Islam and its " imperial perfection » ³⁵

Let us return to the specific examination of Islamism. The specificity of Islam in the history of empires is striking: while all the great civilizations seem to have known only one or more moments imperial (experienced certainly as highlights founders) " Islam, on the contrary, had no other past or roots than the empire. It was born almost a thousand years after the Roman and Chinese empires, from a conquest so rapid and so complete, associated with a religious mutation so profound, that it almost annihilated all memory of what preceded it, and that it set itself up as an unrivaled model in the genesis of any future Islamic state. » ³⁶. Similarly, from the point of view of other monotheisms, imperial logic is foreign to Judaism, and accidental for Christianity, which inherited from the Roman and then Byzantine (and then Russian) Empire only through a slow infiltration of a historical form that will never be recreated. The characteristic of Islam seems to have succeeded in articulating in a single mechanism the Bedouin logic and the despotic logic in a cycle of renewal of the imperial form.

This reading grid sheds light on Islamist projects and the difficulties we have encountered in categorizing them: much more than a simple extreme right or an imperfect totalitarianism, it would ultimately be a question of an imperial restoration endogenous to Islam and inherently Muslim. This restoration would aim to turn into totalitarianism, but whose era is not'a no longer have the means. It remains to appropriate contradictorily everything that the West has been able to invent in order to serve the will for power and anti-Western propagation.

Destroy the West by Western Means

Let us digress on this contradiction, which should be examined further. Because this movement of return to the empire is taking place against this very Westernization – it's a historical release of the Western universe, such as totalitarianism, but by taking up the most instrumental innovations without being able to grasp its fundamental springs. It is obvious every day that it is the Mohammedan infiltrator who demands the freedom, the tolerance and equality to impose obscurantism, supremacism and authoritarianism in the public space – it is, more profoundly, the use of all useful knowledge, sciences and technologies without being able to grasp the movement that created them. A disarming contradiction that one would be profoundly wrong to consider as proof of the impossibility of the Islamization project: it is one of its driving forces, and perhaps even le main spring, based on a double-bind psychopathological which has no other outcome than manic proselytism and jihad.

And considering the history of totalitarianism, one cannot help but be struck by this mechanism of turning the inventions of the West against itself by totalitarian movements following a line of increasing sophistication. It is Hitlerism which claims to be the nationalism and socialism to destroy both, that is to say on the one hand the popular creation of the only territorial framework within which peoples were able to exercise their sovereignty, and on the other hand the invention of a horizon of equality and freedom for all ³⁷It is obviously Marxism-Leninism, which claimed to be the point of convergence of two or three centuries of workers' and emancipation movements, and which scuttled them. better than fascism and nazism combined, across the entire surface of the globe. The difference with Islamism, already pointed out, is that the horizon of the latter is an exit, apparently at least, frank et clear from the West or, more specifically, a refusal to enter : it no longer even claims to be a desirable horizon for all of humanity and openly displays its regression religious, that is to say its aim theocratic.

It is precisely the latter that probably represents the most mind-blowing dimension for a mind stuffed with progressivism, to the point of denying its consistency – wrongly. It is this religious aspect, at once the most visible and the most fundamental, and paradoxically the least understood, that we address last.

III – Imperialism, theocracy, millenarianism

It is not difficult to identify the tacitly religious dimension of the functioning of classical totalitarian regimes, despite their distance from traditional beliefs. Many have spoken of a genuine secular religion, deeply monotheistic, secular millenarianism : single dogma, one community, unified territories, one absolute closure meaning about himself under the sign ofUn. It is, here again, Marxism-Leninism which offers the most spectacular example of this tendency of all totalitarianisms towards theocracy, a theocracy of rationality, right down to the very essence of Marxist dogma, which included all the dimensions of a revealed religion with its proletarian Chosen People, its communist Parousia, its priests, its temples, its saints, its heresies, its apostates… To affirm that Marxism is the fourth monotheism has not strictly nothing of an image, and is the only valid explanation for its global dissemination and its improbable survival to this day, in diffuse and degraded but infinitely pervasive forms. Moreover, here we find the ultimate cement that fundamentally binds Islamo-leftism together ³⁸ – we will come back to this.

Reading the totalitarianisms of the 20th century as attempts at imperial establishment within a European modernity that was constructed outside and against the logic of empire, we must also add that they all tended to constitute themselves as imperialism. theocraticThe verticalization of the scales of sovereignty leading at its summit to a universal singularity: God ³⁹. We understand here the advantage of Islamism which, by explicitly asserting itself as such, takes up and reveals this implicit totalitarian aim and above all carries it at its end point in an exhausted modernity regime, accelerating this exhaustion and precipitating the de-Westernization of the world. To understand how Islam specifically constitutes this royal road, we must undertake a historical genealogy, necessarily fragmentary and succinct, and go back to the origins of monotheism.

The Mystical Imperialism of the Hebrews

If the idea of ​​a single God seems to have been present in several ancient peoples, Babylonians, Assyrians or Egyptians, it is obviously within the Hebrew people that it matured for a long time from the 13th to the 5th century BCE, to reach a unique degree of purity and constitute one of the most singular creations of the spirit of humanity. The Yahvist belief, over the course of Canaanite influences, Assyrian imperial dominations and, above all, Babylonian exiles, finally gave birth to a complete Judaism, resolutely distinct from polytheisms, sealing the Alliance between a chosen people and Their God in a sacred place: the Promised Land, the House of Israel housing the Temple of Jerusalem. ⁴⁰. This radically new relationship with a divinity, unique, creative and transcendent, but triply linked to a particular ethnic group, a unique Law and a defined territory, is obviously fraught with tension: "CHow can we conceive that almost all of creation must forever be ignorant of the identity of its true author and master, and live in perfect ignorance of his will? There must be an end of time when this scandal is resolved » ⁴¹. This is how the promise of the coming of a Messiah, abolishing History, restoring Unity to the world and purging it of enemies and the unjust, in an end of time where " His sovereignty will extend from one sea to another / And from the Euphrates to the end of the world » (Zechariah, IX, 9 et seq.) ⁴². Thereby, " Does the imperial logic, in opposition to which monotheism was formed, resurface in him, once well established, as his obligatory horizon: to the universal God, universal domination? » ⁴³. This messianic eschatology is good consubstantial to consistent monotheism, whether believers forget it or fall into quietism, make it an element of inner comfort or engage in holy war to precipitate the Apocalypse.

But this Judaism inhabited by messianism, this " mystical imperialism » ⁴⁴, had to renounce the salvation of the world through what undoubtedly remains the worst ordeal of its already thousand-year-old existence: Greek influence.

Emergence of Hellenistic humanism

The democratic cities of ancient Greece emerged drained of blood from the internal divisions of the Peloponnesian War, and the civic virtues that had characterized them for three or four centuries collapsed. ⁴⁵ : the end of polycentrism, of the armed people and of self-government which radically set them apart from the surrounding societies marked the establishment of the imperial logic embodied by Alexander the Great, disciple of Aristotle, and his fantasy of a "universal Empire" in reality immediately and lastingly fragmented. From -300 to the Roman conquest (-64), he hybridized Hellenism with the cultures of the peoples of the Middle East, Persians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians... and Jews. This melee of peoples, a true globalization so close to ours in certain aspects, was an extraordinary breeding ground where Greek humanism broke down the barriers between particular identities by altering itself in depth. Thus philosophy left the heights it had reached by turning almost exclusively towards the increasingly religious aspects of individual morality, the salvation of the soul and its immortality: in the midst of the mixing of a multitude of divinities and the appearance of new cults, it was the reign of skepticism, cynicism, epicureanism and especially stoicism, then of philosophical syncretism with a very strong religious dimension, spreading a "philosophical religion" ⁴⁶ whose different tendencies preached in the streets and could only strongly challenge traditional beliefs.

Upheaval of Judaism

The Hebrew world, despite its exceptional effort at enclosure, could not resist this multicultural bath where, in two centuries, Eratosthenes and Archimedes succeeded Euclid (preceding Ptolemy) and where the catapult and ballistic calculations, the Antikythera mechanism and mechanical puppets were invented. Aeschylus and Aristophanes were played; astronomy, botany and human anatomy became exact sciences while the lighthouse of Alexandria, its library and its museum shone… Hellenistic Judaism brought together these assimilated people, often from the Alexandrian diaspora, who attended the gymnasium naked, opened themselves up to rational speculation, abandoned circumcision, spoke Greek and no longer read the Bible except in translation (the Septuagint). This later integrated texts under strong Hellenistic influence, such as " Ecclesiastes » ; marked as « The Book of Wisdom " over there philosophy tragic ⁴⁷ ; THE " Second Book of Maccabees » where the very Greek notion of a creation arises ex nihilo ⁴⁸ ; or the famous "Song of Songs" so surprising by the importance that love takes there (agape) and the place of women, an innovation in the Hellenistic world ⁴⁹. They were also thinkers like Aristobulus of Paneas, the pseudo-Aristaeus or later Philo of Alexandria (-20 BC to 45 AD) taking up Posidonius (c. 134 – 51 BC) to incorporate Platonism and Stoicism into Jewish thought. Sects were born, like the Essenes, who formed egalitarian ascetic communities open to non-Jews while Hellenistic fraternities like the eranoi or thiases " most often brought together men and women, free people and slaves: they therefore no longer admitted social distinctions, because their members rejected all oppositions which disunite and felt themselves brothers, united as they were in the worship of the same god that they had chosen. » ⁵⁰ .

Birth of an original Christianity acosmic

All this constituted a primitive soup from which emerged in a diffuse manner a new religious spirit which aimed to radically separate the spiritual from the temporal. It seems to borrow its myths and its liturgy from many peoples of the Empire, Egyptian in the first place, and is nourished by the multiple Greek contributions, from the Word (Logos) to the immortality of the Platonic soul, to the divinization of monarchs and heroes (soter : "savior") to the affectionate and very stoic piety of a Cleanthes ⁵¹ . This new religion in formation resulting from the crossing much less strange than it seems ⁵² between Jewish revelation and late Greek wisdom was of course proto-Christianity, which was born, grew and truly founded in and through the Hellenistic universe: the first followers, the Nazarenes, were the hellenists like Paul or Stephen, who will form the first and second circle and will massively convert the Greeks of the diaspora; all their writings are in the Greek language (church/church, apostle/apostles, christ/christos, heresy/hairy, etc.) and take up Greek themes and terms. And these are the Christianized Greeks, the Apologists who, later, will defend their faith against Jewish and pagan attacks... This original, primitive Christianity breaks the Jewish alliance between a people, its God, its Law and its place: it frees its own like Moses, by " coming out of the world ", his Kingdom " is not of this world ", he wants to be spiritual and no policy. This new millenarianism is fundamentally acosmic : it therefore unites those for whom Jesus was not to liberate Palestine from the Greco-Roman yoke, but to announce another world by his resurrection. The militant messianism of Judaism, the mystical imperialism of Israel of which he remains the bearer will be concealed by this massive Greek contribution to which we owe what the Christianity of the origins can possibly contain of so little enslaving or even of egalitarian or universal. It is indeed inconvenient for the contemporary believer and attentive reader of gospels to do something other than put on his toga and set off on the trails to announce the Good News of the Resurrection. Paradox of history: it is to this "same" Christianity that helped to pacify the Roman Empire by infiltrating it that we owe, once in power, one of the most important ideological purges and then the establishment of the first real monotheistic theocracy in the Byzantine Empire. Proof that texts, even sacred ones, are of little weight in the face of the millenarian determinisms that monotheisms ontologically carry – at most they require exegesis in the face of the inevitable and massive contradictions and, in the Catholic case, a dedicated exercise of exceptional duplicity in History. Its true castration would come later during the Reformation and then, definitively, during the anti-religious movements that Europe witnessed for four centuries, two moments of reappropriation of the ancient heritage, consequently bringing the cult of Jesus back to its inaugural letter and its practice in the intimate sphere. The millenarian and apocalyptic side of Christianity experienced some resurgences (from the Anabaptists to the Jehovah's Witnesses) but remained incapable of instituting political entities (at least until their Marxist-Leninist metamorphosis).

Millenarian reactions: birth of theocracy

To understand the lineage of Jewish messianism, we must return to the Hellenistic period. In parallel with the birth of Christianity through assimilation, the existential crisis caused by the penetration of late Greek culture into the Hebrew world also gave rise to its exact opposite: a stubborn refusal and a fixation on dogma. This is how the famous Maccabean revolt (175 – 140 BC) came about, a struggle for liberation against the Alexandrian occupation, according to the Hebrew model of resistance to subjugation, whose victory is still celebrated in the feast of Hanukkah – but above all a traditionalist surge against acculturation caused by Hellenistic Judaism. This inaugural divorce is at the origin of the formation of proselytizing sects which will succeed one another (Galileans, Sicarii, Zealots) for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel, that is to say for the continuation of the theocratic project by the expectation of a Messiah Politiquement liberator of the Temple and the Territory of Jerusalem – and, above all, the constitution and the hermetic maintenance of the integrity of the dogma. Terrorism and clashes with the authorities will not cease, leading to the first Jewish-Roman war (66-73) and the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (70), to the riots of Kitos (115-117) then to the revolt of Bar Kochba (132-135), whose Roman repression was devastating and finally provoked the famous diaspora. Just as territorial claims meant the preservation of Jewish purity, the expulsion from Palestine implied an abandonment of the religion of the Temple and the Priests: the rabbinical reform, the majority Judaism today, through the reinterpretations compiled by the Mishnah and Talmud, signs the resignation of the Jewish people gathered around the synagogues and the rabbis not to reestablish a theocracy. Here again, political messianism disappears, apart from a few largely marginal resurgences and totally foreign to any imperial logic ⁵³ .

The heirs of millenarianism: proto-Islam

The baton seems to have been taken up by a post-Christian sect, to which a growing number of works by contemporary historians attribute a crucial place in the emergence of Islam. ⁵⁴ : the Judeo-Nazarenes. Refugees in Syria after the destruction of the Temple and recognizing Jesus as a prophet policy humiliated and unjustly put to death by the "infidel Jews", they would have continued to nourish the project of a reconquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. They would thus have participated in the establishment of the ephemeral Palmyrian Empire (270-272) of Queen Zenobia, but it is especially in the XNUMXth century with the freshly Christianized Arab tribes, notably the Qorechites, that religious indoctrination would have been successful through the invention of a common ancestry (the " Ismailis "). They would have translated their preaching texts from Syriac-Aramaic to Arabic, the lectionaries (qor'ono/qur'ân, which will give Koran), cut into sûrat (sura) where the figures of Jesus and Mary are omnipresent, while anti-Judaism is systematized and the millenarian project of establishing an earthly empire hammered out: this would be the birth of a proto-Islam, whose first mosques are modeled on the churches of the region and oriented towards Jerusalem (and not Mecca). The gradual success of the company, once again thriving on the fertile ground that was the chaos regional created by the incessant and colossal clashes between the Byzantine and Persian empires, will finally lead to the capture of Jerusalem around 637. This is the beginning of the dazzling conquests which took advantage of the military anarchy caused by a regional geopolitical collapse to annex the entire Middle Eastern zone, an area ensuring a lasting geographical income as an intermediary between the East and the West (at least until the discovery of America). The rapid eviction of the Judeo-Nazarenes in favor of the Arabs alone would have been done through a historical falsification and the progressive manufacturing of a "new" monotheism capable of competing, in a mimetic manner with Byzantium; Islam. The late invention (around 680) of the figure of Mahomet, destined in reaction to become obsessive, allowing to gather and recruit under the patronage of a war chief and coming to legitimize, structure, organize the future Umayyad empire by forging the Muslim legend as we know it ⁵⁵ .

Islam is therefore the only civilization that is the heir to monotheistic messianism, the Koran the historical recipient of the theocratic will, the Muslim legend the incarnation par excellence of the imperial religion, its radical currents obsessively apocalyptic. ⁵⁶ ; its religious specificity seems to reside in its millenarianism at once theocratic, never reformed. Judaism having had no political roots for two millennia – contemporary Israel is a nation secular like there are not many others ⁵⁷

– only Christianity could compete; but the multiple metamorphoses it has undergone, the continuous exit of religion which continues to operate via the West, notably through the intersection of the Hellenistic foundations of the New Testament and the rediscovery of the rationalism of ancient Greece, seem to prohibit any imperial resurgence, at least in a monotheistic or even religious form, in the medium term – and in the West.

Resumption of a thousand-year-old conflagration?

For more than half a century, contemporary Islam has been reconnecting with its congenital millenarianism, its sacred scriptures containing intact apocalyptic and imperial tendencies and reawakening them in believers asleep from centuries of faith in the coalman ⁵⁸. The historical conditions today are astonishingly close to those in which Jewish messianic currents developed more than two thousand years ago: whether it is ancient Judaism facing declining Hellenic culture or today's Islamism facing the Western world, it is a revealed dogma that is deeply and patiently eroded, not by a higher truth or a new prophet, but rather by a civilization for which There can be no more revealed dogma than there can be prophet.. AJ Toynbee noted that Islam, having drawn " its inspiration mainly from Judaism ", had finally restored the territorial integrity of the Persian Empire by permanently ridding the Middle East of the foreign irruption that had been Alexandrian culture. ⁵⁹, bearer of this Greek germ so corrosive for all cultures traditionally despotic, imperial and deeply heteronomous.

We cannot help but see this age-old battle resume today, with the West and its Greco-Roman heritage confronting an Islam pregnant with all the messianic, theocratic, imperial genealogy of which it is the depository and for which the simple existence of societies and individuals aiming at self-determination, unlimited questioning and historical creativity is absolutely unbearable, requiring theextermination of a few (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the apocalypse for allIt would be imprudent to push the comparative exercise further, except by noting that if Romanity finally defeated the apocalyptic Jewish currents, it was a long process, at the cost of an unprecedented devastation of the region, of deportations and mass massacres. typically imperial. To take this same path would signal the end of the West as we know it today, as surely as the incessant capitulations to which its current decline condemns it.

What is certain is that Islamism, this neo-Islam, both as the Muslim extreme right, as a new totalitarianism, as an imperial enterprise with a theocratic aim and as an apocalyptic millenarianism, will prosper where the conditions are favorable to it – devastation. Its growth, its expansion, its development, its transformations will depend first and foremost on its ability to take advantage of the current geopolitical crises and the chaos engendered by the food, health, climate, ecological and, of course, economic, political and cultural crises.

New front lines

The struggle that is ours today must be capable of such historical perspective in order to grasp its own issues – and to understand the external and internal dividing lines.

External: if Islam so perfectly embodies theocratic millenarianism, the resurgence of this archaic imperialism ⁶⁰ seems to announce, as we have seen, the return of a non-religious logic of empire on a global scale, and cannot mask it. Quite the contrary: the violent eruption of a theocratic imperialism can only in every way free up the various civilizational tendencies towards domination, and make them comparatively acceptable (see Syria today). Rereading Samuel P. Huntington twenty years later (or reading him!) forces us to agree that we are indeed witnessing the formation of continental groups which seem to take up, each with their own particularities, the major imperial traits highlighted by Ibn KhaldûnThe now obvious Russian expansionist aims or the hardening of tensions in the Asia-Pacific region around China are of the same nature as the growing pacification of the European populations, who are even disarmed of their own capacity to think, while the plundering oligarchy plans community fragmentation day by day.

It is then within the West that the second front line is placed: the oligarchy that reigns there, freed from the counterweight that social and political struggles have exercised for centuries, seems to be resuming its imperial reflexes, plundering the productive sectors without limits, erasing all common cultural ties, accompanying unprecedented population movements through mass immigration. This change has been taking place for thirty years under the ideological influence of the contemporary "Left". ⁶¹, that is, the only Western totalitarian side that survived the Second World War. Today, it takes up the tried and tested mechanisms of Marxism-Leninism, the main one being absolute cynicism in the manipulation of the masses. It is obviously in the militant and/or media Islamo-leftist fringes that we encounter the most enlightened discourses on the next earthly realization of the multicultural Paradise, taking up all the tropes of religious millenarianism – the very Christian guilt-tripping in the name of good feelings extra.

This should come as no surprise: Marxism as a dogma, degenerated into a protean leftism, and whose vanguard is today embodied by Islamo-leftism, is indeed the ultimate revival within the West of the messianic enterprise. It confusedly believes it has found in contemporary neo-Islam a substitute for the failure, for it incomprehensible, of its own Marxist-Leninist prophecy and the means to finally put an end to populations that centuries-old Western emancipation movements have made too resistant to domination. It is these people, wherever they are and wherever they come from, it is their behavior, their discernment, their capacity to act that will determine the course of future events.

Common Places

April – August 2016